Last week, I watched one of the philosophy videos produced by the Toronto Centre Place. I discovered there that Occam's razor (promoting simplicity) is better than counting sheep. Half awake part way through the presentation, I found myself in a miasma of platonic Forms explicated by dense prose similar to the stuff I write. Fully awake now and still not sure what that's all about, I'm inclined to spend some time thinking about thinking. I don't know much about philosophy except that it is soporific, but thinking about thinking is more reasonable than thinking without thinking about thinking, if you get my meaning. You just need to stay awake for it.
Plato seems to say that an Idea is more real than its material instances. Actually that premise fits experience quite well; we have an idea first and then make what we have in mind, which is often a poor imitation of the original idea. (Think democracy and the mess we get into trying to implement it.) I guess Plato was projecting his experience of creativity back onto the root of things.
Here is the materialist alternative, as I understand it. Imagine that original matter, which is empty of ideas, may be complexified and modified through mindless processes of emergence and evolution until an organism has evolved having a brain that generates ideas. An idea is the product of a highly evolved neural network informed by experience and culture.
Which comes first, the idea or the object. If we play the chicken-egg game back at the singularity, either God thought up the circus, and the monkeys were God's idea, or the circus (including us clowns) assembled automatically, and we look for monkeys because we want company. Either the Idea is divine and therefore beyond question, or the idea is the end of a long messy process and is itself somewhat messy.
Platonic formalism, has the advantage of being intuitive because it uses the familiar experience of creativity as a metaphor for origins. It is also simple because it encapsulates the poorly understood problem of consciousness, assumed without justification to be the motive behind the existence of the universe. Applying Occam's razor we skip the hard parts to get a God with ideas and humanity as God's favourite idea substantiated. It's all nice and easy.
As for materialism, the singularity arising from nothing, the big bang, the aggregation of matter into stars turning hydrogen into heavier elements, the formation of the planets, the emergence of molecules and self-replicating macromolecules, living cells, multi-cellular life and conscious organisms capable of generating ideas: that story is big and growing as it embraces complexity, more like a quasar than a razor. Occam would not approve, but that doesn't make it untrue. Materialism is a more reliable predictor of outcomes and therefore is the foundation of productive technologies. Vaccine clinics replace prayer meetings and fewer people get sick. On the negative side, materialism is endlessly complex, somewhat impersonal, and negligent of values. Not reassuring or friendly.
Formalism and materialism are ideas about ideas. Reality is what it is and will continue to be what it is when the clowns and monkeys vanish and there are no ideas left. Ideas are our attempt to map reality so we can find our way around in it. Because the ideas are partial, parochial, ephemeral and contingent, we will find our way better if we know how an idea can misdirect.
Now take a dash of formalism with its humanlike god and godlike humanity, and mix in a dollop of materialism providing evidence-based, value-free know-how, and what have we got? We've got the sixth mass extinction, and we are already up to our knees in it.
We need to think more about thinking.
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Confronting Canada's Climate Paradox: the David Suzuki Foundation
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