MC Philosophy

Out-dating Locke

This is the fifth and final entry on Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding".  The first is Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the second Locke and the Formation of Ideas, the third Locke's Function of Words, the fourth Locke's Notion of the Self.

Definition:

Real Essence -The generally unknown constitution of things, wheron their discoverable qualities depend,  the being of anything whereby it is what it is.   

Limits of Knowledge

- One of the most important points that Locke tries to establish in his Essay is that the real essence of most material objects and phenomena we see in the world are completely unknown to us.  This is a major limit to our knowledge.  We receive simple ideas from objects, but those ideas are only of the surface, the materialness of the object.  They reveal nothing to us of the inner, "real" (as defined above) essence of objects. 

You see this picture and get many simple ideas from it, and from them gather complex ideas of the image.  The complex ideas might be "handsome young man", "blue pack", "big black mountain", "mist".  Ladies would abstract into further complex ideas and think of the children this man would give them, or what that toned body would feel like on top of them, or even imagine his wang to be bigger than it is.

- What you don't comprehend are the real essences of these ideas.  There's no way to know the essence of the dashingly attractive young man, there's no way to know the underlying nature of the dark mountain, nor any of its rocks, pebbles, sticks etc.  Their real essences are known only to God. 

- In this way, we only get to the superficial levels.  There is no way for us to know the hidden being behind things. 

Our knowledge is more like the Jerry Springer show, we see the surface, the fights, the crying, the slapping of hoes and such.

It is not like Montel, where you understand the real essence of issues, where the underlying nature of pathetic people's problems really come to the surface through the amazing probity of an elevated soul such as Montel. 

GOD

- Now that doesn't mean that our knowledge of everything is limited.  Locke makes the distinction between knowing things like mathematics, God, and morals, and knowing superficial things like the essence of rocks. 

- Of course, Locke tries to make his theories coincide with an affirmation in the existence of God.  Here is basically how he does this:

-Those who look at this will see heavy influence from Spinoza's proof of God.  Locke doesn't spend nearly as much time proving God's existence.  He assumes it is pretty much given.  He believes that although the knowledge of God is not innate,  He has "fitted [hu]men with faculties and means to discover, recieve, and retain truths, accordingly as they are employed."

-One of these truths is the knowledge of God, that humans can discover from our own ideas, as shown above.  But we can never know the essence of God.  To that we are as blind as finding the essence of a rock.

Probability

-Because there are only a few things we can really know, like God, tennets of mathematics, and some broad moralities, the rest of our so-called "knowledge" is based on probabilities. 

"As demonstration is the shewing of the agreement of disagreement of two ideas, by the intervention of one or more proofs, which have a constant, immutable and visible connection with one another: So probability is nothing but the appearance of such an agreement or disagreement, by the intervention of proofs, whose connection is not constant and immutable, or at least is not perceived to be so, but is or appears, for the most part to be so, and is enough to induce the mind to believe its true"

- Here he is saying that what we see as cause and effect, even in the hard sciences, is nothing more than noting something that will probably happen, not noting any true connection. 

So even when we see the shirt of a fat angry woman come off on Springer, it is only probable that a fight may ensue
Even though it happens every single time. 

-This is because all the empirical watching we do can see nothing of true cause and effect, only the material phenomena, therefore we have no real knowledge of these connections.

Out-Dating Locke

- Unfortunately for Locke, his theories on not knowing the essence of things, at least materially, have been disproven wholly. 

-He states things like, "All gold is fixed is a proposition whose truth we cannot be certain of...For if...anyone supposes the term gold to stand for a species of things set out by nature by a real essence belonging to it, it is evident he knows not what particular substances are of that species, and so cannot with certainty affirm anything universally of gold."

Unfortunately for Mr. Locke, he didn't anticipate things like the Periodic table, nor atomic mass, that shows that underlying material essence of gold. 

- It is also interesting that he would undermine the possibilities of science describing the real essence of natural phenomona, during the Enlightenment!  The man was alive for the publication of Newton's Principia.  There was certainly a deeper connection between the world and the observation of it through the calculus that Newton created.  Furthermore, Newton could predict cellestial phenomena because of this.  But there is still serious debate as to whether this is still just probability. 

MC - Though Locke proved to be wrong about the limits of our knowledge, especially on discovering the material essence of objects, his contribution on Tabula Rasa and the use/formation of language have lived on and had great influence.  His work is easy to comprehend and makes great sense on those areas.  Though there are many theories of language that have been used since, his notion of simple ideas as sensory material being recieved and abstracted into complex ideas, then generalized into nominal ideas is still a prevelant and appreciated theory.   
 

Locke's Notion of the Self

This is the 4th entry on Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", the first is Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the second Locke and the Formation of Ideas, the third Locke's Function of Words.

Let's take a trip back to the Enlightenment.  Take out all knowledge of cognitive science or neurons firing and contemplate what it is in your mind that thinks.  You would have a tough time finding that "thinking" thing in the brain, even though you know it serves as the main functionary.  Descartes actually tried to find it and failed, guessing it was the pineal gland.  Instead, it is much easier and, at the time, rationally acceptable to consider the soul of a person seperate from the body.  That is where we start with Locke, assuming that the "thinking" thing in the brain is immaterial in the soul.

Definitions:
Will - The power the mind has to order the consideration of any idea or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest or motion in any particular instance
Personal Identity - the sameness of a rational being through consciousness that distinguishes himself/herself from all other thinking things

Essence of Individual

-  Locke doesn't take it upon himself to prove that the soul and body are different.  He limits his inquiry into the nature of knowledge, and in that respect, it is easiest to assume a soul and a body that that soul manipulates. 
My educated guess is that the soul is the white light and the body that thing with tits

- Locke doesn't believe that the essence of your soul is purely in your thoughts.  The soul is very personal and can perform many things.  Thinking is just one of the functions of the soul, so the forming of ideas and words to explain their generalities is just a function. 

Locke says, "I ask whether it be not probable that thinking is the action and not the essence of the soul?  since the operations of agents will easily admit of intention and remission; but the essences of things are not conceieved capable of any such variation."

Thus your soul is not a dynamic being in its essence.  The knowledge and actions of the person can change through thinking, but its essence will stay the same.  The essence of the woman's soul above will stay greenish/purplish, whereas my soul's essence has always had more of an aqua tint with some fire yellow and orange hints to compliment. 

Personal Identity

- Though the essence of the soul will always stay, the characteristics of the soul, the manifestations of its thought onto the humans, change.  We will call that the self.  As we see from the definition of personal identity above, the self is determined by the continuity of consciousness. 

-Locke thinks about the human being as having a body and a mind, those two taken together can be considered the human. 

-But now we can start to differentiate between the human and the self, for they are different.  The human is the combination of the mind and the body.  Everything that is done by person x, is done by the human who is person x

When Courtney Love lets us see her tits, it is the human Courtney Love that pulls up her shirt and allows some dude to lovingly frame her tits for the camera. 

- But now the kicker: For Locke, it is not the self of Courtney Love that allows us to see her tits.  (Even though Courtney may be fine with people seeing her breasts), in this instance, she is obvioulsy drugged up after popping pills and is in another state of mind.  Her body is being exposed to the camera, but her self is not there because she is not conscious of the event, and the self is determined by consciousness.

ps. the most hits to this website come from people finding this same image on google and clicking it to get a better look.

"Personal Identity (what MC is calling self for now) consists: not in the identity of substance but...in the identity of consciousness, wherein Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person.  And to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of right than to punish one twin for what his brother twin did"

-This is taken farther, even.  If a person forgets what has happened to them in the past, then the current manifestation of the self is completely different from the self who now exists without that memory. 

So it's true that Teddy Kennedy is not responsible for killing that young girl on the bridge in Mass.  He was too wasted at the time to be conscious of his actions, therefore, it was only human Teddy, not self Teddy that drove off the bridge and ran away instead of saving her. 

-Teddy made the conscious decision to drink, like many of us had.  But he was no longer himself when he got in the car and drove it off a bridge.  This is certainly why he got off, not cause he was a Kennedy.

So when you wake up feeling like this don't worry!  Whatever you did the night before was only the drunk reincarnation of your human it wasn't your real self.  (When the frat daddy's try to make fun of you for giving that public BJ, alert them to this post and they will understand).

Will Need Not Be Free

- As we see from the definition of will above, it pertains to the mind's power.  In this way, the will is only a tool, it is something that the mind can do.  Locke believes that to talk about "freedom", we must be talking about some agent, or something that has the power to do something.  Since will is only a tool, it doesn't make sense to talk about "free will".

"will, in truth, signifies nothing but a power or ability to prefer or choose; and when the will, under the name of a faculty, is considered, as it is, barely as an ability to do something, the absurdity in saying it is free or not free will easily discover itself."

- In this way Locke sidesteps the whole free will problem.  By making the will nothing more than a tool of the independent and immaterial mind, it is hard to see how the tool could be limited.  You can limit the person.  You can brainwash them and make them will differently, but that is not stripping them of free will, they still have the power to will something.  Instead you are taking the freedom of the person.  Freedom can only be applied to the thing with the power, not the tool used by that power.  It makes good sense. 

This person voting for Bush still has the capacity to will.  It is her mind that has been fucked by her Church and Fox News, such that you could say she is no longer free. 

Next Up: Outdating Locke

 

Locke's Function of Words

This is the third entry on Locke's "Essay on Human Understanding", first is Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the second Locke and the Formation of Ideas

Definitions:
Abstraction - whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind; and their names, general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract ideas.
Essence - The underlying nature of any object

Recap

- A very brief recap of how ideas are received and manipulated by the mind from the last post is in the nice graphic below.  I also added the next two steps of generalizing terms and assigning words that will be discussed in this entry.

Generalized Ideas

- As we saw in the last entry, Locke believed that we first learn about the world through the most elementary of sensations that he called simple ideas.  These ideas are the most basic of sensation and cannot be exactly specified with words.

You can call this "red", but this is not exactly what it is.  In fact, it is simply a color you see that is almost like the color that you associate the word "red" with.

Furthermore, if you tried to say this is just a "red dress" you are missing many of the specifics of the scene that make up its true essence, like the material that covers that tight bod. 

- Because the mind cannot fully linguistically communicate simple ideas, it generalizes ideas like "red" into more basic groups and then comes up with a complex idea of what the color "red" entails.  Then the name "red" is given to this complex idea so that the general idea can be communicated to others. 

-Let's hear it from Locke himself, "The use of words then being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas, and those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless.  To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas received from particular objects to become general; which is done by considering them as...separate from all other existences and the circumstances of real existence."

- From this, Locke is saying that we abstract ideas out of their particulars, out of the time and place in which the idea was received, and place names on the general ideas so we can communicate those ideas to others.

So we can see this animal
and though it is a specific entity, we abstract it into the general term "donkey"

Then that term can be more widely generalized to include things that aren't exactly the same, but fall in the same general group

Though this isn't a real donkey, the generality of "donkey" includes this image

And the generality "shitface" fits this guy

Nominal Essence

- So when we give an abstracted idea a name, we are then giving it a nominal essence.  That is, the name does not depict the actual essence of the thing named, but signifies the generality that humans have given the thing, for convenience and communication purposes.  

- So anything with big pointy ears, ugly course fur, that is smaller and uglier than a horse, we call a "donkey"

Thus the description above (though not wholly correct) is the nominal essence of a donkey

*Note for later - (Locke doesn't believe we could ever know the true essence of a donkey, or anything else for that matter, which will be discussed amply in the next entry)

Abstraction

- The limit that concepts can be abstracted by the mind is almost limitless, and as it gets further and further away from a simple idea, its meaning becomes more and more diluted and controversial in its use. 

"when a word stands for a very complex idea that is compounded and decompounded, it is not easy for men to form and retain that idea so exactly as to make the name in common use stand for the same precise idea, without the least variation.  Hence it comes to pass that men's names of very compound ideas, such as for the most part are moral words, have seldom in two different men the same signification"

- When ideas are abstracted more and more with different ideas, the names given to signify them become abstracted and stand for something not wholly agreed upon.

Some would call this man "wealthy"

Others call this guy "wealthy", for wholly other reasons

Words Before Ideas

-Locke admits that sometimes we learn words and then learn their meanings, or learn words without their meanings.  He thinks lowly of these people.  People should see bravery and then assign the term to it, not make up a notion of bravery in their minds and apply it wrongly.

  He would think that these kids knowledge of words without signification is worthless.  (Prediction: these kids are going to hate their parents and start listening to Gwar, when they find out their parents made them memorize the dictionary while wasting away their youth and giving them the classic social skills of a psychopath)

In fact, this is the same white kid as in the picture above

Next Up: Locke's Notion of the Self

Locke and the Formation of Ideas

This is the second entry on Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".  The first is Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Definitions:
Universal Consent - Things which all people can assent to being True
Sensation - The source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses
Reflection - The notice which the mind takes of its own operations, whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding
Simple Ideas - The most basic conceptions we receive from sensation and reflection, or immediate impressions
Complex Ideas - Ideas that are formed by the mind by composing together, in some way, perceived simple ideas
Ideas - Impressions in the mind
Mind - An immaterial entity that exerts its power over the body through perception and volition

Empiricism over Rationalism

- Locke's first major project in his Essay is to establish that humans are not born with pre-existing Rational concepts.  This was a widely held belief, that people were born with innate concepts that just had to be recollected, but their Truth was given (most likely by God). 
Locke begins by showing that concepts like "Whatsoever is, is and It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be" are not innate principles that this kid has already in his mind (right now his only thought is "where the fuck am I?").  For "it is evident that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them". 

Try that concept on Madden and see what happens

- Locke claims that there are no such universal concepts to which all mankind would consent to, and even if there were, "children and idiots"  certainly have no understanding of them, so they can't be innate.

- This argument was anticipated by the Rationalists, by saying that a person needed to come to a point where they could reasonally deduce the innate principles.  So because a baby and an idiot didn't have the power to rationally deduce them, they would never discover the innate principles bottled inside of them.

- Locke attacks this by showing that children can grow into using "reason" and yet not know, nor ever even think about such concepts as "That it is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be".  Many people will go their entire "rational" life without ever thinking on this concept, so how could the "reason" they are supposed to acquire be the only barrier to them understanding this? 

Don't you think Pee Wee would've rationally deduced the maxim that "whacking off in public isn't acceptable"?  It might seem like an innate idea to you or me, but it wasn't for Pee Wee or that huge Gorilla at the Bronx Zoo. 

-This doesn't mean that humans can't come to principles that can be deemed true, but those truths can only be determined through "God having fitted men with faculties and means to discover, receive, and retain truths"

Tabula Rasa and Sensation

-Though discussed in the earlier post, it will be helpful here to reiterrate his notion of the Tabula Rasa.  We are born with a mind that is a "blank slate".  The mind is a wholly pure thing, that is yet to be imprinted with anything.  When the imprinting starts is of little importance.  It can start in the womb, with the recognition of hunger. 

- So all of our knowledge is founded and derived "from experience".  It is from our first perception of sensation that we start forming ideas in our minds. 

That is to say, if we lived in a Cubist world, the sensations the baby percieved would be much different, but they would have no innate notion that "my mothers head shouldn't be deformed into odd shaped ellipses with only one eye". 

- It is after perceiving these original sensations that "In time, the mind comes to reflect on its own operations about ideas got by sensation and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas"

- It is these "ideas of reflection" that come to form all our more complex, general, or abstract ideas concerning the world. 

Simple Ideas

- The "simple idea" is one uniform idea that the mind perceives and it cannot be distinguished into any two seperate ideas. 

- Simple ideas can come through only one sense
you can't smell or taste the blue moon

or can be conveyed into a simple idea through more than one sense

This woman gets a simple idea from both the smell and the sight of the elephant shit falling in her bag. But it must be stressed that this is truly the most basic of ideas.  It is specific to that exact sight/smell, though it can later be abstracted and labeled, the simple idea is an original idea.  So even though this shit-carrier has been collecting Dumbo's shit for years, this simple idea she is witnessing now is an original sensation. 

-Simple ideas can also be formed by Reflection.  When we experience simple ideas with our senses, our mind can then reflect on those simple ideas and come up with original simple ideas through the reflection.  This would be like the idea of pain.  We get a sensation from our experience, reflect on it and create a new sensation of a specific pain.
The old stubbed toe is a good example of a simple idea caused by reflection on how much it fucking hurts to jam your big toe into an ill-designed half-step in the living room (though that extrapolation of the context of the pain would actually be a complex idea, as we will thusly see). 

Complex Ideas

"The next operation we may observe in the mind about its ideas is Composition, whereby it puts together several of those simple ones it has received from sensation and reflection, and combines them into complex ones." 

- All of our ideas about anything, fantasies, imagination, abstract concepts, all have their origins in sensational experience.  This can be showed to be true by the limits of our knowledge of things which we have never experienced. 

The MC Philo and John Locke Challenge: Think of a wholly original color that isn't based off the known primary colors. 

Good luck. 

- What about our fantasies?  What about our old friend the unicorn?
He is simply a mixture of simple ideas that have been gathered together to form a complex idea in ways that don't actually exist in nature.  Thus, we can have an ample imagination, for we receive a lot of simple ideas and our mind "has in its power, by varying the idea of space and thereby making still new compositions by repeating its own ideas and joining them as it pleases, is perfectly inexhaustable." 

- This is how our mind is able to perform its abstracting and generalizing functions, by perceiving sensation and reflecting upon it in whatever way our individual mind wants. 

Next Up: Locke and the Function of Words

 

 

Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  John Locke (1632-1704)
  - Great early philosopher on epistemology and political theory
  - Credited by some for being the first great empiricist
  - Enlightenment philosopher
  - He was born to a Cavalry Captain for Parliament in the English Civil War, which saw Cromwell come to power and change the face of English politics forever. 
- Oxford academic and medical doctor taboot
Positions Defended: Empiricism, Tabula Rasa, Representative Government, Social Contract, Talkin' Bout a Revolution
Those Who are Definitely Wrong: Descartes, Rationalists, Hobbes, Anyone who Believes in a priori programming or reincarnation, or anything of the sort.
Work to be Reviewed: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

- Though most people know Locke from their middle school readings of Locke and Hobbes fighting it out over the correct political theories (the teacher probably coming down on the side of Locke, because his views are most like the American Way), his work in epistemology is just as important as his political writings. 

These kids love America and soon they will love John Locke and his admirer Thomas Jefferson

- John Locke made famous the notion of a "Tabula Rasa", which means something like "blank slate".  There was a prevailing view that people were born into this world with concepts in their minds that they knew to be right, but just had to be re-discovered in their consciousnesses.   These concepts would include things like the knowledge of God, the given moral laws, knowledge of mathematical concepts, and knowledge that Africans were inferior to Europeans.

-Locke tried to destroy this notion with his Essay, by very convincingly showing that people come into this world with a blank slate and learn things through sensory experience only. 

This picture to the left is a visual representation of what humans come into the world knowing.  Locke proposed that there are true things that can be learned, but they have to be learned, they are not a priori principles that people should just know, if their Reason is correct. 

- Locke had the interesting task of reconciling his view of no innate principles or a priori human knowledge with God.  He was not so bold as Spinoza to destroy the concepts of God.  He stated that God didn't need to fashion people with a priori knowledge to be their determining factor.   But instead argued that through sensory data alone, we could come to know that God exists. 

As we will see, he doesn't mean that we can actually see God, but that through sensory data we can imply that God exists.  As we will see later, his explanation for this is rather dubious.

- His work with how human sensory data is received (though not in the Cognitive Science manner, that was far in the future) and processed into ideas is rather remarkable, well thought out, and convincing. 

-Furthermore, he was very influential and controversial in how language was used to form nominal conceptions and describe generalities in sensory data.  He firmly believed that the idea of something came first and then words were used to group those things. 

Thus, as we shall see, he believed that we had a general concept of a Jackass before we applied a name to that thing, used to categorize all things like it. 

-Then the names were generalized and abstracted into more complex thoughts so we could attribute Jackass to other things:

- His theories had interesting ramifications for science.  His empiricism was so deep that he believed we could predict nothing and never know the true essence (in a scientific manner) of anything. 

-As we shall see, unfortunately for Locke, science progressed past the point it was when he wrote and proved many of his statements to be premature so that later they would become obsolete. 

Next Up: Locke and the Formation of Ideas