I very much enjoyed reading the book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away by Rebecca Goldstein. She is a novelist and philosopher who has written on mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
The book alternates chapters between straightforward discussion of Plato's writings and philosophy with chapters where he visits the 21st Century and visits, yes, Google.
By its very nature, this is a bit clunky to pull off. But if you accept this writing conceit, the book is just so wonderful... Laugh out loud passages - delightfully contemporary - and it takes courage and skill to put Plato in today's world and maintain his arguments as-is and yet move our thinking forward by challenging 'today's' presumptions.
One chapter is of course at Google. Another sets up a debate with a blowhard TV anchor. In particular, I enjoyed last chapter Plato in the magnet, where Plato gets ready to get an MRI scan. This last chapter, if I may, is actually an important one.
The debate is setup in this last chapter between a reductionist scientist (a neurologist), Plato and a graduate student who stands between the two, philosophically speaking. At a meta level, the author is speaking through the graduate student.
This debate between 'platonic' constructs such as a perfect circle (or really the argument over a living 'soul') and the reductionist scientist seeing a buzzing beehive of atoms and physical processes, is intriguing.
I myself, as you might have heard me express it before, am in the complexity theory camp of subscribing to the theory of emergent phenomenon. (i.e somewhere between the graduate student and the scientist!).
A quick note on emergent phenomena. To illustrate, we can imagine a flock of birds are flying. The V-formation of the birds is the emergent phenomenon in this case. One might preliminarily conclude that the Birds are real and the V-formation is ephemeral. And also in particular that the V-formation exists only in the eye of the beholder watching the birds fly by.
However, that is true only if we fix time and perception in an objective Newtonian framework (or shall we say Platonic framework!).
If we were to think of time in nanoseconds on the one hand or in light years on the other hand - then the V-formation is VERY long when counted in milli-seconds. At the other end, the life of the birds making the V-formation is very short, if we were to think of it in terms of a cosmic scale of billions of years.
Similarly, the V-formation is as real to the observer, as any result of an experiment where the observer has to decide whether the electron is a wave or a particle (since it can be both).
So, if we shift our perspective to milliseconds and give genuine import to the observer, the V-formation of the birds is a long, beautiful real 'object' as it were!
All this to hypothesize that human consciousness is a more sophisticated form of the V-formation, where the neurons are the birds. Which is why I prefer to stand between the graduate student and the neurologist in the last chapter of Plato at Googleplex.
Regardless, this is a fundamentally irreducible philosophical argument that is worthy of having Plato visit us in the 21st century!
Here is a book I read s-l-o-w-l-y afraid it would be over too soon.
Separately, the author essayed this article that explains her core argument about why Philosophy is relevant even today - and uses the term coherence to make this case.
http://m.chronicle.com/article/Is-Philosophy-Obsolete-/145837/
Happy reading!
By its very nature, this is a bit clunky to pull off. But if you accept this writing conceit, the book is just so wonderful... Laugh out loud passages - delightfully contemporary - and it takes courage and skill to put Plato in today's world and maintain his arguments as-is and yet move our thinking forward by challenging 'today's' presumptions.
One chapter is of course at Google. Another sets up a debate with a blowhard TV anchor. In particular, I enjoyed last chapter Plato in the magnet, where Plato gets ready to get an MRI scan. This last chapter, if I may, is actually an important one.
The debate is setup in this last chapter between a reductionist scientist (a neurologist), Plato and a graduate student who stands between the two, philosophically speaking. At a meta level, the author is speaking through the graduate student.
This debate between 'platonic' constructs such as a perfect circle (or really the argument over a living 'soul') and the reductionist scientist seeing a buzzing beehive of atoms and physical processes, is intriguing.
I myself, as you might have heard me express it before, am in the complexity theory camp of subscribing to the theory of emergent phenomenon. (i.e somewhere between the graduate student and the scientist!).
However, that is true only if we fix time and perception in an objective Newtonian framework (or shall we say Platonic framework!).
If we were to think of time in nanoseconds on the one hand or in light years on the other hand - then the V-formation is VERY long when counted in milli-seconds. At the other end, the life of the birds making the V-formation is very short, if we were to think of it in terms of a cosmic scale of billions of years.
Similarly, the V-formation is as real to the observer, as any result of an experiment where the observer has to decide whether the electron is a wave or a particle (since it can be both).
So, if we shift our perspective to milliseconds and give genuine import to the observer, the V-formation of the birds is a long, beautiful real 'object' as it were!
All this to hypothesize that human consciousness is a more sophisticated form of the V-formation, where the neurons are the birds. Which is why I prefer to stand between the graduate student and the neurologist in the last chapter of Plato at Googleplex.
Here is a book I read s-l-o-w-l-y afraid it would be over too soon.
Separately, the author essayed this article that explains her core argument about why Philosophy is relevant even today - and uses the term coherence to make this case.
http://m.chronicle.com/article/Is-Philosophy-Obsolete-/145837/
Happy reading!
2 comments:
I find it to be very interesting. I may not be the best judge here, because I think I am perhaps victim to the shortcomings of the philosophical thinker, at least in terms of favoring thought and opinion over other degrees of experience. However, I do think it is a mistake to lump philosophy into the categories of the unseen. Philosophies have always been an expression of experience blended with a rationalization of that experience. Therefore, I don't see how scientific discovery is at odds with that. Sure, scientific discovery has rendered some past philosophical notions obsolete, but how many more theories has it then spurred? I think it is dangerous to always separate sensing from thought; they are one in the same. Thought is but another expression of sense.
I do not think that the humanities no longer have a place in higher education, but I am also not naive enough to think that they exist only for the sake of a well-rounded individual. It is far more complex than that. The level of logic and analysis and understanding which is required in the humanities leads to discoveries in other realms as well. We've all heard that philosophy majors score best on the LSATs, which indeed finds an extremely practical outcome for a path that many might deem mere dawdling, but I think it goes beyond that too. The computer programmer and the financial modeler can use a sort of practical philosophy nearly as much as a theologian.
I believe there is a great scientific structure embedded in all religions, and religion embedded in science. There is a belief system, a code, and a sense of the self or the whole for that matter. It is not and should not ever be mutually exclusive.
I think academia can sometimes run into issues by becoming so isolated in a specific field that all of philosophy is suddenly contained within the banter of two men on a park bench under the evening sky. Or all science is stuffed into a decanter to be carefully delineated one particle at a time. Those are romantic images to be sure, but, I think, incomplete. The real flourishing of certain studies are the degrees to which they are interdisciplinary and relevant to each other. When offered up in that manner, there is not this or that, but it is all a part of the same great complexity: what is it, how is it, and why?
I, too, live somewhere between the grad student and the scientist. And I am fully in the camp of Socrates when it comes to placing a value on the effort and courage needed for self-examination though I would not go so far as to say that live unexamined are not worth living. The challenge is that these personal quests cannot be measured or weighed with objective tools. Worse, it is the pursuit that has value rather than that which we are pursuing.
In the movie "Particle Fever", which is a very well story of the search for the Higgs Boson, a theoretical physicist says something that describes this existential challenge: "I go from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm".
Me too.
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