Existentialism: The Curious Case of Phineas Gage

To celebrate the unearthing of the first known photograph of Phineas Gage, I thought it'd be prudent to talk about him a little bit. Gage was a railroad foreman in the mid 19th century. During an accident a 3 ft. railroad spike was driven through his head, entering right under his left cheekbone and protruding through his skull, obliterating one or both of his frontal lobes. Miraculously he survived without any significant physical or mental impairment. However, prior to the accident Gage was a family man and a good Christian, afterward though, he became physically abusive to his friends and family, began drinking, gambling, and stealing. To the people who once new him, Gage was a wholly unrecognizable person after his accident.

In essence, Gage had his frontal lobe destroyed and, as a result, his entire personality changed. What does the frontal lobe do, then? First off, only mammalian brains have a frontal lobe, further, primates have the largest and most evolutionarily advanced frontal lobes. This part of the brain doesn't reach full maturation in humans until about the age of 25. For instance, onset of schizophrenia, (which typically occurs in the late teens/early twenties is related poor myelination (nerve connection formation) in the frontal lobe). Nuerologists observe that the frontal lobe is primarily responsible for social and existential activity in a human being. Our ability to empathize, recognize proper social conduct, censor our actions and speaking in accordance to the sensitivities of others, making moral choices, anticipate consequences for our actions, form long-term goals and actualizing those goals, and emotional memory. Basically it is the go-to part of the brain for all of our societal living needs.

You can see why, when Gage lost this part of his brain, he became the man he did. So what does Gage teach us about how we view ourselves? I've noticed that people tend to regard the brain organ differently than other organs: for instance, if the heart is removed, then blood will no longer pump, if the lungs are removed, then air will not be taken in, if the frontal lobe is removed, then we become sociopaths. Perhaps the difference in the way regard the former two versus the latter is that the former are autonomic (they occur without our conscious control) whereas when we find ourselves empathizing with someone, we feel we're somehow "doing it".

Does Gage's case study suggest that our capacity for empathy and such is not really something we "do" any more than we "do" cause our blood to pump? This question points to an even bigger and more important one: to what extent can we claim responsibility for any of our mental endeavors or any of our personality traits at all? If it's the case that I could remove certain portions of my brain and thereby effect my personality, then it must be the case that my personality determined by the physical contents of my brain. I am my brain.

This is a classic and rather insoluble problem in philosophy. On the one hand we have a certain sense of responsibility with regards the type of people we are. For instance, I prefer rooms that are painted light blue, this is part of who I am. On the other hand, if the above argument is true, then I could remove some certain part(s) of my brain and find that I no longer prefer rooms that are painted light blue. Take poor Gage's case, he, unfortunately, had the part of his brain removed that caused him to love his wife and family, hence he was no longer able to do so.

Well, all of what I've said so far is true, as far as I can tell (if it isn't then that spells pretty bad news for the nueropharmacuetical industry.) But, that doesn't mean I particularly like it. One caveat is that neurologists have demonstrated that the brain, like muscles, is capable of growing and developing. If one exercises their capacity for empathy then more dendrite and myelein connections tend to form, same with any other basic motor skill development. Who and what you are is not necessarily static, you can develop yourself through mental exercise (or pills, I suppose).

There's still more important things to be written because of Phineas Gage, but this'll do for now.

Metaphysics: Painting by Numbers (A Summary)

So... I thought that I'd just put up a brief summary of my last post, sans supporting details and verbosity. I probably ought to have put up a summary at the same time, but better late than never.

Language is a representational tool, for instance, "That is a chair," is really a sentence token for something like, "That object matches the criteria for being referred to as a chair according to our agreed upon conventions." So, what a chair IS, is actually just an object that contains a semi-ambiguous set of qualities. The word chair refers to a concept rather than an object, it refers to the list of qualities that an object necessarily has in order to be validly referred to as a chair. The art of speaking and conversing relies on the presupposition that the difference between concepts and objects are functionally negligible. That is to say that even though the word chair refers explicitly to only the concept of chair, it doesn't really matter, the conversation can go on.

So what about non-object based words, like truth or cause? Neither of those two words refer to any objects in the world, but like object words are merely concepts, just not anchored to anything external. Well, words like truth and cause function like mathematical symbols like + and =, they allow mathematics to occur. Without + and = then a 2 and a 3 are rather uninteresting and can't do much, but 2 + 3 = 5 and you have something quite amazing. Raw numbers, like raw objects, unmended by mediating concepts, serve little functional purpose for the human mind. We require these mediating concepts (e.g. +, =, truth, cause, and etc.) as grease in order for objects and numbers to do work.

What's the big payoff then? The world we live in is colored by linguistic equations, "That is a chair," is not relevantly different than a mathematical equation (2 + 3 = 5). While objects do actually exist, they are not identical to our concepts of them, the concepts are on our end, so "chairs" don't actually exist outside of us, even though the object of reference does. Likewise, truth, cause, and other functional mediators serve only as that, truth and cause don't actually exists external to us and to language, in essence "There is no truth," is valid if one is referencing the reality that exists outside of our linguistic reality.

Metaphysics: Painting By Numbers

I know that it's been a while since my last post, but hey, it's summer, hence this is the laziest post yet. I am posting the paper I presented at the 2008 Midwest Philosophy Conference entitled "Painting by Numbers". Posting this kind of violates some of my self imposed rules for this blog in that, a.) it's really long, b.) it's technical and verbose, and c.) it's flowery as all hell. So if you don't read this, I won't blame you.

However, this paper does represent some of the core features my metaphysical foundation, upon which I stand and do most of the philosophy you've read here in the past. So without further ado...



I should think it difficult to appreciate the delicacy and, perhaps, the aesthetic quality that life possesses, if we leave living wrapped in endless and superfluous layers. It has been poetically charged that philosophers would clip an angel's wings or unweave a rainbow, implying that the philosopher would just as soon smash a thing of beauty to discover what makes it beautiful rather than just appreciate it for what it is. Should our quest for truth break truth in the process? Maybe, though, what becomes clipped, unwoven, or breaks as a result of unrelenting philosophical inquiry wasn’t really worth it to begin with, maybe they were just distractions seeking to pacify inquiry. Maybe true value and beauty resides within a thing's resilience, through all manner of rigorous inquisition, a thing still whole and intact amongst the ruin and rubble of angels and rainbows would perhaps be greater and more beautiful.

Using various texts an inquisition of sorts will be preformed upon what we take to be the relational balance between reality and sense reality. For our purposes the two will be referred to as the metaphysic and epistemic worlds respectively. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate certain aspects of the relation of the two worlds in hopes of peeling away at some of the current conceptions to get at something more resilient.

The first step of this inquest is the call for revisions of certain ideas taken for granted. This will be best done in two parts 1) we will use Nietzsche as a paradigm of understanding of the nature and influence of language and 2) we will turn to a text which shows the way in which science demands this revision of logic. In so doing we will finally turn to an alternative philosophical idea which attempts to reconcile the delicacy between the epistemic and metaphysic worlds and hopefully provide something substantial and capable of weathering harsh inquiry.
In Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, Nietzsche paints a vivid picture of what he takes the nature of language to be. The frequent criticism of this writing by Nietzsche is how he can make a claim about truth that is, in itself, a claim that there is no truth . The reason why this piece by Nietzsche is chosen as paradigmatic is because it is the most clear example of the way in which metaphysics and epistemology transcend each other and a failure to understand this circular transcendence is what has led to a failure to understand Truth and Lie and subsequently enormous amounts of frustration on the part of philosophers.
There is an impenetrable disunity in human experience. It is physically impossible for you and I to look at a flower in the numerically same way. I cannot, even if I stole your eyes and shoved them into my head, replicate your experience of looking at a flower, nor, if I removed your brain and placed it in my skull along with your eyes. No amount of adjusting angles or positions or any other methods would work. I would demand that for a duplication of one person’s experience of viewing a flower to another’s there would have to be an entire replication of that spatio-temporal moment. Bottom line, it’s not possible. So that’s where language comes in. Through the adaptiveness of language I can look at a flower, point to it, and say, “That’s a flower”. The person to whom I am speaking will no doubt agree, despite the disunity of our experiencing the flower. Truthfully, this disunity is not a very large one. The differences of experience are subtle ones, differing only slightly from one person to another. But these differences are enough to justify the invention of languages. Suppose, for a moment, that we did all have one collective mind in which all experience was unified from person to person, then there would be no need for language to bridge the gap of disunity.

Nietzsche’s concept of language and truth as a mobile army of metaphor slides in nicely to fill in the experiential gap. He stipulates that language is fundamentally arbitrary, that any utterance is merely a token for a common, societal understanding. My uttering, “That’s a flower” is the token of something like this “I am seeing, from my numerically unique perspective, a thing which you and I conventionally accept as being a flower and am relating this visual experience to you.” Never and nowhere in nature do we find flowers, as we call them. We find objects in the world that adhere to a certain set of traits, given a degree of similarity of these traits we lump them up under the linguistic net of the word flower. The point Nietzsche is making is that there really aren’t any flowers, just the word and concept of flower. He is accusing us of confusing our word and concept of flower with what is actually out there in the world. Not totally unlike Quinne’s attack on empiricism. Language is a net that we throw over the world in order to caste it into easy to organize categorical terms. These categorical types are completely artificial and have no real empirical basis on the world. Any similarity found is found only in property ascribing which is, itself, a matter of arbitration. In saying that there are no flowers, in no way is the existence of things out in the world being denied, merely that we would be fooling ourselves into believing that our concept of flower is what’s out there in the world.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way we can focus on the criticism leveled against Nietzsche. The point Nietzsche makes about truth is an epistemic/metaphysic claim in which they transcend each other circularly. He understood this circle and felt comfortable making a claim in light of it without justification. The claim, “There is no truth” seen only in epistemic terms is a contradiction, that is, how can that statement be true if it is actually true, but tempered by metaphysics can be understood for what it is. Truth is a mere concept, more flimsy, in fact, than the concept of flowers. At least with flowers we could go out and find, touch, and smell what we call flowers, but truth cannot be smelled. Like a currency with no store of value, truth is substantial only because most of us believe and agree it is. Consider then that concepts like truth or cause (which will be addressed later) function like a plus sign (+) or equals (=) sign. These mathematical signifiers bridge the conceptual gap between numbers as merely existent entities and functional entities. Because of the (+) and (=) signs I can take the numbers 2 and 3 and relate them in a way that transcends their individual qualities, e.g. 2 + 3 = 5. However, note that the (+) and (=) signs themselves serve no existential function but rather act as bridges between existential entities. So, searching for truth, as a thing beyond a concept is futile. There is no truth, per se, there are no flowers. The critics of Nietzsche here are the ones who are pushing cogency out of the window by failing to understand the duality of the claim. It is this precise duality that we must pay careful attention to.


“So stop the sun and the stars, and start up the Earth. The Sun’s motions, which we so plainly see are illusory: the movement is on our end.”
C.L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers, pg 91


Now that we’ve introduced the topic of the metaphysic/epistemic duality lets flesh it out in hopes of getting the clear picture that is being painted. What is important to understand in this duality is the role of science. Through science we can find out what is actually going on in the world versus what is going on in our minds. The contents of the distinction are thus: the metaphysical aspect of the world is the world outside of and independent of us. This is the world that persists even when we all die. “And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.” This is the world of math and science.

The other world is the epistemic world. The world colored by categorizations and truths. What bridges the two worlds I will refer to as the act of imagination. Imagination, in this sense, merely refers to a cognitive leap or interpretation of the sense data that we are bombarded with. This act of imagination colors the world in the epistemic way whereas the metaphysic world is the world of seamless data. The metaphysic and the epistemic world supervene on each other through the act of imagination, the epistemic being reducible to the metaphysic when the act of imagination is removed. It is this removal process that has been overlooked and underappreciated. When one frets over what, say, causation looks like he is neglecting this delicacy of reduction.

We’ll start with a colorful pop culture analogy and then move on to the science that backs it up. In the film The Matrix there exists an artificial world that is accessed by physically connecting the brain to the computer network that generates the artificial world. While people are “jacked in” to the artificial world they experience sense data in exactly the same way that it is experienced in the real world. Sights, smells, sounds, tastes all convey an indistinguishable realness. While there are people “inside” this artificial world there is usually one or more people in the “real” world called operators who monitor the activity in the artificial world from the real world by observing multiple screens that have streams of green colored symbols raining vertically downwards representing the workings of the artificial world. It is demonstrated in the film that an experienced operator can validly interpret these symbols as they correspond to the artificial world. There is a scene in which an operator points to various streaming symbols and identifies them with objects in the artificial world, “You get used to it…” he says, “I, I don’t even see the code. All I see is… a blond, brunette, red-head....” What the claim is that both the people “jacked in” and operator are seeing the same thing. The artificial world can be reduced to the streaming symbols and supervenes on it, but this does not invalidate the experiences had inside the artificial world because the act of imagination that occurs while in the artificial world occurs by necessity. The only thing the operator is missing is the act of imagination that drops out during the reduction of the artificial world to its symbolic parts. But these two accounts of the artificial world are completely valid.

Further, when a billiard ball strikes another and “causes” it to mover there are two complete and valid accounts of it that supervene on one another. First, there is the mathematical account that breaks the entire phenomenon into a balanced equation. It tracks the energy transition and is able to predict things like speed and trajectory. However, nowhere in the equation is causality implied, it is only inferred on our end. This inference is the act of imagination that categorizes the event as one of cause. This is the second account of the phenomenon; we see the ball strike the other and the other starts to move. Cause is inferred through the act of imagination by necessity. The reason for the act of imagination will be clear later on. What is important for now is that both accounts of the event are valid and do not conflict in any way whatsoever. Not only that but the two accounts depend entirely on each other for validity.

In the book Color for Philosophers C.L. Hardin, having grown weary of all the color examples in philosophy being done without a real understanding of the sciences of color, provides integral scientific data to the issue at hand. The scientific details won’t be gone over in detail, but enough will be provided. Color sight is spread across three different receptors that function in an on/off “opponent” system. Three receptors are achromatic (white/black) and chromatic (yellow/blue and red/green). “On” is typically associated with white, yellow, and red while “off” is black, blue, and green. The nature of the opponent system is such that in order to see red, the green receptors are shut off; this works for the other three as well . So when viewing a thing that has red and green parts, various red/green receptors are switched to either on or off. One red/green receptor cannot see both red and green simultaneously. So, in reality a thing really can’t be both read and green all over. The second important fact is that the eyes oscillate continually at an incredibly fast rate . Ironically, the eyes depend on high-speed differentiation in order to maintain a steady and coherent image. Studies and experiments have shown that if the oscillation of the eyes is matched then object in question begins to disappear. This can be observed by staring intently at your own eyes in the mirror and notice that other facial features begin to disappear. Lastly, there is a blind spot in each eye 16 degrees off center caused by the positioning of the nerves in the eyes. This blind spot is six degrees wide, which would be something like holding six quarters horizontally at arms length away and would be vertically comprehensive .

The implications from the last two facts about the eyes are thus: what we see is not what is seen. What we do not see is an enormous blind spot, nor does the world appear to us as a frustrating blur. It is the act of imagination that fills in the gaps in both these anomalies. The distinction between perception and conception begins to break down when a careful and scientific analysis is entertained. What are eyes actually see is vastly different than our sight experience. These anomalies can be accounted for in the metaphysical world, but the sight experience occurs in the epistemic. Both accounts are valid and supervene on one another.
With regards the opponent system of color vision, rules of logic get relegated to the epistemic category where they belong. An experiment was performed that was set up as such. There was an image presented to an observer that featured a pure red and pure green bar divided by a grayish center. This grayish center was then oscillated to match the eye frequency so that it would begin to deteriorate from the vision of the observer. The point of the experiment was to see what would happen when the data became contradictory. What would a single receptors do when told to be both on and off at the same time. Three different events occurred. 1. Subjects reported that the previously grayish area had become pebbled with red and green dots, 2. that there was a green island in a sea of red or vice versa, and 3. that there was, what could only be described, as a red/green color . The act of imagination is thus a mechanism that functions for various senses translating the data presented to us from the metaphysic into the epistemic. The world is, in essence, a giant paint by numbers picture.
So, perhaps, there is a noumena and phenomena, but, perhaps, we can know the things in themselves. Through rigorous science, we can know the noumena. I will refer to this philosophical idea as Reductive Idealism (RI). RI posits as its central thesis that there is a duality in the world, a duality of metaphysic and epistemic. This duality is bridged by the act of imagination, which takes in and categorizes the sense data that we experience. Both worlds are accessible through different means, science and experience, and are completely valid so long as one respects the imaginative reduction. The reason why the epistemic world is on the same ontological level as the metaphysic is that this act of imagination is a reflexive activity that occurs within the brain beyond our control, there is no escaping or getting outside of it. But this inability to escape the act of imagination does nothing to invalidate the accessibility of the metaphysical world through the practice of rigorous science tempered by an understanding of the reduction process.

Through RI, metaphysical or epistemic problems that have kept you up at night can hopefully evaporate. RI urges that work be done in both fields in such a way that pays careful respect to the circular transcendence of both the disciplines and to the importance of scientific information that is uncovered. It is the aim of RI to bring together the noumena and phenomena in way that unifies experience between the polarities. This is a loose and flexible idea that is capable of admitting to adjustments and changes as science shows us new things about ourselves. An embracement of change is entirely necessary as we shift into a new scientific paradigm of understanding the human body, we should not cling to brittle ideals, doing so only leads to stagnation and the type of self deception that Nietzsche so often warns us of.