Science

2 Responses to Science

1. Cole says:

   February 17, 2013 at 5:23 am

   Mr. Johnson,
   I could not find another place to make this post, so I’m doing it here, unsure of where it will be delivered. This is Cole from your Phil 231 course last Fall (’12). Anyways, my girlfriend and I have and ongoing debate about this, among others, about whether or not it is possible to think nothing. Here is my argument, of which I believe is deductively valid, but I’d like another’s take on it.

   To think nothing can be considered the absence of thought,
   The absence of thought can never occur, because even when one imagines they are thinking nothing or are without thought, they are actually thinking of what they consider to be nothing (ex. an individual meditates and thinks only about their breathing, or an individual sits relaxed and concentrates only on the clouds or complete darkness).
   Therefore the waking, human mind is incapable of being without thought.
2. Dave says:

   March 1, 2013 at 9:03 pm

   Hey Cole, nice to hear from you. I think your argument is almost valid, and it could easily be reworded slightly to be valid. In order to make it valid you have to spell everything out and leave nothing assumed. So, I would modify it slightly to be something like this:

   1.To “think nothing” can be defined as the absence of thought.
   2. The absence of thought can never truly occur for a living human being (because even when one imagines that he or she is thinking nothing, or are without thought, in reality they are actually thinking of existing things such as focusing on one’s breathing, or clouds, or darkness, etc).

   Therefore, it is impossible for a living human being to “think nothing”.

   I don’t think you would need to distinguish waking states from sleeping, because dreams tell us that our mind is still active even when we are asleep. Okay, so that makes it valid. But being valid, as you know, is not enough to make the argument correct necessarily. It could still be unsound. I don’t know that it is necessarily unsound, because I don’t think your premises are obviously false. However, my suspicion is that your girlfriend probably has a different definition for what she means by “nothing”. It is kind of an ambiguous term. Some people mean the absence of everything, and take it in a more literal way, as you seem to be doing, and others take it in a more figurative way. For example, if someone asked you what you did over the weekend, and you said, “Oh, nothing.” You don’t mean that you actually didn’t do a single thing at all, you just mean that you didn’t do anything that was very important, or fun, etc. So, I imagine she has something more like that in mind. She probably just means that she thinks it is possible to clear one’s mind and not be focused on anything in particular. This would probably be a more metaphorical sense of “nothing”. If that is her definition then I think you are both right in a way, and the only difference is in how you are defining the terms. I would agree with you, though, that it would be impossible for a conscious human being to have at any point a complete absence of thought.

   This conversation reminds me a little bit of a portion in “Alice in Wonderland”. Here is the quote from chapter 7:

   ‘…Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.’

   `I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice.

   `I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!’

   Unfortunately I cannot take complete credit for thinking of this example. I first learned of it from Donald Palmer, who used it to discuss category mistakes in his book “Does the Center Hold”. What I have to say about it is a little different than Palmer’s take, though. Do you see how the King is assigning a different meaning to the term “Nobody” than Alice is? The King is using it like it is someone’s name or title (notice how “Nobody” is capitalized when the King is speaking, but it isn’t when Alice is), whereas Alice means it literally. Here it is done for humor, of course, as this is obvious to everybody, but real arguments are sometimes like this. Often they just come down to the fact that people have different definitions of the same word in mind. Their intuitions are actually the same, or very similar to each other, but they just talk past each other because they are assuming different meanings of the terms. Once they get clear on what definition of the word they are actually using, often the disagreement evaporates and they find that their positions are pretty similar. Anyway, thanks for visiting the site and commenting. It was a fun topic to think about for a few minutes. Keep me posted on how things go. 🙂