In the Children's Primer, what work of Wittgenstein's is being
referenced?
in 1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus,
a book of only 70 pages in which he claimed to have solved all the problems of
philosophy. His method was to show the limitations of language and hence the
limits of what philosophers can intelligibly say. "The whole sense of the book
might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said
clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."
After finishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein retired from philosophy for
seven years and trained as a primary school teacher and then as a gardener. He
eventually repudiated his earlier work and returned to Cambridge, where he
discovered he was one of the most famous philosophers in the world.
Tell me more about Firebelly's final jump.
This section of the book is heavily based on Kierkegaard's work Fear and
Trembling
and the complexities of faith. From Firebelly's perspective, Claire is a
wholly other creature in need of help that only he can give. His only way to
save her, is to commit his entire will and body into a singular act, a leap.
He rips himself from his old way of living and old the choices of that world. He
will never be able to return to that sphere. His jump is not calculated, it is
not rational, and yet it is the only possibility. When he lands, he ends up in a
new and unknown world.
Why does Firebelly feel guilty at the end of Part II?
We are guilty because someone has judged our actions to be less than what was
expected or what could have been otherwise chosen. When Firebelly he realizes
how fully responsible he is for his actions, he judges himself to be guilty.
Why does Claire sit in the mud?
Claire's wants to do the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unreasonable. Being
irrational is her way of showing she is an autonomous person, an individual that
is unique, whose actions cannot be predicted. In the nineteenth-century, there
was a very strong belief that the world and human nature, could be understood
through science. Dostoyevsky strongly rejected this belief, arguing that we
would seek the irrational just to show that we have a free-will.
Free-will is an Illusion, so how is Existentialism relevant?
Many scientists and philosophers argue that, in an age of neuroscience and brain
studies, fee-will is clearly a fiction that we create in order to explain our
behavior. I disagree with this assessment. I say this as a person with a
life-long interest in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and a
graduate degree in cognitive and neural modeling.
The debate is usually framed as free-will vs. determinism. The problem begins
with using common language to discuss complex actions in the world. Determinism,
for example, implies that every event has a cause. Since my actions are physical
events, they too must have a cause. In order to have free-will, there must be no
physical cause for my actions. Free-will is contra-causal, and therefore
suggests that each of us are like little gods creating out lives. While this
might be appealing to some, this is not the language of science. The problem,
however, begins with the very notion of determinism. Determinism is not a
property of Newtonian mechanics and certainly nor of quantum mechanics. There is
no great billiard table of the universe with the trajectory of every particle
determined. An excellent paper on this is
Causation as Folk Science by John D. Norton from the Department of History
and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh. I also recommend the book
Primer on Determinism
by John Earman.
Once we have an understanding of the limits of determinism and causation, then
we have a language in which to discuss free-will. I find this one of the most
interesting areas of philosophy and science--and one that is vastly more complex
than might first appear. My brief comment on free-will is that functionally,
free-will is part of our ability to direct our attention when we have competing
internal drives. If directing attention is completely causal in the
folk-deterministic view of the world, this is an assertion to be proven.
What is the beginning of the postscript about?
This section makes an analogy between number theory and the ontology of being.
Two very abstract ideas that are very relevant. Let's start with an experiment:
If a collection of similar objects, say beads are arrange in two parallel rows
with one row having more beads than the other but the arrangement of the beads
is such that the rows are the same length, a child between 4 - 5.5 years will
say that both rows have the same number of items. Children of this age do not
yet possess the concept 'Number' that we have as adults.
Around the age of 6, a child begins to develop an abstract understanding of
Number
and realizes that the number of objects is not related to the spatial
arrangement. Number
becomes an abstract concept that can be applied to any group of discrete
objects. Although we use this concept of 'Number' all the time, it is difficult
for most of us to define it. Ask adults to define a specific number, such as
3,4,5 etc. Unless a person has had a course in number theory, they will probably
only be able to offer examples such as pointing to three objects and saying
'that's three', or holding up three fingers. These are all concrete examples,
not really definitions. This is like asking someone to define 'happiness' and
this person shows you a 'happy' face. How can we define a particular number
(lower case n) and how can we define any number, or Number.
It was not until the 19th century that anyone had a good definition of
Number. How we now understand a number such as '3' is as an attribute of a
group of objects in which there exists a one-to-one correspondence between
objects that share this attribute, in this case the attribute '3'. You can draw
a line between any three objects of one type and any three objects of another.
if I have three coins and, three beads, '3' is the attribute of these sets that
allows them to be put into one-to-one correspondence.
This is the mountain that I am climbing in those first few pages of the
Postscript. For now, we can't go much further. But I want to use that same
abstract thinking that we use with number and Number to
understand being
and Being. Just as number is an abstract attribute shared by
groups of objects, being is an attribute of life that I share with each
living creature. Just as 3 apples has an attribute that it shares with any other
collection of 3 things--no matter how diverse--each of us share a fundamental
attribute of existence, being.
If we look at the infinite varieties of being and consider what they
have in common, this is what I am calling Being. This is analogous to
the difference between a specific number, such as 3, and any number, which I am
calling Number. I don't want to answer question about Being
as I think we each answer this in our own way. I just want to open the door so
this dialogue is possible. This is the what I refer to as the high-country of
the mind.
