The trivial isn't necessarily trivial

[Recently posted to my Google+ collection, Language, Logic, Life.]  At one point in John le Carré's early classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas, a British secret service agent, is staying on the Dutch coast, waiting for an important and fateful meeting. His thoughts turn to a woman who had looked after him when he had became ill in a rented room in London. Liz had been a member of the Communist Party in Britain and so technically opposed to Leamas's cause.

"... At about eleven o'clock the next morning [Leamas] decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some cigarettes and stared dully at the sea.

"There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea. He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things – the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it ..."

Le Carré seems to be suggesting that the real meaning of life is not to be found in causes and grand designs but in the mundane, apparently pointless details of ordinary life. It is very tempting to go along with this line of thinking.

Life, death and computation

I have been spending a bit too much time lately reading other people's blogs and (to some extent) participating in associated discussions. The main problem with this sort of activity is that – largely because the focus of discussions is always shifting – it encourages superficial debate at the expense of deep understanding.

But, interestingly, two recent blog discussions on two very different sites which I happen to follow touch on a similar theme.


Biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci recently precipitated a freewheeling discussion of the relevance of computers and computing to understanding the human mind and the universe in general. In fact, Pigliucci's post on the topic prompted more than 200 comments, many of which are well worth reading.

Professor Pigliucci has a disarming tendency to rush in where more cautious academics fear to tread – that is, beyond his areas of specific expertise. (I suspect his approach owes something to the intellectual traditions of his native Italy, where academics have traditionally played an important role in the broader cultural, moral and political sphere.)

Pigliucci argues strongly against functionalist and computational views of the mind. I don't have strong views on this question, though I share Pigliucci's skepticism about some of the (as I see it) wilder claims about mind uploading and the scope of simulations etc.

I did, however, question his contention that seeing the operations of nature in computational terms is likely to lead to mathematical Platonism, commenting as follows:

My understanding is that many of the leading proponents of an information- and information processing-based approach to physics see information as physical. The bits or qubits are always 'embodied' in actual physical processes, albeit that these processes are understood at a deep level in terms of the processing of information. (There are close parallels between information theory and thermodynamics.)

So I'm not sure that such a view leads to Platonism. Seeing physical processes as algorithmic (and scientific theories as predictive algorithms) seems to me a genuinely interesting perspective: but it may well be that there is no way actual physical processes can be perfectly simulated (or predicted).


Adrian McKinty is a novelist with a strong interest in social, cultural and philosophical topics. In the comment thread of a post at McKinty's nicely named site, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (I know – Freud got there first), a post about Philip Larkin featuring his confronting poem, 'Aubade', McKinty mentions Nick Bostrom's simulation argument: that if we accept two fairly plausible-seeming assumptions then our universe is almost certainly a 'simulated' universe created by an advanced civilization.

As I commented there:

I am ... (prompted by your comments, Adrian) having a look at Nick Bostrom's ideas. My initial attitude is skepticism, but that may just be what he would call my status quo bias jumping in.

I do think it makes sense (simply in terms of physics) to see natural processes in terms of information processing, but it is a big jump from there to thinking about beings who might have set the process going (and to calling it a simulation).

And what would Larkin make of all this? (Turning in his grave, I suspect.)

I am continuing to look into the simulation argument which I first encountered some years ago. More later, perhaps.

But regular readers will know that I am very skeptical of arguments and points of view which take their origins from a philosophical (as distinct from a scientific) base. Bostrom's main argument for the simulation hypothesis is in part statistical but basically philosophical – and far from convincing from my point of view.

I can't help feeling that people like Bostrom (and David Pearce who influenced him) are driven by a kind of religious instinct. Certainly some of the groups with which they are associated have a cultish feel.

The other thinker mentioned by Adrian in the comment thread is Samuel Scheffler. Scheffler applies 'what if' scenarios to thinking about death. What if we knew the world was going to be destroyed soon after our death? His general point seems to be that we are underlyingly less concerned about our own personal fate per se than about our fate seen in the light of a continuing social context.

This may well be, and such thinking is very much in accordance with the view that the sense of self derives from the linguistic, cultural and social context in which we grow up. But I think Scheffler overplays the extent to which future generations give meaning to our lives.

Also, I had a look at Scheffler's background. And it seems pretty clear that his being a socialist (he is apparently a disciple of the 'analytical Marxist' G.A. Cohen) would have – to some extent at least – shaped and played a part in his approach to thinking about the future in general, and about ethics.

The fading of philosophy

Last year, the well-known and respected philosopher Colin McGinn suggested that we replace the term 'philosophy' with 'ontics' to designate the area that academic philosophers – or 'onticists' – are engaged in. But, in my view, philosophy's problems are deep and long-term, and such talk of rebranding the discipline on the part of a leading practitioner only serves to underscore its parlous state.

My suggestion is not that we replace the term, but that we de-emphasize it, recognizing that it has gradually lost any substantive meaning as the designation for a stand-alone discipline.

When, in the early 20th century, metaphysics in general and philosophical idealism in particular fell out of favor, philosophy itself (of which metaphysics had traditionally been seen as the core) began to suffer a crisis of confidence and a fall in status. This trend was exacerbated as psychology and other social sciences established their scientific credentials, and severed their links with philosophy.

It's no wonder that the very existence of philosophy as an academic discipline began to be called into question, and, in the post-World War 2 period, it was seen by a significant number of its practitioners as being limited to serving a clarificatory function with respect to the sciences. It was seen as a handmaid to science in a similar way that, in the medieval period, it had been seen as a handmaid to theology.

Since the post-War period, things have gotten more complicated. There have been attempts to revive a more traditional and general role for philosophy, but, in my view, these attempts are fundamentally ill-conceived.

I would be happy to explain my case in detail to anyone who might be interested (a small and shrinking section of the population, I suspect), but for now will just say that I don't see whence such a discipline derives its authority.

Science derives its authority from established procedures generally referred to as 'the scientific method' which ensure that, to a large degree at any rate, human bias is filtered out: scientific findings are objective, and so authoritative. Mathematics incorporates similar procedures which allow results to be objectively assessed.

But nothing like this happens in philosophy. And, consequently, there is no convergence of opinion and slow building of a body of genuine knowledge such as occurs in the sciences.

This is not to say that science can play the role that religion played, that scientific knowledge can provide certitude, solace and a sense of purpose. It can't.

Nor can 'philosophy' of course. No discipline can.

There is – and always will be – a place, however, for reflective thinking. My point is simply that it doesn't constitute – and nor is it encompassed by – a single academic field or discipline.

Meta-thinking will always occur within and about the various physical, social, and historical sciences, and other disciplines, such as mathematics and logic. Such thinking can still be usefully described as the philosophy of physics, of biology, of history, of logic or whatever.

But reflective – and value-based – thinking about human life in general is more problematic. We all do it, but it does not – it cannot – be systematized. I have written before about my reservations about philosophical ethics, which I don't see as a viable area of research, or as something that constitutes a distinct and authoritative intellectual discipline.

What about reasoning in general (considered from a normative and pedagogical perspective)? Isn't this an area in which philosophers can claim expertise? Perhaps.

I do see a need to develop and promote logical thinking and skills related to reasoning and argument. But, though this is an area which philosophers are claiming as their own, I don't see it as necessarily being connected to philosophy at all.

In a recent discussion on a comment thread at Rationally Speaking, Paul M. Paolini argued (against me) that in areas beyond the scope of science and mathematics (like normative ethics) we have a stark choice between philosophy on the one hand and dogmatism or chance on the other. I made the point in response that defining philosophy in terms of rationality was inappropriate. Rationality is clearly a broader concept than philosophy, and there are many non-philosophical ways of dealing with general questions of human life and value which are compatible with reason.

In fact, ordinary educated discussion and deliberation may allow more scope for valuable, experience-based intuitive insight than the often stale, flat and superficially complex reasoning style of professional philosophers.

The careful use of language and sophisticated reasoning skills have traditionally been taught, directly and indirectly, in a variety of academic and intellectual contexts and subject areas. No knowledge of philosophy or philosophical logic is required to think and reason and argue well (which is not to say that a knowledge of informal and formal logic may not be useful).

On the question of logic, it is well to bear in mind that the crisp and complex grammars of ordinary human languages encapsulate the fundamental logical principles upon which formal logical systems are built. And ordinary language use is predicated on an understanding of these principles.

Philosophy and philosophers don't have a monopoly on reasoning or the teaching of reasoning, in other words, even if, historically, much cataloguing of logical fallacies and so on was done by philosophers.

Modern approaches will, of course, incorporate (but need not be restricted to) the findings of research in various branches of psychology concerning our brains' inbuilt biases of perception and reasoning.

Regarding the broader, more ambitious questions with which philosophy has traditionally dealt, we need to recognize that many of these questions are unanswerable, either because they are conceptually confused or because they are beyond the scope of current science (and perhaps also beyond our intellectual capacity).

It helps however – at least in my experience – to cultivate a sensitivity to, and a critical interest in, the fundamental media of our understanding: above all, ordinary language and its implicit logic; but also, if possible, mathematics and other formal systems.

The goal, as I see it, is clarity with respect to what we know, coupled with an awareness of the vastness of our ignorance and the need to remain alert to the possibility of new – and unexpected – perspectives.