Thursday, 18th of November, 2004

Funny ol’ Momus started a thread over a ILX about metaphysics, with a cute quiz. Go read his rant and quiz. He also posted it in his LiveGerbil. Here are my answers, which admittedly go off the beaten track a little.

1. Do you think that ‘Reality is elsewhere’?
No, reality is right here.

2. Do you think that ‘If my life as I live it was all there is, I’d top myself right now!’?
Certainly not. I’ve never felt that there’s an afterlife, or an uberlife or anything.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it’s not really where your concerns are?
Not really, unless my concerns are about other (real) things. On a related note, it’s quite possible to care about things that don’t directly seem to be “physical” (as opposed to “meta”-physical), like people’s rights not to be tortured, or whether it’s advisable to destroy the environment, and yet be a scientific materialist. Caring, and human rights, and moral responsibility and so on exist because we exist rather than on some higher plane of existence. They’re part - in fact an imperative for - living in a society or society of societies in a shared biosphere, if self-destruction is to be avoided.

4. Is your body going to seed because you’re off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?
I’m trying not to let it. But if it were, that wouldn’t imply that one’s “too metaphysical” or something - unless one were to actually believe in that other world (especially if it’s the X-Files). Uh.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?
No. I once thought I could be a Marxist, but no I don’t think so. Call me a non-dogmatic green-leftist…

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?
There was never a Golden Age. Lionising our childhood is a difficult thing, because one’s so dependent during childhood. Your childhood bliss came at the expense of your poor slavedriven parents. And our childhood bliss was generally driven by our childhood ignorance. The trouble was, as we realised more about how the real world works - oops, here come the tears!
So will utopia come when we all grow up? I don’t have that much faith in human nature, but it’s a nice thought. It’d be nice to think that the more knowledge we amass about the world, the more in tune with it we’ll get, and the more in tune with each other. But that’s not how it works. I believe strongly in the need to continue the scientific program, to continue the gradual whittling away at the edges of what we don’t know, the gradual focussing and nuancing of what we do know.
But it’s fair to say that the program of creating the utopian society won’t just be an inevitable by-product of that other program, although just as science’s shadow, industry/technology, makes big bad things easier, it can also make an enlightened, sharing society of equals more attainable (inasmuch as it’s possible)…

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them ‘objective’?
Pardon?
Oh all right, well those which aren’t designed by others (such as Philip Pullman or some committee or evolutionary process) I accept personal authorship for. But the’re just conceptions, and radically incomplete and probably inconsistent at that. Relativity notwithstanding, there’s only one “objective” world. (Relativity calls into question the concept of “simultaneity”, but when two observers (subjects) share the same relativistic frame of reference, this isn’t a problem.)

8. Do you find yourself using the word ‘timeless’ when you praise things?
I doubt it. If so, it would only be metaphorically. But I’m very wary of using the word “infinite” even metaphorically to describe things in the real world, so I doubt it.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as ‘all there is’ be like? Better, or worse?
Depends how literally they took it. The present? I think that you can be doggedly non-metaphysical but still accept that some parts of history (remembered and learnt) are most likely mostly the case, and there are shades of believability. Living only for the present would be, as someone else mentioned upstream, living without a context. That strikes me as a dangerous thing. Take it to its extreme, and it would mean ignoring things you saw just a second ago. Take it to even a considerably lesser extreme, and you still couldn’t rely on science or the lessons of culture and history.

Accepting the material world as described to the best of its ability by science as “all there is” is a trickier question. I’ve tried to outline why I don’t think this sort of materialism implies that other sort of materialism, a philosophy of life in which nothing matters other than amassing material wealth. If such a materialist of the latter sort really believed that suffering, love, culture et al didn’t matter because they didn’t exist, why would even material wealth matter? Why would having when others have not matter to them, that is?
Oops, I’m ranting. Over.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or ‘god particle’? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
The questions? Well unifying physics is a holy grail of sorts, but it won’t inevitably mean all the other questions are answered. There’ll still be more for science to unravel and demystify. The Higgs Boson won’t necessarily convince people of the truth of Darwinism, nor will it stop people who yearn for “something more” from yearning - and nor will it bring about the Republic of Heaven on Earth.
Shame, though.

Comments are closed.