Category: Metaphysics

In my previous essays I examined the idea that love is mechanical and its ethical implications. In this essay, I will focus on the eternal truth that love hurts.

While there are exceptions, the end of a romantic relationship involves pain. As noted in my l essay on voles and love, Young found that the loss of a partner depresses a prairie vole. This was tested by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine how much they would struggle. Prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled less that those who were not bereft. The depressed voles differed chemically from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was “treated” for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

Human beings also suffer from the hurt of love. For example, a human who has ended a relationship often falls into a vole-like depression and struggles less against the tests of life (though dropping humans into beakers to test this would presumably be unethical).

While some might derive pleasure from stewing in a state of post-love depression, this feeling is something most would want to end. The usual treatment, other than self-medication, is time: people usually tend to recover and seek out a new opportunity for love. And depression.

Given that voles can be treated for this depression, humans could also be treated as well. After all, if love is essentially a chemical romance grounded in strict materialism, then tweaking the brain just so would fix that depression. Interestingly enough, the philosopher Spinoza offered an account of love (and emotions in general) that match up with the mechanistic model being examined.

As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their affections and chained by who and what  they love. This is an unwise approach to life because, as the voles in the experiment found, the object of one’s love can die (or leave). This view of Spinoza matches this as voles that bond with a partner become depressed when that partner is lost. In contrast, voles that do not form such bonds do not suffer this depression.

While Spinoza was a pantheist, his view of human beings is similar to that of the mechanist: he regarded humans as within the laws of nature and was a determinist. He believed that all that occurs does so from necessity—there is no chance or choice. This view guided him to the notion that human behavior and motivations can be examined as one might examine “lines, planes or bodies.” He held that emotions follow the same necessity as all other things, thus making the effects of the emotions predictable.  In short, Spinoza engaged in what can be regarded as a scientific examination of the emotions—although he did so without the technology available today and from a more metaphysical standpoint. However, the core idea that the emotions can be analyzed in terms of definitive laws is the same idea that is being followed currently in regards to the mechanics of emotion.

Getting back to the matter of the negative impact of lost love, Spinoza offered his own solution. As he saw it, all emotions are responses to what is in the past, present or future. For example, a person might feel regret because she believes she could have done something different in the past. As another example, a person might worry because he thinks that what he is doing now might not bear fruit in the future. These negative feelings rest, as Spinoza sees it, on the false belief that the past and present could be different and  that the future is not set. Once a person realizes that all that happens occurs of necessity (that is, nothing could have been any different and the future cannot be anything other than what it will be), then that person will suffer less from the emotions. Thus, for Spinoza, freedom from the enslaving chains of love would be the recognition and acceptance that what occurs is determined.

Putting this in the mechanistic terms of modern neuroscience, a Spinoza-like approach would be to realize that love is purely mechanical and that the pain and depression that comes from the loss of love are also purely mechanical. That is, the terrible, empty darkness that seems to devour the soul at the end of love is merely chemical and electrical events in the brain. Once a person recognizes and accepts this, if Spinoza is right, the pain should be reduced. With modern technology it is possible to do even more: whereas Spinoza could merely provide advice, modern science can eventually provide us with the means to simply adjust the brain and set things right—just as one would fix a malfunctioning car or PC.

One problem is, of course, that if everything is necessary and determined, then Spinoza’s advice makes no sense: what is, must be and cannot be otherwise. To use an analogy, it would be like shouting advice at someone watching a cut scene in a video game. This is pointless, since the person cannot do anything to change what is occurring. For Spinoza, while we might think life is a like a game, it is like that cut scene: we are spectators and not players. So, if one is determined to wallow like a sad beast in the mud of depression, that is how it will be.

In terms of the mechanistic mind, advice would seem equally absurd because to say what a person should do implies that a person has a choice. However, the mechanistic mind presumably just ticks away doing what it does, creating the illusion of choice. So, one brain might tick away and end up being treated while another brain might tick away in the chemical state of depression. They both eventually die and it matters not which is which. This is another reason why I choose free will; if I am right, then maybe I can do something about my life. If I am wrong, I am determined to be wrong and hence can neither be blamed nor choose to be any different.

In my previous essay I discussed the theory that love is a mechanical matter. That is, love behavior is the workings of chemistry, neurons and genetics. This view, as noted in the essay, was supported by Larry Young’s research involving voles. This mechanistic view of love has some interesting implications, and I will consider one of these in this essay, the virtue of fidelity.

While humans (such as King Solomon and various officials in the current Trump regime) sometimes have polygamous relationships, the idea of romantic fidelity has been praised in song, fiction and in the professed values of modern society. Given Young’s research, it could be that humans are biochemically inclined to fidelity in that w form pair bonds. Sexual fidelity, as with the voles, is another matter.

While fidelity is publicly praised, an important question is whether it is worthy of praise as a virtue. If humans are like voles and the mechanistic theory of human bonding is correct, then fidelity that grounds pair-bonding would be a form of addiction, as discussed in the previous essay. On the face of it, this would seem to show that such fidelity is not worthy of praise. After all, one does not praise crack addicts for their loyalty to crack. Likewise, being addicted to love would not make a person worthy of praise.

An obvious counter is that while crack addiction is seen as bad because of the harms of crack, the addiction that causes pair bonding should be generally regarded as good because of its consequences. These consequences are those that people usually praise about pair bonding, such as the benefits to health.  However, this counter misses the point: the question is not whether pair bonding is good (it generally is in terms of consequences) but whether fidelity should be praised.

If fidelity is a matter of chemistry (in the literal sense), then it would not seem praiseworthy After all, a lasting bond that forms is merely a matter of a mechanical process, analogous to being chained to a person. If I stick close to a person because I am chained to her, that is hardly worthy of praise—be the chain metal or chemical.

If my fidelity is determined by this process, then I am not acting from the virtue of fidelity but acting as a physical system in accord with deterministic (or whatever physics says these days) processes.  To steal from Kant, I would not be free in my fidelity—it would be imposed upon me by this process. As such, my fidelity would not be morally right (or wrong) and I would not be worthy of praise for my fidelity. For my fidelity to be morally commendable, it would have to be something that I freely chose as a matter of will. At least for thinkers like Kant.

One concern with this view is that it seems to make fidelity a passionless thing. After all, if I chose to be faithful to a person on the basis of a free and rational choice rather than being locked into fidelity by a chemical brew of passion and emotion, then this seems cold and calculating—like how one might select the next move in chess or determine which stock to buy. After all, love is supposed to be something one falls into rather than something one chooses.

This reply has considerable appeal. After all, a rational choice to be loyal would not be the traditional sort of love praised in song, fiction and romantic daydreams. One wants to hear a person gushing about passion, burning emotions, and the ways of the heart—not rational choice.  Of course, an appeal to the idealized version of romantic love might be a poor response—like any appeal to fiction. That said, there does is a certain appeal in the whole emotional love thing—although the idea that love is merely a chemical romance also seems to rob love of that magic.

A second obvious concern is that it assumes that people are capable of free choice, and a person can decide to be faithful or not. The mechanistic view of humans typically does not stop with the emotional aspects. Although Descartes did see emotions, at least in animals, as having a physical basis—while leaving thinking to the immaterial mind. Rather, they tend to extend to all aspects of the human being and this includes decision making. For example, Thomas Hobbes argued that we do not chose—we simply seem to make decisions, but they are purely deterministic. As such, if the choice to be faithful is merely another mechanistic process, then this would be no more praiseworthy than being faithful through a love addiction. In fact, as has long been argued, this sort of mechanistic view would seem to dispose of morality by eliminating agency.

The humble prairie vole was briefly famous because of research into love and voles. Researchers such as Larry Young found that the prairie vole is one of the few socially monogamous mammals that pair bonds for extended periods of time (even for life). Interestingly, this bonding does not occur naturally in other varieties of voles—they behave like typical mammals, such as many politicians.

Larry Young found that the brains of the voles are such that the pleasure reward of sexual activity becomes linked to a specific partner. This mechanism involves oxytocin and vasopressin, and the voles become, in effect, addicted to each other. This is like how a smoker becomes addicted to cigarettes and associates pleasure with the trappings of smoking.  To confirm this, Young genetically modified meadow voles to be like prairie voles. The results showed that the bonding is probably due to the chemistry: the normally non-bonding meadow voles engaged in bonding behavior.

Humans, unlike most other mammals, also engage in pair bonding (sometimes). While humans are different from voles, the mechanism is presumably similar. That is, we are addicted to love.

Young also found that prairie voles suffer from heart ache: when a prairie voles loses its partner, it becomes depressed. Young tested this by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine the degree of struggle offered by the voles. He found that prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled to a lesser degree than those who were not so bereft. The depressed voles, not surprisingly, showed a chemical difference from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was treated for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

This seems to hold for humans as well. While humans typically become saddened by the loss of a partner (by death or breakup), this research suggests that human depression of this sort has a chemical basis and could be cured. This is what is often attempted with therapy and medication.

While the mechanical model of love (and the mind) might seem new, the idea of philosophical materialism (that everything is physical in nature) dates to Thales. Descartes saw the human body as a purely mechanical system, albeit one controlled by a non-material mind. Thomas Hobbes accepted Descartes view that the body is a machine but rejected Descartes’ dualism. Influenced by the physics of his day, Hobbes held that a human being is a deterministic machine, just like all other machines and living creatures.

Perhaps the most explicit early development of the idea of humans as machines was in Julien de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine.  While La Mettrie is not as famous as Hobbes or Descartes, many of his views are duplicated today by modern scientists. La Mettrie held that humans and animals are essentially the same, although humans are more complex than other  animals. He also held that human beings are material, deterministic, mechanist systems. That is, humans are essentially biological machines. Given these views, the idea that human love and vole love are essentially the same would probably be accepted by La Mettrie and would, in fact, be exactly what his theory would predict.

Contemporary science is continuing the project started by philosophers like Thales, Hobbes and La Mettrie. The main difference is that contemporary scientists have much better equipment to work with and can, unlike La Mettrie and Hobbes, examine the chemical and genes that are supposed to determine human behavior. Probably without realizing it, scientists are proving the theories of long dead philosophers.  The chemical theory of love does have some rather interesting philosophical implications and some of these will be considered in upcoming essays.

“The amazing, the unforgivable thing was that all his life he had watched the march of ruined men into the oblivion of poverty and disgrace—and blamed them.”

 

-The Weapon Shops of Isher, A.E. van Vogt

 

In the previous essay, I discussed the role of chance in artistic success. In Salganik’s discussion of his experiment, he noted it probably had broader implications for success. Sorting out the role of chance in success is both interesting and important.

One reason it is important to sort out chance is to provide a rational basis for praise or blame (and any accompanying reward or punishment). After all, success or failure by pure chance would not merit praise or blame. If I win a lottery by pure chance, I have done nothing warranting praise. Aside from acquiring a ticket, I had no substantial role in the process. Likewise, if I do not win a random lottery, I do not merit being accused of failure.

This also ties into morality in that chance can mitigate moral responsibility. If the well-maintained brakes on my truck fail as I approach a stop sign at a reasonable speed and I hit an innocent pedestrian, I am not to blame—this seems a matter of chance. I were to accidentally crash into someone trying to commit murder and save their intended victim, I am not responsible for this fortuitous outcome.

Much less obvious is the connection between chance and setting rational public policy and laws. After all, setting public policy on such matters as unemployment benefits and food stamps without properly assessing the role of chance in success and failure would be a grave moral error. Suppose as some claim, people end up unemployed or in need of food stamps because of factors that are well within their control. That is, they effectively freely decide to be unemployed or in need. If this is the case, then it would be reasonable to set public policy to reflect this (alleged)reality, and this would seem to entail that such support should not exist. To use an analogy, if someone foolishly throws away her money, I have no obligation to give her more money. Her poor decision making does not constitute my obligation.

However, if chance (or other factors beyond the control of the individual) play a significant role in success and failure, then it is reasonable to shape policy to match this alleged reality. Suppose as some claim, people often end up unemployed or in need of food stamps because of chance rather than their own choice. In this case, public policy should reflect this alleged reality, and such aid should be available to help offset chance.  To use an analogy, if someone is robbed of the money she needs to buy food for herself and her children, then her situation does obligate me—if can help her at reasonable cost to myself, I should do so. Otherwise, I am lacking in virtue.

Thus, determining the role of chance in success and failure is important matter. Unfortunately, it is also a very complex matter.  I think it would be helpful to use an example to show that chance seems to be a major factor in success in factor. Since I am most familiar with my own life, I will use myself as an example of the role of chance in success and failure.

As I mentioned in the previous essay on this matter, I was accused of believing in choice because I want to get credit for my successes. As might be imagined, people who are successful usually want to believe their success is largely due to their decisions and efforts—that they have earned success. Likewise, people who are failures often blame chance (and other factors) for their failures. People also apply their view to the opposite of their situations: the successful attribute failure to the decisions of those who have failed. Those who have failed attribute the success of others to chance. People usually embrace the narrative that pleases them most. However, what pleases need not be true. As such, while I like to believe that my success is earned, I am willing to consider the role of chance.

One factor that is entirely a matter of chance is birth. It is, if there is chance, a matter of chance that I was born in the United States to a lower middle-class family and that I was healthy. It is also largely a matter of chance, from my standpoint, that I had a family that took care of me and that I was in a society that provided stability, healthcare and education. If I had been born in a war and poverty ravaged area or had serious health issues, things would have been much different.

The rest of my life was also heavy with chance. For example, I almost ended up a Marine, but budget cuts prevented that and instead I ended up at Ohio State. I ended up meeting a woman there who went to Florida State University and thus I ended up in Tallahassee by chance. This allowed me to get the job I have—which was also largely due to chance. Florida A&M University needed a philosophy professor right away and I just happened to be there. I could, easily enough, go through all the matters of chance that resulted in my success: meeting the right people, being in the right place at the right time, avoiding the wrong people, and so on.

Of course, my desire to take credit drives me to add that I surely had a role to play in my success. While chance put me in the United States with a healthy body and mind, it was my decisions and actions that got me through school and into college. While chance had a major role in my getting a job as a professor, surely it was my actions and decisions that allowed me to keep the job. While chance played a role in my book sales, surely the quality of my work is what wins people over. Roughly put, chance put me into various situations, but it was still up to me to take advantage of opportunities and to avoid dangers.

While my pride drives me to seize a large share of the credit for my success, honesty compels me to admit that I owe almost everything to pure chance—starting with day zero. Presumably the same is true of everyone else as well. As such, I think it wise to always temper praise and condemnation with the knowledge that chance played a major role in success and failure. And we should do what we can to help ensure that everyone can have a good life and not just the lucky few who all too often think they deserve what they have been granted by chance.

Because of my work on metaphysical free will, it is hardly a shock that I am interested in whether sexual orientation is a choice. One problem with this issue is it seems impossible to prove (or disprove) the existence of free will in this, or any, context. As Kant argued, free will seems to lie beyond the reach of our knowledge. As such, it cannot be said with certainty that a person’s sexual orientation is a matter of choice. But this is nothing special: the same can be said about the person’s political party, religion, hobbies and so on.

Laying aside metaphysical speculation, it can be assumed (or pretended) that people do have a choice in some matters. Given this assumption, the question would seem to be whether sexual orientation is in the category of things that can be reasonably assumed to be matters of choice.

On the face of it, sexual orientation is within the domain of what a person finds sexually appealing and attractive. This falls within a larger set of what a person finds appealing and attractive in general.

Thanks to science, it seems reasonable to believe that some of what people find appealing and attractive has a foundation in our neural hardwiring rather than in choice. For example, humans find symmetrical faces more attractive than non-symmetrical faces and this does not seem to be a preference we choose. Folks who like the theory of evolution often claim that this preference exists because those with symmetrical faces are often healthier and hence better “choices” for reproductive activities.  

Food preferences also involve some hard wiring: humans like salty, fatty and sweet foods and the usual explanation also ties into evolution. For example, sweet foods are high calorie foods but are rare in nature, hence our ancestors who really liked sweets did better at surviving than those who did not really like sweets. Or some such story of survival of the sweetest.

Assuming such hardwired preferences, it makes sense that sexual preferences also involve at least some hardwiring. So, for example, a person might be hardwired to prefer light hair over dark hair.  Then again, the preference might be based on experience—the person might have had positive experiences with those with light hair and thus was conditioned to have that preference. The challenge is, of course, to sort out the causal role of hard wiring from the causal role of experience (including socialization). What is left over might be what could be described as choice.

In the case of sexual orientation, it seems reasonable to have some doubts about experience being the primary factor. After all, homosexual behavior has often been condemned, discouraged and punished. As such, it seems less likely that people would be socialized into being homosexual—especially in places where being homosexual is punishable by death. However, this is not impossible—perhaps people could be somehow socialized into being gay by all the social efforts to make them be straight.

Hardwiring for sexual orientation does seem plausible. This is mainly because there seems to be a lack of evidence that homosexuality is chosen. Assuming that the options are choice, nature or nurture, then eliminating choice and nurture would leave nature. But, of course, this could be a false trilemma as there might be other options.

It can be objected that people do choose homosexual behavior and thus being homosexual is a choice. While this does have some appeal, it is important to distinguish between a person’s orientation and what the person chooses to do. A person might be heterosexual and choose to engage in homosexual activity for practical reasons or curiosity. A homosexual might act like a heterosexual to avoid being killed. However, these choices would not change their orientation. As such, my view is that while behavior can be chosen, orientation is probably not.

A few years ago, I was doing my pre-race day run and, for no apparent reason, my left leg began to hurt. I made my way home, estimating the odds of a recovery by the next day. On the morning of the race, my leg felt better and my short pre-race run went well. Just before the start, I was optimistic: it seemed my leg would be fine. Then the race started. Then the pain started.

I hobbled forward and “accelerated” to an 8:30 per minute mile (the downside of a GPS watch is that I cannot lie to myself). The beast of pain grew strong and tore at my will. Behind that armor, my fear and doubt hid—urging me to drop out with whispered pleas. At that moment of weakness, I considered doing the unthinkable: hobbling to the curb and leaving the race.

From the inside this seemed a paradigm example of freedom of the will: I could elect to push through the pain, or I could take the curb. It was all up to me. While I was once pulled from a race because of injuries, at that time I had never left one by choice—and I decided that this would not be my first. I kept going and the pain got worse.

At this point in the race, I considered that my pride was pushing me to destruction or at least a fall. Fortunately, decades of running had trained me in pain assessment: like most veteran runners I am good at distinguishing between what merely hurts and what is causing significant damage. Carefully considering the nature of the pain and the condition of my leg, I judged that it was mere pain. While I could have decided to stop, I decided to keep going. I did, however, grab as many of the high caffeine GU packs as I could—I figured that being wired would help with pain management.

Aided by the psychological boost of my self-medication (and commentary from friends about my unusually slow pace), I chose to speed up. By the time I reached mile 5 my leg had gone comfortably numb and I increased my speed, steadily catching and passing people. Seven miles went by and then I caught up with a former student. He yelled “I can’t let you pass me Dr. L!” and went into a sprint. I decided to chase after him, believing that I could still hobble a mile even if I was left with only one working leg. Fortunately, the leg held up better than my student—I got past him, then several more people, then crossed the finish line running a not too bad 1:36 half-marathon. My leg remained attached, thus vindicating my choice. I then chose to stuff pizza into my pizza port—pausing only to cheer on people and pick up my age group award.

As the above narrative indicates, my view is that I was considering my options, assessing information from my body and deciding what to do. That is, I had cast myself as having what we philosophers like to call free will. From the inside, that is what it seems like. Maybe.

Of course, it would presumably seem the same way from the inside if I lacked free will. Spinoza, for example, claims that if a stone were conscious and hurled through the air, it would think it was free to choose to move and land where it does. As Spinoza saw it, people think they are free because they are “conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which those actions are determined.” As such, on Spinoza’s view my “decisions” were not actual decisions. That is, I could not have chosen otherwise—like the stone, I merely did what I did and, in my ignorance, believed that I had decided my course.

Hobbes takes a somewhat similar view. What I would regard as a decision making process of assessing the pain and then picking my action, he would regard as a competition between two competing forces within the mechanisms of my brain. One force would be pulling towards stopping, the other towards going. Since the forces were closely matched for a moment, it felt as if I was deliberating. But the matter was determined: the go force was stronger and the outcome was set.

While current science would not bring in Spinoza’s God and would be more complicated than Hobbe’s view of the body, the basic idea would remain the same: the apparent decision making would be best explained by the working of the “neuromachinery” that is me—no choice, merely the workings of a purely mechanical (in the broad sense) organic machine. Naturally, many would throw in some quantum talk, but randomness does not provide any more freedom than strict determinism. Rolling dice does not make one free.

While I think that I am free and that I was making choices in the race, I have no way to prove that. At best, all that could be shown was that my “neuromachinery” was working normally and without unusual influence—no tumors, drugs or damage impeding the way it “should” work. Of course, some might take my behavior as clear evidence that there was something wrong, but they would be wrong.

Kant seems to have gotten it quite right: science can never prove that we have free will, but we certainly do want it. And pizza.

By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the book cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the publisher or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8584152

In the Dr. Who story Inferno, the Doctor’s malfunctioning TARDIS console sends him to a parallel universe populated by counterparts of people from his reality. Ever philosophical, the Doctor responds to his discovery by engaging in this reasoning: “An infinity of universes. Ergo an infinite number of choices. So free will is not an illusion after all. The pattern can be changed.”

While the Doctor does not go into detail about his inference, his reasoning seems to be that since the one parallel universe he ended up in is different from his own in many ways (the United Kingdom is a fascist state in that universe and the Brigadier has an eye patch), it follows that at least some of the differences are due to different choices and this entails that free will is real.

While the idea of being able to empirically confirm free will is appealing, the Doctor’s inference is flawed: the existence of an infinite number of universes and differences between at least some would not show that free will is real.  And not just because Dr. Who is fiction. This is because the existence of differences between different universes would be consistent with an absence of free will.

One possibility is that determinism is true, but different universes are, well, different. That is, each universe is a deterministic universe with no free will, yet they are not identical. This would seem to make sense. After allm, two planets could be completely deterministic, yet different. As such, the people of Dr. Who’s original universe were determined to be the way they are, while the people of the parallel universe were determined to be the way they are. And they are different.

It could be objected that all (or at least some) universes are initially identical and hence any difference between them must be explained by metaphysical free will. However, even if it is granted, for the sake of argument, that all  (or some) universes start out identical to each other, it still does not follow that the explanation for differences between them is due to free will.

An obvious alternative explanation is that randomness is a determining factor, and each universe is random rather than deterministic. In this case, universes could differ from each other without free will. In support of this, the fact that dice rolls differ from each other does not require that dice have free will. Random chance would suffice. In this case, the people of the Doctor’s universe turned out as they did because of chance and the same is true of their counterparts—only the dice rolls were a bit different, so their England was fascist and their Brigadier had an eye patch.

If the Doctor had ended up in a universe just like his own (which he might—after all, there would be no way to tell the difference), this would not have disproved free will. While it is unlikely that all the choices made in the two universes would be the same, given an infinity of universes it would not be impossible. As such, differences between universes or a lack thereof would prove nothing about free will.

My position, as always, is that I should believe in free will. If I am right, then it is the right thing to believe. If I am wrong, then I could not have done otherwise or perhaps it was just the result of randomness. Either way, I would have no choice. That, I think, is about all that can be sensibly said about metaphysical free will.

Thanks to The Time Machine, Dr. Who and Back to the Future, it is easy to imagine what time travel might look like: people get into a machine, cool stuff happens (coolness is proportional to the special effects budget) and the machine vanishes. It then reappears in the past or the future (without all that tedious mucking about in the time between now and then).

Thanks to philosophers, science fiction writers and scientists, there are enough problems and paradoxes regarding time travel to keep thinkers pontificating until after the end of time. I will not endeavor to solve any of these problems or paradoxes here. Rather, I will add another time travel scenario to the stack.

Imagine a human research team has found a time gate on a desolate alien world. The scientists have figured out how to use the gate, at least well enough to send people back and forth through time. They also learned that the gate compensates for motion of the planet in space, thus preventing potentially fatal displacements.

As is always the case, there are nefarious beings who wish to seize the gate for their own diabolical purposes. Perhaps they want to go and change the timeline so that rather than one good Terminator movie, there are just very bad terminator movies in the new timeline. Or perhaps that want to do even worse things

Unfortunately for the good guys, the small expedition has only one trained soldier, Sergeant Vasquez, and she has limited combat gear. What they need is an army, but all they have is a time gate and one soldier.

The scientists consider using the gate to go far back in time in the hopes of recruiting aid from the original inhabitants of the world. Obvious objections are raised against this proposal, such as the fear the original inhabitants might be worse than the current foe or that the time travelers might be arrested and locked up.

Just as all seemed lost, the team historian recalled an ancient marketing slogan: “Army of One.” He realized that this marketing tool could be made into a useful reality. The time gate could be used to multiply the soldier into a true army of one. The team philosopher raised the objection that this sort of thing should not be possible, since it would require that a particular being, namely Vasquez, be multiply located: she would be in different places at the same time. That sort of madness, the philosopher pointed out, was something only metaphysical universals could pull off. One of the scientists pointed out that they had used the gate to send things back and forth in time, which resulted in just that sort of multiple location. After all, a can of soda sent back in time twenty days would be a certain distance from that same soda of twenty days ago. So, multiple location was obviously something that particulars could do—otherwise time travel would be impossible. Which it clearly was not. In this story.

The team philosopher, fuming a bit, raised the objection that this was all well and good with cans of soda, because they were not people. Having the same person multiply located would presumably do irreversible damage to most theories of personal identity. The team HR expert cleared her throat and brought up the practical matter of paychecks, benefits, insurance and other such concerns. Vasquez’s husband was caught smiling a mysterious smile, which he quickly wiped off his face when he noticed other team members noticing. The philosopher then played a final card: if we had sent Vasquez back repeatedly in time, we’d have our army of one right now. I don’t see that army. So, it can’t work. Because it didn’t.

Vasquez, a practical soldier, settled the matter. She told the head scientist to set the gate to take her well back before the expedition arrived.  She would then use the gate to “meet herself” repeatedly until she had a big enough army to wipe out the invaders.

As she headed towards the gate with her gear, she said “I’ll go hide someplace so you won’t see me. Then I’ll ambush the nefarious invaders. We can sort things out afterwards.” The philosopher muttered but secretly thought it was a pretty good idea.

The team members were very worried when the nefarious invaders arrived but were very glad to see the army of Vasquez rush from hiding to shoot the hell out of them.  After cleaning up the mess, one of the Vasquez asked “so what do I do now? There is an army of me and a couple of me got killed in the fight. Do I try to sort it out by going back through the gate one me at a time or what?”

The HR expert looked very worried—it had been great when the army of one showed up, but the budget would not cover the entire army. But, the expert thought, Vasquez is still technically and legally one person. She could make it work…unless Vasquez got mad enough to shoot her.

And this, my friend, may be conceived to be that heavy, weighty, earthy element of sight by which such a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below-prowling about tombs and sepulchers, in the neighborhood of which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible.

-Plato’s Phaedo

 

While ghosts have long haunted the minds of humans, philosophers have said relatively little about them. Plato, in the Phaedo, briefly discussed ghosts in the context of the soul. Centuries later, my “Ghosts & Minds” manifested in the Philosophers’ Magazine and then re-appeared in my What Don’t You Know? In the grand tradition of horror movie remakes, I have decided to re-visit the ghosts of philosophy and write about them once more.

The first step in ghostly adventures is laying out a working definition of “ghost.” In the classic tales of horror and role playing game such as Call of Cthulhu and Pathfinder ghosts are undead manifestations of souls that once inhabited living bodies. These ghosts are incorporeal or, in philosophical terms, they are immaterial minds. In the realm of fiction and games, there is a variety of incorporeal undead: ghosts, shadows, wraiths, specters, poltergeists, and many others. I will, however, stick with a basic sort of ghost and not get bogged down in the various subspecies of spirits.

A basic ghost must possess certain qualities. The first is that a ghost must have lost its original body due to death. The second is that a ghost must retain the core metaphysical identity it possessed in life. That is, the ghost of a dead person must still be that person, and the ghost of a dead animal must still be that animal. This is to distinguish a proper ghost from a mere phantasm or residue. A ghost can, of course, have changes in its mental features. For example, some fictional ghosts become single-mindedly focused on revenge and suffer a degradation of their more human qualities. The third requirement is that the ghost must not have a new “permanent” body (this would be reincarnation), although temporary possession does not count against this. The final requirement is that the ghost must be capable of interacting with the physical world in some manner. This might involve being able to manifest to the sight of the living, to change temperatures, to cause static on a TV, or to inflict a bizarre death. This condition can be used to distinguish a ghost from a spirit that is in a better (or worse) place. After all, it would be odd to say that Heaven is haunted. Or perhaps not.

While the stock ghost of fiction and games is incorporeal entity (an immaterial mind), it should not be assumed that this is a necessary condition for being a ghost. This is to avoid begging the question against non-dualist accounts of ghosts. Now that the groundwork has been put in place, it is time to move on to the ghosts.

The easy and obvious approach to the ghosts of philosophy is to simply stick with the standard ghost. This ghost, as noted above, fits in nicely with classic dualism. This is the philosophical view that there are two basic metaphysical kinds: the material stuff (which might be a substance or properties) and the immaterial stuff. Put in everyday terms, these are the body and the soul.

On this view, a ghost would arise upon the death of a body that was inhabited by a mind. Since the mind is metaphysically distinct from the body, it would be possible for it to survive the death of the body. Since the mind is the person, the ghost would presumably remain a person—though being dead might have some psychological impact.

One of the main problems for dualism is the mind-body problem, which vexed the dualist Descartes and his successors. This is the mystery of how the immaterial mind interacts with the material body. While this is mysterious, the interaction of the disembodied mind with the material world is not a greater mystery. After all, if the mind can work the levers of the brain, it could presumably interact with other material objects. Naturally, it could be objected that the mind needs a certain sort of matter to work with—but the principle of ghosts interacting with the world is no more mysterious than the immaterial mind interacting with the material body. And no less mysterious.

Non-dualist metaphysical views would seem to have problems with ghosts. One such view is philosophical materialism (also known as physicalism). Unlike everyday materialism, this is not a love of fancy cars, big houses and shiny bling. Rather, it is the philosophical view that all that exists is material. This view explicitly denies the existence of immaterial entities such as spirits and souls. There can still be minds—but they must be physical in nature.

On the face of it, materialism would seem to preclude the existence of ghosts. After all, if the person is their body, then when the body dies, then that is the end of the person. As such, while materialism is consistent with corporeal undead such as zombies, ghouls and vampires, ghosts would seem to out. Or are they?

One approach is to accept the existence of material ghosts—the original body dies and the mind persists as some sort of material object. This might be the ectoplasm of fiction or perhaps a fine cloud. It might even be a form of energy that is properly material. These would be material ghosts in the material world. Such material ghosts would presumably be able to interact with the other material objects—though this might be limited.

Another approach is to accept the existence of functional ghosts. One popular theory of mind is functionalism, which seems to be the result of thinking that the mind is like a computer. For a functionalist a mental state, such as being afraid of ghosts, is defined in terms of the causal relations it holds to external influences, other mental states, and bodily behavior.  Rather crudely put, a person is a set of functions and if those functions survived the death of the body and were able to interact in some manner with the physical world, then there could be functional ghosts. Such functional ghosts might be regarded as breaking one of the ghost rules in that they might require some sort of new body, such as a computer, a house, or a mechanical shell. In such cases, the survival of the function set of the dead person would be a case of reincarnation—although there is certainly a precedent in fiction for calling such entities “ghosts” even when they are in shells.

Another option, which would still avoid dualism, is for the functions to be instantiated in a non-physical manner (using the term “physical” in the popular sense). For example, the functional ghost might exist in a field of energy or a signal being broadcast across space. While still in the material world, such entities would be bodiless in the everyday meaning of the term, and this might suffice to make them ghosts.

A second and far less common form of monism (the view that there is but one type of metaphysical stuff) is known as idealism or phenomenalism. This is not because the people who believe it are idealistic or phenomenal. Rather, this is the view that all that exists is mental in nature. George Berkeley (best known as the “if a tree falls in the forest…” guy) held to this view. As he saw it, reality is composed of minds (with God being the supreme mind) and what we think of as bodies are just ideas in the mind.

Phenomenalism would seem to preclude the existence of ghosts—minds never have bodies and hence can never become ghosts. However, the idealists usually provide some account for the intuitive belief that there are bodies. Berkeley, for example, claims that the body is a set of ideas. As such, the death of the body would be a matter of having death ideas about the ideas of the body (or however that would work). Since the mind normally exists without a material body, it could easily keep on doing so. And since the “material objects” are ideas, they could be interacted with by idea ghosts. So, it all works out with phenomenal ghosts.

While the classic werewolf is a human with the ability to shift into the shape of a wolf, movie versions often transform into a wolf-human hybrid. The standard werewolf has a taste for human flesh, a vulnerability to silver and a serious shedding problem. Some werewolves have impressive basketball skills, but that is not a standard werewolf ability.

There have been various efforts to explain the werewolf myths and legends. Some of the scientific attempts include forms of mental illness or disease. On these accounts, the werewolf does not actually transform into wolf-like creature but is an unfortunate person suffering from an affliction. These non-magical werewolves are possible but are more tragic than horrific.

There are also supernatural accounts for werewolves, and some involve vague references to curses. In many tales, the condition can be transmitted—perhaps by a bite or, in modern times, even by texting. These magical beasts are not possible unless this is, contrary to all evidence, a magical world.

There has even been speculation about future technology-based shifters—perhaps involving nanotechnology that can rapidly re-structure a living creature without killing it. But these would be werewolves of science fiction.

Interestingly enough, there could also be philosophical werewolves (which, to steal from Adventure Time, could be called “whywolves”) that have a solid metaphysical foundation. Well, as solid as metaphysics gets.

Our good dead friend Plato (who was probably not a werewolf) is known for his theory of Forms. According to Plato, the Forms are supposed to be eternal, perfect entities that exist outside of space and time. As such, they are even weirder than werewolves. However, they neither shed nor consume the flesh of humans, so they have some positive points relative to werewolves.

For Plato, all the particular entities in this imperfect realm are what they are in virtue of their instantiation of various Forms. This is sometimes called “participation”, perhaps to make the particulars sound like they have civic virtue. To illustrate this with an example, my husky Isis was a husky because she participated in the form of Husky. This is, no doubt, among the noblest and best of dog forms. Likewise, Isis was furry because she instantiated the form of Fur (and shared this instantiation with all things she contacted—such was the vastness of her generosity).

While there is some nice stuff here in the world, it is sadly evident that all the particulars lack perfection. For example, while Donald Trump’s buildings are clearly quality structures, they are not perfect buildings. Likewise, while he does have a somewhat orange color, he does not possess perfect Orange.

Plato’s account of the imperfection of particulars, like Donald Trump, involves the claim that particulars instantiate or participate in the Forms in varying degrees. When explaining this to my students, I usually use the example of photocopies of various quality. The original is analogous to the Form while the copies of varying quality are analogous to the particulars.  

Plato also asserts that particulars can instantiate or participate in “contrasting” Forms. He uses the example of how things here in the earthly realm have both Beauty and Ugliness, thus they lack perfect Beauty. To use a more specific example, even the most attractive supermodel still has flaws. As such, a person’s beauty (or ugliness) is a blend of Beauty and Ugliness. Since people can look more or less beautiful over time (time can be cruel), this mix can shift—the degree of participation or instantiation can change. This mixing and shifting of instantiation can be used to provide a Platonic account of werewolves (which is not the same as having a Platonic relation with a werewolf).

If the huge assumptions are made that a particular is what it is because it instantiates various Forms and that the instantiations of Forms can be mixed or blended in a particular, then werewolves can easily be given a metaphysical explanation in the context of Forms.

For Plato, a werewolf would be a particular that instantiated the Form of Man but also the Form of Wolf. As such, the being would be part man and part wolf. When the person is participating most in the Form of Man, then they would appear (and act) human. However, when the Form of Wolf became dominant, their form and behavior would shift towards that of the wolf.

Plato mentions the Sun in the Allegory of the Cave as well as the light of the moon. And it seems appropriate that the moon (which reflects the light of the sun) is credited in many tales with triggering the transformation from human to wolf. Perhaps since, as Aristotle claimed, humans are rational animals, the direct light of the sun means that the human Form is dominant. The reflected light of the full moon would, at least in accord with something I just made up, result in a distortion of reason and thus allow the animal Form of Wolf to dominate. There can also be a nice connection here to Plato’s account of the three-part soul: when the Wolf is in charge, reason is mostly asleep.

While it is the wolf that usually takes the blame for the evil of the werewolf, it seems more plausible that this comes from the form of Man. After all, research shows wolves have been given a bad rap. So, whatever evil is in the werewolf comes from the human part. The howling, though, is all wolf.