ToK Prescribed Essay TItles (May2015): Question 1

There is no such thing as a neutral question. Evaluate this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Click on picture to listen to soundtrack: 'It's a jungle out there'

 

Where do babies come from?  Remember asking this question to your parents? Do you remember how they reacted or what they said?  Were you satisfied with the response? Do you remember if you asked a follow up question?  There’s something about asking questions that drives people crazy, especially curious little children who just seem to want to ask questions for the sake of it without really appearing to be interested in the answer. Sometimes questioning can be just playful; a form of mental gymnastics to keep the mind supple and flexible – you’re not really interested in gaining any knowledge but just enjoy the ‘trip’.  At other times, questions can be dangerous, a form of intellectual probing which reaches into areas which may be classified as ‘Top Secret’ or ‘For your Eyes Only’ – you’re poking your nose into forbidden knowledge and ought to be aware of the risk.

 

There are other times when questions can drive you a little crazy: the song, ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, by Randy Newman raises the knowledge questions, how far should we be over cautious about the world? To what extent do our fears hinder our day to day lives? In what ways should we protect ourselves from the dangers of knowledge?

 

The first of the two actual questions posed by the song – ‘Who’s in charge here?’ seems to be driven by utter terror of the randomness of the world; it’s almost a cry for help from someone or something to take control of some pending danger; an appeal to some higher authority so give sense and meaning to life.  Isn’t this sometimes true when we ask knowledge questions?  When attempting to justify our beliefs, we often make an appeal to the higher authority of experts to help support the truth of a belief.  The authority could be a Nobel Prize winner on the field of medicine or a religious leader of a faith.  The ultimate authority in the latter example is, of course, God.  We tend to think that such authorities are infallible and that their answers are detached and have no hidden agenda, but is this strictly true?  Shouldn’t all our questions to authority figures be driven by a scepticism and be, as such, non-neutral?

 

What about the second question: ‘Do you know what’s in the water that you drink?’  This seems to be driven by some deeper knowledge: ‘I know something that you don’t’.  It’s not a rhetorical question (it’s followed by a clear ‘Well, I do…’), but why would anyone want to ask this question.  Surely we can take it on trust that the water coming out our taps is drinkable.  We know that we can wash babies without any side effects.  We take this knowledge for granted don’t we?  But it wasn’t so long ago that we couldn’t take it for granted (and there are some places on earth even today that people can’t take it for granted). So is the singer’s knowledge about the drinking water personal or shared?  The tone of the song suggests that it’s emotive knowledge: his ‘gut feeling’ is that the water is full of the kind of poison that’s in the air we breathe.  What would he need to convince us that it’s not simply personal knowledge: That we should actually ‘better pay attention’?  The answer comes back to justification or evidence.  The singer would have to show us some empirical evidence carried out by respectable scientists using the scientific method to generate some reliable data to back up his belief (which would, of course, spoil the song entirely!)

 

Still, the song neatly captures the kind of paranoia that drives some people with obsessive compulsive disorders (‘People think I’m crazy because I worry all the time’) giving us an insight also into the state of mind of conspiracy theorists and reminding us of that famous Joseph Heller quote from Catch-22? ‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you’!...

Examples

Natural and Human Sciences (The problem of consciousness, Part 6)

Here's the original question: is consciousness something irreducibly subjective and private (like the dualists believe) or is it something outward – a physical manifestation of inward states linked to our brain functions and nervous system?

We propose two theories to explain the mystery without (hopefully) explaining it away:

1. Consciousness is an 'emergent property'
2. Consciousness is 'built into' our body functions

Consciousness is an emergent property

This idea runs counter to the scientific/materialist belief that consciousness, and for that matter all biological life, is reducible to its individual physical parts; and it appears to address the ‘explanatory gap’ pointed out by Jackson that science can’t explain everything in terms of physical facts/causes. 

The idea of ‘emergence’ is related to the development of the ‘science’ of ‘chaos’ and ‘complexity’ (click on the picture above for further information).  These theories depend on a specific understanding of causality that is not based on the traditional reductionist thinking.  You do not take apart a complex system such as a rat to see how the different components work in order to cause the rat to function.  Instead, you look at the system as a whole.  Applied to consciousness, there is a sequence of physical causes to take into account, but these do not follow the 'top-down' series of events whereby conscious behaviour originates from a prior set of physical causes.  Rather, we must look in a 'bottom-up' way at consciousness as a whole in order to come to grips with the nature of the mind.  This approach allows us to think that we are somehow more than the sum of our parts.

Chaos theory

In its simplest form, chaos theory presents the idea that simple systems or organisms display behaviours which are too complex to analyse in terms of their constituent parts and yet present underlying patterns or rules as part of their complex behaviour.  We have to study the interaction between the units to explain their complex behaviour. 

For example, take one ant.  On its own, it appears to behave randomly.  Add another ant and again they seem to behave in a similarly unpredictable fashion.  Add a group of ants and things start to happen: they begin to display organised behaviour, working towards the same end for the whole colony.  This complex behaviour of ants is an emergent property.  One ant on its own is not intelligent; intelligence somehow resides in the collective; it is based on the existence of a set of physical conditions or simple rules (chain of causes and effects?) that makes their communal behaviour possible.  The complex behaviour is somehow over and above the physical facts necessary for the ants’ communal behaviour, but wouldn’t exist independent of them.

Complexity theory

Complexity theory, on the other hand, suggests that complex systems and organisms often produce very simple outcomes; outcomes which can be explained in accordance with the capacity for their individual constituent parts for ‘self-organisation’.

For example, consider the millions of people that that make up a nation and interact to create a society.  Just by looking at one single person, you couldn’t tell that he would be able to operate with other people in this way to create this nation or this society.  Nationhood or society takes on a life and identity of its own by means of the interactions of the individuals who live within the nation.  Without the physical fact of individuals’ existing within a nation, there couldn’t be a national identity.  We can’t predict what a complex system like a society will evolve into, but this only serves to underline the mystery of life.

Perhaps, consciousness is neither a private realm of subjectivity, nor simply a public expression of internal brain states; it is an emergent property.  That is, it needs various physical facts like the features and functions of the brain, the nervous and muscular system and a set of simple rules, but cannot exist independently of them.  These individual parts interact, according to the rules and consciousness spontaneously emerges.

There are definite problems with these theories.  For example, where do these 'rules' come from?  Moreover, what sort of property is an 'emergent' property, if it isn't physical or mental?