#it almost feels like that debate in Plato’s republic

[indecision-16]

I feel like the epic the musical keeps giving Odysseus these moments emphasizing that he’s mortal and human and grieves and feels so much (just a man, remember them, and then the end of keep your friends close) only to then immediately have a divine figure punish him for that

Someone else posted about how there’s this conflict of the Ancient Greek morals homer presents in the odyssey about the valor of essentially ruthlessness which is definitely what Athena and Poseidon are conveying but then Odysseus is written in epic with more modern morals (at least to start).

[togglesbloggle]

So, @argumate is up to some more prosocial atheistic trolling.  As is usual with such things, the conversation isn’t particularly elevated, but it does make me nostalgic for the old bbc days.  So I thought I’d be the Discourse I’d like to see in the world.  This is the post that kicked things off; correctly noting Platonism as a philosophical foundation underpinning most versions of Abrahamic faiths.  And it’s probably the most useful place for me to target also, since hardly anybody just identifies as a Platonist but most westerners are one.  So, without further ado, a halfhearted and full-length defense of Platonism:

Well, strike that.  A little bit of ado.

I’m not a Platonist myself, so this is a devil’s advocate type of thing.  Or maybe you could call it an intellectual Turing test?  As I discuss here, my philosophical commitments are mostly to skepticism, and for instrumental reasons, to reductionist materialism.  That combo leaves me some wiggle room, and I find it fairly easy to provisionally occupy a religious mindset, so I can generally read and enjoy religious polemics.  I also have a fairly deep roster of what are often called ‘spiritual experiences’; I’m probably in the set of people that are by nature predisposed to religion.  I am not religious, and I approve of Argumate saying things like ‘God is not real’ a lot.  This is in no way a retread of the arguments in The Republic or Plato’s other writings; you can go read those if you want, but I’m going to play around with stuff that I think is better suited to this audience.

Attention conservation notice: yikes.  This got pretty long.

Anyway, on to the argument.  Argumate’s main point is pretty clear, I think: ‘forms’ in the Greek sense are a function and product of the perceiving mind.  Birds don’t conform to bird-ness; instead brains naturally produce a sort of bird-ness category to make processing the world easier, and to turn a series of wiggly and continuous phenomena into a discrete number of well-modeled objects.  Basically, we impose ‘thing-ness’ on the wavefunction of reality.  And there are some good reasons to think that it might be true!  Our understanding of categories gets a lot sharper when reality conveniently segregates itself, and whenever that boundary gets a little blurry, our ability to use categories tends to break down.  If the recognition of animal-ness came from contact with a higher plane of reality, you wouldn’t necessarily expect people to get confused about sponges.

But.  While there’s certainly plenty of support for Argumate’s position, it doesn’t strike me as anything near self-evident, or necessarily true.  So what I’ll argue is that Platonism isn’t obviously false, and that if we ever converge on a true answer to the question of our reality, then that truth could plausibly be recognizably Platonist.  My opening salvo here is, predictably enough, mathematics.

‘Mathematical Platonism’ is a whole other thing, only distantly related to Classical Platonism, and I only really mean to talk about the latter.  But nonetheless, mathematics really actually does appear to be a situation where we can simply sit in a chair, think deeply, and then more or less directly perceive truths.  Basic arithmetic can be independently discovered, and usefully applied, by almost anybody; ‘quantity’ comes naturally to most humans, and the inviolable laws of quantity are exploited just as often.  It’s also very hard to argue that these are ‘mere’ linguistic conventions, since fundamental natural behaviors like the conservation of mass depend on a kind of consistent logical framework.  In most chemical reactions, the number of atomic nuclei does not change, and the atoms added to a new molecule are perfectly mirrored by the loss of atoms in some reactant; this remains true in times and places where no thinking mind exists to count them.

There are a lot of debates about what math is, fundamentally.  But inevitably when we study math, we’re studying the set of things that must be true, given some premise: we’re asking whether some proposition is a necessary consequence of our axioms.  The so-called ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ suggests that the phenomena that Argumate mentions- hotdogs and birds and whatnot- are observed only within the auspices of a sort of super-phenomenon.  Loosely speaking, we can call this super-phenomenon self-consistency.  

We treat phenomena as having a natural cause.  Platonism, at its crunchy intellectually rewarding center, represents a willingness to bite the bullet and say that self-consistency also has a cause.  Plato himself actually provided what might be the most elegant possible answer!  Basically, posit the simplest thing that meets the criterion of being A) autocausal and B) omnicausal, and then allow the self-consistency of the cosmos to follow from its dependence on (in Platonist terms, its emanation from) that single, unitary cause.  The universe is self-consistent for the very straightforward reason that there’s only one thing.  Any plurality, to the extent that plurality is even a thing, happens because ‘the only real thing’ is only partially expressed in a particular phenomenon.  To skip ahead to Lewis’ Christian interpretation of all this, you’d say that humans and moons and hotdogs are distinguished from God not by what they have, but by what they lack.

And for present purposes, I do want to take a step back and point out that this does feel like a reasonable answer to a very important question.  Materialism fundamentally has no answer to the question of self-consistency and/or the presence of logic and order, and that is (for me) one of its least satisfying limits.  We’ve got things like ‘the origin of the universe’, sure.  But we probe the Big Bang with mathematical models!  That’s a hell of an assumption- namely, that even at the origin of our universe, self-consistency applies.  It’s not like materialism has a bad explanation.  It just remains silent, treats the problem as outside the domain.  If we’re adopting the thing for utilitarian reasons, that’s fine.  But if we’re treating materialism as a more comprehensive philosophy, a possible approach to the bigger questions, then it’s a painful absence.  In that domain, far from being self-evidently true (in comparison to Platonism), materialism doesn’t even toss its hat in the ring!

Which, uh, gets us to the stuff about Forms and shadows in Plato’s Cave and all that- the intermediate form of existence between the omnisimple core of Platonism and the often chaotic and very plural experience of day-to-day life.  And frankly, we’re not especially bound to say that the forms are exactly as Plato described them, any more than atomism is restricted to Democritus.  Whether there is some ‘bird-ness’ that is supra- to all extant birds might be contestable; however, it’s easier to wonder whether ‘binary tree’ is supra- to speciation and the real pattern of differences between organisms that we map using Linnaean taxonomy.

But, this is an attempted defense of Platonism and not Toggle’s Version of Platonism that He Invented Because it’s Easier, so I’ll give it a try.  Fair warning to the reader, what follows is not fully endorsed (even in the context of a devil’s advocate-type essay), except the broader claim that it’s not self-evidently false.  And on the givens we came up with a couple paragraphs ago, this is a reasonable way to tackle what necessarily follows.  So let me see how far I can defend a very strong claim: in a self-consistent (or: mathematical) cosmos, beauty cannot be arbitrary.

Remember that Plato never argued that his Forms were arbitrary, or even fully discrete as such; their apparent plurality, like our own, emanates from the unitary Thing What Exists.  And so, bird-ness is treated as a contingent thing, not an absolute.  It’s just not contingent on human experience.  And so for us to believe in ‘bird-ness’ is to believe that there exists some specific and necessary pattern- a Form- which any given material bird must express.

Let’s take an obvious example: any flying bird will, for fairly simple aerodynamic reasons, tend to be symmetrical.  Usually, this means two wings.  In theory, you could… have one in the middle?  Maybe?  Even that seems rather goofy to try to imagine, but you could probably get away with it if you were extremely creative biologically.  And if we see a bird with only one wing (without a prosthetic or other form of accommodation), then we will tend quite naturally to recognize that something awful is in the process of happening.

A fully materialist explanation of our reaction here would say: we think of the one-winged bird as problematic because A) we have been socialized to recognize and appreciate two-winged birds, and spurn deviations from that socialization, or maybe B) because natural selection has given us a set of instincts that recognize when a body plan has failed in the past, so things like ‘being crippled’ or ‘being sick’ are recognizable.  

Platonism, I think, would offer a third option, that C) we recognize (as emanations of The Real Thing) that a one-winged bird body is insufficiently reflective of The Real Thing, and that accordingly it lacks the ability to keep existing.  Plato had some… basically magical ideas, about how Forms are recognized, but here I’ll point out that ‘deduction’ is a completely serviceable kind of magic for our purposes.  It is, after all, our direct experience of the self-consistency of the cosmos, which follows from the fact that we are ourselves an expression of that same self-consistency; it meets the criteria.  

Materialists, obviously, would agree that deductive reasoning could allow a person to recognize the problems inherent in a one-winged bird, but as I said a few paragraphs up, their(/our) explanation of this process is rootless.  “Yes, logic and a few high-confidence assumptions let you assume that a bird with only one wing is in trouble,” they might say.  And we might ask- “what makes you so sure?”  And then the materialist must respond, “Well, let me be more clear.  It always worked in the past, and my Bayesian priors are strongly in the direction of the method continuing to bear fruit.”  True enough, but it’s not an explanation and doesn’t pretend to be.  The universe just does this weird thing for some reason; it works ‘by magic’.  So why not call it that?  Theurgy for all!

So, consider.  We recognize (deductively, let’s say for the sake of argument) that a one-winged bird is on the road to becoming nonexistent, absent some change in circumstances.  It may keep going for a little while, but it’s not in homeostasis.  And if we reasonably admit this very basic duality to our thinking- things which can persist, and things which cannot- then we start to recognize a sort of analogy between physical phenomena and mathematical propositions.  A lemma can be right or wrong, albeit sometimes unprovably so.  Basically, it can follow- or not- from the axioms we’re working with.  And in a softer but very real sense, that one-winged body plan is wrong analogously to the lemma’s wrongness.  Not ‘wrong’ as in ‘counter to cultural norms’, but ‘wrong’ as in ‘unstable given the premises, given the Thing That Exists Most’.  Look up research on fitness landscapes, if you’re so inclined- actual biological research isn’t totally unacquainted with the notion.  There exists a surprisingly discrete ideal or set of ideals, both for flying birds as a whole and subordinately for any given flying bird species.  And we have discovered this using magic.

Insofar as beauty is something to be admired, or pursued, or is otherwise desirable, then our sense of beauty must necessarily correlate with those abstract, and dare I say supra-real, qualities which allow things to persist, and which can therefore be understood deductively.  And that set of qualities does, effectively, meet the Platonic criterion of a ‘form’.

The immediate materialist objection is: hey, wait a minute.  The supposed ‘objective’ criterion of a bird is contingent, not absolute!  It follows from the strength of gravity, the thickness of the atmosphere, the availability of food sources, and on and on.  This is one of the most important reasons why genetic drift and speciation happens in the first place, because the ‘ideal’ bird depends on an environment that’s in constant flux.

True enough.  But!  How do you think the atmosphere got there?  It’s an old trick in religious discourse, but in this case I think a valid one.  The rightness of the bird depends on the atmosphere, the rightness of the atmosphere depends on the planet, the rightness of the planet depends on the solar system, and ultimately it all depends on that necessary self-consistency which (we proclaim) implies our unitary Most Real Thing.  This does mean that we can’t really think of Platonic forms as wholly discrete objects, unconnected to one another and without internal relation among themselves- unfortunately, that’s part of the original Plato that I don’t see as defensible, even with maximum charity.  But there’s such a thing as a ‘ring species’, and if we admit Platonic Forms of that type, a kind of dense network of paths being traced through higher-dimensional spaces that correspond to the shadow of That Than Which There Is No Whicher, then it’s more than salvageable.  It’s both satisfying to imagine and, I think, quite consistent with the spirit of the original philosophy.

One thing this doesn’t mean.  Even if we were to accept all of this, we aren’t obliged to resign ourselves to the lot of that one-winged bird.  Indeed, if anything this gives us a rich language by which to justify a prosthetic wing or other form of accommodation: we can talk about ‘making the bird whole’, and can see how our compassion for that bird might lead us to create the conditions of homeostasis once again.  But it does mean that if we take a position on the merits of existence- if we’re in favor- then we don’t treat a one- and two-winged bird as coequal scenarios.

Anyway, this has gone on hideously long already for what’s basically an intellectual exercise, so I won’t dive into immortal souls or any of the other ancillaries.  I mostly want to reiterate that, far from being obviously false, I do think that (some forms of) Platonism are quite defensible, and can provide coherent answers to questions that I A) care about very deeply and B) can’t resolve to my own satisfaction.  Of course, it is not obviously nor trivially true, either.  But one can be Platonist without being willfully wrong.

[because3am-blog]

Preceding My Conclusion..

Sooo.. A short while ago a dear friend of mine suggested I put pen to paper. Someone I admire, and perhaps friend feels like a belittlement of this individual's meaning in my world, she has in fact been instrumental in my life as of late, and helped firmly fix a smile to my face during a rather turbulent period; alas I digress. I believe she lives firmly in the delusion of my intellect, the blessed fool, however, nothing ventured and all that! As to what I should write I haven't the faintest, I think beyond my humility (remember I said that), the firm belief that what I have to divulge is of little consequence, I have never felt the pull to write for lack of topic and motivation. Yet here I am, at least I suppose this could indeed prove useful as a backlog, a point of reference, proceeding my probable institutionalisation. So to you, the reader, my condolences, I can only imagine the misfortune that bestows you to end up with either the time or the inclination to humour my pen (or buttons, it is like 2017 after all, why do we even still have pens, surely we're beyond such a primitive medium of expression)! Maybe, this, right now, is one of those grounding moments in life, you, and at great haste, should take a minute to reflect, and forge a different path forward? You're right, it's not my place to say.

The only thing I feel I could possibly impart with much grounding in use, would be a glimpse of the world through my eyes, novel huh? But perhaps, I like to question things, actually everything, and maybe this could evoke a thought in you, or maybe better yet you have an answer for me? I have always appeared as a well disguised alien to many of my peers, my family especially, for reasons unknown I struggle in equal measure with a childish inability to accept the world in the condition it is in and the inability to invoke change in any capacity. Fundamentally I appreciate change starts at home, but it never seems enough, and that alone in itself is a struggle. But to my eyes (dazzlingly blue, in case you were wondering) we have fallen, almost unknowingly, into an experience of mediocrity. Perhaps it is with the advent of technology, perhaps with our busy urban lives, or could it be some sort of Palio deficit, where we have moved so far from our roots as a species we have lost track of our senses. Most likely it is my own pessimism coming into play. But I cannot shake the belief that we, here and now, are not living well, at least not to what we deserve. Allow me a minute to explain.. (Please also refer to my previous comment on humility). Life, whatever it is, is a sensory experience. We can get into all kind of long debates on its meaning, or purpose, or even its tangibility. I confess to knowing almost nothing on many of these matters, and all of the above topics could never be bought into the realm of scientific scrutiny and quantified as such, so each and every person should and will have their own personal relationship with these questions. But as to its application, that is where we do get a degree at least of authority. So it's on the up! And yet we appear so frivolous with it? I think my mind started pondering this issue when discovering the amount of people who cannot remember what they did, yesterday, last week, a month ago. And you know what, I couldn't remember either. And these are people young, people with quick lively brains, eager and waiting to pour in memory's, to catalogue your adventure, and hopefully, with any luck, to enjoy and relish in when old age arrives. In plato's republic a particular line has always stayed with me, it is within Socrates dialogue with an elder, on ageing, it's toils and  blessings... "To the man conscious to himself of no unjust deed, sweet and good hope is ever besides him". But what of the man who is not conscious of the majority of his existence? Regardless of good or bad, morals and ethics, what if you, and I, are living unconsciously. If I cannot remember now, what happened last Tuesday, in 50 years I stand less chance still. And at what consequence comes of this. On one hand I would muse that you cannot learn or grow or develop without appreciation of the effect (or affect, does anyone really know the difference?) of the events occurring in your life; and that's important. Alas I do not feel I have the patience now to further explore why this is the case ((however I can thoroughly recommend the book Descartes error (Damasio Antonio) for anyone who cannot persevere any further into this text without an informed perspective on the importance of cognitively processing experience, it is quite possibly explained even chapter 1, go wild, catch you soon!)). But fundamentally, I think it is more prudent to focus on the fact that if you are not readily absorbing your days you are probably not using them correctly. And you don't get many, really you don’t. For all that I have forgotten, I can remember with great certainty what happened on Thursday 21st of November two years ago. On that day I parted with someone more dear to me than I believed was possible, for one reason or another our union came to an end, and as if it was yesterday I can recall the feelings and emotions and memories with better resolution than a Sony super HD 4K 10578479479 megapixel display with full Dolby surround sound. And you know what, I'm glad of that. It is a moment in my life so bleak, yet so meaningful, and I carry daily the things  learned from that. But shouldn't every day be that way? Obviously by this I do not mean heartbreaking and depressing, but vivid! We seem to have coloured our days in mono. We no longer seem to relish in taking in the full splendour of each moment. We no longer notice birds in the sky, absorb the smell of the air after a heavy rainfall. (Should my aforementioned friend ever stumble upon this I am sooo going to get a comment about my needing to partake in some kind of late night adult activities, perhaps she'll be obliging?) We take the company of our dearest for granted. We no longer listen to music, at least little further than as a mild distraction from the peripheral noise of the world going about around us, or indeed our own thoughts, let's keep those dragons at bay huh? We take no comfort in the luxuries of necessity, cooking a good meal at the end of the day, tending the garden. Without another paragraph on what it is (I feel) we do not seem to appreciate I will resolve my point. It appears we are allowing ourselves to be distracted from the beauty in the world, and if we do catch a glimpse of it not nourishing ourselves on every morsel of it, but by what, if our days are so forgettable. And the pessimists in us hold on so closely to our worries and woes, we stress fitfully on matters yet to even come into fruition. I forbid the realist within a voice. Of course these phenomena can be easily explained away. But they do not have to be, what probably feels like ages ago, I attested the fact that this is one realm we can gain at least some purchase. So of late, I have been endeavouring to absorb as much of my life as I can. Not just the good, the bad too. It almost seems taboo in our sociocultural mindset to feel negative, even with negative feelings seeming to be the predominance of our days. It is appreciated that you will 'get over' whatever grievances come your way with haste and as little fuss as possible. And whilst I agree it is best to rid yourself of upset sooner rather than later, I do not believe it advisable to skate over feelings to the comfort of escape. The most sobering moments in my life have bought about great changes in my outlook, given me an appreciation of aspects of life I might have otherwise overlooked, and above all reinforced a courage within. You learn you can cope with a lot more than you expected, often better than expected. And with that courage comes the ability to navigate life confidently, freely, openly. I still have a long way to go down that path, and am far from the authority on living a life free from the restrictions of fear, but all progress is progress. I guess what I am getting at is that there is benefit to be had from all that comes your way, if you do indeed take note of it, and apply it to your advantage. If you're happy feel really really really happy, if you're sad feel really sad, love unconditionally without fear or strings, give of your heart, what benefit becomes anyone by exerting half measures of emotion, it's the only medium we have to appreciate life! I have again fallen away on a tangent. Apologies. I resume. So in an effort to absorb experience, I have spent the time to reason with myself the parts of life that make me happy, the aspects I aspire to, and at heart keep those as the focus of my days and see what benefit my way come. One thing I will give myself credit for is the ability to wonder, my brain is both my biggest asset and my greatest daemon. I have to know all things about all stuff, because what how why and when and who. Apart from sports, sports are just rubbish! Anyway, with my nice concise introduction over.... I hope you gleam I am not as pretentious as my words may suggest, I know I am as useless at life as everyone else, probably worse, and I make no claim to possess anything other than my own thoughts and beliefs; which will vacillate with the weather! And use these words as an attempt at maintaining my focus and even maybe drawing in yours.