BBC IN OUR TIME Melvyn Bragg

Have Your Say - Comments on programmes by RMA

The Consolation of Philosophy

An outstanding programme, perhaps the best in the whole series. So encouraging to find that, starting from a not very obvious but worthy point with Boethius, the discussion broadened out to cover virtually the whole range of pre-modern philosophy. The intelligent interweaving of the contributions made by each of the participants was admirable. In the end it is apparent that Stoicism, with some contribution from Epicureanism in the form it took in Lucretius, provided and provides the best philosophic guidance for a life of action and contemplation (but not forgetting Kant). It is a pity that modern academic philosophy is so arid set against these riches.

St Paul

I was pleasantly surprised by the manner in which the subject was developed, particularly the importance (for St Paul and his successors) of the concept of original sin. No doubt the general level of depravity in his time would have been much the same as it is in modern society so the question of the nature and origin of original sin is still relevant. Perhaps one might consider a conflation of St Paul (and St Augustine) with Darwin. Original sin would then be seen as what has been necessary in human evolution for the survival of the fittest. Genes and brain structure have inevitably had to be selected for reproductive vigour and aggression. These remain fundamental in human psychology and sexual behaviour, even if they have been modified to some extent by language-based cultural advances in the functioning of human groupings. The churches and moralists over the ages have been struggling against the evolutionary drive, still very powerful as can be seen in the continuing remorseless growth of the world population (to 10,000 million).

Vacuum

A very difficult subject which has raised problems for 2500 years so it’s a bit much to hope to tackle it in 45 minutes – despite the heroic efforts of the participants. Long before Aristotle, Parmenides dealt precisely with the question of the void, the vacuum. His famous verses argued very clearly that it was nonsense to think that there can be nothing, that something called nothing can actually exist, that there can be space with nothing in it or that matter can emerge out of nothing or disappear into nothing. What Michelson and Morley demonstrated to their and others’ satisfaction was that an ether carrying light waves was not apparent in terms of the particular experimental method they used. The problem is as much a philosophical one (Kant is relevant) as one for physicists – who now seem to have arrived back at the idea of a plenum but updated in terms of quantum mechanics. Bohm dealt with this (as well as the dual/particle wave conundrum) rather well in terms of the material object, from the electron to the supernova, not as isolated objects or waves travelling through space but as patterns being instantiated from moment to moment in the plenum; this makes possible a quite different understanding of the results of the Michelson/Morley experiment. The main impression left by the discussion was how many major puzzles physicists and cosmologists are still wrestling with – including anti-gravity, dark energy, dark matter and cosmological inflation. Perhaps what is needed is a rethinking of some of the central concepts, of what we mean by matter or by objects and not least how we should understand gravity. Perhaps gravity after all is not an attractive but a repulsive force? Maybe Newton should not have assumed that the apple was falling as a result of the attraction of the earth but seen the apple as being pushed towards the earth by the repulsive pressures exerted by the rest of the universe, a sort of visual illusion similar to the familiar example of the train in apparent movement. Then cosmological inflation would be an understandable result of this re-interpretation of gravity.

Human Evolution Language and Art

Melvyn's Newsletter this week remarks that language is a fascinating area and he quotes Margaret Clegg's note on this. So far in its evolution and in its remarkably rapid acquisition by children, language, and speech, remain very much a mystery. It would be nice to have a whole In Our Time devoted to language. What was of interest in the discussion were the comments on the relation between art and language. The crucial point about the cave-drawings, from a neurological point of view, is not their character as symbols but as demonstrating that early man had become able to externalise his purely mental images, to transduce the structure of the images say of an elk or a bear into a motor plan for the hand and arm movements needed to draw the elk or the bear. The brain operation needed for drawing is in this respect parallel to the brain operation needed for speech. The conversion of the mental image of a word into the utterance requires complex motor programming of the articulatory system, the tongue, larynx etc. Speech like drawing is essentially a high-level motor activity. Margaret Clegg's mention of the closeness of the brain areas for speech and fine hand movement makes plausible the idea that speech emerged, and continues, as an exaptation of neural motor control, Motor systems existing to program hand and arm movements have become extended and applied to program the articulatory movements of speech.

The Measurement Problem

Disappointing and even incoherent. To constrict Penrose and the others to a few disconnected remarks on extremely difficult matters was unsatisfactory. The subject really could not be fitted into the constraints of the IOT format. What is needed is an hour-long structured programme, or more than one, chaired by someone like Martin Rees. An hour could usefully be spent presenting and discussing the wide-ranging ideas of David Bohm.

Rutherford

Another excellent In Our Time. Rutherford was a well-chosen subject. Undoubtedly he would have been unsympathetic to many speculative developments in physics in recent years (superstring theory, big bangery)had he lived longer. A favourite quotation from him on more high-flying talk: "Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department!" The ground covered in this week's programme was remarkable. Considering how many valuable programmes there have been in the series is there any prospect of preserving them in a CD or a book? What the programme reminds me is the immense range of topics dealt with by classical Greek philosophers, Epicurus and others, as extensively listed in Diogenes Laertius. Altogether one of the best things on the BBC.

ALTRUISM

Another excellent programme on a very important topic. Altruism is the foundation of sociability, the making of a humane, liberal society. All the contributions to the discussion were clear and helpful, though in the end none really offered a satisfactory explanation. Dawkins' Darwinian account is a familiar presentation of William Hamilton' kin selection approach with some cultural dressing, with the idea that somehow or other a 'rule of thumb' could be built into the structure of the brain. But how? Perhaps there needs to be a new approach to the problem of altruism, and sociability, which takes account of recent remarkable progress in neuroscience. The discovery of mirror neurons, that is neurons which create a link between visual perception and motor planning, offers a neural explanation of empathy, a neural explanation of how it is we feel the pain of others, why we wince when someone is hurt, see others as intellectually and emotionally "other selves" (going far beyond a 'theory of mind'). We can feel for them and can be moved to help them in their problems, problems which we can see and tackle in terms of ourselves. Altruism thus becomes a manifestation of the common, shared, neural organisation on which societies have been constructed.

Beauty and truth

Another winner. The contributors were excellent, as Melvyn Bragg suggested in his note about the programme. If so much can be covered in three-quarters of an hour, how much could be in an hour and a half or longer? A suggestion: some time a neurologist or linguist should be added to the philosophers. We have the words 'beauty', 'truth' and 'good' but where did they come from? How is it that equivalent words exist in other languages (if they do)? How does the human brain function so as to arrive at these concepts? How does a child learn the meaning of these words - or are the concepts there before the child finds the words? Maybe the time is approaching when philosophical discussion can be enriched, enlivened or reformed by drawing on progress in neuroscience and in research into the foundations of language.

Wittgenstein

I found this morning's discussion of Wittgenstein interesting, particularly since I presented a paper earlier this year at the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States on "Language as a Mirror of the World: Reconciling picture theory and language games". The paper can be seen on the University of Southampton cogprints site. For convenience I attach the abstract here: Wittgenstein in the Tractatus focussed on a picture theory of language. He was clear that this meant that language mirrored reality, mirrored the world. The picture theory was an account in essence of the relation between a word and what it referred to in the external environment, or between a sentence, a proposition or sachverhalt and the event or situation to which it referred. The Tractatus was completed in 1919 and published in 1922. Within the space of 11 years after its publication Wittgenstein had abandoned the picture theory and, in the Blue Book and the Brown Book, sketched out a quite different account of language as a congeries of language games, and different languages as different sets of language games; words were given their meanings by use, by explanation, by training and essentially by social interaction. This changed account took its definitive form in the Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1954. Wittgenstein did not wholly abandon the Tractatus and would have liked the Tractatus and his later writings to be published together, though this was never done before his early death. There is a problem how he could have presented two such different accounts of language with equal conviction. Can they be reconciled? The examination in much greater depth of both may solve the problem. Since the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, there have been massive advances in different but equally relevant fields: in linguistics, in neurology, in philosophical discussion, in evolutionary theory, in psychology, in child development. Most recently and relevantly, there has been the discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998), neurons which are excited by the perception of action and which seem to constitute the precursors of motor programs to reproduce the perceived action, that is, a plausible basis for imitation and communication. There has also been great progress in the study of the active brain in the production of speech, using fMRI, PET, ERP, MEG and there are new ideas on the motor basis of speech production and speech perception, on the relation of speech and gesture, on visual and auditory perception. The paper will suggest that in the light of all these developments Wittgenstein's two accounts of language can be reconciled within a larger framework, and the philosophy and science of language can profitably be linked with each other.

Logical positivism

Logical positivism in effect called for the elimination of traditional philosophy. Analytic propositions (of mathematics and logic) survived but could not refer directly to the world. Empirical statements could be meaningful, if verifiable, but otherwise were, on the neo-positivist view, nonsensical, including all metaphysics. The logical positivist proposition - 'All propositions which are not analytic or empirically verifiable are meaningless' - was itself an unverifiable generalisation and should also have been treated by the Vienna group as meaningless nonsense! There is no empirical method for demonstrating the truth of non-analytic generalisations; they are not verifiable but they are falsifiable – by any simple proposition where we understand the meaning but are not able to specify how, empirically, the truth or falsity of the statement can be established. The meaning of a sentence must be prior to the question of its truth. Despite its self-refutation, logical positivism was not all bad. It was part of a trend away from speculation to a recognition of the central importance of language. As Wittgenstein put it, in his early philosophy (much more satisfactory than his later views) a perfect language is like a map; it pictures the structure of reality, mirrors the world as a map mirrors it. In this way language facilitates our useful interaction with the world. The really important further step is to make progress in understanding how, in evolution, humans became able (no doubt via a neural link between gesture and speech) to invent words and how, in development, children became able to acquire the words of their mother language so effortlessly. Research suggests that there must be a linked explanation for these two remarkable processes.