There are no jokes. Un-give the punchline. Laughter is only screaming without confidence.

Still on the metaphysics, so few jokes
- though there are jokes made by metaphysicians, e.g.,
Q: how many metaphysicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: There is no change. -

Actually,  I've just been reminded of an email exchange with my friend Andrew where a load of lightbulb jokes came out of it to do with this philosophy. I'll just go see if they are appropriate for posting.

First, Andrew asks me: 'How many philosopher's does it take to change a lightbulb?'

A1: none.

(Andrew replies: no, the answer is: 'what's a lightbulb?')
(No philosopher would say that. They probably could make an issue of it but they probably wouldn't unless you were annoying her.)

 A2: Unask the question. There is no change. There is only the idea of change.

A3:  Unask the question. All things are in flux  - the question is: how
many philosophers does it take to stop a lightbulb changing? (The answer is: as many as can divide by zero).

A4: The real question is: how many light bulbs does it take to change
a philosopher?

A5: None. Nothing changes except immanently and intrinsically.
Philosophers cannot change lightbulbs because philosophers are not
lightbulbs.

A6: None. Philosophers never change anything!

A7: As many as think of changing a lightbulb. Lightbulbs are just
ideas in the mind.

A8: As many as thinking of changing a lightbulb. A thought is
something that happens - in becoming, there is a change in a
philosopher's mind. Everything changes by changing in its relation to
everything else. Everything changes when anything changes. Lightbulbs
change simply by the philosopher's IDEA of it changing.

A9: One, if one is not feeling poorly, the lightbulbs are both within easy reach or there is a ladder.

Running up to the rays of the sun

Trying to understand nature when he was young, Einstein imagined running alongside a beam of light, and he wondered, if he did, what would he would see light do? His conclusion was that he would see light stand still as a wave. I suppose the way surfers might see a frozen wave beneath their feet.

But years later, through the theory of relativity, Einstein blocked off that possibility of reaching the speed of light. Anything slower - or faster - than light can not reach light, and light can neither speed up nor slow down. Assuming that we are massive creatures, i.e., creatures with mass, to get to the speed of light is to acquire infinite mass. Now, this isn't the sort of thing you get by eating a lot of sweets. Nor does it mean we magically acquire mass like a mythical stone in a folk tale or the child christ in the legend of St.Christopher. It means that, the faster something gets, the harder it is to make it even faster (I think that is all that is meant by inertial mass in relativistic physics). So, this is something which gets harder and harder as you do so, each time requiring more and more energy for the same increment of light-speed. And, no matter how fast you make it - 0.99 the speed of light (0.99 c), 0.999c, 0.999999999999999c - you can never make it hit light speed.

Nothing massive can catch up with light.

For faster-than-light particles, tachyons (we slower-than-lights are tardyons), no matter how much energy you put in, you cannot slow them down to the speed of light. They are always faster-than-light. Whether tachyons exist outside the realm of Star Trek, i.e., in the actual universe, the universe where people can't fly around space in plastic and tin boats - that is not something that's been in any way proved.

Nothing massive can be caught up by light.

It's also not clear to some physicists that there could be anything 'like' moving at the speed of light.Once we define the motion of another massive body, through transformation equations (I think they're called), we can use the data about the universe as observed within our own frame of reference to describe the universe from the other frame of reference. But, at the speed of light, such equations break down.

For example, the length something has along its line of motion - e.g., a rocket ship's length from nose to tail as it flies forward - this length is shorter for an observer in another frame for whom the ship is moving. But, at the speed of light, this length is zero. It disappears. At least according to the equations.

But worse - and for me, this was worse, and left me grumpy and disatisfied - the time between two moments, e.g., the time between seeing the rocket pass and checking your watch, however quick you do it - this time, once translated into the 'frame' of light - this becomes infinite.

Does this mean that, from the speed of light, all time has stopped and everything is flat? I thought that was what it meant when I first started working on time-consciousness. Then I got another interpretation. It's this: no, it doesn't mean those two things; it means that there is no physical description of spacetime structure from the speed of light. Physical lawas do not provide any description.

Perhaps this is why I've also heard it said (and no I can't cite sources; ask a physicist) that there is not, in a sense, any such thing as light. In the way that an asteroid occupies the 30,000km/hour inertial frame relative to earth, and I occupy the rest frame relative to this couch, and this couch occupies the 40miles/hr frame relative to a car passing by outside, nothing occupies the light-frame. If so, photons don't exist-

Or if they do, they are quite unlike anything we can otherwise describe.  And this 'quite' is quite a 'quite' - I mean, it's not a quiet 'quite'; it's not a quitting 'quite'; it's not a quasi-'quite'; light is seriously QUITE. Unlike, anything, massive.

Brief prelude to better stuff

I wish I could remember the poem, the one from John Gray's Straw Dogs, that said of philosophers, or any seekers of truth, that only pain makes people do this. Most people, the poem says, in some other form of words, want sex, and love, and fame, food, never truth.

It's been months since I've written. Things have changed a little - I now have had a job for several months and have travelled to a few places. I've been to Glasgow, to compare them to Cork; and I am going again, this time to give a paper from my project, to learn from the people there, and to attend a conference on cross-modal illusions. I've taught in Aalborg, Denmark, and attended an imagination workshop in Leeds (where I also briefly acted like a dimwit, for - at least un-analytical - philosophical reasons. But never mind that). I am a practicing philosopher, with an office, a phone, and - soon - printer.

Right now, though, I'm in a cafe in central Cork where I often come in to do the simple crossword in the Irish Times. I think I've been doing it a bit too much. It took me ten minutes today.

I'm very happy in Philosophy Cork, as I'm working with a brilliant phenomenologist Julia Jansen, and am surrounded with a pluralistic mix of philosophers, ranging across Eastern, to Continental, to Analytical, to....etc. Anyway, to anyone reading this who doesn't do philosophy, these distinctions might sound a little irrelevant. The point is that: after working with Julia, I'm discovering many of my issues about imagination a few months are anticipated and seemly made redundant by writers such as Husserl, Sartre, Colin McGinn. They argue against the idea of the imagination as involving a mental image, as involving some kind of psychological depictive surrogate of what we imagine  - unlike how a stone sculpture is a geological depictive surrogate (fancy).

So why does it bother me so much - why do I keep exploring that possibility? A possibility, incidentally, that I can most clearly see expressed by other thinkers in the writings of some scholastics like, I think, Fludd (at least from what I get through Warner's writings) or Athanasius Kircher(at least from what I get in my otherwise uninformative memory....). Thinking like them is thinking like a medieval scholar. What the hell?

Well, maybe that's where I'm going. I'm bringing back the thinking of the past. Last week, I read for the first time a review of one of my papers which stated that my work was an example of an out of date, or perhaps old style, or traditional? way of doing philosophy. (The paper was still accepted, though, so it didn't seem to discourage the editors). I felt a kind of grim amusement at that, though I was a bit upset.

But never mind: I still have the best job in the world (while it lasts).

-------------------------
Why explore the idea that what we experience in imagining things, or remembering, is in some way a kind of image? Why explore the idea that it is a thing, an object, the way a painting is an object, or the writing on a page? Isn't it clearly not that?

One reason comes, actually, from those who deny imagining is like that. Sartre is insistent that, in what he calls 'image-consciousness', there is no mediating representation of what we imagine. Instead, there is just what we imagine - presented as absent.

The italicised phrase might sound abstract, confusing, incoherent, or just plain pretentious, but an example makes it obvious:  when I imagine the Eiffel tower, I do not see it. Perhaps I also see it (something, for example, Wittgenstein seems to deny) but my imagining is not like seeing it. And why not?

'...Well, I might be imagining hearing it...'

- oh, yes, sorry - I'm assuming like lots of philosophers that we're always talking of some kind of visual experience - McGinn's 'Mindsight', not 'Mindsound' -

'Very well' [picks off a bit of lint] 'do go on....'

One reason that imagining is not like seeing the Eiffel tower is that, when I see it, the Eiffel tower is present - it's there, beyond those buildings; it's here surrounding me. But when I imagine it, it is absent. But it is still in some sense presented to me - I make it present to myself in imagining it. Although I don't.

'That's obvious....'

Well, you know what I'm referring to. All the way through this discussion, you've been imagining the Eiffel Tower. So imagine looking at it from a hundred yards away. Whatever that means for you, that's what is meant by visually imagining it.

'I've never seen the Eiffel Tower. Remember, I'm from the Island of Doctor Moreau.'

Oh.

It looks sort of like - well....like - like ....eh.....The Eiffel Tower.

'That isn't very helpful.'

Well, well....you've been to Waterford right?

'Yes, I've been to that Metropolis of Espionage.'

You know the giant dock cranes that are there for unloading ships?

'Sure.'

It's like one of those, but dark grey, I think, and stretched like gum high into the sky.

'Ah.'

Can you imagine seeing that?

'Sort of.....eh....yes. Sort of.'

So it's not like seeing at all is it? And yet, it is a kind of visual experience.

'If you say so.'

Oh come on. You know yourself.

'Ok,. You've convinced me. You're very persuasive. It must be the cake you keep offering me.'

I call it soph-as, I call it so-pastry.

'I don't understand what that thing is you just said.'

Well, anyway, can I go on now to my next point.

'No. You've run out of time.'

Confusion about EEGs and fMRIs in my JCS paper

So, I had a paper published last month in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS). I'm very happy about this, especially as it resulted in brief discussions on the journal's yahoo group's messageboard.

I'm particularly happy about this as this journal is what brought me back to philosophy. In 2002, I was working as a waitress in a hotel bar - hold on, no I wasn't. I was working as a technical support engineer/software consultant - the title kept changing - in a desolate industrial estate just a few miles from Schiphol airport in Holland. On my breaks, I found a series of articles and discussions about consciousnesss. The one that struck me was 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' by David Chalmers in JCS (free-to-read here). I'd gotten quite cynical about philosophy after my undergraduate - definitely partly due to not having done any work for my BA. After reading Chalmers' article, I got interested again. Never thought I'd be published in the JCS myself, though. Alot of things have changed.

Like my professional situation. In February, I applied to IRCHSS - the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences - for my two-year project 'Time and Illusion' at University College, Cork. Two weeks ago, I found out that I got it. Again, I am very happy. In Dublin at the moment for a meeting of 'awardees' tomorrow in Dublin Castle.

Anyway, enough about me - more about my mistakes. In my JCS paper, I discussed a possible experiment for finding out if there is a privileged frame for the neural correlates of experience - or, at least, the subject of the experience. This experiment turns on measuring the velocity of the neural correlates. The evidence needed is a common velocity, i.e., not a velocity relative to each subject, for the neural correlates in all subjects. In setting up the experiment, I suggested you could do this with an fMRI or something like that.

However, as I discovered in discussion with my friend David Jenkins, this can't be done by fMRI. fMRI - or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - is a method of mapping activity in the brain. To quote from the Columbia site, it does so by tracking increases in blood flow. It doesn't measure the movement of the correlates themselves. Positronic emission tomography, or PET also only measures the blood flow. EEG (electroencephalography) does seem to measure neural activity directly but it does not seem to do so finely enough to pick out the motion that's needed.

This, however, is not a problem for the argument of my paper. It is a problem for those who object to it. So it is not a serious issue for the position I promote. But it still shows that I should pay more attention to the actual detail of how things are made, and what they can do. I forget that most things I encounter have limits. They can break; they are finite. Even the  internet you're reading this on is not some spiritual non-physical dimension of thought. It's electric fields, dark dots in hard disks, copper wires and undersea cables. It is a multitude of such things, the locations of which are not easy to find. But the multitudes are finite, and they are somewhere. You can break the internet by pulling enough plugs.

Anyway, enough!

Caprica

Caprica is set in the Battlestar Galactica milieu but set several decades before that story. It is set in a world of a mixed aesthetic of the 1930s prohibition US and some time very near in our future. Men wear hats and conservative clothing, smoking, standing by apple carts. There is sexual liberation, casual interplanetary prejudice, and a multisensory, immersive online world where anything goes.

The story revolves around a group of families from different backgrounds connected by the tragedy of a single terrorist act. This act is in the service of a religious group called the Soldiers of the One True God. One family's daughter is a member of this group; she dies in the first episode. Her father is the original designer of the Cylons.

************************************

Caprica breaks away from the typical science fiction model of these shows in the first few episodes by playing with a very common premise: The Super-Girl. There is one of those in it, certainly, but here she does not look like a girl; she has the mind of one. In most shows, the Super-Girl looks like an ordinary girl but she is actually a super-hero/robot/and so on. It is important that, no matter what she is, she looks normal. Here, she doesn't look normal. She looks like a great big clunking machine. She, Zoe, is downloaded into the body of a Cylon . Although, there is a bit of a cheat on this - the immersive virtual world (if I remember the world's name I'll set it in) allows her to appear as a girl.

***************************************

One of the ideas in this series is that Zoe, in being downloaded from the immersive virtual world into her Cylon body, leaves the immersive virtual world. She cannot simply be copied into the Cylon body. She is not like a file. You cannot simply copy her and make two of her.

In the last four years, I've been a tutor at the university where I did my doctorate. There, we ran courses in the philosophy of mind and the introduction to theoretical philosophy. Some of the thought experiments run were like the following two:

(i) In the future, you can teleport to very distant planets by doing the following: You step in a machine which scans information about all the atoms in your body, with all the relative locations, parts, etc. It then sends this information to a receiver in a far away planet, where the machine over there assemblies an exact physical duplicate of the original body as you stepped in. The person who steps out is physically identical to you, down to the arrangements of the most basic atoms.  Meanwhile, the body in the original machine is broken down into raw materials for assembling bodies from incoming signals.

Would you get in the machine?

(ii) From surgical evidence, it seems as if a person can lose a hemisphere of their brain (have a hemispherectomy) and still retain their personality, memories etc.(for, e.g., epilepsy). Let's accept that we can survive as ourselves with just one hemisphere, and it doesn't matter which one.

Now say also the following, slightly more science-fiction scenario occurs. An evil scientist knocks you ought, then clones your body.  They then swap one hemisphere of your brain in your original body with one hemisphere of your cloned body. The scientist then wakes both of you up. 

Who is the real you? Is the other a real person?

If they have the same personality, memory, etc. as you, and look the same, and actually have one of the original hemispheres from your body, are they just as right to think of themselves as you?

Let us say this happens: the scientist clones your original body, replaces one hemisphere of that clone's brain with one of your hemispheres, then destroys the rest of your body. The scientist then wakes....you up in your new body (because it is your hemisphere in there, and this has all of your personality in there)? ...Wakes your clone up (and has murdered you)? Which?

Change the thought experiment to this happening: the scientist is not evil at all but good. You barely survive a plane crash, which  happens at the base of her secret mountain fortress. She finds your smashed, ruined body in the debris, and that you have barely any brain activity; only one hemisphere is intact, but it is very intact. So what she does is clone your body in her laboratory, and then put the surviving hemisphere into the clone. A few days pass, the brain-body connections seems fine, so she wakes....is it, you? up.

If you get different answers for whether or not the hemisphere-in-clone is you, why do you think that is? Am I subtly leading you to those conclusions, perhaps? If so, is there are a more neutral way of describing these?

*************************************************8

These thought experiments are not identical to all the original courses' details. I pick out the details that suggest the following: You can physically copy  a person so that they are indistinguishable from the original copy - including: moles, cuts, broken noses, stomach ulcers, haircuts, environmentally worn neural pathways, etc. If you do this you get a psychologically, consciously, personally identical being to the original. This is true even if you keep the original.

Is this right? 

**********************************

So, is an exact copying of someone possible? Is it incoherent to say that it happens? Is it incoherent to say that it cannot happen? How could we know?

No person has never been exactly copied;  we don't have any evidence if it is right or not. 

What we have is whatever our assumptions about the world give us.

***********************************

Caprica suggests* a different response: whether they are merely  physical or not, persons are unique; they can only be maintained in one physical place;. This may mean one of two things, one of which I consider better than the other:

(i) A physical copy can be made, but a conscious or mental copy cannot. 

 Making a copy results in something that acts, looks and reacts just like a conscious, mental person, but this thing is not a person. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that the original keeps the consciousness or the mind. The physical duplicate or the clone-with-its-original-hemisphere might have the consciousness or the mind, and the original lose it. The point is that the behaviour of the non-conscious or non-mental thing is just like it has consciousness or a mind, but it doesn't, because only one of them has a  mind.

This option exploits one or both of two philosophical issues, the problem of other minds and the possibility of philosophical zombies. I'll put these aside for now (but will return to it later).

(ii) A physical copy can't be made and the original survive.

No matter what we do, no matter how exactly our technologies  should, in  principle, physically duplicate the original, either:
a. The original remains intact, acting like it is the same conscious/thinking, etc. person but a copy can never be constructed of the original person.
b. The duplicate is a proper person but the original fails in some crucial respect, so that it fails to behave like a conscious, thinking, person.

In comparison to (i), (ii) is rarely considered.  Yet, so far as it stands, in terms of contemporary evidence, (ii) is as possible as (i). And what someone claiming (ii)  is also doing is making a falsifiable statement about the world. It's just it comes from how we think about minds, not how we think of the physical world.

Both alternatives are possible at the moment. Until we actually succeed in making a copy of someone while keeping the 'someone' as well, we cannot discount either. If we do succeed, then we throw aside (ii), leaving just (i), and then face the puzzle of who is the real you.

But at the moment, it is all just a problem for the characters in Star Trek, just like evil is a problem for the characters in Christianity.

*******************************
-------------------------------------------------
*Although it only suggests it. Arguably, Cylon-Zoe is a software copy of original Zoe. Although, they also seem to be different - and they are not as clearly distinguished as how I put it here (which is interesting too).

Technical Metaphysical Interlude: does what we experience exist?

In my thesis, I defined a principle I called PEPE,The Principle of the Experienced Particular Existent. This principle is that what we experience exists (and is something in particular - but that's not important right now). If this is right, then if we experience something when we are imagining, then this 'something' exists.*

But is this right? Is there anything wrong with saying that what we experience doesn't exist? (and isn't something in particular - but that isn't important right now).

I called my principle a principle because I don't think there is anything obviously contradictory in denying it. It doesn't seem to me to be incoherent to say that what we experience doesn't exist. But at the same time I think that, when pressed, this is not what we tend to say.

How would we be pressed on this? Consider the following: someone turns up, shaken, late at night, soaking wet from walking through fields of heavy rain, and says:

'I'm sorry. It's so late. I had this experience. It - I seemed to experience - it was - was - like - it wasn't like I saw something, or heard or - it wasn't like anything physically touched me, or any sort of sense-perception..But, tonight, you must believe me' - and he twists his sleeves in his fingers, looks up at you, scared, hopeful - 'I experienced the presence of God.'

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you do. Do you believe that you can have some awareness of God? Perhaps you do. Say this, however, take this viewpoint: you do not believe in God.

If you are an atheist - you must be an atheist to run this - an agnostic might concede the possibility - my hunch is that you will say to him: 'look - calm down - here, have this vodka and lime.** I know you're overwhelmed for now, but, although it seems that way, you did not experience the presence of God.'

Does that seem right to you? And do you think that your intent is clear to the listener? Or could you say, without causing any extra confusion, or for the listener to not have to actively interpret what you're saying: ''you experienced the presence of God alright but God does not exist'.

Because we tend to speak the first way, I think that, when we talk about 'experience', we mean that we are consciously aware of something, there is something apparent to us; there is something phenomenological going on. But we do not often refer to 'experiencing' as experiencing, typically. We refer to it as seeing, hearing, or doing something of which we are conscious, e.g., experiencing running a marathon, jumping from a plane, scratching off the charcoal from burnt toast.

My example above suggests another point about experience: we refer to an experience as only an 'experience' when we mean the most general form; we aren't referring to a particular kind of experience, e.g., to seeing a bright light, hearing a low rumbling, remembering the taste of honey, or reciting the ten times tables 'in our heads'. I think we only refer, in ordinary conversation, to experiences in cases of being unable or unwilling, or of being unsure how, to specify the kind of experience further. For whatever reason, we can't say we are seeing, feeling, imagining, or only thinking. It's just we are experiencing. That's all we can say.  

-------------------------------------

But there might be another way of using 'experience', especially if we are talking about being conscious in experiencing. Perhaps when we talk about experiencing something, 'something' needn't exist. Or, even more, what we experience needn't even seem to exist.

For example, if I imagine a unicorn, I experience the unicorn - but I also definitely experience it even if it doesn't exist and I know it doesn't. That's just what it is to imagine unicorns.

Once I say that, I no longer say anything more: I imagine a griffin and so I experience furriness, eagle-head-shape-ness - but no problem: whether I experience it or not, the furriness needn't exist or even seem to.

I got this idea from a conversation with Julia Jansen: she didn't see why I would think in the following way: we experience a mental image when we imagine something. What we imagine isn't necessarily what we experience - actually, anyone is more likely to say that it isn't. What we imagine is, e.g., a griffin, and whatever we say here, it doesn't seem right at all to say that we experience a griffin. But why, Julia wondered, would anyone bring images into this story? When I imagine a griffin, I just imagine something that doesn't exist - and, so we could say here that I am experiencing something that doesn't exist as not existing. But this doesn't mean we have to say, really, we experience something that doesn't exist or we experience something else that does exist. The former is like saying you really experience a God, though there is a non-existent God; the latter is saying you experience an image.

Julia is an expert in phenomenology, which we might very roughly call the philosophical examination of appearances, or how things appear to us, or an examination of consciousness from the first person perspective. This isn't exactly accurate, there is a  lot more too it, and different versions of it from different founders, each version different to the others, e.g., Husserl's phenomenology is more ideal than Heidegger's phenomenology,  who is fascinated with the sense of our being always conscious in time , while Merleau-Ponty constantly reiterates the compelling idea that we are always experiencing the world from a body.

The development of the phenomenological method comes in stages(I am not sure it is right to say it is done). But a significant beginner of it, a 'father' some might say, is Edmund Husserl. Husserl's description of the phenomenological method is, to my mind, the best example of what phenomenology is. In particular, there is epoche, the 'suspension of belief 'by someone about the reality, idealism or unreality of what is presented to them 'in consciousness' (as is often added - though I'd assume it anyway, if it weren't mentioned). To suspend belief is not to doubt the reality of what you experience; following thinking of Descartes, Husserl considers doubt to be disbelieving in something. Suspending belief is not believing or disbelieving it. Husserl thought you were free to do this, no matter what you were presented with it.

Give it a go. 

Get back to me when you do.

The point about this method is that you examine what is presented to you without necessarily believing it is real or not, and you do so in order to get at invariant features of consciousness, 'rigid data', and thus ultimately to develop a science of first-person consciousness of the world.

I think that's it, anyway, although I am often frustrated in my understanding.  (It reminds me of the pyrrhonian sceptic view, that one does not believe anything except appearances, does not assent to anything except to which she is a forced to consent to. I don't think this is a coincidence). The point I take, anyhow, is this: When you describe what we experience, you don't just presume what you experience is as you have assumed it to be. To do so is to remain in what Husserl has called 'the natural attitude', an attitude you are supposed to bracket off. Away from that attitude, and instead in the phenomenological attitude, you don't assume that what you are presented with is either illusory or real. You simply describe it as it appears to you.Back to the ancient sceptics again: I do not know if honey is sweet or not when I am not around, but it tastes sweet. It seems sweet.

Once you do that, though, this question arises: does anything seem real or unreal to you anyway, even if you suspend belief in everything you are conscious of? That is, can you suspend belief in everything you are presented with? Are you compelled to believe in the reality or unreality of anything you are presented with? What is left? What is lost? Are you forced to believe?

This question is important because it gets us to what phenomenology can contribute to a discussion about what exists. This is a metaphysical question, not in the domain of phenomenology as it is traditionally understood. But it is in the domain of which physics or physicalism is involved:  the entities posited by physics to explain what is apparent to us should address at least what we is apparent to us after doing phenomenology; physicalism says  only what is physical exists so it should show how what is apparent after doing phenomenology is physical (these two tasks might be different; they might  be the same; I'm not sure).   

When we walk in with what we hold to exist or be real, we can look at this phenomenological description as a test of our theory.

Take, for example, someone claiming to see the Virgin Mary hovering in the sky over a cave. What exactly is apparent to them? They believe that it is the Virgin Mary but what is apparent to them if they suspend belief in that? What can they suspend belief in, and what must just seem to be real and presented to them? 

This is the sort of thing that is supposed to be done in doing phenomenology.

Anyway, that is the end of this metaphysical discussion.

[Right now, I have a massively high temperature, dried out mouth, and exhaustion, sitting by a gas fire and listening to a documentary on BBC4 about the science of sleepwalking and law. So, the phenomenology bit might be a bit unclear. I feel very frustrated about my understanding of the phenomenological tradition. But I need to get it clear, bit by bit].

---------------------------------------

*If I continue to run with this, I'll probably change the principle's specific terms. Since reading a paper by Peter Simons, and seeing a lecture by him, I think it's better too refer to 'real particulars' rather than 'existing particulars'. According to Simons, 'existence' refers to a much broader scope of things, including things that are not real; in addition, in his paper, he argues, or perhaps simply shows, that 'existence' is more...I don't have the paper in front of me, so I can't use his term - but, it might be said to be more esoteric, or metaphysically technical or idiomatic than 'real'. So, then, it would be the principle of the experienced real particular, or PERP. These things matter to analytical philosophers. But, here, existence is fine.

**Atheists always drink this. It's an empirical fact.

Are you an atheist?

See?

An Ontology Game

Sometimes I think philosophy is just a particular family of games. I'm sure Wittgenstein has said something like this ('family' and 'games' are two of his followers' favourite words).   The games have rules to them, rules which are based on their purpose (just like all games).

For example, there is the Ontology Game, the rule which is: if you say there's this sort of thing (x), and there's only this sort of thing (x), then any of these other sort of things (ys, zs) can be explained by this sort of thing (x). These zs and ys are lots of xs, really, e.g., the flashing motion of a ghost  (y) is an ultra-low frequency vibration of your eyeball (x).

Calorific
Now, many zs and ys only come up in the ontology game if someone suggests they explain some of what we experience, e.g., what we see, hear, etc. etc. So, there's calorific, the fluid that scientists before Joules thought carried heat from one place to another: heat, in other words, was some kind of a substance that moved through things. We often preserve this idea in our language, when we talk about letting the heat out or the cold in.

However, an experiment by Joules, according to George Johnson one of the Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (guardian review), demonstrates that this is not at all what's going on. (I won't detail the experiment here, except to note that part of it involved measuring the difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of waterfalls).  There's no such heat fluid (y) - there's just very energetic particles (x). We can explain everything we experience of heat, e.g., the apparent flow, and indeed more, by saying there are only xs - energetic particles - and without invoking ys - calorific.

What we experience
But other ys are not just explanations of what we experience; they are what we experience. We feel the change in temperature over our skin, or in our body, so this change needs to be explained. It isn't a movement of calorific fluid but it is the energetic motion of particles. So, there is no calorific, unless it is just another word for the change in temperature - or if 'calorific' is just heat described in a much more objective, naturalistic way - not just what we experience when we're experiencing it, but also what it is when we're not, e.g., we leave the warm room, and now feel cold; still, the warmth remains in the room (some philosophers, and others I imagine, will have great trouble with the casualness of my saying that any such 'heat' remains. But nevermind that for now).

So, a part of the ontology game is to explain what we experience - or at least seem to experience - in terms of what there is, i.e., the ontology. That isn't the whole of the ontology game; some philosophers think that there are claims about what there is which make no difference to any experience we  could possibly have, especially in terms of how that experience seems. That aside, where it comes to what we do seem to experience, the game is to explain it - and to do so in terms of what we hold there to be.

This might seem obvious. But there is another issue here: this concerns what sort of explanations are good and what sort of explanations are bad.

Good and bad explanations in the Game
Whether or not an explanation is good or bad depends on the game. Even in the Ontology Game, there can be slightly different rules depending on your position. 

For example, the claim that everything is physical is a variety of the Ontology Game, and it seems to be quite a popular one. (Think of it as the scrabble or football of modern ontology).  This game is particularly exciting because of one of its rules: evidence or empirical data scores points. In fact, for some scientists and philosophers, evidence or empirical data is the only way to score points (an assumption derided by other philosophers - I think. I'm  not sure).

Evidence and empirical data is all about experience: you can't claim an experiment gives evidence if you don't actually do the experiment and observe the results. You might delegate it, of course, e.g., I trust the decisive evidence for relativity theory or quantum tunnelling, even though I've never actually observed it myself. 

The Physicalist Ontology Game, then, is to explain this evidence in physical terms. That is, it is to explain what we experience in physical terms.

In the straight version of the game, this is enough. People tell you that, if you do this and that, then you will experience a y; this is evidence - evidence anyone can observe. Then, the best explanation of this y wins points. You explain heat just with excited electrons, which we already accept; I explain heat with something extra: calorific. You win the points. And either version is an explanation in terms of something physical. So, in either case, physicalism wins the point.

There are, however, versions of this game which have, figuratively speaking, jokers in the pack, get out of jail cards, rule-breakers.

For example, there is a version where, given you invoke something or other (evolutionarily-useful delusions, the spell of a malignant demiurge, Descartes' evil demon), you can then say: ah, we only think we experience y; but we don't; therefore, I needn't explain y with my x. This is usually good for the particular player, since it is usually invoked by someone who can't explain y.

But, it is important to  see that this is not just a particular rule. It is a 'get out of jail' type rule. It can be withdrawn whenever it suits. If the player finds, after a bit of a think (which is allowed in the game, uncommon as it is), that they can explain y with x, what do they do then? Well, they can take the joker off the table. They can say 'We weren't just thinking we experience y. We were experiencing y - well, x, because  y is just a sort of x' - etc., etc. 

Given they have this, a player of the ontology game can, whenever they like, accept or deny what we experience. They can, to adopt a phrase from phenomenology (which cannot play the game this way) , 'bracket off' what is apparent, however compelling it is, and still claim that there are only xs - inventive evil demons, Gods intentions, inert passive physical things, etc., etc.


The cheat is nullified if everyone has it, of course. So, e.g., you're a creationist, I'm an evolutionary theorist. You say 'fossils are God's test.' I say 'the presence of God is an evolutionary useful delusion.' Both of us do this to get rid of what we are all compelled to seem to experience: fossils, divine presence. (I'm not saying there are either; I'm saying if our experience makes it compellingly seem that there are either).

Or, e.g., I am blind and you are deaf. My theories are only drawn from my experience - they do not include visual things; yours are only drawn from your experience - they do not include auditory things. You say 'there are colours'. I say 'there are sounds'. You only  think so, I say, and so don't have to explain what we visually experience; you only think so, you say, and so don't have to explain what we auditorily experience.

And this leads to the last point: if we share a theory, we don't have to explain what either of us claims to see or claims to hear. So we don't have to explain those kinds of experience. (Hopefully, the two of us don't ever come across anyone who suffers from proprioception impairment).

Everybody's happy, so long as they don't have to spend time in each others' company.