How to get mad with mathematical logic - ByMartin Prior

How to get mad with mathematical logic

Madness is nothing if it is not bad logic, so here is my crazy little flow-chart:

But also in all ‘walks of life’ we have to deal with a variety of factors beyond our experience, so:

(i)                 As we discussed in an earlier, re Faith and Science, when there are ‘fewer observations than variables’ we must have some reliance on faith: in many societies, and as I argued, ideally in socialist societies, this is a function of custom, or what I have called customary care.  But this scenario can be mucked up, not least when the authorities, or those with superiority want it so to be.  This I have previously discussed in connection with exploitation.

(ii)               The poor psychologists and psychiatrists: their task is not logic or mathematics but to look into the souls of individual patients, though occasionally mad professors, of philosophy  like Karl Popper, will tell them how to be ‘scientific’.

(iii)       We might say that if people make false deductions and this harms society, if they harm themselves it is madness, but if they benefit themselves it is greed.

[btw]  Who’s the chicken?

I was going to present a logically valid deduction as to why the Tories are institutionally mad.  I started to do this in the last issue when I argued that they think it’s not them but others are mad, specially those they want to exploit... oops welcome into the great family that is Eng... Britain, but I shall rest my case with a cartoo... nother diagram.

:]

By        Martin Prior

[Btw] - Who's the chicken?

Which is truly? - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Which is truly?

Halt the flow of thoughts for a primitive second, and let the cycles of human life around us continue without us – we can perch upon the rafters of society as observers for the briefest time.

  Now we can ask: Which is truly insane?

The ones who could not fit the mass mould or...

...the ones for whom life is a series of numbers, gathered, defended and worshipped. For ones who make a very special effort to raise creatures in barns only to slay them for nothing more than simple satisfaction. For ones who build fanciful worlds and unrealistic dreams and mistake them for the course of nature. For ones whose learning centres are burial grounds of creativity. For ones who cannot cope with the inevitable reality of mortal flesh and commit themselves to ritual, pretending that bodies do not rot and decay when lain beneath the soil. For ones who laugh down genius, and then celebrate it a generation after she has died. For ones whose codes of law contain a myriad of injustices provided none of that harm is done to them – but some other poor sod beyond immediate perception. For ones who alternately call their wickedness 'natural' in one sentence and then themselves free agents in the next (a terrible contradiction).

Truly, the ones who did not fit the mould may carry all this madness and more, but let us not forget the mundane madness of people and of cities.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Market Stall - Greenwich

 

And they can talk too! Check out this link for a philoso-podcast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDTnGbWL3m4

How powerful are mere words? - by Selim 'Selim' Talat

How powerful are mere words?

Words. Are they enough to convey how we truly feel?

  One expects some cheesey so and so has written a ballad at some point about the shortcomings of words to express the torment in his heart and/or soul. Yet this 'shortcoming' of language is not only desireable, but necessary.

Firstly, if words were as effective as our senses at determining what was real and what was not, we would be able to fashion realities at the stroke of a pen. Words are less powerful than actual experiences, and it is because of this that we can read fiction without quailing in fear everytime mischief is afoot in a story. We seem to have a sense of checking if words match our idea of what is real - if they do not, they become fictional.

  Imagine if words were so powerful at communicating a thought, or an emotion, that you could read a sentence and instantly feel the same as the author of those words. We would melt down in short order! Commands would become ultra-powerful, the word 'Stop!' would have us all frozen. Humanity would be torn apart by this hypersensitivity to language. This would actually make quite a good science fiction story!

  Communication between humans is performed through the barrier of occupying different bodies and being different people. This prevents a complete exchange of information from taking place. For instance, I may feel profound sadness at a world event, but I am unable to directly transmit that sadness to you; I can only collect my thoughts and emotions and deliver them out to you in the diluted form of words (even the words I use in my own head might be diluted forms of the actual emotions present in my mind).

  This inability to share absolutely how we think or feel is what grants us some degree of selfhood. The limited power of words is restrained by our occupying individual shells, which depend on their own secrets and a certain degree of isolation in order to remain individuated.

  Let us take this to its conclusion: Suppose you and I were able to perform an absolute transferal of thought from one person to another. Would we then fuse into one consciousness? For there would be nothing preventing us from feeling and knowing the exact same things, and we would have no secrets or private thoughts and so the very word 'self' would be carried away into meaninglessness by our hyper-effective communications.

Anecdotally, you will hear people talking about connecting and becoming one consciousness and suchlike, although it is wise to question whether such a fate is desireable. If not, then the limits of our communicating with one another are just fine the way they are.

  Language cannot immediately convey what we want to say, but this is no tragedy - it is a challenge! To be expressive is good, to have a powerful vocabulary and grasp of words allows us to make the most of this thing we call 'reality'.

To get good at this delivery of thought requires a lot of practice. The finest poets did not become so overnight.

Words versus Situations

Does the meaning of a word change?

  Yes! Consider three audiences each watching the same play simultaneously. The first audience is utterly content in regards to biology. The second audience all desperately need to use tolietry facilities. The third (and most unfortunate) audience is slowly been boiled alive in the gallery. In each situation, the play being performed has not changed. The meaning of the text however is most likely to be lost on the audience that

Thus we are presented with two ends of a scale. On one side, easy comprehension of language and the ability to understand and appreciate it in a comfortably middle class environment. On the other end of the scale we have the nightmare scenario of inevitable doom and survivalism wherein the meaning of words that are not directly related to actual survival become negligible, and most terribly bourgeois things.

  Can we not say, therefore, that words can have power in the right environment, but not in another?

The power of words, then, is ultimately liable to the situation in which they are uttered, read, or delivered.

This exercise in hypothetical quasi-philosophical indulgence was brought to you by Selim 'Selim' Talat

A ruse by any otha nme. - By Lloyd Duddridge

A ruse by any otha nme.

Their not there. Don’t not dont. Capital letters. Full stops. Endless English textbooks are full of them. They tell us how to write. They tell us what is correct. However this article wants to explore the idea that there is a right way to use the written word.
Now language has many functions, to entertain us, to make us smile, to make us cry. However these are all linked by one overall function of language. That it is used to communicate. Now communication relies on a level of understanding. Hence if I wrote this sentence it would not be understood and is this not language. Gkdalf dosncf inglereted dwasd. This sentence has no meaning. It fails the function test. However try this sentence. I can run, wouthit a porbelm. Now two words are conventionally misspelt in this sentence. However this sentence can be understood. Now in this case what is the difference between the conventional spelling and the supposed mistake? The both pass the function test. In fact if you can spot a mistake in a sentence, it must mean that it passes the function test. This is because you can understand what the writer really meant. Thus you understand. A word need not be spelt the same way by everyone if it can be understood. The only test for language is if it is able to be understood. It need not be understood by everyone. For example I cannot understand Dutch, that does not mean it cannot be understood by others. Language is a tool for communication, thus it is necessary social. If someone can correct you, they can understand you. Hence correcting someone’s language is unnecessary. It is simply a snobbish and conservative construct.
The same argument can be used for Internet language or ‘text chat’. ‘2 b, r nt 2 b dat iz d Q wthr ts noblr n d mnd 2 sufr d slngs & arowz of outrAjs fortn r 2 tAk armz agnst a C f trblz, & by oposn nd em?’ Now many young people will be able to understand this quotation from Shakespeare. I ask the reader if you can read the text and understand the words does the passage lose any meaning. Does the passage lose any beauty? Is it now not able to move you ? The answer if you can understand the texts speak used is that no change is noticeable at all. It is wrote in a differing way, however the meaning is the same. We must remember of course that it was the bard himself that used and manipulated words into the forms we use today. He was by no means conventional.
What I am trying to say is this. Convention is just a mould that has set. Pour water on it and it can be made in a different way. If there was a right or wrong way to write, then it would be able to have a league table for languages. The only rule for language is that you must be able to be understood. This sometimes means that context and digression should sometimes be used. However next time you try and correct someone on their grammar or spelling remember that you have understood, thus the language that you are trying to correct has completed

By Lloyd Duddridge

Emic and etic – Language, Philosophy and Society - By Martin Prior

emic and etic – Language, Philosophy and Society

I thought this issue we might be discussing gender, and thought this followed on naturally from my discussion of the sex (and love?) life of the stag, but of course gender comes into language as well.  But I shall not discuss this.

As I pointed out too, there are indeed linguistic issues when discussing the purpose of life.  But nor shall I discuss this.  Let us just get on with the living and loving even if action does not naturally come to a philosopher.

Nor will I discuss two well-trodden topics, Semantics and Philosophy of Language – I shall take a nap from Carnap (rotfl) – instead I shall go where many linguistic philosophers fear to tread, the field of phonetics and phonology: when they study linguistics there is usually a compulsory paper on phonetics and they HATE it.  Whereas I for one quite like it.

In phonetics and phonology, we have what is known as an –emic/etic dichotomy.  In phonology, a phoneme is a set of sounds which never contrast to give words of different meanings.  Thus the d- and p- of pot are different phonemes, since dot and pot mean different things.  But there are different ways in which I can pronounce t, without changing the meaning, thus the t on pot can be pronounced in various ways.  I can for example put a glottal stop just before the t, or a little h just after, and for many people both.  These various sounds are phonetically different, and in particular this can be shown through acoustic measurements.

But we have here the idea that if x and y are not strictly identical, we might still be socially conditioned to regard them as identical.  In both social and philosophical terms we might regard John of today and John of yesterday as being identical: thus we might observe that John was and is a buffoon.

By contrast, the –etic has to be more objective, and to discuss this I shall re-introduce two diagrams from previous issues, with relevant annotation added:

a ‘maroon’ socialist	a cultural analysis of exploitation

I have shown both diagrams in previous issues, but here I have annotated them.  As I said then, it should be said that these diagrams, ‘saying it in maroon’, represent an informal account of stages in a socioeconomic process, and as such should be regarded as a tool for formulating a more rigorous hypothesis.  But in the both diagrams, the elements representing culture are marked –emic, and the pink element, representing skills (or perhaps in one case ‘scientific socialism’), is marked –etic.  At this stage we do not use –emic concepts though we may well try and create them on an objective and/or scientific basis.

In natural language, phonologists may use the criterion of different sounds different meaning, but this is basically a diagnostic device.  Phonemes have a psychological reality, and after early ’teens they are difficult to change.  We have discovered quite recently that something similar happens with colour.  If we are presented with a set of coloured balls and asked to pick the odd one out, linguistic (ie. vocabulary) criteria are used.  If they are all red, we will take longer to decide to pick say a more scarlet ball.  This of course is –emic, perhaps we could talk about chromemes, as does Pickett (1997) in his book on Early Persian Tilework: The Medieval Flowering of Kāshī: “By analogy I would like to coin the terms chromeme and allochrome, the first to indicate variations in color that are significant in making a design intelligible [the second to indicate insignificant variations.”  A painter will not necessarily have an –emic approach to colour, but he almost certainly will in terms of the standards of his genre.

Turning to the right-hand diagram, we now see grey and blue, the ‘baddie’ colours.  Here we see ‘hypercorrection’.  This is basically a linguistic concept: we see it for example when people speaking an accent/dialect dropping H’s put them in in the wrong place.  They are trying to do things ‘correctly’.  On a social level there are parallels which constitute over-generalisation.  Thus people in the States are terrified of communism.  For them socialists are clearly communists, therefore they are terrified of socialised medicine.  To my mind, this sort of fear, based on over-generalisations is deliberately encouraged within exploited groups.  That’s what newspapers are for: they are of course free to do otherwise, but stray too far and they might well not make a profit.

Then we have next to the blue: P.O.S.H.  Supposedly ‘port-out-starboard-home’.  But exploiting groups reinforce their power with concepts of prestige.  They find ways of making the exploited group want to follow the example of their exploiters.

These are the people who set social criteria as whether x=y; which to my mind equates to saying they know what’s what.

Now talking about people who know what’s what, I shall now introduce another diagram: the self-image of the Tories, which I have been dying to produce:

Everything’s there, and it appears that in the good old days some Tories had principles, the Church, the WI (fully clothed of course) and cricket.  The City and industry are kept out of sight... anyway they were liberal/Whig inventions.  Such Tories would understand the ‘maroon socialist’ concept of customary care ‘quite well actually’.  And here we see two faces, one toward England’s green and pleasant land, and the other towards Empire.  The colours are wrong of course... they fit in with my other diagrams and indeed the armed forces would not be associated with pink.  Perhaps we have a social model of the English language especially the ‘wrong kind of emic’!

Almost everything is emic.  This is of course my analysis and not part of the self-image unless knowing what’s what counts.  But the preponderance of emic and a lack of asking what’s what suggests a serious rut, except for the case of the armed forces, and one of the two faces of the Law of the Land, facing towards Empire.  Here principles of justice applied at home are jettisoned.

Now in Sociology there is a debate as to whether the emic/etic dichotomy is found there as well as in phonology.  I would say yes... everything is emic, except on the edges of social change.  And something very similar is relevant in Political Philosophy.

The modern Tory has discovered finance, but in a very ‘emic’ way except perhaps for derivatives and other destructive financial products.  Apart from universities, research has little appeal except in the military and perhaps in the ‘fight against terrorism’.  So our model of British decline is indeed ‘not bad’.

By Martin Prior

Purpose of life - By Johannon 'Joanna' Davis

Purpose of life

To establish the purpose of life one can identify the denominator which is common to all life and furthering this effort, a common factor essential to all humanity irrespective of gender, status or background.  There are two tiers to the purpose of life, firstly, to continue to exist, secondly, and essential to separate us from animals and botanic life, is the pursuit of knowledge.

The first purpose of life is to continue to exist. Evidence for this is found in the body’s perpetual state of awareness as to its need for maintaining basics such as nutrition, allowing for the most basic of functions to continue. As such even in man's most primitive state, the purpose of life was met. As these functions are carried out in nature also, one could further imply that animals and botanic life have purpose. Only in man however does the need to maintain ones existence raise moral questions. For example, in a life or death situation would my consuming essential food and water to continue my existence in place of a pregnant woman who requires sustenance for two lives as opposed to one, be considered immoral? Instinctive patterns of ‘fight or flight’ may further offer support that the avoidance of death is a purpose of life, supported by the most basic cognitive functions.

The second purpose of life and the end which distinguishes man from nature, is the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is essential for mankind as knowledge is the cornerstone of power and choice, precipitating freedom. It also thereby allows the fulfilling of the first purpose of life in man as knowledge provides strategies for survival. This pursuit is a universal principle and should not be confined to lofty ambitions to reach the corners of the universe or an understanding of the nature of happiness, but is found in daily tasks such as the understanding of ones social values and moral code. Such is its intrinsic link to life that not only is the pursuit of knowledge a purpose of life but a sustainer of it. If man is mind and matter then this is the purpose of life for man, whilst the purpose of all life is simply to continue to be.

If we then reject either tier of the purpose of life in favour of the belief that there is no purpose at all, then this rejection must remain relegated only to the outcome of a philosophical exercise as should this rejection of purpose be held true in reality, then humanity must abandon all attempts at continuing to live.

By Johannon 'Joanna' Davis

Man’s end ever fading - By Liam Bland

Man’s end ever fading

How it must once have felt to be alive

When life was struggle and mankind strived

To gather, to hunt, ergo to feed,

Existing within the boundaries of essential need.

Fashioning spear from flint and cloth from hide

To hunt, to kill, to feed the tribe

To have purpose, biological, knowing no existential doubt

To never ask the question; ‘What is it all about?’

But with diminished threat, and limited room

Man fought not to feed, or protect, but to consume.

And as human societies began to thrive

We lost the imperative to merely survive.

Unaware perhaps that the traps of greed would force

Man into a costly and unseemly divorce

From reason pure, animalistic and free,

Replaced with aspiration; servitude, in perpetuity.

And now, tribally estranged, with the system full

Men live as fattened calves, awaiting the cull,

A food source for a ruptured civilisation

Bereft of purpose, of strife and inclination

Money, harnessed, brought individual success,

Succoured hierarchies and enabled, for some, excess,

Reduced man to consumer, the easier to control;

Capital conceiving the original Prole.

Now flaccid, mankind limps in line,

Footsteps fall in regimented time

To the TV’s pacifying, narcotic call

And man, dumbed-down, accepts his fall.

For, as the last lords of land and power flail

And dwindling fuel resources finally fail

We will all fall, feeble, bereft of fight

And slip, forgettable, into endless night.

By Liam Bland

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it - By Martin Prior

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it

Part II: More sex and love?

In the last issue, in fact Part I of the issues on ‘Purpose of Life’, I argued that the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species. 

There are indeed linguistic issues: one might interpret the purpose of life as meaning the purpose for which there is life.  Surely there must be an intelligent power to bring about the manifestation of life.  My argument is that if something is conceptually possible, then in all likelihood it will happen at least once.  

But we must return to the activities we directly pursue: thus if I am a stag, I will not see my purpose of life as maintaining the quality of the gene pool.  What?  The purpose of life is to save the girls from those other guys.  They manage both to be wimps and maltreat the kids at the same time (mine of course).  And if anyone questions that they must be philosophers or the like, and probably not very good philosophers at that.

In Part I, I argued that within a socialist framework, it is the activities we directly pursue rather than socialism itself, that is the purpose of life.  And under socialism there must be a fair opportunity to pursue these goals.  A stag would say fair’s fair, why not, as long as this represents equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.

Now this might suggest that a stag has a lot in common with an economic liberal, where competition is all.  But let us look at my earlier analyses, not least that for the self-image of a supposed exploiter (RHS):

self-image of ‘maroon’ socialist	self-image of economic liberal

I have shown both diagrams in previous issues, but here I have annotated them.  Note that the outer maroon from last time on the socialist diagram has now been termed ‘customary care’, a term I have come up with in the last week: culture, society and custom all overlap.  It should be said that these diagrams, ‘saying it in maroon’, represent an informal account of stages in a socioeconomic process, and as such should be regarded as a tool for formulating a more rigorous hypothesis.

What we see on the right-hand side is that the wider environment, a resource to be exploited rather than respected, is divorced by the market, via supply and demand, from culture, which is now valued for its feeding the demand curve.  One can say a lot about this, but often a species evolves not so much to improve the gene pool as to make it more sexy. Or better equipped for fighting the other guys.  So perhaps one can say that life is for antlers, but antlers are not necessarily for life.

But coming back to the liberal agenda, the modern market does in fact need infinite expansion - often most profitably exploiting resources to extinction – it sows the seeds of its own destruction and periodically it needs to be bailed out by those exploited.  This purpose of life seems to have more in common with a cancer cell.

Would a stag do this?

By Martin Prior

What is the point? - By Patrick Ainley

What is the point?

A point for anything suggests that whatever process is going on in what we observe or take part in can be understood in terms of its own finality. It implies a development towards an end so that the changes taking place – and everything changes – can be made sense of in terms of where the thing is going.

This is like Aristotle’s idea that all mortal things – men, animals and plants – develop according to their own specific natures and this is their purpose for themselves in a sublunary world that is also following the rules for its own perpetuation.

However, if there is no ultimate purpose for everything save its own eventual dissolution and random dissociation into a void, which is what scientists now think will be the ultimate heat-death of the universe (since there is apparently not enough dark and other matter in existence to prevent its endless expansion), then the finality of anything, including humanity collectively and individually, is to fulfil our nature by becoming what we are in the brief time allotted to us as fully as possible.

This was Nietzsche’s idea for accepting what he thought was an endless recurrence in which the universe (as scientists then believed) would be repeated by a perpetual reordering of random events an infinite number of times. Nietzsche’s Superman was a heroic individual who rejoiced in joining this pointless dance and spurned the untermensch who could not live without myths and religions that all supposed some universal purpose guided by a supreme deity, even if only a watchmaker who had constructed the whole caboodle and wound it up to set it all going in the first place.

Darwinism for Nietzsche, as for Dawkins today, explained the emergence of increasingly complex living beings following the same physical laws that allowed the formation of non-living but regular objects and events from the original chaos of creation through further mechanically and statistically random events. Today scientists are experimenting with the sub-atomic building blocks of matter to model how if not why this all happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.

Nietzsche’s existential individualism – aside from its implied moral and philosophical relativism (since what is true or not is what the Superman can get everyone else to accept, so that ‘might is right’) – was not intended to have a social appeal. To find a humanist doctrine that would have a collective appeal ‘to all mankind’ was the task of the European Enlightenment philosophers who sought to replace irrational religion with rationality as the guiding light of human progress. As distinct from other animals, human beings were uniquely able to reflect on their own situation and to make purposes for themselves, the first of which is surely our own survival. And not survival alone but betterment and improvement to increase the total of human happiness through progress.

Progress does not necessarily mean greater complexity; it might involve a return to some previous more simple and harmonious relation with nature. But it was understood as a feat of emergence, of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In this, humanity, even whilst being different from other animals, shares with similar complex and living systems their being as centres of self-interest against the universal drift of meaningless events.

This leads us to systems theory, which sees reality as composed of hierarchically ordered systems open to determination by the systems within which in turn they are contained. So, the individual as a biological system maintains and reproduces itself throughout its lifetime by digestion, excretion, growth and regrowth, relying upon psychological and other subsystems while being contained within the various levels of its society as a larger system.

Societies also follow the tendencies of their own development, within – in turn – economic, ecological and other still larger systems. In this context, human needs are defined in terms of sustaining the necessary conditions for the continued successful maintenance of the social system and if they are not met the behaviour of the system is disturbed, either at the level of individual or group sub-system or at the level of the society as a whole.

However, human beings are unique in not only being informed by but in forming their own environment through the use of tools. Tools transform objects not only literally but also conceptually; they distance consciousness from its immediate perceptions by forming a new purposive whole of means to ends with thought before action. A new and symbolic subsystem is thus created which is capable of self-steering, as the phrase is. Unlike inherited genetic information and animal communication by signalling, symbolic consciousness and the self-steering system it creates is capable of learning from past mistakes to act differently in future. This is what makes human beings, as the nineteenth century artist and socialist, William Morris said, ‘the learning animal’.

For, potentially at least, humanity can learn from the accumulated knowledge and experience of human and natural history that is contained in the culture we pass down the generations to decide our own purpose or point of our collective existence, within which individuals can also achieve their own satisfactions. Utopian ideals of a fixed end state of human development, whether as ‘communism’, ‘a free society’, or any other ‘state of grace’, can be forsaken. Instead, we need to develop and implement the collective knowledge of what is required for human survival. In this sense, nowadays survival has become Utopia. We can then decide where we go from there!

But it may be that we are not alone as beings that have consciousness of themselves in a universe that, despite its vastness, is seemingly pregnant with the possibilities for life and that we may share with other conscious beings, as Michael Polanyi put it in the conclusion to his 1958 philosophy of science, Personal Knowledge that I discussed in the last issue of The Philosophical Take-Away, ‘a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress… towards an unthinkable consummation.’

By Patrick Ainley

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt?(II) - The How and The Why: Are Cosmologies an Ontological Necessity?- By Richard James Marklew

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt?(II)

The How and The Why: Are Cosmologies an Ontological Necessity?

The physical and social sciences are epiphenomena of society and culture –  perpetually malleable, subject to extraneous socio-political, historical and cultural stimuli; however, also an arbiter moulding them through the proliferation of socio-cultural products. Thus, in order to dissect and form discussions around atheistic beliefs, one must realise the interdependency with the organizational and symbolic world they inhabit – mostly academic, sometimes popular. A multitude of nuances, mythologies and litanies are immensely important to the atheistic cosmology – specialised litanies from different fields whittle a specialised atheism propounded through different explanations such as that of the physicist or sociobiologist.

            A scrupulous inquisition into the nature of belief, experience and being is essential in understanding anyone's faith. After careful inquiry one can make salient that atheistic cosmologies provide a certain ontological necessity, analogous to any explanation of the phenomenology of the world on which we dwell; a facet, just one strand in a vast interwoven array that entangles man.

The faithful being

This being can be divided into several categories: The human entity as matter; as a socio-cultural symbolic classification; the psychological manner, or the self – the operation of psyche in (Morris 1994:10- 13) relation with situational/environmental, biological, neurological and socio-cultural constraints which guides the actions of the being in its entirety. The self, from one perspective, is the captain of a ship on a tumultuous sea, commanding a course in accordance with the environment and the structure of the vessel – this is not to infer a Cartesian split, for the vessel in itself can demand and dictate the actions of the captain. The self is a creature of limited will.

            The entity as matter is a phenomenon which encompasses both object and agent, which can be perceived by others in a myriad of ways. Thus, in talking of the faithful being, one must talk about the experiential aspects of the self as the conduit through which stimuli is both ingested, ruminated and expelled back through self-other relations. The faithful being rationalises phenomena based on culturally constructed categorisations of the world which are by no means concrete themselves. By contrasting atheistic beliefs against other cosmological world views through the medium of the self, one can extrapolate if atheists experience stimuli through cosmological mediums. Therefore, serving a psycho-cultural purpose which is a fundamental construction – and here I may be a step too bold – which is universal.

On the subliminal

Let me start this half with a little vignette, which may serve to illustrate my point:

I came to the boundary of the metropolis. It was the first time the stars relinquished themselves from bindings of light pollution...How wonderful that radiation is coming forth from a nuclear fusion reaction billions of miles away and probably hitherto passed and dead...But why matter at all? Why a molecule, electrons, photons e.t.c?

           

The subliminal experience, once rationalised, of myself seeing the stars can be classified as a  symbolic experience. I became overwhelmed, and merely experienced for a while, then had a mechanistic description come to mind - but still wondered why matter?  An experience shaped by socio-historical scientific dogmas – most certainly ascribed atheistic myths - also a cosmological experience and symbolic explanation bound by cultural webs. One thing is certain, that the way I rationalised the experience of the stars was part of my own internalised collection of  mythologies. Myths, that as Midgley states:...are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning'(Midgley 2011: 1)

            The theist could explain this experience coherently to the atheist. He may say a God has placed those stars there, without even a mechanistic description. All earthly matter may not be important to him, as it is explained by the will of God... But, still ask:Why God – the primordial matter to the theist?..The theist is awaiting heaven for this explanation. Atheism is content with doubt and faith in a present life, as endeavouring to answer the question of matter. However, that does not refute my claims that it is a cosmology. Just reasserts them as a faith in doubt with a commitment to the present.

The cosmological event

Mechanistic explanation are not alien to a theist, for a Christian will say a person died by being hit by a car, but it was gods will – they are likely to put the death down to some human fault, god did not push the man in front of the car, but it was the right time for him to be taken. Thus, the mechanistic, everyday experiential element is not removed, but an additional explanation is conflated to the mechanistic explanation as a conduit through which emotions such as grief and loss can be controlled. The atheist may lack the belief in an afterlife, but deals with bereavement in an equally efficient fashion; The human experiential life is unpredictable and we all must die and our matter be redistributed, creating a symbolic recognition of death based on a shared fate of humans. Thus, a symbolic rationalisation of death is constructed, hardly differing from the notion of the shared fate of humans to be judged or reincarnated.

           

In an infamous ethnography on the Azande,  Evans-Pritchard became fully conscious to the fact that 'the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events' (Evans-Pritchard 1976:18). To put in brief Azande cosmology is an incredibly difficult task, as Evans-Pritchard points out: 'It is no use saying to a Zande 'now tell me what you Azande think about witchcraft' because the subject is too general and indeterminate, both too vague and too immense, to be described concisely' (ibid. p.23). However, the most salient features are that witchcraft is a psychic act; a hereditary condition; that it manifests itself as a blackish swelling, Evans-Pritchard determines on the information provided by his interlocutors that it is somewhere near the xiphiod cartilage; only sorcerers can utter spells; many oracles, diviners etc. are employed to combat and find the source. Witchcraft, is seen as an almost unconscious act, caused by social disruption, one often will find the be-witched is prey to someone with whom one had  a fray with in the past. (ibid).

            Even early ethnographic accounts such as this, however provide immense value when one envisions the rift between everyday perception of causality and cosmological explanations; between sensing stimuli, rationalising and an ultimate reality. For instance, if one looks at examples regarding death amongst the Azande and then relates it to the car vignette, one will almost certainly find no differing conditions...God didn't push the accelerator; Neither did witchcraft...

            In the case of a man that committed suicide, Evans-Pritchard enquired into the full nature of the event from one of the community members, eventually getting a response that the man had killed himself by hanging; this he did because he was angry with his brothers; But, witchcraft caused the man to kill himself because only the mentally ill commit suicide (ibid, P24).  One can see how this differs only slightly from atheistic cosmological views. Three causal events happened, and indeed the third – the mental illness – is the most important as it is the causal event which requires an explanation. An explanation of psychological depression through social rejection or discontentment resulting in suicide would be the atheists cosmological explanation, akin to the theory of bewitchment.  Cosmology is based on the Why not the How (ibid).

            As he later states:

           

            'Zande belief in witchcraft in no way contradicts empirical knowledge of cause and effect.           The world known to the senses is just as real to them as it is to us. We must not be deceived   by their way of expressing causation and imagine that because they say a man was killed by     witchcraft they entirely neglect the secondary causes that, as we judge them, were the true cause of his death' (ibid, P.25).

Similarly, one should not be deceived by an atheistically grounded explanation of causality. Atheistic conflations of Why to the How, is one facet of an ontological necessitation to understand certain events. One must understand that it is only certain events. For, it is a fallacy for one to believe ones cosmology is consciously phosphorescent in logically deciphering every stimuli one encounters... I don't think about the molecules in my coffee I am currently drinking...Although I am thinking about all those lovely neurotransmitters... Now, I am consciously considering my coffee as it is ordained by my current situation, which required such an analogy...Thus, as I will suggest later, enquiries into the nature of consciousness, agency and ethics arise from such mild contemplations on cosmological categorisations/rationalisations of the phenomenological world through the conduit of the self.

Conclusion?

Through a logical contemplation of what atheism provides for those who adhere to it, one can delineate the possibilities of an ontological necessitation of  why akin to any cosmological world-view. Unearthing innumerable questions which must be investigated; If a cosmology is an ontological necessity, why is this so?..Does the conflated why provide evidence that reality is a consequence of cognition, not a prerequisite?..What are the socio-historical events that lead to a rise in atheism and why is it a cosmology that purports western ideological conceptions of egocentricism(Midgley 1999 & Foucault 2002[1966])?..If atheism has no ascribed moral code, what can this tell us about ethics?

It is my belief that an engaged philosophical enquiry that utilised knowledge afforded us by other social and bio-psychological sciences can help to answer such questions, and that the questioning of belief does not stop at atheism, it starts: A new brand of ontological anthropology and a fresh turn to Metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology.

By Richard James Marklew

Bibliography

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles, And Magic Among The Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Foucault,M. (2002[1966]). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Oxon: Routledge

Midgley, M (1999) 'The Origins of Don Giovanni: if our genes are selfish, does that mean we are too?'. Philosophy Now (25): 32-34

Midgley, M. (2011). The Myths We Live By. Oxon: Routledge

Morris, B (1994). Anthropology of The Self: The individual in cultural perspectives. London: Pluto Press