Philosophical Inquiries:

Answers No:31

Is emptiness the absence of something, or the presence of nothing?

If it is the latter, then does true emptiness really follow the common perception of the word
empty, if it is in fact a presence?

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Emptiness is the absence of something. "Nothing" does not have a presence, except
linguistically. It is important in philosophy not to let language rule thought.

Helier Robinson

Lawrence asked:

Is abortion ever right?

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Well, let's put it this way... suppose you were happily married, to a woman you loved dearly, but
who is physically frail. She becomes pregnant, and the doctors say 1) the baby will be born
severely retarded and physically deformed, so that if it lives, which is not certain given the
deformities, it will have to be in an institution for its whole life, unable to care for itself, talk, or
recognize you. 2) In addition, your wife has a greater than 90% chance of dying giving birth to it
(after all, nothing is certain, right?) because of the deformities and her frail physical condition.
Now what? Your wife or your potential child... choose. Cases like these are rare, but not unheard
of. It's extreme, yes. But it illustrates the danger of all-or-none, black or white, thinking. The
next issue is this: who should choose? The Pope? Your local priest, rabbi, or imam? The police?
Your government? You? After all, she's frail... Your wife? After all, it's her body... Both? And
what if it was the same situation, but you weren't married? Should you have a voice in the
choice? How much voice? You believe that life is sacred, perhaps? Well, there's no winner in
this one.... What now?

Steven Ravett Brown

Andrew asked:

I have a theory that free will is an illusion, but I don't think it is predestined by god or anything
like that.

If all we are is a combination of our genes, experience and current circumstance. Then maybe
our reaction to events are determined by these three variables, and we are always going to react
in a certain way. e.g. Tom calls Fred a bad name, Fred will react in a way that is the sum of all
these events.

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On a larger scale pick out any moment in time, if everyone in the world are all going to do
something based on the unescapable programming in their personality, and they had no choice,
or had no choice but to make the choice they did at that moment then the following moment
everyone has no choice but to react in a certain way based on the three variables and so on...

Or maybe there is something I am not accounting for.

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Yes, there are some small problems. If we are not free to make our own decisions then we are
not free to decide if determinism is true or false. We cannot praise or blame people for the things
they do since they had no choice except to do what they did.

All the things that we rely on in our everyday life assumes that humans can to some extent
choose rationally between alternative actions and beliefs. Determinism seems to imply that this
is impossible. If you are really going to be a determinist then you must be prepared to apply your
belief to your everyday life. If someone lies to you or steals from you then there is no point in
blaming them since they could not have acted in any other way.

It is a characteristic of a real philosophical problem that it poses a real dilemma. It shows us

something which must be true but at the same time can't be true. You haven't yet understood this
with regard to free will v determinism. To really understand philosophical problems you need
start by understanding their dual nature and why there are no easy answers to them.

Shaun Williamson

R, a rule: (the beans in this bag are white),

C, a case of the rule: (these beans are from the bag),

E, a result: (these beans are white)

(Peirce, 1992a, p. 188).

By altering the order of the elements in this expression, Peirce realized that one could symbolize
entirely different types of thinking. Thus, deduction consists of statements in the above order:
(1) R, C, E; induction in the order (2) C, E, R; and hypothesis construction (also termed
"abduction" (e.g., Houser & Kloesel, 1991, p. xxxviii; also Peirce, 1998b, p. 95), the order (3) R,
E, C (Peirce, 1992a, pp. 188-189).

If you try to fail, but succeed which have you done?

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Haha, well, I guess it depends on whether you're a 'the glass is half empty' or 'the glass is half
full' type of person...

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Steven Ravett Brown

Lu asked this question:

What is the difference between having knowledge and KNOWING?

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Knowing is an activity which involves a process. Knowledge is a kind of product, which you
have received through this process. For example, If I say 'I see a bird there on the tree', the
process of knowing is perception through eyes and the piece of knowledge which I obtained is
'there is a bird on the tree', which is the product of knowing process , i.e. perception.

If the knowing process is defective the knowledge will be erroneous and if the process is correct
then the knowledge is true. For example, if my eyes are weak I may not see birds there or I may
see something else because of the distance. If there is dark I may not perceive clearly what is
there This leads to wrong knowledge which is a product.

There is a difference between knowing how and knowing that. Sometimes knowledge is stated
as propositional. It is a fact stating affairs. For example 'the sky is blue' states a fact of reality. It
is called knowing that. At other times I use the expression 'Knowing how' For instance, I know
how to swim. knowing a fact is not enough you must know how to perform the swimming
activity. Read Gilbert Ryle.

Madhu Kapoor

Matt asked:

I would like to know your thoughts on happiness. Everyone is looking for happiness,
presumably because it is our instinct to do so, and the things that aid survival make us happy
(until we started making things full of sugar and what not). Do you think that people ever reach
a state of happiness, or could it be that happiness is a sort of instinctive idea to make us
continually strive,

And do you think that all lives have the same happiness/ sadness ratio (for want of a better
word), because we get used to our situation over time? Also, would continual happiness be
possible, or would it be hampered by a lack of comparative sadness? As you can probably this is
something I've been thinking about and it has confused me quite a bit!

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You are right that seeking happiness is basic instinct of all living beings. Happiness lies in self
preservation. We are all struggling to preserve our genes through our children, our culture
through propagation, our identity and every thing that we love to preserve because that brings
happiness to us. There is a saying of Upanishads, EKO aham BAHUSYAM, before this creation
of the world, Brahma was alone and desires to be many. It is the desire to propagate oneself vis-
a-vis self-preservation.

When we understand our limitation we feel comfortable with ourselves that brings happiness. If
I try to do something that I cannot, it brings frustration and sadness. Thus sadness in turn help to
realise our potential what I can do and what I cannot. So indirectly it helps to bring happiness.

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Madhu Kapoor

Aigerim asked:

"Why be Moral?"

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Very, very complex question. Firstly, try not being moral. You'll be unpopular, maybe thrown
into prison. Imagine driving on a road where there are no traffic rules. Anarchy would exist with
drivers doing anything they want. Travel from A to B would be dangerous if not impossible. So,
my first and glib answer is that socially created, observed and disputed rules, values make
travelling the road of life possible.

Second, the methodology of this question is similar to the subjective doubting of the objective
world as undertaken by Rene Descartes for epistemological purposes. Without the invocation of
God, Descartes is stuck with solipsism and the doubtful existence of an external, objective
world. The moral sceptic who from a subjective position asks why s/he ought to follow objective
moral prescriptions follows the same approach. Here, s/he can, like Hume after him, leave all the
philosophical questioning in the study and engage with everyday life before returning to
question it. Or, one can become truly dualistic and engage with the everyday world whilst
simultaneously questioning it and doubting everything. There seems to be something 'not quite
right' with this position. Martin Heidegger picks this up when he criticises the Cartesian
worldview in Being and Time. Bernard Williams also makes germane points in his Ethics and
the Limits of Philosophy when he points out that even the moral nihilist follows the morality s/he
doubts.

Thirdly, one could reply that morality is essentially emotive. [A.J.Ayer Language, Truth and
Logic]. They are not subject to empirical verification like observing a cat on the mat. I may have
sympathetic other regard for persons whereas you may not. I try to implore you to agree with me
but this carries no prescriptive weight. It is as if I have gone 'ergh yuk!' at something and hoped
you'd agree with me. But why do so many human beings concur in moral matters?

Finally, following on from Heidegger's insights, human beings are already in the world before
reflecting upon it. Norms [ethos is Greek for custom] are immanently followed, as they are our
being in the world. Norms or the structures, values of what might be called morality are
followed insofar as they further interests, feelings being in the world in particular socio-
economic-cultural contexts. They are altered insofar as they fail this. See the works of Richard
Rorty, Michel Foucault and Heidegger's Being and Time to pursue these insights. Difficult
question Aigerim.

Martin Jenkins

Danny asked

Philosophically has the existence of God been proved conclusively one way or the other?

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The blunt answer is no. Philosophers are divided into those who believe that God is a necessary
being, and those who find no reason to entertain such a notion. There are those who see order

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and design in nature as proof of God's existence, others believe that if there is order in nature it
is somehow self-generated. Whichever way we look at it we seem forced to recognise a non-
causal situation, either God is self-generated from nothing or matter is self-generated from
nothing.

The most common view in the sciences is that life has no purpose except physical survival, and
that we live in a purposeless universe. The opposed view asserts that if this were true all art and
science would be meaningless and a total waste of effort. There are those who believe that since
life's purposes and meanings seem inaccessible to present-day science, they can only hope to
find them in religion, metaphysics, art, literature, poetry and music. Scientists may look upon
creationism as a simple primitive attempt to explain the world, however, they seem to
conveniently overlook the fact that the so called Big Bang and Darwinian evolution are also
nothing more than unproven theories that try to explain the world.

John Brandon

Krissy asked:

Lets say that we have mastered brain transplant and some guy gets hit by a bus that day, and his
body is totaled but his mind survives... and another guy has a stroke and his brain dies but his
body is fine... so they take the brain from the first guy and puts it in the body of the other man so
one can live.... this new person is it the FIRST guy? Or is it the SECOND guy?

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A parallel problem is: an individual egg and an individual sperm, both alive, combine at
conception to form a new human being; is this human being the egg, or the sperm?

This is the problem of identity and change. One argument and a definition are needed to clarify
it.

The first is that qualitative change requires quantitative change. This is easily proved: Whatever
A and B may be, if there is a qualitative difference between them then there is some quality, Q,
such that one of them is Q and the other is not-Q. If A and B are identical one and the same
then one thing is both Q and not-Q, which is impossible. Therefore A and B must be two,
they cannot be one.

Second, a satisfactory definition of change is: change is some degree of dissimilarity in parallel
with a duration. If A is in any way qualitatively different before time t to what it is after time t,
then it has changed; and if there is no qualitatively difference then it has not changed. In other
words, a change is qualitative difference over time.

So now if we ask whether one thing can change over time and remain one, the answer is no. The
thing before time t is qualitatively different from the thing after time t, and so they must be two,
they cannot be one. Conversely, if it remains one over time then it cannot have changed.

The trouble is that we all have a sensation of being one person, travelling through time and
changing as we go. But there is an analogy that can help here. Imagine that you are a two-
dimensional person living in Flatland, and that your entire life has been filmed by a three-
dimensional being. The film consists of a long series of stills, each qualitatively different from
the next. Now imagine these stills being stacked, in chronological order, to make a three-

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dimensional whole. Between each still there is a change, so there is no individuality over time;
but the stack, as a whole, is unchanging and so has individuality. Now think of yourself as a
four-dimensional stack of temporally separated, and qualitatively different, momentarily three-
dimensional persons, and you have individuality as a stack and you change over time. It follows
that your sensation of travelling through time is an illusion.

So your first guy, your second guy, and the new person are three.

Helier Robinson

I have a theory that free will is an illusion, but I don't think it is predestined by god or anything
like that.

If all we are is a combination of our genes, experience and current circumstance. Then maybe
our reaction to events are determined by these three variables, and we are always going to react
in a certain way. e.g. Tom calls Fred a bad name, Fred will react in a way that is the sum of all
these events.

On a larger scale pick out any moment in time, if everyone in the world are all going to do
something based on the unescapable programming in their personality, and they had no choice,
or had no choice but to make the choice they did at that moment then the following moment
everyone has no choice but to react in a certain way based on the three variables and so on.....

Or maybe there is something I am not accounting for.

============

The problem of freedom and determination is a very controversial one. Determinism is the view
that nothing is uncaused, everything is an effect of an earlier cause or causes. Human freedom is
the belief that human acts are not all determined by prior causes: some are freely chosen by the
person concerned. The reason for this belief is that we all have a feeling of being free. If
determinism is true then this feeling of freedom must be an illusion. However, if it is not an
illusion that determinism must be false, and some events must be uncaused. These are free acts
of people and random events: both are beginnings of causal chains in the complex tangle of
causal chains that join and branch processes in the world, in other words. Is a so-called free
choice a random event, as if it was decided by a coin toss in the brain, or is it rationally decided?
If it was rationally decide then it was determined, and so not free; if it was random then the
person concerned is not responsible for it, which makes morality pointless and we all make
moral judgments.

A second point is that explanation is causal: to describe causes is to explain their effects. If
determinism is false then there are things which cannot be explained because they are uncaused.
Scientists and philosophers tend to accept determinism because they believe everything to be
explicable.

A third point is theological. It is said that God gave humans free will, even though this allowed
some of them to commit evil acts, because freedom is a much greater good than the total evil
produced by people. However, if God is all-powerful then he could have created people with
free will who in fact never committed evil acts like the angels in Heaven, for example. Also,
it is sometimes claimed that God gave us free will in order to test us. But if God is all-knowing,
why should he need to test us he would know in advance the results of the tests.

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Spinoza gave an interesting analysis of freedom. He was a determinist, and said that if the cause
of what we did was inside us that it was an action, making us an agent thereby; but if the cause
was from outside then what we did was a passion, making us a patient thereby. Actions are free
and passions are unfree. To control the passions is to escaped human bondage and move towards
ultimate understanding, or wisdom. And therein is perhaps the answer to your question: in
everyday living we behave more or less morally, as if we had free will, but in ultimate
understanding (such a Plato's escape from the Cave) freedom becomes an illusion, along with
many, many other features of everyday living.

Helier Robinson

Justin asked:

I have been hearing a lot of people, fellow students at university and in the media, making
the claim that emotions are chosen. This claim is made to support other claims such as
'You should not be angry', 'Don't get depressed', 'Stop being so jealous' etc. I fail to
understand how anyone can claim that emotions are chosen. When I am angry, did I have
choice? Recently on TV an 'expert' told parent off for getting angry in front of children they
were driving in heavy traffic. They should have chosen a better time and place to get angry. The
interviewer asked if they should have suppressed their anger. The expert replied, no. They
should not have chosen to get angry. This sounds completely bizarre to me. My question is, are
emotions chosen? I have no trouble understanding that after the emotion is experienced one can
chose to do many things, but surely one cannot help the occurrence of an emotion. I also
understand that one can shape circumstances to cause an emotion, but this is not the point either.
Any ideas?

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I think you are quite correct: we cannot choose our emotions: they are reflex responses to what
we perceive and to what happens to us. If this were not so we could choose to be happy all the
time, or someone who was depressed could end the depression by choice, or we could be
courageous by simply denying fear. But we cannot do these things.

Helier Robinson

Richard asked:

In Europe today the prevailing ethic appears to be anything from pure hedonism to a weak form
of utilitarianism, based on happiness as the arbiter of morality. Is this not pure self indulgence?
This is what I like so I will make it the basis of moral judgment. WE cannot judge happiness to
be prior, or superior to, other values, other than through constructing an ethic that is itself prior
to ethical values which is absurd. If values are fundamental, as ethical values must be, then there
is nothing to make one greater than another. It is the whole that matters, not any part we choose
to select arbitrarily.

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I sympathise completely with your distaste for 'the prevailing ethic', but unless one counts "is
this not pure self indulgence?", this didn't really seem to be a question, Richard. Yes, there is self
evidently self indulgence involved in hedonism, indeed there isn't much else to hedonism,
though I'd be hard pressed to think of a method for distinguishing the pure kind of self-

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indulgence from the impure (I stuff myself with cake this was obviously self indulgence, but
was it pure self indulgence?). And no, utilitarianism is in no way even slightly self-indulgent
(have you misunderstood what utilitarianism is? It involves thinking that happiness counts,
never mind that it's not your happiness, and may therefore be thought of as one of the more
challenging and selfless moral outlooks on offer). Since it is patently obvious that various values
conflict, I am afraid I cannot make any sense of 'there is nothing to make one [value] greater
than another. It is the whole that matters'. That you doubt our qualifications to make ethical
judgements as to the priority to accord to various conflicting values ('WE cannot judge...' )
suggests a desire to appoint someone else to do this. But you would not wish that we appoint
that someone else 'arbitrarily', so I wonder, who else might you have in mind, and what was your
preferred selection procedure?

David Robjant

olly asked:

What is life? There can be life in the living, the nonliving, and the dead.

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The best definition of life was made by Erwin Schrodinger in his "What is Life?" (Cambridge
U.P., 1944: life is very high negative entropy in dynamic equilibrium. Dynamic equilibrium is
like the equilibrium of spinning top, which stays upright as long as it continues spinning.
Negative entropy (so called it should be negated entropy) is a physical measure of order. As
is fairly obvious, living things are very highly ordered and they maintain that order, as it is lost
according to the second law of thermodynamics which requires negative entropy to decrease
of its own accord by feeding on negative entropy in the environment. This latter is either
sunlight, used by plants, or any other life or recent life. Humans interfere with this process by
having their corpses buried, embalmed, or created, making them useless for the world food
chain. When you write that "There can be life in the living, the nonliving, and the dead" you are
merely stating contradictions: the non-living are not living and the dead were living but are not
any more.

Helier Robinson

why are optical illusions relevant to epistemology?

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Optical illusions are empirical contradictions, as in the half-immersed stick, which is bent to the
sight and straight to the touch,, or else contradictions between empirical experience and well
established belief, such as visible space diminishing with distance (in all three dimensions) when
we know that it does not really diminish. The only explanation of illusions is that they are
misrepresentations (false images) of reality, due to distortions in the process of perception. So if
our perception is false it becomes necessary to investigate what the truth reality is. This is
investigation of the process of gaining knowledge, which is epistemology.

Helier Robinson

A moral dilemma?

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If the murder of 6 million Jews was a crime against humanity and the people concerned taken to
task, why not call a natural disaster a crime also and take the creator to task also?

Is there a blur of judgment here?

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No, no blur of judgment. This is a special case of the problem of evil: if God is all-powerful, all-
loving, and all knowing, why does evil exist? Because if He is all-powerful He is able to abolish
evil; if He is all-loving he would want to abolish evil; and if he is all-knowing He must know
that evil exists. So since evil does exist He must be not all-powerful, or not all-loving, or not all-
knowing; or two of these, or all three; or else there is no God. This problem is the biggest of all
problems for theologians. A logical solution, not acceptable to faith, is that there is more than
one god one of them being all-loving but not all-powerful, another being all-powerful but not
all-loving. Assuming that both know evil exists, the first would want to abolish it but would not
be able to, while the second could abolish it but doesn't want to.

Helier Robinson

Jake asked:

Why is easy easy but hard isn't hard?

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Some words apply to themselves and some do not. Short is short and long is not long. The ones
that self-apply were called autological by Grelling, and the ones which do not were called
heterological. A paradox arise from this: if autological is autological then it is heterological, and
if heterological is heterological then it is autological. Because the paradox is confined to
language it is not very important. Your question concerns a curiosity of language, but no more.

Helier Robinson

Is this a question?

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Yes. Any grammatically correct sentence that ends with a question mark, '?' is a question. There
is no reason why a question should not contain the word 'question'. Language can do strange
things because it is only limited by rules of grammar. So I can describe the indescribable,
classify something as unclassified, and know the unknowable. You can in fact have a lot of fun
with language, but the fun is not really philosophy.

Helier Robinson

What is a synthetic statement?

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An analytic statement is one that is true just because of the form of the statement or the
meanings of the words contained in it. For example 'A tall man is taller than a short man' or 'If it
is raining and I am getting wet then I am getting wet' are both examples of analytic statements.

A synthetic statement is one that is not analytic. For example 'I am six feet tall' or 'It is raining'
are both synthetic statements.

This is a question that I have pondered since Kindergarten. Many people (including myself)
believe that God has always existed. We also believe that God created Earth in "at the beginning
of time". How is it that God was around at the beginning of time? Can there really be a forever
before time exists? Also, how did God create time if it takes time to create anything? Is this a
matter of philosophy or faith?

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To say that God is eternal properly means that God is outside of time, not that He always
existed. That He always existed means that time had no beginning; it stretches infinitely into the
past, whereas if God created time he could not have existed for infinite time. But if He is outside
time He could have created it; and being all-powerful, could have created it instantaneously.
There cannot be a forever before time exists, or any time at all before time exists. This is a
matter of philosophy; faith often diverges widely from philosophy.

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