The Philosopher
By Ayele Teklemariam
A review of “The Making of a Philosopher.” – By Colin McGinn
It is quite a transition from the solitary reality of reading , study , contemplation, thinking and research with an end product of lose, revelation and discovery to the practical social world of often one plus one is two. It is often the search for enlightenment and discovery that leads us to the pinnacles of total ignorance and unsolvable mystery than the practice of what has been proved working. It seems philosophically and practically right to assume and expect the road to enlightenment and discovery only leads to a cascaded sequence of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, revelation, discovery and lose. With these expectations and more I often raise a book to read, listen to an audio or watch a scene despite the customary practice of listening to authority on a subject matter and accepting the practice of a professional. It seems and it is more than likely true that authority and professionalism that is not held to account even by the likes of me often go ashtray and may lead us on the path to nowhere.
Let it be known from the outset that I have no intention or interest to defy authority or denigrate professionalism neither do I claim any myself of professionalism or authority on the subject matter the author is celebrated and acknowledged for; yet still I feel I needed to say a word or two here and there on some of the more controversial points raised and some others I feel had some kind of circular reasoning and shadowy logical argument. It is clear and it is very much an established fact that philosophy encompassed the totality of what has thus far been known, is being known and will ever be known, what has been, what is and what will ever be; it is therefore inherently susceptible to vast variances in interpretation and understanding amongst those who made it their profession and practice. I have not read any of the professor’s works thus my knowledge of his philosophical outlook and the entirety of his work is very limited and I beg an apology for, and I promise to hunt and read them all. I wouldn’t call my review a critic of his book nor is it an acclaim, it is rather a preliminary inquisition in an effort to make sense of the essence and being of some of the fundamental issues of philosophy in the book as briefly as it is stated.
As it is clear that the book is not about philosophical issues or philosophy, but a biography of a philosopher and his making, it goes without saying that issues of philosophical importance and significance has populated its pages. It is as well clear that the philosopher has gone through the cascaded mountains of enlightenment and ignorance before he has reached his current pinnacle that I refuse to hold him to his earlier held points of views, but only to those he seems to have held on or has discovered. I feel it is incumbent upon me than bother with generalities of the book to come to the specific points and facts and arguments on which I find my misunderstandings and needed explanations and at other times, on what my possible other alternative views are based. I have often read biographies and almost always found that as much as the story is about a recent existence or a relatively recent reality, the story is often told from the early beginnings to the recent standing and reality.
As it is often difficult to build top to bottom we are almost always abruptly taken to a beginning in time and brought forward to a position and reality of the time of narration; May be backtracking step by step is simply incompatible with the general movement and growth of things in nature that the natural order of things are such that they move and develop in a uni-directional manner necessitating an instantaneous time travel to the beginnings of things and all, and then follow them from there along the path of time. In a way, maybe we simply are used to and have adapted to the logical and sequential incremental path of development or simply we are wired in the ways the rest of the Universe is wired, that we can only comprehend everything in a past to present to the future sequence that in all our narrations we often begin at the past beginnings of things and come to the present and forecast the future. It is no surprise therefore that we are taken to the early humble beginnings of the life of the professor in the earlier chapters of his book. Although it lays the basic foundations of his earlier formative ages quests and drives that led him to his later year philosophical adventures and per suite, I find no issues of philosophical significance beyond the normal and common early age inquisitions, search of direction and lose that we all pass through as a developmental stage in physical and spiritual life. It is though a break away from the most traditional ways of telling a biography that it is a story of the development of philosophy in a life of a person than it is a story of a person’s development in philosophy. In that sense there seems an inversion of tradition and a new approach and admirable as all new approaches and breakthroughs are.
That said, I somewhat find it troubling when the philosopher states “Thus it feels as if you are in a bar in New York talking to your friends, but actually you are stuck in a Vat somewhere in Cleveland hallucinating all these, What the scientists are doing is producing a mere simulation of the ordinary physical world-a virtual world of pure sense data.” I can always understand and feel it is not hard to either comprehend or visualize or even relate to an objective existence and reality engendering an objective data, yet further still an objective data engendering an extension of or over extension of an objective reality, but fail short of comprehending the possibility of a virtual reality produced pure sense data. I could be wrong and I stand corrected if I am, or could be excused for may be my naiveté or being un informed, but how could it be possible to produce a simulation of an objective reality of a pure sense data? Doesn’t Simulation by its very definition presuppose an objective data of the objective reality simulated? Would it be safe to assume that all the data about any objective reality are always or almost always incomplete, because reality is affected and effected by infinite and dynamic variables? Though the philosopher seems to agree that simulations are based on an objective data of the simulated, he fails to address the difference of the simulation to the simulated and misses the missing data of the simulated from the simulation due to the impossibility of finding all the data for all the variables and if found and known the impossibility of duplicating or in modern scientific terminology cloning it and them.
Then in his continuing statement he leaves me with a sort of philosophical penumbra when he states “If we can reproduce those signals (i.e. signals that comes to our senses from objective realities) without the aid of actual physical objects, then we can simulate experiences of objects without bothering with reality.” One fundamental fact of simulation to me is that it happens in a controlled environment i.e. known and possibly in finite variables and reality on the other hand is a phenomenon in a dynamic infinite variable environment. Pre supposing that The “If” is not possible, but best possible and there lies a difference between the possible and best possible, there for while knowledge based on existing reality by extension and deduction is possible, but not on no reality at all as suggested. If nothing else the data that reaches our senses are pieces of information at the least material representations of a reality in action or are about a material objective reality. I felt it might be very appropriate to quote some important recent scientific revelations that were published on one of the most recognized publications in the scientific communities, The Scientific American of Nov, 2006 Issue , that I felt is supportive of what I have questioned above.” Observing another person experiencing emotion can trigger a cognitive elaboration of that sensory information, which ultimately results in a logical conclusion about what the other is feeling.
It may also, however, result in direct mapping of the sensory information in to the motor structures that would produce the experience of that emotion in the observer.” It seems it is safe to assume and conclude that the human self in its hard form (i.e. the self not about the self) is a result of generations of common experience the information of which is encoded in our genes and the proteins that preceded our birth, our parents and may even that of our grandparents in the configurations of the pieces of information upon which our initial predecessors were built on. In a way at one level, beyond the basics of what we know today there could possibly be a match of some basic entities of all humans that matches independently of time, distance and condition? We only know what we know and leave what we don’t to the beautiful future to unravel it as it is endowed with that power. Whatever, the explanation given or remains, one thing seems rather clear here and that is the human brain acts and perceives the future and acts now only based on some past or present material common or individual experiences; that makes Now and about Now and what we do a three way union of then, now and the future, the future is what is in our mind what is and what was are what are objective realities out in the real world whether we are aware of them or not. What we do has its intent in the future and what we base our actions are from yester and our actions now. “Our common sense beliefs are not as rationally impregnable as we fondly supposed before we inquired in to their foundations.”
The quote above seems to suggest that our beliefs precede our inquiry in to the basis of their foundations, in a way like the information about ourselves precedes our selves so some of our beliefs may be passed on to us from our predecessors we might even take them for granted, yet their luck of seeming impregnability with rational at their initial inception, however short handed the rational seems at the time and condition is an impregnable rational on itself.
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