The 60-second Philosopher

Expand your Mind on a Minute or so a Day!

Andrew Pessin

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780744452
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The budding thinker's Little Book of Calm Philosophy means "love of wisdom" in Greek. Unfortunately, as much as we all love wisdom, we don't all have the time to spend acquiring it! This fabulous little book provides the perfect antidote. Split into 60 one-minute chapters, Andrew Pessin offers you a snippet of philosophical wisdom everyday, giving you something to think about on your coffee break. Guaranteed to sharpen your mental faculties, as well as entertaining you with its witty humour, The Sixty-Second Philosopher will delight aspiring thinkers everywhere!

1

THE PHILOSOPHER WITHIN YOU

There’s the legend of the fish who swam around asking every sea creature he’d meet, “Where is this great ocean I keep hearing about?” A pretty small legend, true—but one with a pretty big message.

We are very much like that fish.

For consider, it’s hard to look at a newborn baby without thinking: what an incredible miracle. But when was the last time you looked at an adult and had the same thought? But why not? Every adult was a little baby; if the latter is a miracle then so is the former. But it never occurs to us to think this way for one simple reason: we’re so used to seeing people that we stop reflecting on them.

Or you drop something, a spoon, and it falls to the floor. But why? Couldn’t it, in theory, have remained floating in air or moved upwards? And how exactly does it fall to the floor, by “gravity”? There are no strings connecting the earth to the spoon. How can the earth pull on something from a distance, that it’s not even attached to? Why don’t we pause every time something drops and say: what an incredible miracle!

The most ordinary things contain a whole lifetime of questions, if only we are reminded to start asking them.

Children already know to ask these questions. Every answer you provide to one of their “Why?” questions just generates the next question. But we were all children once. What we need to do now is to let the child still within us—the philosopher within us—re-emerge. What we need now are a few seconds out of our ordinary conceptual habits. We need to take a cold wet plunge into the great deep ocean of thought.

It’s time to start thinking.

RELATED CHAPTER: 60

2

PASSING TIME

Nothing is more familiar than the passage of time. “Seize the day!” they say, because “What’s here today is gone tomorrow.” But while it admittedly seems to us that time moves along, it’s just not clear how it does so. For time is not a physical object or a thing: it doesn’t exist first in one place, then in another. But then in what sense, exactly, does it really move?

Indeed if it were truly moving we ought to be able to say how quickly. You may think that clocks measure that rate, but actually that’s not quite right.

What a clock measures, in fact, is not time but rather how some physical things are correlated with other physical things. You glance at the clock and see that it reads 1:13 p.m., and then glance again and see 1:15 p.m. Those two glances are correlated with those two readings, apparently measuring two minutes of time. But now imagine that between those glances everything in the universe sped up together, including your brain activity and thoughts and sensations and the mechanisms of the clock. Those two glances would still be correlated with those two readings, but less than two minutes would have passed—and you’d never notice the difference. So the clock isn’t actually measuring the time itself!

If we’re really to imagine time itself moving, distinct from all physical things, we must imagine the universe to be entirely empty of all physical things and ask ourselves whether time would still flow. Again, it’s tempting to say yes. But then remember that it’s an empty universe: there is nothing in it. But if there is truly nothing in it, then nothing can be happening, nothing can be occurring, and nothing can really be moving.

“Time flies”, they also say, “when you’re having fun.” I’m all in favor of having fun. But having fun won’t pass the time more quickly, if time doesn’t really pass at all.

RELATED CHAPTER: 40

3

THE WOMAN OF MY DREAMS

We all know that experience: some exquisite, beautiful dream, into which the alarm clock suddenly and rudely intrudes. We wake up, and our day begins.

Or does it?

Can you in fact be sure that you’re not dreaming right now—that you haven’t been dreaming your entire life? This is not merely a sleepy philosophers’ question. For if you can’t be sure you haven’t been dreaming, then how can you be sure that anything you believe about the world is true?

Could you pinch yourself? Well, you could. But then how would you know that you didn’t just dream the pinch itself and then transition into a different dream?

Indeed I once decided to keep a log of my dreams. I quickly found that on waking I couldn’t remember the dreams I’d had earlier in the night, so I started waking up during the night to write them down. A few nights of this interrupted sleep and I was exhausted! So my body (or mind) got the better of me: I woke up one morning to discover that my notebook was actually empty. I had only dreamed I had woken up to write down my dreams!

At that point I knew I was defeated. But I also knew I had a deep problem. I am positive, right now, 100%, that I am awake and writing this. I’m also positive, right now, 100%, that I have a wife, that I have a physical body, and that other physical objects exist, because I perceive all these things. But then again I was equally positive during my failed experiment that I was awake and writing down dreams. And look how far that got me.

Could it be, then, that nearly everything I believe about the world is false? That even my lovely, lovely wife is only literally the woman of my dreams?

RELATED CHAPTERS: 30, 42, 52, 56

4

MY MIND IS ELSEWHERE

You can’t deny that your mind exists. After all, the very act of denying requires the ability to form thoughts, which seems to be a mental ability—so denying that you have a mind would amount to proving that you do! What’s unclear, however, is just what it means to have a mind. We know that we have brains, which are purely physical objects. The question is whether our minds just are our brains. And important differences between the mental and physical suggest that they are not.

For example, ordinary physical things have spatial properties: they take up space, they have sizes, shapes, locations, etc. But the mind does not seem to be spatial. It doesn’t make sense to ask how “big” that thought is, or what the shape of your consciousness is. Nor does it make sense to ask where a thought or perception might be located. If you were to shrink down inside a brain, all you’d see would be lots of molecules zipping about. You would never find a “thought” or “perception”—since they are not literally located anywhere in the brain.

Minds also have a unique feature: their owners have a special access to them. You can directly know what you are thinking in a way no one else can know what you are thinking. But no physical objects have this feature. Since physical objects all exist in space we all have equal access to them, even to each other’s brains. In fact, doctors have even greater access to what’s going on in your brain than you do, by means of medical imaging! But simply looking into your brain will never allow them to feel whatever you are feeling. That belongs to you alone in a way your body and brain do not.

It’s not clear exactly what a mind is, unfortunately. But it is clear that the only thing in the head is the brain, and that the mind, in the deepest of senses, is elsewhere.

RELATED CHAPTERS: 9, 13, 16, 19, 22, 24, 30, 31, 42, 48, 52, 55, 56, 57

5

DO THE RIGHT THING

If only we knew what that was. Or rather, if only we knew how we knew what that was.

Consider an action such as feeding a helpless hungry child. Everyone agrees that that is a morally good thing to do. But now if you were to witness someone doing this, what would you see? You’d see the person feeding and the child fed; you’d see the food, the chewing, perhaps you’d see the child smile. But here’s something you wouldn’t see: the actual goodness of the action. “Goodness” is not the kind of property which is literally visible.

Our eyes see only light and color, after all. But good and bad and right and wrong are not equivalent to light or color so of course our eyes can’t see them. And more importantly, what our eyes see at best is how things actually are at a given moment. But moral properties are about how things ought to be. To say that feeding a hungry child is good is to say that one ought to do it. And our eyes are just not equipped for seeing that sort of thing.

It’s easy to overlook this fact since we reach our moral judgments so quickly. If you witnessed a murder you’d be so immediately aware of its wrongness that you wouldn’t realize that its wrongness is not something you can actually see. But now you might wonder: if you don’t know about whether an action is right or wrong by your senses, then how do you know it?

So you might be pretty confident you know which actions are right and wrong. Feed that hungry child; be kind; don’t steal donuts. You might even be confident in your moral beliefs about more controversial issues. But unless you can say a little more about how you know what rightness and wrongness are, you ought not be so confident about what it is you’re confident about.

RELATED CHAPTERS: 12, 20, 23, 26, 29, 39, 45, 49, 54, 57, 58, 59

6

PUTTING INTO WORDS WHAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING

Language is as important to human beings as it is mysterious.

You make some sounds and people somehow respond appropriately. But of course only certain sounds, namely the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The philosopher within you
• 2. Passing time
• 3. The woman of my dreams
• 4. My mind is elsewhere
• 5. Do the right thing
• 6. Putting into words what goes without saying
• 7. God’s odds
• 8. Everything that exists
• 9. True colors
• 10. There is no path not taken
• 11. The one thing I know is that I know nothing
• 12. Don’t worry, be happy—unless worrying makes you happy
• 13. Mental billiards
• 14. The rational thing to do is to act irrationally
• 15. A rose by another name wouldn’t be a rose
• 16. Two hands in a bucket
• 17. Can Jesus make a burrito so hot he couldn’t eat it?
• 18. Surgeon general’s warning: everything causes everything
• 19. Seeing red
• 20. You choose, you lose
• 21. Really moved, by the unreal
• 22. You are not what you eat
• 23. The Devil made me do it
• 24. Cyber-romance
• 25. “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”
• 26. God’s top ten
• 27. The proof is in the (vanilla) pudding
• 28. There’s more to the world than what there is
• 29. It’s all relative
• 30. What you see is not what you get
• 31. It doesn’t add up
• 32. Same old same old
• 33. I can’t see for miles and miles
• 34. If you read only one book this year ...
• 35. By Shakespeare—or someone else of the same name
• 36. Why are you still here?
• 37. Surgeon general’s retraction: nothing causes anything
• 38. Will you still love me tomorrow?
• 39. An inconvenient tooth
• 40. There is no time, like the present
• 41. My identity crisis is having an identity crisis
• 42. I’ll see you in my dreams
• 43. God only knows what you’ll do next
• 44. I’ll take my chances
• 45. Santa and Scrooge
• 46. Cooperating in not cooperating
• 47. Cool metaphors
• 48. “In one ear and out the other”
• 49. The luck of the draw
• 50. Sometimes you’re just not yourself
• 51. Some ado about nothing
• 52. The eyeball of the beholder
• 53. You either will, or will not, buy this argument
• 54. To plug, or not to plug
• 55. It’s all English to me
• 56. There’s ... something ... out ... there
• 57. What experience cannot teach
• 58. Intolerance is a virtue
• 59. The best of all possible worlds
• 60. This is not the end
• Sources
• Index