It’s been a long time since I’ve read—and I hesitate to call it this—“traditional” philosophy. What I mean by that is philosophy that follows a logical structure and commits to an exploration of premises and conclusions. I think of writers like Aristotle numbering off each of the claims in Nicomachean Ethics or Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Not just in terms of style, but in terms of substance, I see Eric Schwitzgebel’s The Weirdness of the World as a return to the foundations of philosophical discourse. The parallel isn’t simply stylistic, either. Schwitzgebel and Aristotle have a love of philosophy that enjoys thinking for its own sake, regardless of whether it’s practicable.
Indeed, Schwitzgebel outlines his objectives in the introduction to the text. He is exploring the fundamental weirdness of the world and, in so doing, recognizes that answers might not be forthcoming. His philosophy of philosophy is that he appreciates anything that expands our consciousness and allows us to think about more things; answers are restrictive and he has no intention of definitively proving any one interpretation of the world.
The actual thesis of Schwitzgebel’s text is, in fact, that any attempt to explain the weirdness of the world puts us into other strange positions. When we make commitments to particular explanations for phenomenon, we are required to adopt other strange premises and implications from our thinking. As such, we are left with the “universal bizarreness thesis,” which dictates that all explanations to questions about our world are strange, and with “universal dubiety,” which dictates that no one answer is going to be certain enough to reach conclusions.
Schwitzgebel goes into a number of case studies, and this is where I see parallels with Descartes and beyond. Each chapter is a kind of thought experiment in the vein of the Ship of Theseus, usually about consciousness, and Schwitzgebel posits different solutions before explaining why they are either insufficient or weird. For instance, we are asked to determine whether individual consciousness exists in a race of alien ants that communicate telepathically and organize their actions towards a common purpose. At what point does the individual consciousness stop existing in favour of the whole? One chapter considers whether the United States as a country would be considered ‘conscious’ and grapples with how the definition fits, but places us in some strange consequences if so. Again, I’m brought back to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy because in my copy of that classic, there are letters of rebuttal and Descartes’ responses to objections to further clarify his claims. Schwitzgebel does something similar here; there’s an appendix that addresses other philosophers’ objections to the claim that the United States as a country has a shared consciousness.
As with all things these days, the book addresses the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Used as an example in classic thought experiments, Schwitzgebel uses the now-extant technology to consider the definition of consciousness. If we can determine consciousness as being a collection of particular features, such as intention and feeling and reflection, could we classify artificial intelligence as being conscious? And if so, is AI entitled to ‘life’? Is it entitled to vote? The Weirdness of the World offers no answer to that, but it does illustrate that we don’t currently have a functional framework for thinking through these issues. I can guarantee that ChatGPT doesn’t have a ‘philosophy’ division that’s trying to figure out the ethical and political implications of definitions of consciousness. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, though, since corporations are classed as individuals…
The other most compelling piece to me is something that I think about in terms of causality and possibility. If we accept that the universe is infinite, it means that everything within it is infinite. In turn, it forces us into a position of accepting that every single circumstance is possible; there is a part of the universe where a version of me exists on a planet like Earth and is similar in every respect (right down to the books I’ve read, the people I’ve known, the poems I’ve written, etc.). That seems completely unfathomable, and also means that every slight gesture I make creates a different kind of universe. That’s an unreal position to me, but if we consider the universe logically, that seems to be where we end up. I really liked the weirdness of that section.
I wish I had more to offer in terms of specific examples from the text. One of my favourite philosophy profs used to say how important it is to read philosophy slowly. My English classes and history courses had hundreds of pages of reading per week. My philosophy courses had maybe 50 because it requires such intense concentration to really grapple with the ideas. Unfortunately, I forgot just how important that piece is and I read too quickly. That, paired with the fact that I read this as an audiobook and consequently didn’t have the visual divides of the different sections of the arguments, meant that I wasn’t as astute of a student as I ought to have been. It was thought-provoking in the moment, but I didn’t take enough time for its arguments to really calcify in my brain. Sorry, team!
Nonetheless, happy reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment