Technical Exercise

I had just come out of a purple patch when I hit the rough trot. The thing is, I had been giving 110% at work, really putting in the hard yards and all that, but I guess I just kind of drew the short straw. Or maybe my boss couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow. I don’t really know myself. I guess I’m pretty in the dark about it. All I really know is that I had a big fall from grace. I really hit the ground hard, and it was hard to pick myself back up. You know the story. They say you shouldn’t count the chickens before they hatch, and I guess I stuffed that up. I thought I was going great guns, juggling a lot of balls, but then this curveball came along and I derailed. I’ve really been dealt a bad hand, and I don’t exactly know how I’ll be able to brush it off.

You learn from these mistakes though. I guess if I’m ever coasting again, taking it real easy, and then I get stopped dead in my tracks by another hurdle like this one, I’ll be prepared. Maybe I’ll be ready to take evasive action. They say too many cooks spoil the broth, but also that many hands make light work. I think the last one is more accurate. I’m gambling on the last one. I think it’ll come up good if I stick by my mates. You know, sticking together – that’s the ideal. It’s funny how you can be on cloud nine one day, and then the next you’re totally in the dumps, really in the wars, so to speak. But every cloud has a silver lining, they say, so maybe she’ll be right in the end. At the end of the day, I guess I take solace from the fact that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.


*Editor's (/Superego's) Note: You missed out "axe to grind" and "up in arms", which would actually have been very easy to fit in. No doubt countless others, too. 

An Essay called "My New, Improved Theory of Morality"

My New, Improved Theory of Morality

The way many philosophers explore the question of what morality is is very odd. I began to realise this a while after I finished studying “ethics” as part of the first semester philosophy course at Sydney Uni called “Reality, Ethics and Beauty” and wrote my previous essay on the subject published on this blog. What one learns when they study the philosophy of morality is that there are about four basic philosophical positions on what morality is, or the “meta-ethics”.^[1] These are typically split into two groups: the cognitivist theories, which hold that moral utterances or judgements have “truth aptness” (meaning can be true or false), and the non-cognitivist theories, which hold that they don’t (meaning they are neither true nor false). Of the cognitive positions, the main ones are (arguably) Objective Moral Realism [certain moral principles are objectively, unquestionably true], Subjectivism [moral utterances and judgements are really reports of emotional states, and thus they can be true or false of a person but not generally true or false], and the hippest one, Error Theory [moral utterances and judgements are made as if they were objective propositions, but they must all be false because of facts about our universe]. The overview I have just given is, of course, pretty perfunctory. Something else I should definitely mention is that Objective Moral Realism and Error Theory contain notable subcategories. So, in the case of Moral Realism, it is not just the obvious religious evangelicals that subscribe to the theory, but also Kantian “rationalists” and atheistic moral naturalists^[2]. Likewise, some Error Theorists are supposedly complete Nihilists (though that is a practically untenable position) but most are what are called “Fictionalists”, who believe that morality is a good or useful fiction that we ought to uphold.^[3]

Any overview of non-cognitivist meta-ethical positions also depends on how one apportions the dogmas and what one chooses to omit, but for our purposes we will say that there is only one non-cognitivist position, namely, Emotivism. This theory, as propounded by the English philosopher and logical positivist A.J. Ayer, holds that what moral utterances really are are exclamations of some kind. An Emotivist claims that saying “That is good” can be roughly translated to “Hooray for that!”, and “That is wrong” can be roughly translated to “Boo!”.

When you study morality in philosophy, it’s easy to get ensconced in these positions, and to trick yourself into thinking that they’re your only options – that you have to choose one of them. But I don’t think that’s true. Indeed, I see major flaws with all of them.

I believe that most philosophers today would probably endorse moral Error Theory. This is because it is regarded as being most compatible with basic facts about human morality, and the near unanimous metaphysical view of our universe as solely material, which is the dogma often described as Metaphysical Naturalism or Materialism. The primary precept that distinguishes Error Theory from other relativist positions is that it holds that we do speak moral judgements as statements of fact. That is why our moral views tend to be immutable, and why we pick them up a certain set of moral principles in a similar way to any ideology, and why we are able to have moral arguments, and so on. Non-cognitivists retort to this elementary observation by twisting their theories in weird ways, and making claims like “But people don’t actually realise that we’re just expressing emotions even when we’re advancing arguments for moral positions”. Basically, though, very few people accept hard-line Emotivism and its unmentioned sisters nowadays. Likewise, Subjectivism is arguably self-refuting for similar reasons. If our moral judgements are true when they are sincere, as Subjectivism claims, that means two people with differing moral judgements must both be right. But that can’t possibly be true, ergo Subjectivism fails.^[4]

Error Theory does also seem to be the strongest for more fundamental reasons. It is seen by most philosophers, I believe, as the most “scientific” because its proponents appear to have refuted Moral Realism with their metaphysical arguments. Perhaps the most significant of these arguments is the argument of the Australian-born philosopher J.L. Mackie (whose book in support of a moral error theory, Inventing Right and Wrong, is regarded as seminal) that moral properties couldn’t possibly exist in a material world due to their necessary “queerness”. This “argument from queerness” is very cogent and hard to deny. Generally speaking, most irreligious people today would agree that to believe that there might be moral properties floating around in our universe or in the noumenal realm (or whatever) is pure mysticism. To Error Theorists, that means the only answer is that all moral truths are really falsities – that killing is not right or wrong but that it must be false to say either. To them, the centrality of morality to human experience has no bearing on the truth of the position, because what matters is the “eye of the universe”. And in the “eye of the universe”, it appears that every moral proposition has to be false – equally so for both “Killing is good” and “Killing is bad”.^[5]

However, as soon as you leave the stifling world of philosophy and take a breath of fresh, unpolluted air, you realise that taking this view on morality is quite strange and leads to injurious distortions. What I call a more “pragmatic” view on the basis for morality, like Noam Chomsky’s (who steers clear of most contemporary philosophy), makes a hell of a lot more sense to me. Principally, Chomsky argues that we all have an innate moral sense, and that there are basic moral truisms and elementary principles of moral behaviour. This belief is undoubtedly related to what he believes about language and the infamous (but actually uncontroversial and almost self-evident) postulation of a “Universal Grammar”. Indeed, morality is just like language in one sense: it seems as if we can generate infinite judgements in various contexts from one recursive procedure in the brain. We seem to have a combinatorial grammar of morality, if you like. Possibly corollary to this is Chomsky’s second important component of morality: the principle that we should be non-contradictory in our moral behaviour, i.e. that we should apply our moral standards equally to all people (and possibly beyond). Again, he claims that everyone accepts this in the abstract; they just don’t apply it in practice. Incidentally, most of his polemics against US foreign policy are based on his belief that America never obeys this truistic principle of morality. In any case, the consequence of these facts for Chomsky seems to be that there are some objective moral truths. Like a lot of popular intellectuals – for example, the globetrotting physicist Lawrence Krauss – he has said more than once, without qualifications, that we made “moral progress” over the 20^th Century. I personally do not dispute this, and my own personal view is heavily influenced by this view of Chomsky, as well as late Wittgensteinian ideas (as per usual).

Like Chomsky, I believe that any form of moral relativism, like epistemological scepticism, can only be endorsed in the abstract, and is not a practically tenable position. Although it is true that moral codes differ all over the world, the evidence does suggest that all cultures do at least have some recognisable moral system. This points to an innate moral faculty of some kind, most likely involving both our altruistic emotions and, importantly, some moral beliefs or values.^[6] The fact that we seem to have innate moral beliefs is important because it allows us to extend our moral behaviour even to actions that have nothing to do with our emotions, or even contradict them. For example, we seem to all have the capacity to do moral things out of moral duty. This happens all the time.  People often do things like giving money or food to a hobo on the street, or donating to some African family in some rural region they have never heard of and will never visit. People who look to simple Darwinian, selectional reasons for the advent of morality claim that morality is ultimately about favouring our tribe and that’s why we give so much more care towards our own family and social groups than acquaintances and strangers. Yet even if this is roughly true (and it may well be), we are, as progressive citizens of the 21^st Century, able to see that it is irrational to only care about people with whom we are close. Instead, we can learn to extend morality beyond our own social environment or gender or race – in the end, to all human beings in need or strife, and other species too. When most of us proclaim that “killing is wrong”, nowadays, we undoubtedly intend the judgement to be universal. It is the same with rape and torture and stealing and fraud and all the other great evils human beings perpetrate. Sure, ISIS think that the proposition “Killing is wrong” is true only within their own sect. But most people in the West condemn the death penalty no matter who the person is or what crime they committed. Eye-for-an-eye retributive justice is now a historical relic in our legal system.

Of course, the obvious relativist rebuttal to this would be the claim that human beings are still only ever moral deep-down because it makes us feel good, and that morality is still fundamentally emotional. Sociopaths and psychopaths are not moral, they might say, and the reason is that morality is not about innate beliefs or a specific innate faculty. As Peter Singer has claimed, however, even some of the most diabolical criminals – one of his most intriguing examples is the Australian crimelord Chopper Reed – still have moral codes of some kind. They still feel the need to justify their murders morally.^[7] And although you might think the existence of some psychopath who didn’t understand morality at all and had no moral intuitions would impugn the notion of an innate faculty, I submit that it would actually effectively confirm it. Assuming this hypothetical psychopath had been exposed to roughly the same cultural mores as other people who had developed a moral sense, it would prove that he possessed a slightly different neurophysiology.^[8] While it would be hard to prove this definitively, it certainly appears that some kind of moral belief-system seems to be about as innate to us as language is.

Of course, Error Theorists might also accept this. After all, as I explained, they accept that we treat moral judgements like they are truths, and agree that we do have moral beliefs, probably genetically endowed. But to believe that Error Theory is the only option once this has been assimilated is, I believe, erroneous. There are a number of very tenuous assumptions that that view relies on.

One important assumption that most Error Theorists almost certainly make (if only unconsciously) is that it doesn’t matter whether some moral principles and intuitions might be shared across all cultures and communities. Most Error Theorists almost certainly believe that the fact that all cultures seem to accept the same elementary moral truisms and very young children give the same answers as adults to “trolley problems” is irrelevant to the question of whether morality has an objective basis. In other words, most Error Theorists almost certainly reject universality as a basis for objectivity. If an Error Theorist does believe universality necessarily entails some kind of objectivity, I don’t think they can be sure of the truth of their position, given there is evidence of moral universality. Therefore, most Error Theorists must believe that even if everyone believes or tacitly accepts some fact, that doesn’t mean the fact is in the least bit true.  The proposition that “Killing a member of your own family is wrong, unless they are endangering you” is, I submit, one such universally held belief.^[9] So most Error Theorists presumably don’t dispute the universality of that specific belief, but claim its universality has no bearing on whether it is objectively right.

Unfortunately, I can’t decisively refute this position, but I can demonstrate that it is deeply unsatisfactory and possibly stretches language beyond sense. My main objection to it is rather Wittgensteinian and can be stated thus: one cannot meaningfully talk of morality without accepting moral truisms like “Killing is wrong” and “Caring about others is good” or the more specific proposition above. I contend that the phrases “morally right” and “morally wrong” are only meaningful insofar as such aforementioned truistic propositions are accepted as true. If you deny the moral wrongness of something that everyone on planet earth thinks is morally wrong (such as the “Killing a member […]” proposition), then you must, I believe, be going beyond the limits of language. You are not only contradicting yourself (because deep down you feel that it is true to say it is wrong) but you are perverting the words “moral” and “wrongness”. This objection is possibly quite confusing, but it should become clearer. The most important thing to point out is that when we are not engaging in the strange discourse of philosophy, we all intuitively know that morality, and rightness and wrongness, have limits. While it may be possible to argue that, for the Aztecs, human sacrifice was a moral duty – because they supposedly did it in order to keep the sun rising in the morning – it is not possible to argue that a serial killer is being moral by wantonly murdering people. His actions are amoral; they’re obviously morally wrong. Everyone would accept that, and if you deny it, I believe you cease to discuss morality. To say that he is being moral, or that it is simply false to say that he is being moral (as an Error Theorist would claim) is to lose sight of what ethical words even mean. The pragmatic fact of the matter is that, to all human beings, that serial killer is acting in a way that is completely morally wrong. That’s how we all think and those are the words we use. An Error Theorist says any moral judgement is ultimately false in the eye of the universe. But morality is not about the eye of the universe! Importantly, I think it is a mistake to treat it like you would a material phenomenon – to examine it from the universe’s point of view. To put this in a more Wittgensteinian fashion (albeit crudely), I think it is wrong to dissect morality within the scientific language-game.  We all know, intuitively, that to deny the truth of such statements as “Saving a drowning child is good” or that “Massacring innocent children is bad” is nonsensical. But in philosophy it is suddenly sensible. The question is, why should we call something a “fiction” when it is not a fiction in real life? How can that make sense? And if morality is bound up with the unique attributes of human beings, why should we regard it in a way that abstracts the phenomenon from human action altogether? And if everyone agrees on some moral universals, why should the universe’s perspective overrule us to make them objectively false?

I believe that some kind of “weak objectivity” does obtain in the kinds of moral judgements aforementioned. Moral truths may not be objective like the fact that gravity on Earth propels objects downwards at roughly 9.8 m/s2, but they’re objective to us humans, in the sense that everyone believes them. Surely that means it is insane, in a very literal sense of the word, to call them objectively false.^[10]

And past this obstacle,^[11] I believe that the question of how moral you should be is not a precise matter but can be roughly gauged through reason alone. Being logical is, as the second of Bertrand Rusell’s three fundamental laws of thought suggests, in large part to do with being non-contradictory. For Chomsky, the problem with American foreign policy (and indeed with all imperialist powers in history) has always been that consistency is never applied – that moral hypocrisy is rife. The governments always portray their agenda as moral, but they never prosecute the moral standards to which they hold their enemies on themselves. If the American government did follow consistent moral standards, Chomsky argues, they would see that they are by far the most powerful, most brutal and most nefarious terrorists in the world. I believe that the exact same principle applies to all of us. If you are caring and magnanimous to your family (as we all seem to be), if you believe in all-encompassing moral truisms (as we all seem to), then you ought, logically, to extend your moral behaviour to people you don’t know at all. You ought, logically, not to be discriminatory of people of different creeds, classes or races. You ought, logically, to try to extend your kindness as far as you can beyond your own family or close friends. You ought, logically, to give some of your money – if you can afford it – to charity. You ought, logically, to support some kind of feminist doctrine – to care about women as much as you care about men, and to rail against such current issues as domestic violence statistics and ubiquitous internet misogyny and the pernicious effect of gonzo internet pornography on adolescents. You ought, logically, to lament Australia’s racist colonial past and to decry continuing endemic racism towards Indigenous people in our society. Etc.^[12]

Although I don’t subscribe to any strict utilitarian model of morality like Peter Singer, I think his famous thought experiment from the 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” illustrates brilliantly the irrational moral hypocrisy of most of us Westerners. Here is a simplified version of it.

Suppose you are walking through a park. On your feet are some expensive shoes that you recently purchased. A boy is playing next to a pond nearby. Suddenly, the boy trips. He falls into the pond. He cannot get up and seems to be drowning. You scan the environs, and there is no one else to save him. What do you do?

Unsurprisingly, Singer has claimed that everyone he has posed it to responds to this thought experiment by saying something to the effect of “Forget the shoes, I’d save the child”. But Singer’s great observation is that most of us can in fact save children’s lives all the time, just by spending a bit less of our income on unnecessary, material luxuries (like the shoes in the thought experiment). The only reason we don’t is because we don’t bother to think about these children – because we put them from our minds. Essentially, because we are selfish.  And our selfishness also entails irrationality. Because if we all agree on saving the boy we don’t know from drowning, why shouldn’t we all agree to saving other children and adults in a far off land? It would, I believe, be utterly irrational not to do so. Some moral philosophers dispute this. But I don’t think their intuitionist arguments have any basis. Admittedly, I couldn’t refute them, per se, but they rely on a strange view that we should trust our moral intuitions above all else – that they should be the final arbiters of what we ought to do. I believe this is silly. I share Singer’s disdain for illogical intuitions.  So what if these Africans are geographically thousands of kilometres away? So what if, intuitively, we feel less compelled to give to those thousands of kilometres away? There is no logical reason why that should lead us to ignore their plight and misery. 

You can now hopefully see why I do believe that it is in fact right to say that there are moral truths and things we should objectively all be doing. If everyone agrees on certain moral universals, and expanding your circle of care is simply a matter of logical consistency, doing such things as I enumerated before does seem to me to be in some way objectively right. That is why I think it is correct of Chomsky and Krauss to say we have made “moral progress”. What we have collectively done, over the course of the 20^th Century, is expanded our circle of moral decency to women, people of all races and gay people. And the simple fact is that it makes no logical sense not to care about women, people of all races and gay people. Even back in the 19^th Century and before, where pseudoscientific theories about the subhumanity of the black race and the intellectual inferiority of women to men carried great weight, it still didn’t make sense to oppress those two groups. Even the biggest bigots back then knew that black people and women could feel, could suffer, had thoughts, hopes and dreams. After all, if you pricked them, did they not bleed? 

Nowadays we are also increasingly coming to realise that it makes no logical sense to be completely anthropocentric: a human chauvinist, as it is amusingly known. Just because us homo sapiens appear to have superior cognitive powers to other creatures doesn’t mean we should have absolute control over them. Just because a lot of us savour the taste of meat doesn’t give us a logical claim over the life of an animal. Of course it doesn’t. To insist otherwise, as a normally moral person, knowing that animals must suffer in some fashion, is simply to be logically inconsistent. That’s fine, but I assure you there is no way to defend eating meat on ethical grounds. Health grounds, perhaps – but not ethical ones. Some people say that we ought to be able to eat meat because we have evolved to do so and that is the way of nature – dog eat dog and so forth. But we certainly don’t get our moral compass from the natural world in any other circumstance. Indeed, that is the last place we want to look for moral direction. Hitler did (the idea of “Social Darwinism”), Ayn Rand did, but these were not good people!^[13]

I hope you can see, too, why I believe it is ultimately trivial that moral facts are not like scientific facts. If morality is intrinsic to human nature, it seems deeply strange to say that, on the basis of science, all moral judgements are false, and that morality is a mere fiction. Furthermore, it seems a matter of simple reason to recognise that it makes little sense only to be moral to your own family or friends or a neighbour’s drowning child, when you could be helping so many others. Of course, this isn’t an ironclad argument against the claims of Error Theory, but I also don’t believe there’s any more plausible way to view this thing we call “morality”. It seems to me that morality is central to human nature and that we ought, if nothing but for the sake of logical consistency, to take our commitment to it as far as we can bring ourselves to.

---

[1] I should say that few people would agree with my claim that there are “four”, but that’s inconsequential.

[2] Moral naturalism is a very broad term that I am meaning to refer to people who believe that we somehow (through a series of evolutionary mechanisms) have access to indisputable moral truths.

[3] Funny I should use the word “ought” there, given that it implies the Fictionalists have a duty to uphold the fiction. Not entirely sure how a Fictionalist would react to that.

[4] Which is not really a decisive refutation unless you’re being very rigid-minded, but let’s move on. 

[5] Yes, the consequences of this are a bit counterintuitive: according to the theory, Killing is both not bad and not good, and not anything in between either. But you’re meant to be able to just accept that.

[6] This is not to suggest that moral deliberations occur in only one part of the brain or anything like that, merely that we are programmed to develop some kind of moral system.

[7] You know, like “He insulted the gang” or something.

[8] Even if, as is quite likely, the source of this neurophysiological difference was actually environmental, originally – say, he was a neglected or abused baby – that wouldn’t impugn the notion of an innate moral faculty either. The environmental trauma would have just stunted the development of the moral faculty, in the same way that a lack of exposure to any language in the first few months of a child’s life causes her to have severely constrained linguistic capacities. In fact, speaking of language, there is a big misconception about the Chomskyan idea of Universal Grammar and the “poverty of stimulus” argument related to this: people seem to think that UG means that a baby would begin talking fluently with no stimulus. Well, all I can say is that you’d have to be extremely stupid to think that. The only explanatory alternative to Universal Grammar is a general learning mechanism (given the blank slate position is incoherent, obviously), but no one has come up with a convincing proposal for such a mechanism that could explain language. So, really, the shit that gets published about Universal Grammar being wrong on the internet is complete nonsense.

[9] It is true that some people kill their own family members, but that is irrelevant because we are talking about avowed beliefs here. I don’t believe that anyone (except a wilful Error Theorist or some other liar) would deny the truth of that sentence. I have no evidence for it, but I am willing to wager a lot of money that even men who kill their wives hold such beliefs – they have just failed to practise them at all times. 

[10] Insanity is not a knockdown objection, but it’s the best I’ve got.

[11] Which you don’t even have to entertain anyway, given that, as I have argued, we are all unavoidably moral regardless of doubts about the ontological status of moral properties.

[12] I don’t mean you should literally do exactly those things, but I am saying that you should do something close to them.

[13] Though even they had moral codes, however perverted, which buttresses my postulation of an innate moral faculty of some kind. 

Looking down from their ivory tower even though it is actually made of sand. A dismal state of intellectual impoverishment.

My thoughts after an incident involving an authority figure spewing intellectual tripe

My God, what a joke, what a farce, what a travesty! What captious, capricious martinets they are! No academic value, integrity or credibility. Their entire department is a sham. A total, unalloyed, unadulterated, unmitigated sham. Frauds and charlatans the lot of them. No intelligence, no rigour, no anything.
And they have the gumption, the temerity, the audacity to call themselves intellectuals. They are not intellectuals. Most people I know are significantly more intelligent than them.

As a corollary to what I'm saying, cryptically, see this:
http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/noam-chomsky-on-derrida-foucault-lacan.html

Yes I seem like a dickhead but oh well. I believe this. 

A Diary Entry called "A Concatenation of Cataclysms"

A Concatenation of Cataclysms

Yesterday I had mild, sporadic tinnitus in my blocked, hearing-impaired right ear, which was kind of annoying and made me slightly anxious that some permanent damage might be being inflicted. That night when I went to bed, I had a clogged nose and my ear was still blocked and squealing quietly. Since my sinusitis and shitty ears were starting to really agitate me, I decided I would do something about it: I hence started blowing snot out of my right nostril like nobody's business in a (probably) quixotic attempt to clear out my sinuses and thereby unblock my right ear. I was holding my nostril open with my left index finger and blowing furiously, depositing the sticky snot on my sheets (why not?). Eventually, after maybe half an hour, it did seem like I had unblocked my ear somewhat, but then, maybe as a result of this, that ear started to hurt like hell. The pain was very intense. I couldn't rest on that ear because it was so sore. It kind of felt like all the nerves were exposed to the air or something. It was a really terrific ache. I tried to rest with only my left ear on the pillow to get to sleep, but I am used to constantly changing sides when I sleep and the forced stasis was putting me off my routine. Consequently, more than two hours passed with me unable to get any shut-eye. Finally, at 12:20pm, I decided to temporarily give up on the possibility of sleeping and instead go searching in the kitchen for some kind of painkiller to allay the ache. There I found some Panadol and took two tablets. I don't know if the Panadol worked, but I do know I got to sleep about ten minutes after I returned to bed post-pills and in the morning the ache was gone. 

My ear was still blocked, though, and the hearing was still impaired. Oh, and the mild, sporadic tinnitus was still there. 

I spent this morning mostly doing my French essay (as well as watching the last few episodes of Season Cinco of T & E Awesome Show Great Job! and various other things that I often do on Saturdays (eating cereal, doing ablutions, drinking coffee that my dad made and eating the pastry that he had bought that morning, as he often does on Saturdays or Sundays, staring out the window in the study, going on Facebook for no reason, etc)) and my ear didn't improve. As soon as I had gotten up, my dad had recommended that I phone up the Fox Valley Medical Centre about my ear and book an appointment at 8 O'clock on the dot so I could get in early. I did in fact carry out this recommendation, phoning them up at precisely 8am (according to my mum's laptop, which was sitting on the bench open), but the call went straight to their answering machine because, as the recorded message informed me, they are not open on Saturdays. I should have known this, of course, considering that the Fox Valley Medical Centre is a part of the Sydney Adventist Hospital (or “San”), which is a Seventh Day Adventist-run institution, and Seventh Day Adventists are those whackos who observe the sabbath on a Saturday for fuck knows why and are also vegetarians, I think (I am fairly sure of the latter fact because I used to always go to the San Carols by Candlelight and always get the Nachos they sold and they were always made with kidney beans instead of mince and I think my mum explained to me why when I asked once). Anyway, after the Fox Valley Medical Centre plan fell through, I had only one other medical option: the place at Hornsby. However, even though I wasn’t aware that that practice doesn’t take bookings until about 11:30am of this morning, when my mum told me, I didn't want to phone up or go there because I couldn't be fucked and because I found it slightly daunting (I am lazy and very shy). 

My parents went out at around 12, I think (I don't know where and I didn't ask). At that point, I knew I had about an hour and a half till I had to leave for my soccer game (which was at 3pm at St Johns Oval), and I resolved that I would try to finish my French essay before I left. I slowly worked my way through the essay, and had just reached the end of my third body paragraph at 1:12, I think it was, when I suddenly realised that I had to start getting ready for my soccer game. For the next 18 minutes, I frantically ran around the house gathering underpants and my soccer gear, and then some shinpads, and then a water bottle, and my wallet, and the car key. And then I was ready. I slipped into my Vans for driving, and – with a water bottle, wallet and pair of car keys in hand – I walked out of the door, then locked the door, then got into the car. Thereupon, I realised I ought to check that the game I thought was on was in fact the one on, not last week's game, and that I had got the time and ground right. Therefore, cursing and self-castigating like an old trooper, I went back towards the door, unlocked it, ran to my dad's (/the family's) Mac, frenetically clicked on the mouse, found that he had turned the computer off (as per usual, ever since he was told by some imbecile that leaving the previous one on too long was one of the reasons for its failure), and then ran upstairs towards the study and my laptop. I flipped up my bad boy's recently flipped-down lid, rapidly entered the password (making sure I pressed the dodgy keys very hard and verifying that they registered as black dots on the screen), and then, once logged in, clicked on the fortunately still open Hotmail tab, found the relevant Email, saw that the date was correct and that I had got the time and ground right. I thus ran back to the car, hopped in, and began the slow and torturous process of manoeuvring the Alfa – with its tiny fucking turning circle – out of the top part of the driveway, where there were numerous obstacles, including the Subaru, parked right next to it. Eventually, I completed this and, after bumping my way over a felled, gibbous branch of one of those weird Palm trees that our neighbours on the left planted, I was off. On my way, from misery to happiness today. Listening to Tchaikovsky with one ear. And so forth. 

All was fairly pleasant and uneventful until I emerged from the Lane Cove Tunnel and was cruising along the M1 towards the city, whereupon I suddenly had the most harrowing revelation: I DIDN’T PACK MY SOCCER BOOTS IN THE CAR. 'Shit', I thought, 'Just my fucking luck'. You see, this stuff seems to happen to me all the fucking time. I am really no good at being an adult. Almost every time I have gone to a soccer training or game, I have managed to fuck up in one way or another. I am also chronically absentminded, and this is confirmed to me every time I have to take multiple things to some event. God knows how many times over my entire school career I forgot some important item and then either had to tell my dad to turn around the car when we were already half-way to the station, or get my mum to move heaven and earth for it to be delivered to me when I was already at school. Jesus. And my dad has even tried to teach my how not to forget to take  things. This is what made my forgetting of my soccer boots even more ignominiously improbable: I was even cognisant of his main prescription, that I should make a list of the stuff I needed in my head, when I was gathering my soccer stuff! Yes, that's right, and I still didn't put the boots in the car! No wonder I couldn't help thinking (and only half-facetiously) that, after all the bad luck that seemed to plague me last year, God actually hated me, and was smiting me once again. Either that, or I had a problem.

I quickly considered not turning back and instead hedging my bets that someone would have a second pair of boots. But I reasoned that even if Olly did bring two of his many pairs of boots, they probably wouldn't fit, and despite the tremendous hassle it would be heading back to Wahroonga, it was probably the only sensible option. Given that I was on the M1, however, doing a U-turn was out of the question. And so, with a mind now flooded with adrenaline, anger, frustration and various other, more complex emotions, I knew I had to recalibrate my route fast. And so I did. I decided to take the North Sydney exit, and thus headed into the furthest left lane in anticipation of the exit. The clock was ticking, the petrol gauge was looking more ominous, everything was bad.

Seeing as everything was bad, I decided to try to think of ways of thinking that might console me. I proposed that the farce I was currently embroiled in was perhaps ‘character-building’, finding the cliche grimly funny in the situation. ‘It is the kind of thing that will make me who I am, who I am tomorrow will be a legacy of this debacle,’ I said to myself, in a fine example of gallows humour. Naturally, the logical part of me rejected these sentiments soon after they came to me, and wondered aloud to myself what "character-building" even meant. Nevertheless, my mind didn't produce many more interesting thoughts than that (except the brief fancy that we probably live in a deterministic universe and I therefore had no choice in the matter, which I also dismissed). And yet, I still tried to console myself. I reasoned that it was perhaps better that I wouldn't have to start the game, given that I was ill and probably incapacitated in some way, and was probably lacking my normal stamina. I also recognised that I probably wouldn't be vituperated by coach for my lateness considering that I would be able to excuse myself (and he probably wouldn't get angry even if I couldn't). These thoughts were slightly consoling, even though the idea that I had wasted half an hour of driving and therefore petrol for nothing, and would waste another half hour going back home in dense traffic, before heading all the way back out again, was incalculably exasperating. 

Anyhow, I eventually made it back to Wahroonga a little after 2:30, according to the Alfa clock. Once at 23 Strone Ave, I parked the car in the middle of the driveway, yanked up the handbrake, turned the car off, sprinted towards the front door, unlocked it, ran inside the house, picked up my boots, locked the door, then ran back towards the car, threw the boots in, hopped in the driver's seat and began the long manoeuvre out (I thought where I had parked would help me get out but I was mistaken). Eventually, I was out of the driveway and back on the road, ready for a frustrating journey back to the city, with a clock ticking towards 3 and a petrol gauge looking worse and worse.

It was 10 past 3 on the Alfa clock when I finally reached Sydney Uni. I pulled up alongside the St Johns gate, which I immediately saw was locked, and then looked at the field: to my horror, no one was there. The nets weren't on the goals, and the place was deserted. Completely empty. And about 50 metres away from me, I saw a sign: "Oval closed".

'You are actually kidding me, God,' I thought. I haven't bothered to charge my phone for the last week or so, so maybe I would have known about the closure if I had been a normal person, but this fact didn't in any way alleviate the almost cataclysmic misfortune I felt. Fortunately, I was able to control my emotions, for the most part. I decided that the worst moment had been the one where I realised I had forgotten my boots, and that it was definitely good in some sense that I didn't have to force my infirm body through any great strain. I was disturbed by the thought that my team might be playing elsewhere, but I resolved to banish that from my mind. Nevertheless, one terrible thought did persist: all the driving had been for nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the stress, all the preparation, all the time, all the petrol, it had all been totally pointless.

Even this was surmountable, though, because I did have one idea for how to make the journey not completely otiose: I would get some petrol and a packet of chips from the servo twenty metres up the road. That way, I could at least feel that my massive, arduous trip could almost have been a normal journey to the servo, for a fill-up and a snack. It was not true, but the fantasy did console me, somehow. And the drive back was actually quite nice, complemented nicely by the Red Rock Deli Honey Soy Chicken chips and some soothing music. 

But I still have a fucked right ear.     

An Essay called "An Essay about 'Identity'" (that is highly derivative of Wittgenstein) (that is really, really atrocious and I now disown)

An Essay about ‘Personal Identity’

                                

In this essay, I shall respond to the question, ‘What is personal identity?’ Given there is little point in shrinking from my initially odd-seeming answer to this question, I will state it clearly and explicitly right now, before we progress any further: we already know what identity is.

It is my contention that the meaning of this word we call identity is not mysterious, because all there really is to the word identity is how it is used. We certainly know what it means in conversation. We do not question it or begin to dissect it when it arises in everyday speech; we parse it and we respond to it exactly as we would respond to any other word. I believe that is all there is to identity, because all identity is is a word. I believe we are misguided in looking for an essence of identity, or in trying to penetrate the ‘concept’ in a philosophical manner.

Since I am sure this strange and prickly idea will have already offended you, I shall start the process of persuasion very slowly. First, I would like to invite you to examine these examples of common sentences in which the word appears:

1.) “He’s changed so much since he got Alzheimer’s, he’s lost his identity.”

2.) “I have a dual-identity: one by night, one by day.”          

3.) “I feel like my identity has changed so much over the years.”

4.) “One’s genes determine one’s identity to a large extent.”

5.) “Her identity hasn’t changed at all, she’s the same as she was twenty years ago.”

6.) “We know the identity of the terrorists.”

7.) “What is our national identity?”

It is true that the word “identity” does seem to be quite straightforward semantically and easy to define with only two main senses. Oxford Online’s primary definitions, for example – 1.) “The fact of being who or what a person or thing is” and 2.) “The characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is” – seem adequate descriptions of the word. Certainly, all of the uses of the word in the exemplary sentences above could be seen to conform to one of the two definitions, or perhaps a subtle synthesis of the both. Nevertheless, if you examine these sentences above a little more closely you can see that they each imply subtly different things about what identity actually is, or the “concept of identity”. In sentences 1 and 2, one’s identity is implied to be discrete, unique, identifiable, and can be transformed into a different but equally discrete, unique, identifiable identity (can be “lost” or replaced with another). By contrast, in 3, the implication appears to be that identity is not so absolute, and can be subject to gradual change. However, there is still a sense in 3 of one’s identity being unique and identifiable (“my identity”).

In 4, “one’s identity” is clearly shorthand for “one’s identity over one’s lifetime”. We do not parse this sentence as implying that we are all exactly the same over our lifetime because nobody could possibly think that. Instead, we immediately understand the word “identity” here as referring to our identity at all times of our life. To use the word in the manner of sentences 1 and 2, we might say that it is referring to one’s identities. But the point is that the speaker of 4 does not have to use the plural form to be understood in that way. In 5, we might say that the sense of the word, taken broadly, is the same as all of the other sentences and that there is thus nothing new to be gleaned from it. Yet it is certainly of note that this sentence preserves the notion that one’s identity can remain the same over many years. This suggests that the concept of identity can be fixed. In 6, yet more different things are implied of the concept of identity. Here, we can say that the concept of identity probably amounts to nothing more than one’s name, one’s age, one’s sex and various other basic, impersonal details. Again, we likely don’t even think of the word in that way when we hear 6; we know immediately what is meant by identity. In 7, the concept of identity is implied to be a fixed and static one, and one that can also be applied to a nation rather than just a person. How exactly you might unpack what someone is talking about when they use a phrase like “national identity” is unclear, but it obviously again implies different things about the concept of identity. While identity is again about characteristics, this time they are the characteristics of a nation, which are surely utterly different kinds of things.

Clearly there is a huge divergence in what these deployments of the word identity suggest about this ‘concept of identity’. Intuitively, it seems that we are confused about what the word actually means! And what a philosopher wants to do in this situation is try to resolve the confusion by shining the light of reason onto the word, by constructing theories that aim to reach the best compromise between logic and our intuitions about the concept.

Yet here’s where we run up against our first problem with this theoretical attitude: to embark upon such a mission of illumination, one must presuppose that there is some kind of abstract essence to the word identity. But what if there isn’t? What if there is only the use of the word?  If so, what are you really doing when you carry out a philosophical investigation of this sort? You are trying to penetrate a word that has no centre. It is no surprise that this leads to extraordinary conclusions, and to grand, irreconcilable disputes, and to the genesis of ever more subtle and interesting theories. There is simply no limit to the explication, elaboration and disputation of a concept that does not exist.

I know this is a fairly grandiose and shocking hypothesis, and I expect that I will have drawn only a reaction of hostility. But be patient, for there is much more justification to come.

Let us first start with a very basic argument.

Identity is not a physical substance, like, say, water. A more obvious and truistic sentence has nary been written, but I believe philosophers do not actually acknowledge the truth of it: indeed, I would go so far as to say that the treatment of intangible concepts like physical ones has been a scourge on philosophy since time immemorial. In order to illustrate this even bolder claim, I will begin by supporting my claim that identity and water are very dissimilar.

First, we need to ask a simple question: can we conceive of a world that is just like ours barring the fact that everyone in this imaginary world uses the word “water” to refer to water as we know it in the sciences (H₂0), but also to refer to what we, in our world, know as salt-water, mud and clouds? Clearly, there are facts about H₂0, salt-water, mud and clouds that unite them (their shared primary ingredient of H₂0 being perhaps the most fundamental), just as you might say that there are facts about the different ways we use the word identity that unite them (the Oxford definitions apply to all my 7 cases). Moreover, you might say that we do already have, in our own language, nouns that refer to a whole host of loosely connected physical things, in the same way that water in this other world refers to a whole host of loosely connected physical things. The nouns “game”, “computer”, “tree” and “tool” might be seen as examples of this. Very few properties unite all the senses of these words, and, in the case of game, arguably none. So I think we can conceive of a world where everyone used water to refer to all these disparate physical things – in fact quite easily.

However, given these different physical things (scientifically defined water, and the other water-containing things) are clearly both quantitively and qualitatively very different things, and even two mud puddles or two clouds can be very quantitatively and qualitatively different, we can assume that we would, in this other world, realise that the word water can refer to utterly disparate things. This is because physical things are quite easily deconstructable, they are very easily reduced to properties of an ever diminishing magnitude, and we do have a technical or scientific vocabulary that permits us to describe these properties. We have basic concepts like size and texture, then slightly more specific ones like chemical state and temperature, and then ever more complex and microscopic properties like chemical composition and atomic structure.

But identity is not a physical thing. It is intangible. It has no size, texture, chemical state, temperature, chemical composition or atomic structure. In fact, it has no properties save linguistic ones. So why should we assume that it has an essence?

I expect that the hostility has probably not died down. This is understandable; the idea I’m proposing is, after all, a very uncomfortable one, and it goes against so much of what we are taught and even where language itself leads us, by giving words like identity precisely the same grammatical properties as words like water. I know that numerous objections will have arisen by now.

We know that intangible things are not the same as tangible things; that is a complete truism, as you said yourself. But surely that means your conclusions are far too grand. Just because people imply different things about identity when they speak doesn’t mean that there isn’t actually a truth of the matter as to the question of what identity is, in a philosophical sense. It is our job as philosophers to figure out if there is such an essence – that’s what we’re doing. We all understand when we use the word identity in a philosophical context that we are talking about something vague, but we are trying to clarify it, make some sense of it, give it a coherence and a consistency. That’s the whole point.

But what I want to ask is a question that may seem totally banal and insignificant, but which I think speaks to the heart of what I’m saying:

What do we actually mean by identity when we ask what identity is?

I believe a philosopher ought to be able to answer this before he begins, but no philosopher ever does! He treats identity kind of as if it were a physical substance, believing that investigation can help uncover a deeper truth about it. But what reason does he have to assume this? What grounds?

It’s easy for you to say all of this in the abstract, but surely philosophers have more sophisticated ways of looking at questions like “What is identity?” than you’re giving them credit for. They’re not just pursuing a nebulous essence when they pose such questions, but looking at the solid heart of the concept of identity. And modern philosophers would surely not just attack the basic question uncritically; they would ask more specific questions first, like ‘Which way of conceiving of the word identity makes most sense?’

This last part is absolutely true. Since it is their remit and duty, since it is in their job description, philosophers think hard about the concept of identity. They don’t examine in any detail how people use the word, but instead adopt the theoretical attitude: they immediately try to formulate cogent theories to try to explain the concept in a way that best fits both with logic and our intuitions. Philosopher A says, “The physical continuity theory of identity is the best one we have for explaining the concept. It is plausible and it is neat. It means we can say that a human being has the same identity as he had yesterday because he is composed of the same matter.”

For a while this theory seems adequate, but eventually new scientific discoveries about cells (how they are constantly replicating and dying) leads Philosopher B to suddenly realise that this theory is hopelessly inept. He says, “The psychological continuity theory of identity is far superior. It means we can say that a human being has the same identity as she had yesterday because he has the same psychology.”

Much bickering between the two camps ensues for many years. Eventually, Philosopher C strides imperiously onto the scene and says, “No, no, no, the concept of identity is not nearly so simple. There are so many problems with both those theories. They both preclude our most strongly held intuitions, because we don’t see our identity as evolving constantly and almost all of us believe we are the same person that we were when a child. No, we must instead look to my new notion of continuity connected by an ancestral rather than strict continuity, and we must stop the bickering and instead acknowledge that both the physical and the psychological are important. This new synthesised theory of mine is the most plausible at all. Now we can make sense of our intuitions: we don’t have to say we have changed identity when we grow up because both the stuff we are made of and our psychological makeup do have their root, their ancestry, in the way we were yesterday, and five years ago, and ten years ago, and when we were a foetus.”

The majority of philosophers think this theory a great leap forward, and the focal point of the philosophical debate about the concept of identity is, for many years following, just around the various permutations of the synthesised theory. Philosopher D says psychological continuity is more important than physical, using a thought experiment involving a computer to illustrate his point, while Philosopher E retorts that physical continuity is more important, using our intuitive beliefs about senile relatives to make hers.

Finally, Philosopher F (who is actually a real guy called Derek Parfit) comes along and throws a spanner in the works. “No, you guys,” he says, “Imagine if you were in Star Trek and the teletransporter malfunctioned and you were actually replicated instead of transported. Surely, we can’t say that that replica would be you, despite being physically and psychologically identical. Therefore, we must conclude that we have no identity whatsoever, that the concept is an illusion.” Many philosophers really like this idea and it becomes, for a while, the most popular of them all. Nevertheless, the debate rages on.

I admit that it’s very nice for philosophers to try to tie up loose ends in this way, to resolve our understanding of words like identity so that they’re neat, logically consistent, compatible with our intuitions and all the rest, but why should we take any of their claims about the nature of identity as anything more than prescriptions? This is how we should think of identity, they say, and we supposedly bow down before them and chant their conclusions to ourselves over and over again, while whacking our foreheads with their weighty gospels and wearing dark cloaks.[1] No, I refuse to submit, to succumb, to acquiesce. And why should I?

Let us look at our common sentences once more. Now that the philosophers have given us this new vocabulary of ‘continuity theories’, we are perhaps better placed to dissect the differences in what the sentences imply about the concept of identity. Now we can say that 1 and 2 imply that some kind of mental continuity theory is correct. We can say that 3 perhaps implies that some kind of mixture of the two is right. That 4 probably implies that some kind of mixture of the two is right again. That 5, well, that’s a bit ambiguous – has she aged physically? That 6 implies that neither theory is correct, but just that each person has a single fixed identity given presumably by their name, D.O.B, address etc.  And that 7, well it’s not about human identity at all (which the philosophers concentrated on when asking the question ‘What is identity?’ for no obvious reason).

As I demonstrated before, if you try to unpack the concept lying behind the deployment of this word in these various sentences, you just go insane. Obviously, we, as human beings, don’t have a fixed concept of identity, and yet we understand what people are talking about when they use it! What weird creatures we are! How completely irrational!

Well, maybe it’s completely irrational, but other words are like this too. Most interestingly, other words that philosophers like asking ‘What is?’ questions about and then debating for centuries, like ‘meaning’, ‘happiness’, ‘love’, ‘friendship’, ‘art’, are actually very similar to this. You just need to think hard about the ways they’re used to realise this. Wittgenstein showed this in Philosophical Investigations, the book that is basically the one progenitor of this essay.

Obviously, most philosophers would concede that this is the case. They’d say, ‘Of course people don’t use these words in a logically consistent fashion and have no idea about our lovely, logical theories. This is because most people are not philosophers! It’s our job to think hard about this stuff and to try to get to some truth of the matter.’ But this is predicated on the assumption that there is something more to identity than the way people use it. And isn’t that quite mystical? What reason do we have to think that the real ‘concept’ of the word identity has to be a logically consistent theory? Why can’t the word be exactly what it is: a word? And if it is just a word, why do philosophers purport to be expressing truths when they make claims about what it is? All they are doing is insisting on some specific definition of the word that has no relation to the real world, are they not?  These, I believe, are the real questions, but philosophers doggedly refuse to answer them.[2]

You may have noticed that I’ve scrupulously avoided talking about philosopher F, Derek Parfit, who doesn’t believe that identity exists. Obviously, he suffers from exactly the same ailment as all the other philosophers, given that, in the construction of his theory, he treated the word as if it had a nebulous essence. However, he is different in the way that he then showed (supposedly) that it doesn’t. Evidently, the word identity does exist and is used frequently and functionally, so he is prima facie wrong like all the other philosophers who make claims about the word. But he isn’t quite like the other philosophers, and I believe that his argument (which appears in his seminal, acclaimed 1984 book Reasons and Persons) does contain some kind of truth. As I demonstrated way back near the start of this essay, when you listen to the way people speak in the real world, you realise there is a profound inconsistency in our understanding of the concept identity, because, to everyone who isn’t a philosopher with a particular theory of identity, there is no one concept of identity, and we don’t even really think about what we mean by the word identity when we use it.

In light of that truth, let us now consider these mostly very basic facts: our bodies are constantly changing, with age or with injury; it is often very hard to recognise an adult from their childhood picture, or a really old person from a picture of them at a young age, and basically impossible to identify a person from a baby picture; our cells are constantly dying and replicating, meaning it takes only seven years for our bodies to replace every single one; our personalities change discernibly over time, even after we have left the tumult of childhood and adolescence; we don’t like to think that our relatives have become different people when they become senile with old age; we don’t like to think that our loved ones have become different people when they suffer a brain injury that lowers their IQ or affects their personality in some other way; we don’t like to think that our loved ones have become different people when they suffer some horrific and transformative physical injury; there is almost certainly no such thing as a soul.

I don’t know, really, what we should take from these facts, but I do understand, on one level, why Derek Parfit might use them to conclude that identity does not exist, even if I think that such a claim must be prima facie wrong. If we are physically and mentally changing all the time yet we like to think that we have some kind of fixed identity, and even when we are physically and mentally identical to another person (as in Parfit’s aforementioned thought experiment) we like to think that we don’t have the same identity as them, then something has to give, right?  

But this is so deceptive, because, as we’ve already made so clear, the word identity is deeply problematic. Sure, it seems iron-clad and logical. Yes, we’re tempted to think, if identity is to exist we need to think that two identical people have the same identity. But we don’t. Therefore, identity does not exist. What a syllogism! However, this syllogism doesn’t actually mean anything. Identity is just a word. What reason do we have to trust the intuitions of people on whether two identical people have the same identity given that they have no consistent sense of the concept of identity? Given that identity is such a fucking adaptable word? Again, why should I think that “Identity does not exist” is not prima facie wrong given that identity is a word that does exist and is functional?

You may think that I’m the one playing with words. I am aware it may seem that way. But I am not the mystic here. I am not the one trying to penetrate a word. I know that this will still be a bitter pill to swallow, but I think it is an ultimately salubrious one, like Panadol. I do admit that people understand what Parfit means when he says ‘Identity does not exist’ and that it is therefore a meaningful statement. In fact, I essentially agree with what I believe to be the sentiment and logic behind it, even if I object so vehemently to its phrasing. I seem to get what he means. So, in the interests of reaching a satisfying conclusion, I hereby propose my own philosophical theory of identity that taps into the same basic ideas:

 We have no reason to think that there is something that makes us who we are throughout our life or – to put in a way more accurate yet kind of spacey way – that there is necessarily anything physical or mental that unites the various people that have the same birth certificate. We have no reason to think that these various people have some quintessence, given that most of us now know that the belief in souls is just a superstition like any other.

However, we are obviously extremely physically and mentally similar to the person we were a day ago, and very similar to the person we were a year ago. And psychologically we don’t necessarily have to change a great deal in adulthood, barring some trauma, because there are no big biological transformations that occur.  

You may have noticed that this is not really a philosophical theory at all, just a statement of a few facts that doesn’t include the word ‘identity’ even once. This is logically consistent with what I’ve said.

I’m afraid I’m sceptical about profundity. It seems usually to rely on the manipulation of words.  

References

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations through http://www.accionfilosofica.com/misc/1307418043crs.pdf

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[1] Did I get lost somewhere along the way there?

[2] You can understand why, though: they’d be taking away their own jobs. 

A Thought Experiment/Short Story called "Don't worry about remembering stuff: Google will soon become your brain"

Don’t worry about remembering stuff: Google will soon become your brain

Here’s a thought experiment that was originally inspired by (but not drawn from) an article I read on the occasionally interesting internet blog called “Brain Pickings”.

Suppose, if you will, that you were somehow transported back in time to the 1920s – to be precise, let’s say the date is 11am on 16 June 1925. Suppose also that your iPhone was in your pocket when you entered whatever portal or machine that got you there and that it has survived the journey.

The place you have arrived at is a big, strange room. Directly in front of you is a wall that reaches up to your neck, concealing most of your body. In front of this wall is a large crowd of people, all of whom are staring at your head. They are almost exclusively male, these people, and almost exclusively odd looking, with many of them seeming rather unkempt and lazily dressed, and a highly disproportionate number exhibiting extremely messy hair. Suddenly you begin to recognise a few familiar faces in the crowd – in fact, many. You see Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Marie Curie, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Alan Turing… a pattern rapidly reveals itself in your mind: all of them are geniuses in their respective fields. After a quick survey of the crowd, it becomes clear that they are, more precisely, the one hundred sharpest minds of 1925. You feel very small and insecure. You are just beginning to feel a deep regret about the very bold decision to travel back to 1925 when their spokesperson (let’s just say it’s anyone but Joyce because then I’d feel compelled to try to mimic his idiolect and I couldn’t pull that off), steps out from the crowd, and begins to speak:

“We don’t know who you are or why you are standing behind a wall with only your head exposed. We also don’t know how we came to be here, or where this room is, or what purpose it normally serves. Naturally, this is causing all of us a great deal of consternation. Nevertheless, being all of us very practical people, we have decided to try to make something good of this experience: we hereby challenge you to an extremely rigorous general knowledge test.”

You feel ill. Two hundred beady genius eyes bear down on you, burning a massive hole in your face.

“Two teams shall partake in this quiz, namely, all of us and you. There is only one rule: none may consult a book. Seeing as none of us have any books in our possession and the door out of this unfurnished room is barred, this rule should be quite straightforward for everyone to observe. Since we should like to be able to confer without a sense of stress or urgency if the answer to a particular question does not immediately come to one of us, we also decree that there shall be no time limit. Naturally, however, in the event that both teams have the correct answer the team which answers first shall be declared the winner, so there is an incentive for rapidity.

The last matter we must clarify before we begin pertains to the questions. You may be wondering how many of these there shall be and how they shall be selected. Well, we have decided that there shall be precisely one hundred questions, each of which shall be chosen and asked by a different one of us. Evidently, he who poses the question in any given round shall be debarred from participating in that round, assuming instead the role of arbiter for its duration.  In case you are concerned that some of us might be tempted to abuse our powers as arbiter, I would like to stress that the far majority of us here are, by reason of our employ and character, interested in the truth above all else – in fact, you might say to the detriment of all else. [Some chuckles of assent from the crowd]. As far as I’m aware, each of us here holds the view that, in general, it matters not who utters a statement, as long as it is true. Thus, I would think it at least extremely unlikely that any of us would engage in such malfeasance. However, if an arbiter does whisper the answer to our team or wrongfully declare us to be the winner, I think you may trust the rest of us to condemn that person and annul the round. I believe this fact ought to suffice to disabuse you of your putative concern.

Although we all aspire to probity, as has been made clear enough, we must insist that you consent to this questionnaire on pain of death, because we are all very eager to play it.”

“Ok,” you murmur, now wishing with all your heart that you were back in the 21^st Century where no group of geniuses ever challenged you to rigorous questionnaires on pain of death. The fear and distress you now feel causes you to momentarily forget that there is no internet in 1925. You hence take your phone out of your pocket, tap in your passcode and press Safari. As soon as Safari begins to load, however, your mind returns. And you are just about to put the phone back in your pocket when, suddenly, Google appears! ‘Thank god,’ you think, ‘This is actually a miracle.’ Briefly, you pause for thought, as you know that, as a metaphysical naturalist, believing that you had experienced a true miracle would completely undermine your view on just about everything. Fortunately, after a few seconds, a hypothesis that is more compatible with your convictions presents itself: ‘Actually, I probably ruptured the space-time continuum, or tore a hole in the fabric of space or something, and that means I’m standing in a tiny patch of 21^st Century space. Thank god I did create a paradox. Now I have the chance to stick it to these titans of the 20^th Century.’

Although some of these titans are looking at your head while you look down at your phone and think these thoughts, they have, at this point, no reason to think you’re from the 21^st Century or are holding any kind of knowledge-giving device. It just does not cross their minds, despite how imaginative and clever these minds are.

The first question of the rigorous questionnaire is about newts. It turns out the announcer is a biologist with a particular expertise in amphibians, and he is the arbiter for the first round.

“I hope it’s permissible that this question is not really a question, strictly speaking:

List the genera of the family Salimandrae in alphabetical order by Latin name; give also their common names after each Latin one.”

As soon as you hear the word “Salimandrae” you bash newts into Google and immediately click Wikipedia – but one of the weirdest looking men in the crowd[1], has already stepped out from the crowd and begun rattling off the list in a high, whiny voice: “Calotriton or Spanish brook newts, Cynops or firebelly newts, Echinotriton or spiny newts, Ichthyosaura or alpine newts…”

You are quick enough onto Wikipedia to verify his list, but you soon determine that he is too much of a freak to slip up. Already feeling defeated, you click out of Wikipedia before he’s even finished. And thirty seconds later, this human beanpole is getting slapped on the back by Curie and Wittgenstein (making him wince and look harrowed), and the biologist announcer is declaring that “Team Genius is ahead 1-0!”

You, meanwhile, have never felt more worthless and stupid in your life, and want to die. But let’s say that the next question is asked by James Joyce, and being both an egomaniac and a man with a predilection for throwing spanners in works, he says, “Since it’s the 16^th of June, I was wondering whether anyone here could be prevailed upon to recite the beginning of Part II episode 4, or “Calypso”, of my controversial, bizarre and epic novel Ulysses. As long as someone is able to reach the phrase “the cat cried” in their recitation, I shall be satisfied.”[2]

You quickly type in the famous first few words of that chapter into Google, and to your delight the room remains silent. Although some people in the crowd are able to recall verbatim much of what they read normally, most of them have not read Ulysses and have no desire to do so. Most of these people don’t care for fiction of any kind, let alone the most bombastic kind imaginable. And so, in a still silent room, you are on the website called “Genius” (funnily enough), the one which is most used for song lyrics and always has that black background, and you are reading aloud the chapter:

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked the thick giblet soup, the nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes […].”

Although it is evident from Joyce’s anguished facial expressions that he does not find your accent euphonious or your voice mellifluous, when you reach the stipulated end of the passage, he does reluctantly declare you the winner of the round.

So it’s one-all now. And let’s say the next question, which is just a basic historical one on the number of ships in the Spanish Armada or something, is answered first by the geniuses. But let’s say the next one after that, a linguist-asked question on some word in some obscure language of an Inuit tribe, is easy enough for you to look up and you actually get it right. And let’s say the next one is a far more obscure historical question than a Spanish Armada one, and you are again able to look it up and get it right. And let’s say Wittgenstein asks about certain aspects of his linguistic theories and you get that one right too. And let’s say Marie Curie asks if anyone can give a brief biography of her, and that’s easy for you again. And eventually, by the end of the one hundred questions, you’ve won seventy to thirty! Against not just one phenomenal genius but one hundred, all working together, you’ve triumphed!

After the announcer has declared you the winner and you begin humbly acknowledging your great victory with a series of polite, gracious nods and some invisible shrugs of self-effacement, many of the geniuses start trying to rationally figure out the nature of your genius. A lot of different hypotheses arise. Most of the geniuses are absolutely shell-shocked. ‘Perhaps’, one of these bewildered individuals thinks, ‘This man is just the smartest person to have ever lived. Somehow he has managed to live in obscurity until now but it seems inevitable that this man will soon achieve a great triumph with the truly incredible intellect he has demonstrated today.’ Some are so overwhelmed by your display that they are doubting their senses and undergoing serious mental breakdowns.

However, most do conclude that there is something suspicious about the way you always looked down before answering any question and always paused for at least twenty seconds before embarking on any response. Some of this majority speculate that you must have breached the one rule of the questionnaire: ‘He must have been holding some kind of massive, vastly detailed encyclopaedia in his hands,’ these people think, even though the rapidity with which you answered many of the questions and the sheer diversity of the responses seem to contradict this. Einstein has concluded that the most likely explanation is that you were assisted by some kind of brilliant futuristic technology. Einstein has, of course, got it right.

But regardless of any of their hypotheses, one fact still stands: you have proven yourself more knowledgeable than the one-hundred geniuses. You have won.

And now suppose that the way you interacted with the internet database was so instinctual and so immediate that you didn’t need to look down at all or even pause before you answered any of the questions. You would have got 100 out of 100 correct and blown the geniuses out of the water.

This is what many futurists think could be the reality in a few decades from now.

                                    

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[1] A bespectacled, gangly, scoliotic newt-fancier and English gent called Augustus Fink-Nottle who is unknown in the 21^st Century but did have an eidetic memory so was naturally part of the one hundred sharpest minds of 1925.

[2] Ok, so I did try to pull off Joyce’s idiolect after all – but not really. Don’t hate.