What Is It to Be Us?

By Keith Tidman

What Is It to Be Us?

Pi departs from its usual prose format to offer a poem that probes the oldest philosophical question of them all: Know Thyself. What makes us, us—what “lights the fire that animates us”? It’s a look at the unique cycle of our experiences as a conscious, complexly intelligent, inquisitive, and contemplative species. Our minds pondering themselves ... and beyond. The account briefly reconnoiters some of what’s key to defining who we are, across dimensions both “mind-boggling and sundry”: experience and empiricism, awareness, reality and truth, illusions (“gossamer ghosts”), identity, consciousness, ethics (“what morally ought”), free will and determinism, theism, language and logic, knowledge and uncertainty, purpose and meaning, cosmos, curiosity and reflection, and nothingness. As well as widening the aperture on who we are by deliberating on our place in the larger cosmic plateau. Where some people pensively envision a universe “made for us by a designer with palette in hand”; whereas others turn to secular explanations that still satisfy the telltale parameters of non-contingency, necessity, and sufficiency.

Galvanized by the continual onrush of sensory cues from surroundings’ presence,
our empirical awareness of the world wends tentacle-like through the fabric of the mind;
In zealous search of knowable realities we hope will garner life’s welcome reassurance,
yet us not uncommonly hampered by chancing upon a knotty metaphysical bind.

The gauzy filaments of objective truth elude our mind’s guarding praetorian presence,
shrouded ambiguously by our invention of reality's illusory, gossamer ghosts;
All the while we clutch white-knuckled to delusions’ hoped-for objective essence,
grasping for a reality unedited by the mind, but which may prove mythological at most.

We wonder what trustily dwells within and lights the fire that animates us,
perhaps it’s what we ourselves choose as a resolutely self-aware identity;
Or perhaps alternatively a fated version of us we hesitate to discuss above a hush,
rather than the emergent mind as an uncannily separate, ethereally otherworldly entity.

The notion of consciousness eerily estranged from the body is arguably for naught,
a polarity of where the mind resides that’s urged on us by those materialism repels;
Yet society’s dogmas compete to piously press upon us ‘what morally ought,’
to accede to the illusion of unshackled, libertarian free agency that determinism dispels.

This ‘ought,’ clued-up by our foreboding mortality, spurs us to ferret out purpose,
where the ethical intent of humanism’s ideals aim to render our community less savage;
And true humanity defies dystopia’s pounding on the door with callous,
where the point–counterpoint between secularism and theism is vain baggage.

In anthropomorphizing divinities for purposes of iconography and relatability,
we paradoxically deify ourselves, where shared attributes whisper of a oneness;
But such false equivalency denotes our species in hubristic coherence with divinity,
where it’s said entreaties go answered and accountability accedes to forgiveness.

Our identity gets forged on the anvil of natural language and its seminal logic,

hammering into its malleable surface the crux of who we are—what it is to be us ;

The arrow of knowledge bends to best foster understanding and tame the chaotic, 

aware of languages’ power and elasticity in drawing the contours of reality thus.

We search, maturing our nascent understanding of the disquieted universe,
imagining the complexity of existence in ways mind-boggling and sundry;
Where thought experiments throw open the door onto new paradigms diverse,
changing knowledge’s landscape, yet where investigation still tarries hungry.

Some dream of a cosmos granularly made for us, by a designer with palette in hand,
but such destiny, as an alluring siren song, risks sounding of vanity unbound;
Therein lie the limits of knowledge, where the certainty of uncertainty is fanned,
and where ideas eclipse the frontiers of realism and commonsense runs aground.

Meantime, we mine and mold our metaphysics for craved significance,
where consciousness and understanding imbue our species with meaning;
We sit astride the sciences and humanities with self-ascribed radiance,
while humbly reminded of the universe as a nursery spawning stars gleaming.

As progeny of star detritus ejected across lightyears by violent supernovas long ago,
humankind is the cosmos probing itself, at which our species indeed excels;
We wonder how it is that natural laws bestow the human mind a clever tableau,
enabling us to ponder the whys and wherefores that therein will always dwell.

The mind stirs tirelessly with fevered curiosity about what’s true and real,
all the while this inborn, foundational quest at its best won’t let us rest;
Not until our expiry time has run its quizzical course and mourning bells peal,
then the nectar of ‘nothingness,’ as the mind wanes within its erstwhile neuronal nest.

What Are ‘Facts’?

On the trail of the Higgs Boson

Posted by Keith Tidman

What are 'facts'? The ages-long history of deception and sleights of hand and mind — including propaganda and political and psychological legerdemain — demonstrates just one of the many applications of false facts. But similar presentations of falsities meant to deceive, sow discord, or distract have been even more rife today, via the handiness and global ubiquity of the Internet. An enabler is the too-frequent lack of judicious curation and vetting of facts. And, in the process of democratizing access to facts, self-serving individuals may take advantage of those consumers of information who are ill-equipped or disinclined (unmotivated) to discern whether or not content is true. Spurious facts dot the Internet landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, and conjuring tangible outcomes such as voting decisions. Interpretations of facts become all the more confounding in political arenas, where interpretations (the understanding) of facts among differently minded politicians becomes muddled, and ‘what’s actually the case’ remains opaque.

And yet surely it is the total anthology of facts — meaning things (their properties), concepts, and their interrelationships — that composes reality. Facts have multiple dimensions, including what one knows (epistemological aspects), how one semantically describes what’s known (linguistic aspects), and what meaning and purpose one attributes to what’s known (metaphysical aspects).

Facts are known on a sliding scale of certainty. An example that seems compelling to me comes from just a few years ago, when scientists announced that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, whose field generates mass through its interaction with other particles. The Higgs’s existence had been postulated earlier in mathematical terms, but empirical evidence was tantalizingly sought over a few decades. The ultimate confirmation was given a certainty of ‘five sigma’: that there was less than 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was detected was instead a random fluctuation. Impressive enough from an empirical standpoint to conclude discovery (a fact), yet still short of absolute certainty. With resort to empiricism, there is no case where some measure of doubt (of a counterfactual), no matter how infinitesimally small, is excluded.

Mathematics, meantime, provides an even higher level of certainty (rigor of method and of results) in applying facts to describe reality: Newtonian, Einsteinian, quantum theoretical, and other models of scientific realism. Indeed, mathematics, in its precise syntax, universal vocabulary, and singular purpose, is sometimes referred to as the language of reality. Indeed, as opposed to the world’s many natural languages (whose known shortcomings limit understanding), mathematics is the best, and sometimes the only, language for describing select facts of science (mathematical Platonism) — whereby mathematics is less invented than it is discovered as a special case of realism.

Facts are also contingent. Consider another example from science: Immediately following the singularity of the Big Bang, an inflationary period occurred (lasting a tiny fraction of a second). During that inflationary period, the universe — that is, the edges of space-time (not the things within space-time) — expanded faster than the speed of light, resulting in the first step toward the cosmos’s eventual lumpiness, in the form of galaxies, stars, planets. The laws — that is, the facts — of physics were different during the inflation than what scientists are familiar with today — today’s laws of physics breaking down as one looks back closer and closer to the singularity. In this cosmological paradigm, facts are contingent on the peculiar circumstances of the inflationary epoch. This realization points broadly to something capable of being a fact even if we don’t fully understand it.

The sliding scale of certainty and facts’ contingency apply all the more acutely when venturing into other fields. Specifically, the recording of historical events, personages, and ideas, no matter the scholarly intent, often contain biases — judgments, symbols, interpretations — brought to the page by those historians whose contemporaneous accounts may be tailored to self-serving purposes, tilting facts and analyses. In natural course, follow-on historians inadvertently adopt those original biases while not uncommonly folding in their own. Add to this mix the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable (chaotic) nature of human affairs, and the result is all the more shambolic. The accretion of biases over the decades, centuries, and millennia doesn’t of course change reality as such— what happened historically has an underlying matter-of-factness, even if it lingers between hard and impossible to tease out. But the accretion does distort (and on occasion even falsify) what’s understood.

This latter point suggests that what’s a fact and what’s true might either intersect or diverge; nothing excludes either possibility. That is, facts may be true (describe reality) or false (don’t describe reality), depending on their content. (Fairies don’t exist in physical form — in that sense, are false — but do exist nonetheless, legendarily woven into elaborate cultural lore — and in that sense, are true.) What’s true or false will always necessitate the presence of facts, to aid determinations about truth-values. Whereas facts simply stand out there: entirely indifferent to what’s true or false, or what’s believed or known, or what’s formally proven, or what’s wanted and sought after, or what’s observable. That is, absent litmus tests of verifiability. In this sense, given that facts don’t necessarily have to be about something that exists, ‘facts’ and ‘statements’ serve interchangeably.

Facts’ contingency also hinges in some measured, relativistic way on culture. Not as a universally  normative standard for all facts or for all that’s true, of course, but in ways that matter and give shared purpose to citizens of a particular society. Acknowledged facts as to core values — good versus evil, spirituality, integrity, humanitarianism, honesty, trustworthiness, love, environmental stewardship, fairness, justice, and so forth — often become rooted in society. Accordingly, not everyone’s facts are everyone else’s: facts are shaped and shaded both by society and by the individual. The result is the culture-specific normalising of values — what one ‘ought’ to do, ideally. As such, there is no fact-value dilemma. In this vein, values don’t have to be objective to be factual — foundational beliefs, for example, suffice. Facts related to moral realism, unlike scientific and mathematical realism, have to be invented; they’re not discoverable as already-existing phenomena.

Facts are indispensable to describing reality, in both its idealistic (abstract) and realistic (physical) forms. There is no single, exclusive way to define facts; rationalism, empiricism, and idealism all pertain. Yet subsets of facts, and their multifaceted relationships that intricately bear on each other’s truth or falsity, enable knowledge and meaning (purpose) to emerge — an understanding, however imperfect, of slices of abstract and physical reality that our minds piece together as a mosaic. 

In short, the complete anthology of facts relates to all possible forms of reality, ranging the breadth of possibilities, from figments to suppositions to the verifiable phenomenal world.

Do We Need Perpetual Peace?

By Bohdana Kurylo

Immanuel Kant viewed war as an attribute of the state of nature, in which ‘the freedom of folly’ has not yet been replaced by ‘the freedom of reason’. His philosophy has influenced the ways in which contemporary philosophers conceive of political violence, and seek to eliminate it from global politics: through international law, collective security, and human rights. Yet is perpetual peace an intrinsically desirable destination for us today?

For Kant, peace was a question of knowledge – insofar as knowledge teaches us human nature and the experience of all centuries. It was a matter of scrutinising all claims to knowledge about human potential, that stem from feelings, instincts, memories, and other results of lived experience. On the basis of such knowledge, he thought, war could be eliminated.

Kant realised, however, that not all human knowledge is true. In particular, our ever-present possibility of war serves as evidence of the inadequacy of existing knowledge to conceive the means and principles by which perpetual peace may be established. Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism explained this inadequacy by claiming that humans experience only appearances (phenomena) and not things-in-themselves (noumena). What we think we know, is only appearance – our interpretation of the world. Beyond this lies a real world of things-in-themselves, the comprehension of which is simply unattainable for the human mind.

While realists, on this basis, insist on the inevitability of anarchy and war, Kant conceived that the noumenal realm could emancipate our reason from the limitations of empiricism, so enabling us to achieve perpetual peace. He sought to show that we have a categorical moral duty to act morally, even though the empirical world seems to be resistant to it. And since there is no scientific evidence that perpetual peace is impossible, he held that it ought to remain a possibility. Moreover, since moral practical reason claims that war is absolutely evil, humans have a moral duty to discipline their worst instincts to bring about perpetual peace.

Claiming to be guided by the universal reason, Kant proposed three institutional principles which could become the platform for a transnational civil society, superseding potential sources of conflict:

• The road to peace starts with the transition from the natural condition to an ‘original contract, upon which all rightful legislation of a people must be founded’, which needs to be republican.
• In order to overcome the natural condition internationally, external lawlessness between states should be solved by creating a ‘Federation of Free States’.
• Finally, a peaceful membership in a global republic would not be possible without ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility […] on someone else’s territory’ – the cosmopolitan right to universal hospitality.

Yet Kant, in spite of wanting to emancipate humans from natural determination and past experience, seems to have fallen under the same phenomenal influence as the realists. His pessimistic view of human instincts, which needed to be suppressed to avoid war, strongly reflected an internalisation of the social perceptions of human nature in his time. Humans, he thought, by choosing to overcome their instincts, ought to move from the tutelage of human nature to a state of freedom. The problem is that this ‘freedom’ was already socially defined. Therefore, viewing war as a purely negative phenomenon that hinders human progress, Kant never subjected his reasoning to the total scrutiny which he himself advocated.

Consequently Kant offered a rather deterministic solution, which merely aimed at social ‘tranquillisation’ through feeding people the ready-made values of global peace. Hence one observes his rather excessive emphasis on obedience to authority: ‘all resistance against the supreme legislative power […] is the greatest and most punishable crime’. Kant’s individual requires a master who will ‘break his self-will and force him to obey’. In turn, the master needs to be kept under the control of his own master. Crucially, this would destroy the liberty to conceive for oneself whether war is necessarily such a negative phenomenon.

Even such pacification, through obedience to authority, is unlikely to bring perpetual peace, for it refuses to understand the underlying factors that lead humans into war with each other. Perhaps more effective would be to try to find the cause of war, prior to searching for its cure.

Kant missed the idea that war may be the consequence of the current value system, which suppresses the true human will. Thus Friedrich Nietzsche argued for the need to revaluate values. Being unafraid of war, he recognised its creative potential to bring about a new culture of politics. Where Kant’s peace would merely be a temporary pacification, a complete revaluation of values could potentially create a society that would be beyond the issues of war and peace.