Who does Kant think he is?

Kant lays out his theory of apperception in “Of the Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding”.  He does so in his usual style, which, as is widely known, includes a great deal of obfuscation, repetition, and tedious verbosity.  

A diligent and patient reader with some philosophy background and a good translation will discover, eventually, that the vast majority of the notions he means to convey in The Critique are remarkably simplistic and powerful.  I find it most unfortunate that his style has made the volume inaccessible to nearly everyone.

Below, I have attempted to render, paragraph by paragraph, Kant’s passages on apperception accessible to anyone who can handle the New York Times.  This task became much more difficult toward the end of the section on apperception, but I think it’s an important project.  There is certainly room for improvement in places, but I envision a collaborative effort to convert all of the Critique to simple English, so I intend for this to be more of a seed than a final proclamation on how best to convey these concepts.

My simple English paraphrases appear italicized, and my further explanations follow in regular font.  The paragraph numbered 1.1 corresponds to the first paragraph of the first topic in section II of chapter II, 3.2 to the second paragraph of the third topic, etc.  Without further delay, I give you the first installment of “Kant in Simple English”.

1.1

To combine a bunch of separate experiences into a single concept, there must be something outside of the experiences performing the combination.

When Kant writes “manifold content”, he’s referring to the stream of information constituting experience over time.  When we form concepts, we combine pieces of information gathered over some period of time.  It may be a short period, as when we listen to a sentence that takes two seconds to speak; or it may be a very long period, as when we come to understand what “Italian food”, as a whole, tastes like by ordering several different Italian dishes over the course of a few months or years.  Each experience is separated by time from all the other experiences.  There is nothing about the taste of garlic bread on October third that suggests it should have something to do with the smell of alfredo sauce on February second.  The relationship among experiences is not contained in the experiences themselves.  Instead, it is imposed on them artificially by something outside the experiences—by  us.

Kant calls the ability to gather diverse experiences into larger concepts “understanding”, and the gathering itself he calls “synthesis”.  The understanding can gather (or synthesize) not only experiences, but also concepts.  We might form the concept “three” by gathering together many experiences in which we sensed that number of sounds or sights, but we might also form the more abstract concept “number” by gathering together the concepts of one, two, three, four, etc.  All synthesis, writes Kant, is an act of the understanding.

1.2

“Combination” involves three things: 1)the concept of a bunch of separate things, 2) the concept of the action of gathering all those things together, and 3)the concept of unity—that the result of this process is a single whole.  (I don’t mean the category I’ve been calling “unity”; the concept of a category requires the concept of combination, so that would be circular.  This kind of unity is something more abstract still.)

Since the concept of “unity” must exist for there to be combination (or “conjunction”) in the first place, unity can’t come from combination itself.  The whole-ness of unified things must be a product of something beyond combination.

2.1

Inasmuch as my sensations are specifically my sensations, they presuppose the thing I call “me”; thus the act of sensing and the ability to sense also presuppose me.  Self-awareness cannot arise entirely from any of these things, because it is awareness of something presupposed by all of them.

All of my sensations and such presuppose exactly the same me.  

The only thing that my experiences have in common is that there is a subject who experiences all of them.  That doesn’t mean the experiencer is somehow embedded in its experiences—it is no part of the taste of garlic bread—but instead that there is a relationship that holds between the subject and its experiences.  When I reflect on this fact, I perceive unity of the subject across all of the experiences; it’s the same subject every time.  Moreover, it’s the same subject experiencing the reflection on the subject of experiences!  I call that unitary subject “me” (Kant calls it “apperception”).  

2.2

It’s interesting that there is sameness of the me presupposed by all those different sensations; the me who experiences sensations participates in of lots of different acts of experiencing, and there’s not anything about any one of those acts that ties it directly to the others.  Self-awareness is needed to combine all of these actions into a single concept of “me”.  So, for me to exist as an identity among experiences, I must be self-aware.

My awareness of myself is why my experiences can all be gathered together under the heading “my experiences”.  Without the unity in the combination described by that heading, there would be nothing tying all those experiences together; there might as well be a different experiencer for each experience.  They are, after all, each separated by time.  Since I am exactly the thing that experiences all of my experiences, the lack of unity would preclude my existence.  Unity, you’ll recall, can’t be a product simply of combination, so the combination of all those subjects does not itself account for selfhood.  There must be something above the experience/experiencer relation that makes the combination across times possible.  The self can’t exist without self-awareness (apperception).

2.3

Remember all that stuff I just said about unity and self-awareness?  Good.  It was important.

This paragraph is mostly repetition and emphasis of the concepts in the previous two paragraphs.

3.1

Earlier in this book, I talked about some other conditions presupposed by experience.  Specifically, I said that the kind of thing we usually count as “experience” can’t exist without Space and Time.  Those are both forms of what I called “sensibility”.

Self-awareness is another condition for experience just like Space and Time, but it involves the mind (or “understanding”) instead of sensibility.

Here, Kant is drawing a parallel between these passages on apperception and those on the transcendental aesthetic from earlier on.  He is also enumerating the conditions he’s so far determined are necessary for experience: space, time, and self-awareness.

3.2

A judgment about the relationship of a group of sensations to the particular object that caused those sensations is called a cognition.  The grouping of various sensations must be done by the self I’ve been talking about, because grouping is a kind of unity, and unity comes from self-awareness.  The relationship between sensations and objects is the objective validity of cognitions, so a self is required for there to be objective truth, cognitions, or anything else that goes on in minds (or “the understanding”).

When I see an aardvark in front of me and I judge it to be true that, “The thing in front of me is an aardvark,” what I’m really claiming is, “The object that caused the sensations that I grouped together into the concept ‘aardvark’ really is an aardvark, objectively speaking.”  It’s a claim about the relationship between the concept formed by my understanding and the object outside of my understanding (specifically in sensibility).  Because concepts are formed through combinations, combinations require unity, and unity is a product of self-awareness, the whole notion of objective truth would be meaningless without selfhood.

3.3

That the self is the same self across all experiences is a prerequisite for there being a mind.

This is already clear from 3.2 and earlier paragraphs.  Unity is a product of self-awareness; since unity is a product of self-awareness, everything that depends on unity also depends on the self.  The main jobs of a mind (or “the understanding”) are to form concepts and make judgments about them.  To make judgments about concepts, you first need concepts.  To form concepts, you first need to combine sensations.  Combination requires unity.  Unity requires self-awareness.  Therefore, the mind depends on self-awareness.

3.4

Read 2.2 again.  I really like what I said there.

3.5

I’m not saying that there’s a particular act of combining that must happen for there to be a mind; only that the mind must be able to combine things, and that the unity of the self is what makes that possible.

We wouldn’t even be able to conceive of a mind without self-awareness to ground it.

4

Objective unity of selfhood is different from subjective unity of selfhood.  Objective unity is the gathering up of all the different bits of self scattered across experiences into a whole.  Subjective unity is the ability of the little bits of self to be gathered up like that.  It’s necessary that the self is objectively unified, but it just so happens that it’s also subjectively unified.

Objective unity can exist if and only if there is subjective unity.  Objective unity is one of the prerequisites for experience, and that is true regardless of whether or not there really is experience.  That there is experience, however, is not logically necessary.

Absurdist Arithmetic

Earlier today, I was explaining to friends how to use polish hand magic (which I've referred to as "absurdist arithmetic" ever since multiplying 3 by 7) to multiply numbers smaller than five and greater than ten.  One of them observed, "It would be an interesting exercise to prove this by induction for all natural numbers."  That got me thinking; it obviously works for negative numbers, and there's no reason it shouldn't work for numbers other than integers.  He replied, "I doubt whether one can have pi fingers."

You can totally have pi fingers.  You just have to be willing to carry from the left as well as from the right.  Keeps you agile.  The problem is merely practical.   Furthermore, there’s no reason to prove it by induction on natural numbers.  It's easier to prove without induction for ALL the numbers.

1.      Let  ↑ = λ n.n-5 [This amounts to "number of fingers up" for any n whatsoever, no matter how many fingers you think you have.]

2.      Let  ↓ = λ m.10-m ["number of fingers down"]

3.      Fix x and y, arbitrary numbers (don't care which sort).

4.      ↓(x)*↓(y) = (10-x)*(10-y) [by def. of ↓]

5.      (10-x)*(10-y)=100-10y-10x+xy [because algebra, or so I've heard]

6.      ↑(x)+↑(y) = (x-5)+(y-5) [by def. of ↑]

7.      10 * ((x-5)+(y-5)) = 10x+10y-100 [also because algebra]

8.      Thus, 10 * (↑(x)+↑(y)) + (↓(x)*↓(y)) = xy [bippity boppity boo]

9.      Therefore, for all z and w, 10(sum of fingers up) plus (product of fingers down) equals the product of z and w. [existential generalization]

Pi times 8, by hand:

Left hand: -(5-pi)+3=pi-2=1.14ish. Put this in the 10's place.

Right hand: (10-pi) * 2 =13.72ish.

Left hand                                      Right hand

1.14                                              13.72

                                                     Cary ten over to the left.

2.14                                              3.72

Carry 0.14 over to the right.

2                                                   3.72+1.4

2                                                   5.2

Pi*8 is 25.2ish.

Wonder what it's like to have imaginary imaginary fingers.  i*8???

What Buddhism Might Be

Perhaps this will sound familiar to you.

"John: Personally, I kinda think *all* religions are bogus.

Mary: In general I agree with you.  I'm definitely an atheist and I think the whole idea of "church" is disturbing.  But Buddhism isn't actually a *religion*; it's more of a *philosophy*.

John: Dude, all that bowing, celestial Buddhas, rosary beads, meditation, nirvana, those crazy hats the Tibetans wear... that's totally religion!  It might have some philosophy mixed in, but overall it's a religion."

If you've spent any time around philosophy or religious studies departments, it almost certainly does sound familiar.  As I spend most of my time in philosophy, much in religious studies, a bit in IU's secular student alliance, I am tired of listening to people have this debate.  Usually one person has read one pop Buddhism book and has made up his mind one way or the other, while the other person is even more oblivious.  It's just tiring.

If you yourself do serious work in areas you or others call "Buddhism", you are probably also familiar with this:

"Other person: Interesting paper!  Zen is awesome!  Are you Buddhist?

You: ...um... *god damn it I hate when people do that* ...well..."

The following is a list of the candidates for the intention of the word "Buddhism".  I implore you to consider them.

1)The set of practices that actually lead to enlightenment.
2)The set of practices the historical Buddha claimed lead to enlightenment.
3) The set of practices people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe actually lead to enlightenment.
4) The set of practices people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe the historical Buddha claimed lead to enlightenment.
5)The list of dogmas to which people calling themselves "Buddhists" ascribe.
6) The list of dogmas to which the historical Buddha actually ascribed.
7) The list of dogmas to which people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe the historical Buddha ascribed.
*Note: The list of dogmas ascribing to which leads to enlightenment falls under 1.  Similarly for those Buddhists believe lead to it etc.*
8) The particular way about which people calling themselves "Buddhists" do philosophy; the methods upon which they agree are legitimate forms of argumentation (their unique brand of analysis, logic, etc.)
9) The particular set of texts whose content grounds number 8.
10) The set of texts written by actual buddhas and bodhisattvas.
11) The set of texts people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe were written by buddhas and bodhisattvas.
12) The truth to which actual buddhas actually awaken.
13) The set of truths to which people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe buddhas awaken (that is, if x believes p and y believes q and x and y are Buddhists, then p and q are elements of "Buddhism".)
14) Actual enlightenment itself, whatever it be.
15) The set of things people calling themselves "Buddhists" believe enlightenment to be.
16)The set of practices people calling themselves "Buddhist" call "Buddhist practices" (regardless of whether they also believe these to  be salvifically efficacious).
17)The set of dogmas people calling themselves "Buddhist" call "Buddhist dogmas" (regardless of whether said people actually ascribe to said dogmas).
18) Some combination of the above.

Whether or not "Buddhism" counts as a "religion", and whether or not it counts as a "philosophy", depends on which of the above you take "Buddhism" to be.  If you take it to be one of, or a combination of, the things that focus on salvation, then "Buddhism" is indeed a religion.  If you take it to be only the philosophy things, it's a philosophy.  If you take it to be only the text things, then it's a literary movement.  If you take it to be 17 or 18, it's an anthropological phenomenon whose name I don't know.

It's false that there is necessarily no fact of the matter about whether Buddhism is a philosophy, a religion, a combination of those, or something else entirely.  There may well be a fact of the matter.  But it depends on which of the available options counts as "Buddhism".  Matsumoto Shiro, for instance, takes Buddhism to be something very specific: the doctrines of dependent origination and emptiness.  This falls under category 12: the truth to which actual Buddhas actually awaken.  If you do not yourself believe that there's such a thing as "enlightenment" yet agree with Matsumoto that these two doctrines constitute Buddhism, then you think that Buddhism is (an extremely limited version of) number 13.

I think that one of the above constitutes genuine Buddhism, but I'm not going to tell you which one because it is not my point.  My point is that the "religion vs philosophy" debate over Buddhism is only substantive if you're willing to do the work of making these sorts of distinctions.  That means careful thought, study of the terms involved, and not tolerating from yourself or your debate partner near perfect ignorance of the world beyond Western pop culture.

In other news, I am in fact willing to answer the question, "Are you Buddhist?" but only if you're willing to demonstrate to me that you have a reasonable understanding of what it is you're asking.

Ray Jackendoff and Mathematical Semantics

I went to the discussion with Jackendoff for the philosophy department today and asked him about the semantics of mathematical statements. He said that semantic mentalism does indeed commit us to a rejection of mathematical realism; "2+2=4" has no mind-independent semantic content whatsoever. He also said that this fact makes him very uncomfortable, but he thinks that just means we need to look into it further, not that we need to reject semantic mentalism. I agree with him on that. But shortly afterward I realized another implication that would probably make him even more uneasy.

Semantic mentalism doesn't only preclude mathematical realism. It precludes classical mathematics entirely.

If mathematical statements have no mind-independent semantic content whatsoever, there cannot exist in that content elements relying on mind-independent existence. Total continuous functions over the real numbers rely on lawless infinite decimal expansions (irrational numbers with no rules governing the calculation of each subsequent digit). If we are to have functions over the real numbers at all and we're not going to assume that such expansions exist mind-independently, we're forced to accept the continuity principle: for every function whose source is the rational numbers, there exists a natural number m such that for any two real numbers x and y, if x and y are identical up to the m'th digit then if (x,n) is an element of the function then (y,n) is an element of the function. Without either omniscient minds or mind-independent lawless free-choice sequences, there can be no complete total functions over the real numbers. And without those we have to get rid of lots of classical math.

Obviously intuitionism doesn't preclude realism (as our resident intuitionist realist is so fond of repeating), but phenomenology is my favorite motivation for intuitionism so far. (Just don't let McCarty catch wind of that.)

So now the question becomes: is Jackendoff committed to a conceptual semantics founded on mentalism strongly enough not only to reject mathematical realism but to adopt intuitionism or some weaker version of constructivism? Does it make less sense to him to say that sentences refer to the mind-independent world than to reject the law of the excluded middle? Or double negation elimination? Or the equivilance of a negative general and a particular negative? Or Church's thesis?

He talks like the whole point of all of this is to have a semantics that makes good intuitive sense and is in line with how people actually think, but it's immediately apparent to anyone who's tested those forbidding waters that intuititionist math is deeply unintuitive. If you're not used to thinking about this stuff (or even if you are, really), trying to get your brain around something like, "it's false that 'a thing is either true or it isn't'" is incredibly difficult. It's about as cozy in human cognition as the most mind-shattering koan. This is not good news, I think, for conceptual semantics.

Squib on adverbial “at all”

As a general rule, adverbial “at all” can be used only when all of the following hold:

• The sentence is about degree, location, number, or type.
• The sentence is negative.
• If the sentence is about location, number, or type, its logical form is particularly quantified.  Quantification is irrelevant to sentences about degree.

For instance...

I don’t like mushrooms at all. [aboutness: degree, charge: negative]
There are no dogs in heaven at all. [aboutness: location, charge: negative, quantification: particular]
There are no coins in my purse at all. [aboutness: number, charge: negative, quantification: particular]
*There are coins in my purse at all. [aboutness: number, charge: positive, quantification: particular]
*There isn’t every coin in my purse at all.  [aboutness: number, charge: negative, quantification: general]

There is one exception to this: when uttered in a counterfactual context, “any x at all” appends well formed formulae to yield new wff’s whenever x acts as a noun or noun phrase.  The gramaticallity of this construction depends only  on the counterfactual status and not on positivity, quantity, or aboutness.  

You might have been any animal at all.
Unicorns could live anywhere at all. (where “where” acts as a noun)
There couldn’t be any man who breathes air in space at all.

The quantity of “unicorns could live anywhere at all” is actually generalization of a particular.  In fact, it would seem that the quantity of all counterfactual sentences with adverbial “at all” is nested.  At all is a sticky problem for semanticians, because in order to understand what’s really going on we’re going to have to work out words like “could”.

What exactly is the problem with “could”?  The problem is the truth value of sentences containing it.  “Unicorns could live anywhere at all,” seems to be asserting the truth of the intended proposition just like any other statement, but if the characteristic function for the truth value of counterfactuals in the actual world exists, it is inaccessible.  It’s not that we don’t know the graph of the relevant function because cataloging all the things of such and such a class along with their truth conditions is impractical or would take an infinite amount of time--it’s that such a process can’t even begin for the class of non-actualized possibilities.  Therefore, semanticians trying to hang out in some kind of formalistic limbo will have to take a metaphysical stance on the nature of semantic practice to work out the meaning of counterfactuals and by extension the meaning of “at all”.

I see a few options for rendering “at all” meaningful.

• Platonism (aka “the lazy way out”): the sentence has a truth value of true or false and the characteristic function exists mind-independently.  “Unicorns could live anywhere at all” means that the proposition to which it refers exists in Plato’s heaven.  It doesn’t matter that we can’t know the function’s graph; we can employ the function intentionally anyway.
• Modal realism: the sentence has a truth value of true or false and the characteristic funciton exists mind-independently.  “Unicorns could live anywhere at all” means that for every place in the actual world there exists a possible world containing a counterpart of that place and at least one unicorn lives in it.  As above, we can use the function without being able to know its graph.
• Conceptual semantics: much like modal realism, but fully mind-dependent.  “Unicorns could live anywhere at all” means that the pluriverse existing representationally in the mind of the speaker is such that the modal realistic interpretation is represented as true (and no relationship to a mind-independent pluriverse is relevant).
• Intuitionism: the truth value needn’t be either “true” or “false”, in which case we get to keep sober realism and counterfactuals are unproblematic.  Obviously, this would mean a complete overhaul of semantics to account for a non-finite t domain.  I say we go for it.  Any takers?

Phenomenology of Self-Interest

Re-posted from a Facebook note entitled "Is Self-Interest Rational?" by Robby Bensinger:

This is going to be exciting.

 
There are two ways to answer the question. First, is egoism valuable as a means? Assuming the self is an intrinsically worthy interest, is it rational to behave in a purely self-interested manner? I.e., is it actually in your interest to try to act exclusively in your own interest?

Put that way, the answer — to the extent that a general answer can be given at all — is clearly 'no.' Effectively all individuals in a society of self-interested individuals will be worse off than if they were in a society of more altruistic individuals. Society and economics are not zero-sum games; when each person is willing to sacrifice a little, everyone gains huge returns on their investment. We all sacrifice the immediate rewards we'd gain from exploiting and stealing from one another; in exchange, we gain the safety required for pleasures of greater duration and depth.

Yes, our brains are also hardwired to punish selfish, unfair, and corrupt behavior, so being an exploiter carries a high risk; but even if we were equipped to do the cost-benefit analysis each time an occasion for crime came up, we would rarely bother, because we are not crudely self-interested beings. We are not idealized economic profit-maximizers: We are messy complexes of conflicting drives and values, including the social emotions. And it is because of these social emotions that society is possible, that the benefits of exploitation do not tempt us into razing the world to reap the immediate rewards in our own lifetimes. Had we the power to make ourselves more 'rational' in this respect, it would be profoundly irrational to do so.

Second, is egoism even valuable as an end? Without assuming the value of self-interest, is it possible to rationally infer this value from a prior, more fundamental value that we all possess? So, sure, maybe it's counter-productive to act self-interested; but is the very premise of this project, the very assumption that we should be aiming to promote our own individual self-interest, grounded in anything?

Certainly it is a matter of fact that we do value ourselves. But we value many things. Sometimes we value things disproportionately; sometimes our priorities are screwed up. Hence the importance of recognizing which values are the most fundamental, which ones are most important and basic to our existence.


Regarding society's need for people to value their own future in order not to bring the world crashing down (as in the coke-addict hedonism of the subprime mortgage crisis), Dan Simonsön (2011) wrote:

"Should individuals sometimes sacrifice themselves now for themselves later?" of course, if you're a 65-year-old CEO, the answer to that question is "no" because there's not enough later left 

But this assumes that the only decision-making criterion for humans is personal self-interest. If you're a retiring executive who also values his children's or grandchildren's or friends' or country's or species' welfare, then other factors may complicate the proper calculus. And we desperately need these complications: The more every individual is willing to invest in every other individual, the more every individual benefits, overall.

So modernity's basic moral problem is twofold. First, people are factually deluded by the thought that a code of pure self-interest favors the individual (even in the abstract!), when in fact a healthy dollop of altruism favors the individual. Clearing up the facts is enough to settle the problem of the 65-year-old CEO who cares about others but is simply blinded by a Randian economic theory; but we'll have to enter deeper waters to confront the individual who simply does not sufficiently care, despite having the biological capacity to care (i.e., not being a psychopath). He turns a blind eye to suffering, even perhaps knowing that if he stared it in the face, he would be compelled to feel compassion. What is that blind eye missing? Why should this matter to an egoist?

The first aspect of our problem is that people aren't questioning the value of egoism as a means to satisfying other values (the human race's liberty, well-being, entrepeneurial progress, etc.). But the second, far more vexing aspect is that people aren't questioning the intrinsic value of egoism.

Why should I especially care about me?



The science and philosophy of mind have a little wisdom for us here. Our self, extended over time, is a construct. There is no purely logical reason for you to identify yourself now with yourself a year ago, or yourself a year from now; lacking an abiding essence (e.g., a set arrangement of cells, or of personality traits, or of memories), there is at best only a vague family resemblance between your 'self' at different stages of life. And perhaps this family resemblance is sufficient. But there is also a family resemblance between yourself and your family — including your extended family, the human species. So the relationship between your present self and your past and future selves differs only in degree from the relationship between your present self and the selves of 'other people.'

'But,' you might inquire, 'why should I sacrifice the pleasure I will actually experience for a transcendent pleasure I can never myself perceive, a pleasure existing only in another's mind?'

And this is to miss the point entirely. Life is a parade of little deaths. When you choose to go on a diet in order to benefit the future you, 'you' are not ever going to experience that future pleasure — 'you' will have radically changed by that point, will have been replaced by a cognitive sibling with only some of the same traits. To sacrifice present pleasure for greater future pleasure is the same type of act as sacrificing my pleasure for the Other's pleasure; in both case there is merely a leap of faith that I am connected to something larger, thus justifying an investment in a grander ecosystem of experiences than my own immediately accessible ones. Obviously force of habit and our basic instincts make it easier to help a future self than to help a perfect stranger — but the principle is still the same. Egoism is unstable because the ego is itself an unstable concept: Am I still the self whose actions I have completely forgotten? Should I sacrifice my current interests for the interests of a self who won't live for another 50 years, who will have completely forgotten even that I made this decision on his behalf? (The ungrateful cur!)

If we wish to be altogether consistent, our choice is not between egoism and altruism, but between participating in a larger reciprocal ecosystem or fixating exclusively upon the immediate. An individual who invests in his future selves ensures that every one of those selves lives a better life; he enters a sort of implicit contract with himself, saying, 'In exchange for the service my past selves have done for my present, I, this present self, will carry on doing good works for my future — and since all shall benefit by this cross-temporal agreement, why should any abstain from it and bring the edifice crashing down, even for the sake of a momentary increase in pleasure?'

But this arrangement, so clearly rational at the level of the community (the temporally extended self), doesn't make an iota of sense at the level of the momentary individuals who actually enact the arrangement. There's no rational reason any individual, momentary 'self' should continue to participate, since it will be a totally different self, not this self, that suffers the consequences if he defects right now. There's a reason that 'gratitude,' 'gratuitous' and 'grace' come from the same root: From the perspective of any individual self, it is unthinkable that you would help another rather than just cash in on others' investments in your well-being. Such gratitude can't be logically justified, if the only motivator of behavior is self-interest. Fortunately for everyone involved, this is not our only motivator: We are motivated by affection for and interest in our other selves (past, future, and in the larger human race). No self is built to exist in a vacuum; we are no more asocial than we are atemporal or anaerobic, which is why egoism is so ruinous, both materially and psychologically.

What is this experience that makes it possible for a self extended over time to flourish? What is the Now's feeling for its sister-moments? A certain affection. A certain familiarity. A trust; a continuity; a faith. A failure to altogether isolate my interests from another's. A genuine concern for this Other, both for its own sake and as an extension of myself. Inextricable intimacy. Impassable distance. Were we to try to designate this experience in a word, none could suffice but 'love.' Love, not 'rational' interest, is what holds the self together, what keeps every momentary self from defecting, and so what lifts up the well-being of the entire succession of lives of the human being.


This sort of self-sacrifice does not denigrate the individual for the sake of some mythic abstraction like Society or The World, or for that matter The Self. Just the opposite. It is precisely because every atom of mind is supremely precious that we must affirm Love as a value, as this self-sacrificing value is the one that makes it possible for life's individual droplets to thrive in a sustainable mutualism. The argument is abstract, but the best conduct for everyone is not ultimately justified by argument (for you could never argue someone into loving another; at best you could only clear up their delusion that they have a counter-argument against loving another); it is simply a byproduct of the fact that we are already in love with one another, that we have common values and desires — not totally identical values, but ones that overlap enough to justify a shared investment in the human project.

Self-love is a remarkable achievement; it is a good thing, for the love we bear at each moment for the totality of our obscurely linked experiences exalts the quality of each of those experiences immeasurably. But it is not an achievement to stop at self-love, to go no further. To extend our love to the family unit was an achievement, but to extend our love to a larger community is a still greater achievement, all the more remarkable and unlikely — and this achievement is a great boon both to the family and to the individual, the earlier stages of organization. To sacrifice our earlier gains in the interest of some abstract and aimless ideal of 'Progress' would be foolishness. To forget that the individual experience is the entire basis for the individual Self's value, or that the individual self is the entire basis for Society's value, would be to fixate upon the abstract and neglect our lived actuality. But altruism is not a sacrifice for nothing; it is a sacrifice for greater overall benefit. One may say that there is no rational way — rather, no selfish way, since 'rationality' is indifferent to self and other — to get the project of altruism started; but that if we can find some irrational way to somehow get the engine of reciprocity up and running, the 'rational' and selfish interests of every individual will be furthered immensely. This is the lesson of the prisoner's dilemma. We are blessed to live in a world where we do love, a world, therefore, where we have the capacity to wish for a better life for ourselves and for all beings that love and fear and strive.

To defend egoism as coherent is trivial. An infinity of logically consistent ethical programs may exist, but only a very few harmonize with our nature, which is love. In memory, love binds us to our past; in hypothesis, love binds us to our future; in the social, love binds us to our family; in art, love binds us to our very shadow. Love is the how, the why, and the what of a human being. Perhaps we can become egoists; and perhaps we can subsist off of nothing but apricots. What of it?

To defend egoism as more 'natural' than altruism — because it arises earlier in childhood development, say, or because it is easier to cultivate — is an absurdity. Eating marshmallows until one feels sick may be more 'natural' than exerting self-control, but that is no great reason to overeat; the health of the intersubjective ecosystem trumps immediacy.

Finally, to defend egoism — perhaps even the hyper-egoism of valuing only the self of the moment — as the pinnacle of some Buddhist ideal of Living in the Now — this risks a tragic misunderstanding. Setting aside speculations about the possibility of consumate perpetual bliss, we can say that the prosaic value of 'staying in the present moment' is to safeguard against our love for other selves mutating into psychic masochism or a total disregard for the immediate. The immediate is, after all, where every payoff will ultimately be found. If we fail to appreciate our hard-won moment-to-moment rewards, then long-term thinking is useless. But if we can attend to the present while remaining circumspect, if we can sail between the solipsistic Scylla of careless short-sightedness (hyperbolic, impractical 'Living in the Now') and the anxious Charybdis of fearful fixation upon distant selves, both our present and our future will be the better for it. Compared with the constructs of society and Self, the virtue of 'The Now' is a late-comer to the game, a phenomenological device appended to the edifice of what we as humans have become. It is a modern technology for improving perceptual information processing and alleviating corrosive mental states. It is not a return to some animalistic, asocial, or perfectly spontaneous state — if such a state has ever existed, it is not mindfulness as we understand it; and just because a lion is free of civilization and its discontents does not mean that a lion is happy or at peace.

But from a bird's-eye view, the greatest virtue of attending to the Now is not that it conduces to an unmediated hedonic upsurge, but that it allows us to better notice our indwelling affection and compassion, for others and for ourself. Coming full circle, the greatest evils of today are not caused by an abstract philosophical doctrine like egoism — egoism assists evil by serving as a rationalization, not as an original motive. Once we have pierced the façade of ideology, of rationalizations, we can confront the real root of evils like poverty, global warming, and the current economic crisis, which is our willful disregard for how much we ourselves can, and do, care for our larger world. The greater problem we face is not how to intelligently reason our way to short-term, narrowly focused pleasures, but how to intelligently cultivate the (in themselves unreasonable) faculties and habits of mind that provide fertile soil for the expansive joys of the lover and beloved.

(End Robby's note, begin my response).

I agree with you on nearly everything here and think this is a beautiful essay.  In fact, your crescendo paragraph  introducing love is stunningly gorgeous.  But I'm going to respond first to our point of contention.

Here is the false claim: "But this arrangement, so clearly rational at the level of the community (the temporally extended self), doesn't make an iota of sense at the level of the momentary individuals who actually enact the arrangement.  There's no rational reason any individual, momentary 'self' should continue to participate, since it will be a totally different self, not this self, that suffers the consequences if he defets right now."

Robby, you neglect that my immediate experience is more pleasureable when I believe in the temporally extended self.  The more vividly I imagine, for instance, a massage, the more pleasure I feel *right now*.  This is because I an create in my immediate experience an imaginary construction that is a body being massaged and can then subsume that construction into my current experience of "self".  This augmentation of identity brings *real* pleasure *now*.  There is no significant difference between imagining being massaged and now imagining later being thin due to my current decision to diet provided I incorporate sufficiently the imagining into my current experience of self.



In fact, there is evidence that the rewards we receive from *imagining* the pleasure of future people with whom we identify as "self" can be so immediately powerful that actual future selves are less likely to uphold the vividly imagined decisions, feeling as though the benefits have already been reaped.  If you tell someone, "I'm going to learn to play the guitar," you're less likely actually to do it than if you'd kept your mouth shut and simply done the deed in silence (or in plinky melody, as the case may be).

This accounts equally well for altruistic actions toward other organisms.  Empathy is exactly emotional identification with another.  We form a construct corresopnding to the experience of self-hood of another person and then either project our self-hood onto it or absorb it into our own, depending on the perspective, and conclude that what we feel as a result is what the other organism feels.  With our sense of self thus perferated, we believe we seek to relieve the suffering of another through our apparently altruistic actions when in fact it is our own suffering we seek to relieve.

It is important to remember there that all of this feeling and thinking is both by and about one immediate experience of self.  It is impossible actually to feel the emotions produced by another mind.  We feel the emotions of corresponding representations of others that in fact reside immediately in our own single (if convoluted) self construct.

Simmilarly, love for imaginings of "future/past selves" that present themselves *immediately* to conciousness is what produces pleasure when we believe we sacrifice for them.  We *do not love* actual future or past selves because not only are they subjectively inaccessable; they don't even exist. 

All that we may ever love, hate, reason about, or be are no more than idealized mental constructions presenting themselves to consciousness in an intricate, ephemeral entanglement whose central intersection we call the self.  Every self is perfectly selfish.


Nevertheless, your claim that love "makes it possible for life's individual droplets to thrive in a sustainable mutualism" is correct.  Love, or perhaps more appropriately "compassion" from an etymological perspective, is the over-arching phenomenon responsible for the illusion of temporally extended selfhood and for social behavior overall.  Regardless, all love is self love.  All compassion is feeling with none other than oneself.

For My Lovely Logicians-In-Training

(So I don't have to re-make this every time I get a new student)


Notes on Propositional Calculus

Syntax: the study of the principles for constructing grammatical entities in a language or logic.

Semantics: the study of the meanings of the symbols in a language or logic.  

Syntax in PC refers to the formal structure of arguments and their component sentences, while semantics refers to the truths or falsehoods of the same.

Valuation:

• is a semantic notion (it's about the *meanings* of the terms used in arguments).
• is a combination of truth value assignments to the atomic propositions in a sentence or argument.

Validity:

• is a syntactic notion (it's about the *structure* of an infinite set of arguments)
• does not depend on the actual truth values of the atomic sentences in the argument.
• An argument is valid if and only if any valuation rendering the premises true also renders the conclusion true.
• Operations in natural deduction (the proof system) depend on the presupposition that all the premises are simultaneously true.

Definition of propositional formula (plural formulae, pronounced form-you-lee)

• p,q,r, ect. are formulae (specifically atomic formulae)
• If X and Y are formulae,
• X*Y, XvY, X-->Y, and ~X are also formulae.

Definition of operators (aka connectives):

• *: T iff both conjuncts are T.
• v: T iff at least one disjunct is T.
• ~: T iff the negated formula is F.
• -->: F iff the antecedent is T and the conclusion F.

Related terms:

• Conjunct: a member of a conjunction
• Disjunct: a member of a disjunction
• Antecedent: the formula preceding the arrow in an implication
• Consequent: the formula following the arrow in an implication

Notes on Predicate Logic

Quantifiers:  

• (∀x) applies to every element of the defined set (general)
• (∃x) applies to at least one element of the defined set (particular)

When you hear... think...

• "unless": if not
• "Unless you like hate football you should watch the game," = "If not (hate football)--> (should watch the game)."
• "only if" or "only": following goes to consequent
• "Only cool people like jazz," = "(like jazz) --> (cool)"
• "You're a good dancer only if you love music." = "(good dancer)-->(love music)"
• if: following goes to antecedent
• "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands," = "If (you're happy and you know it)-->(clap your hands)."
• even if: (it or not it) then
• "Even if you're bad at math you might love logic," = "(bad at math or not bad at math) then (might love logic)
• not any: not some (negation of particular)
• "There are not any more M&M's," = "not (there are some M&M's)."
• no, no one, nothing: all not (general negative)
• "Nothing can stop me now," = "(for all x) not(x can stop me now)"
• "No snowman lives forever," = "(for all snowment) not (live forever)"
• there is/there exists/some: particular
• Some people like cake.
• "There are three agencies of government when I get there that are gone..." (EPA?)

Questions to ask yourself when translating:

• Is it an argument with premises or is it a single sentence?
• What's the main connective?
• What are the quantifiers?  To what parts of the sentence do they apply?
• What do I immediately know from key words in the sentence (like unless, for all, etc.)?
• When closing: again, to what parts of the sentence does the property apply?

Other notes: 

• Conditional arguments are your friends.  If the conclusion is an implication, assume its antecedent and derive its consequent.
• If the conclusion is a negation, assume the negated formula and derive an explicit contradiction.  Conclude the negation of your assumption.
• If you're having trouble with your derivation, assume the negation of the conclusion and derive an explicit contradiction.  Conclude the negation of your assumption and apply double negation elimination.
• If you're stuck on a particular derivation, stop thinking about it.  If possible, sleep before coming back to it.  Remember that there *is* an answer and it *will* come to you if you're patient.
• If you're confused or uncertain about a translation, find a similar sentence whose translation appears in the back of the book and study it, then come back to your translation.
• If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of rules on your derivation cheat sheet, keep in mind that there are really only ten rules needed for any derivation in PC.  If needed, confine yourself to: assumption, conjunction introduction (conj), conjunction elimination (simplification), disjunction introduction (add), disjunction elimination (proof by cases), implication introduction (conditional proof), implication elimination (modus ponens), negation introduction (negation of assumption upon which a contradiction has been shown dependent), negation elimination (any formula, including the non-negated form of an assumed negation, can be concluded from an explicit contradiction), and double negation elimination.