How do we know that the plant, or the person, “grows toward” something and then “decays away” from it? I surely grant that it seems that way to me (especially in the case of the plant; somewhat less in the case of the person), but I’m not sure that it seems that way because it’s true rather than because I’m already positing the “soul.”

From a purely naturalistic sense, if there is no girl guiding the legos according to her will, but pieces are always coming and going according to some mechanism that never ceases and doesn’t favor particular moments in the process, how can we be sure the “house” is more than a functional category?

Also, I’m not sure of your interpretation of the comic girl’s motives. It hadn’t occurred to me that “she wants her body to continue on past death”—though perhaps she does. My first reading was that the explicit realization that she’s just parts led her to want to re-use those parts, because Why not?, they’re just parts and they might as well help make a rocket ship (or whatever) once the house comes apart, and not because she thought some part of HER would meaningfully live on in them. In other words, the block is recycled for sake of the rocket ship, not for sake of the disassembled house’s living on—and she seeks to donate organs for sake of the recipient, not her own immortality.

Robbie asks, “how can we know that a plant’s growing towards something?” The answer is that in order to say that it’s growing at all, as opposed to accreting, we must be positing this thing towards, or according to which, it’s doing what it’s doing. The plant isn’t simply adding mass, like a heap. It’s growing, which is distinguishable from just getting bigger. Specifically, growing is changing with respect to a particular form. A seed grows into a tree. A child grows into an adult. You can’t just add water: the plant has to add it in a particular way and into a particular shape. The verb, and what we’re pointing to with it, is the important difference. (As a hedge: no need to be suspicious of linguistics or word choice here, I’m just using these words to point to a particular difference that we acknowledge in common speech.)

As to the poetic interpretation of the girl’s action: I could see where you’re coming from with that, although I wouldn’t call that the only or the primary meaning. I admit to being influenced by the mouse-over text on this point.

I definitely saw the girl as signing up to donate a piece of herself, because she realizes that she won’t need it anymore. That’s why she looks down at the red brick in the fourth panel. I took it as a recognition that to withhold her piece would be senseless and vain. She is giving herself a kind of immortality, though, since it’s clear she wants her brick to be reused.

Your statement “It seems to me that, for Aristotle, the destruction of an individual soul is a given” sounds fine to me, but it seems like other kinds of Aristotelians disagree with you. It’s funny; the lecturer for my Thomas Aquinas course keeps bringing out the wax and the impression made in the wax as a way to demonstrate that the soul is not a thing added on to the body, but it’s also an arrangement image similar to the comic. At the same time, the intellectual soul for Thomas is both the “substantial form” of the body (the principle of its arrangement) and a “subsistent form”—a form that outlasts matter and has its own kind of existence apart from the form-matter combination (this apparently helps explain not just the immortality of the soul but also the ability for the soul to become reunited with a body during the resurrection). All of this is just desperation and probably a blatant misreading of Aristotle, who does seem to emphasize arrangement, organization and the apparent unity of the organism over other more abstract or elementary first principles.

What the pomo French philosopher Deleuze would do with the bricks and the arrangement is say that the contained bricks are straining to break off and become stray particles again while flows of other bricks are washing against the structure trying to glom onto it. These flows interact with the arrangement which is in the process of becoming an interpretation of itself. This process is never complete and cannot complete, because of the lack of finality of the death of the arrangement. In a play example, this would be like setting out to build a house and in the process of building the house realizing that the house is better suited to be a rocket ship and so building that out of the half-formed interpretation of the house. This is totally how Legos work, btw.

It may also be useful to point out that the idea I’m talking about, the Aristotelian account of the soul, isn’t opposed to nature or even in some sense “naturalistic” arguments. That is, there’s no reason why things like DNA or our chemical composition argue against or oppose the idea of a soul. (In fact, I’d also argue that accounts that posit “mechanistic” causes are based on unexamined premises, whereas in talking about form at all (as a metaphysically necessary distinction) Aristotle’s account of souls is more rigorous and philosophically precise.)

To be fair, I put “grows toward” and “decays away” in quotation marks, since they were your formulations and since their reality is exactly what I was wondering about. I think you’re probably right about how we mean the word “grow” (and “decay,” too).

But suppose the legos come and go, and reorient themselves apparently after some mostly but imperfectly consistent procedure. And suppose I have some attachment to some particular shape or arrangement of them—perhaps it is justifiable or functional, or perhaps not—which, roughly, comes and goes. I suppose I could call the approach “growth” and the receding “decay.” But what am I talking about except my attachment?

Or using the biological examples:
You often hear people speak of DNA with the metaphor of “blueprints,” but as I (quite poorly) understand it, this is notably inaccurate. The genetic information is not so much an image of your adult self, which is built and then maintained until entropy gets the better of it, as it is minute instructions along the lines of “bind this protein,” which do not clearly distinguish between the “growth” and the “decay.” The very same process accounts for both, and also for crippling defects and cancers that might destroy the organism.

I do think I’m quite naturally and justifiably attached to my current arrangement of parts, and to the usefulness of saying things like “might destroy the organism.” So I’m certainly not suggesting throwing that out. I’m just not settled on whether this reflects a fundamental reality, or a phenomenological one, or a merely functional/conventional one.

Joe: I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak on whether and to what extent those other folks are Aristotelians. It would seem that it’s in general harder than it looks to be an -ian of anyone, since it requires first to know what that person said, which is frequently pretty hard, and for ‘Stots particularly so. That said, De Anima does talk about a different kind of immortality and it is related to nous. Rest assured, however, that it in no way requires that the soul outlive the body or be separable from the body.

After a third reading of Robbie’s question, I’ll take another crack at a response: I think we can tell based on observation that things grow according to certain arrangements, and I think that the common observations of human beings, as collected in our speech, are a good starting point for our statements about this. But it seems like you wanted to focus more on what in our observations, as opposed to our common speeches, shows us that soul is present there, and I didn’t pick up on that immediately.

First, we see that certain living things produce other living things that look like them: maple trees produce seeds that produce maple trees. Their similarity in appearance shows us that there’s a similarity, and in fact a continuity, of form: you don’t get dogs growing from seeds or rocks growing in dolphins’ wombs. DNA, for instance, is the name of one of these structures; it too is a sign of the continuity of shape or form or look that’s consistent over generations. (We’re not worried about genetic mutations, say, in pointing to this underlying principle because the material isn’t the same between a parent and a child, or even a particular child and the particular adult he becomes. Somehow over the course of generations, that same form persists: it is at work being itself.)

Second, we note that living beings are in some way self-limiting. Aristotle distinguishes between fire and living things in De Anima by noting that fire grows as long as there is fuel it can burn. Living things, by contrast, do not grow unchecked, in every direction, when presented with food. Somehow the plant holds together as it grows downward for water and upward towards photosynthesis. They hold together, checking themselves, in order to persist in being themselves.

I believe “cross-posted” is the term people use in situations like this.

“I’m just not settled on whether this reflects a fundamental reality, or a phenomenological one, or a merely functional/conventional one.” A very fair statement of the question. That said, I do want to refine the account a little more. I’ll see what tomorrow can bring by way of a response.

I have a hard time reading either the desire for a kind of immortality or the desire to be useful into the motivation of the girl in the referenced XKCD comic.

The closest we have to textual evidence is the argument of the dude, who says, “No, [the bits of house that are in the bin] are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement.” So there’s a slight hint that the girl could, possibly, want her organs to contribute to the human equivalent of future spaceships and trains.

My reading of the comic, though, is that it is principally negative, in the sense that it is about removing the illusion of self-persistence and, therefore, removing the obstacle for organ donation.

I also think saying that Munroe felt “boldly transgressive” in denying a persistent, immaterial self is unfairly patronizing. It strikes me as far more likely, judging him by this and his other comics, that he simply considers belief in “arrangements” rather than immaterial souls to be true and beneficial as well as something that needs to be evangelized, as it is not universally shared. That the latter of these is true is quite obvious, removing any need for further justification of the writing of a tract like this one.

HB wrote:

“Somehow it holds that form within itself, or perhaps holds itself to this form. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to say that it grows or dies. Likewise wouldn’t be able to call it as this, at all.”

And in a later comment:

“Somehow over the course of generations, that same form persists: it is at work being itself.”

This was the kind of reasoning I used throughout college to try to understand and argue for the existence of things like souls or selves that were somehow different from matter. I wonder, six years out, if there is any truth in this focus on thises that is not related to man, language, and his perception. Much is frequently made of the necessity for there to be things that precede our ability to point at them and say this, yet the actual evidence for that seems to me to be entirely lacking.

When we say that the form of a tree persists throughout generations, we mean, of course, that what we consider to be the essential or even definitional characteristics of the tree reappear in subsequent generations, whereas the accidental characteristics continually change. Naturalists spend much energy trying to get our opinions about what is essential to match the agenda of the plants themselves, and continually revise these definitions. And DNA, of course, helps us see even more obviously what is actually the form of the tree: a provisional, temporary continuity of causes. There is no single thing that persists, rather a root cause that creates the long-term recurrence of many attributes of a thing. But there is no true stasis of thinghood: it’s just close enough, and the timeline of our own perception small enough, that we think of it as thing.

But from the perspective of thinghood, the lego house is as souled as a pile of legos as it is when it is a house, and our inclination to talk about the arrangement of the house but not all the arrangements that inevitably follow and never leave the bricks is pure, reflexive preference of our own perceptions and purposes. Absent this, all matter is quite equally and indifferently arranged and souled.

Nate:

On the poetic interpretation, I admit I have a hard time imagining what barriers there would be to organ donation, so it’s difficult for me to read one in the comic. On the order of principle, I’m only familiar with Jehovah’s Witnesses (I think). Are there others? The other barrier I can imagine is something like ignorance: people don’t want to think about death and thus sort of don’t get around to positively deciding to be organ donors. Thus, when they have their ignorance lifted, they can feel more comfortable examining the possibility of organ donation, such that they might decide to do it? Is this more what you mean?

Even then, the presentation of the comic makes the train of the girl’s reasoning seem to me both positive and negative, to use your terms. Specifically, the striking thing about the comic is how quickly the girl makes the entirely unstated connection from arrangement of legos, to arrangement of bodies, to a choice to make her arrangement continue in some fashion. Perhaps we can read some earlier conversation on organ donation into the comic, or some earlier resistance to it on her part, including possibly quasi-willful ignorance. Even if the last explanation were so, I feel that, after having this true thing revealed about the soul’s destructibility (and recall that Aristotle would agree with Munroe on this point), there’s a positive thrust that leads her to do what she does, distinct from the stripping away either of ignorance or a belief in the soul’s immortality. Put another way, even after we did all this good negative work, Robbie’s “why not?” explanation for organ donation seems pretty frail, and the context of the comic—this big reveal, this cataclysmic moment, in which she does all this theoretic work about connecting the destruction of form in general to destruction of humans to her destruction—puts that frailness further relief. The artist shows her doing this thing, not any number of others. Like I said, we can fault her or call her wrong, but the purely negative explanation seems inadequate to providing the simplest or the most complete explanation of the art.

(I think Munroe, like Lucretius, can take the teasing on the evangelistic streak in his materialism.)

As to your other concerns: those, too, seem like very fair statements of the problem. (I’m not certain I follow the reasoning of your last paragraph, if you mean to give souled a positive meaning. If you’re pointing to the inadequacy of that category by showing that it can apply to all matter, however, then that’s a likewise fair device.) It seems like both you and Robbie are pushing concerns about the metaphysical category of form (formal cause, thinghood, etc.), which has to be a living question for all people, I think. I’m not sure how to get at thinking together about them in this forum at this time. The DNA example you and Robbie both cite might be a starting point, but I suspect we really need to talk about the metaphysical questions, not the biology, there.

I’ll just say that understanding Aristotle’s thinking on the question of thinghood isn’t easy, but he does go into the question in a likewise fair manner. Maybe I’ll have the good luck of seeing a comic while reading the Metaphysics sometime soon.

Reading the comments, I agree with Nate (an honor you can most certainly decline-most do). I don’t see any connection to Aristotle, but was reminded of the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta where the soul is compared to fire, being merely an arrangement of conditions, not something existing independently. The caption, “Dad, where is Grandpa now?” strengthens that, since the presumed answer is nowhere, just like fire after it is extinguished is nowhere.

I also don’t see any relation to immortality. If you really want immortality, I guess you could side with Zhuang Zi and say death is a transformation of the arrangement of your matter (v. chapter 6), but I don’t see that in the comic. Getting rid of absurd fears about donating organs seems more to the point.

And, like Nate, I think we only say things have essential characteristics because we view them on a short time scale (and we often ignore exceptions). Most things have “family resemblances” and nothing more. Moreover, I also think nearly everything constantly changes and would count self-identity as a resemblance as well, which may be going farther than Nate.

But the real reason I wrote was to congratulate you on becoming a prospective partaker in immortality. So congratulations.

Nick,

Thanks! Due in March. Where are you these days? Any plans to come to our nation’s capital?

On the comic: I just don’t see any context for absurd fears in the text. Where are you getting this? Why do we suppose that the girl had them before?

On the metaphysics: Good to know some folks are reliable. It’s interesting to know about those other perspectives, although I should be clear that their connections to the comic are on the same level as I perceive Aristotle’s to be, namely, I’m asserting the connections because the comic reminded me of his account of the soul. For the record, Aristotle’s answer to the “where’s Grandpa?” question is likely to be “nowhere,” too, so it’s not really right to say that this response alone answers the question of whether the soul is more than simply arrangement, although it certainly is this, too. In fact, as I said above, for Aristotle it’s not ever going to be right to say that a soul would ever exist “independently” if you mean this to say “independent of the body.”

On immortality: it seems pretty clear to me that the immortality Aristotle’s speaking of, the sort that one might have by means of one’s children, or organs, is only a partial sort. To me, the obvious frailness of this thing we might call immortality underscores the very real destructibility of the soul, and indeed the necessary destruction of each of our souls. On why it might be correct in some sense to talk about this pale thing as immortality, after a fashion, well, that’s clearly not going to match up with Zuang Zi’s transformation.

I think your interpretation of the girl’s motives is not so different from mine, Nate. I agree that the lego lesson primarily serves to remove the obstacle. I only emphasized the altruism because I take it that the absence of an obstacle is not sufficient to account for a positive action. Presumably she’s ordinary enough to think, even fairly passively, that it’s a good thing to help somebody who needs it, and the “negative” force of obstacle-removing allows this otherwise dormant notion to be expressed in action.

And I think there’s something important to the larger conversation in your reference to the smallness of “the timeline of our own perception.”

Take, say, a dog and a bear. (Or whatever other two species you like.) The distinction is so obvious that the categories seem to define themselves, and doubting their reality seems absurd. But suppose you can line them up along with all of their dead ancestors, going back to their most recent common one, and only then commence your taxonomic effort. Perhaps you’ll concede that it’s impossible to separate the mass of animals into categories. Or perhaps you’ll categorize them, but it will be obvious to you that you’re making some arbitrary, or merely functional, decisions in order to do so.

I think more and more that if you could see the world as God sees it, everything would look like this. It doesn’t seem quite right to say non-differentiated; infinitely differentiated? In any case, “thinghood” looks different, I think. We’re like flatlanders, seeing only two-dimensional cross-sections of three-dimensional figures, and concluding things about them that are consequences of our limited perspective as much as they are of the things themselves.

I should confess, in case it wasn’t obvious, that my angle on this may be similar to Nick’s in that most of my doubt has been provoked by certain Eastern (especially Indian) thinkers. (Incidentally I think Zhuang Zi is great in a lot of ways but that his bearing here is more poetic than strictly philosophical.) The Buddhists basically reject this sort of “soul” (or at least most of them do, including the earliest), and even suggest that deeply penetrating this truth is central to ending one’s suffering; and most of the orthodox Indian schools take this to be nonsense. For myself, I don’t know which side to take, but I find both pretty compelling in different ways. (And I wrote some about the Buddhist position over here.)

Maybe I’ll try it like this.

Nate: “A provisional, temporary continuity of causes.” This explanation strikes me as a faulty and imprecise explanation of what’s happening in your example of DNA. What are these causes, exactly? Of what sort are they?

I think this question has bearing on Robbie’s “infinitely differentiated” idea. Robbie, would you say that this notion extends to individuals? That is, that the plant from ten minutes ago is not the same this as the plant right now? And, if so, why is it different?

No plans to come to DC anytime, though I might visit the mainland over Christmas vacation. I live in Honolulu now. I actually would like to visit, but haven’t had the chance.

Actually, I think the comic is talking about an idea of the soul (or lack thereof) similar to Buddhism or Hume (or Simmias from the “Phaedo”). I don’t see the Aristotle connection, but then again, I probably wouldn’t even if it was there.

The “absurd fears” are whatever fears that keep people from donating their organs. I think some people still identify themselves with their body even after they die. They can’t stand the thought of being in the grave and eaten by worms. Similarly, they can’t stand the idea of being divided up and given to others.

And yeah, Robbie and I are probably coming from the place, though I would say Zhuang Zi is more philosophical than poetical—though of course he writes beautifully, and surprisingly clearly.

I have to say I don’t see the appeal of immortality (except in Zhuang Zi’s sense, which I don’t actually think is relevant to the comic). I’m not sure xkcd does either. Any case, you’re certainly right Zhuang Zi’s immortality is not similar to Aristotle’s. I just think it fits immortality-through-organ-donation better than Aristotle’s.

But whatever. It’s only a comic strip, and we already knew we liked different philosophers.

Robbie: Your explanation helps me understand better what you meant: I think I agree with every aspect of your interpretation of the comic.

Nick: You wrote: “Moreover, I also think nearly everything constantly changes and would count self-identity as a resemblance as well, which may be going farther than Nate.” I agree emphatically that self-identity is a resemblance, though I am a fairly recent convert to this position.

hb: I’ll address only your second comment, though it is not a comment on the interest or worth of your first. Just seems simpler.

“‘A provisional, temporary continuity of causes.’ This explanation strikes me as a faulty and imprecise explanation of what’s happening in your example of DNA. What are these causes, exactly? Of what sort are they?”

I think I could better answer this question if I had any idea what you found faulty or imprecise about my explanation. Unfortunately, that brief sentence of mine is a rather powerful personal code: it has so much meaning bound up in it to me that I’m not sure how useful I’m able to be in fully explicating what I mean by it to another party. I’ll hazard into some very general pictures to try to illustrate my meaning.

I mean to say that the expanding ripples following a pebble thrown into a body of water have what I might venture to call formal similarity. That first ripple causes a dozen others, very like it, to procreate outwards. But there’s no thinghood to the ripples: they’re just a chain of causes, with resemblances created by the particularities of their causation: mathematical relationships that hold for a while, then fade into noise.

DNA is like this, too, though it is, of course, remarkable for the strength of its thrust forward through time. It can cause so many recurrences of similarities that it can look like self-persistence on a short time-line, though from any broader perspective it begins to look exactly like Robbie’s God’s-eye.

Robbie, would you say that this notion extends to individuals? That is, that the plant from ten minutes ago is not the same this as the plant right now? And, if so, why is it different?

I think so, yes. Or at least maybe. Why it might be different is because it has changed, even if imperceptibly, as it is always doing, and I’m not sure I can point to a permanent and unchanging substratum without invoking a kind of essence whose existence I can’t defend to my own satisfaction. When you step into a river a second time, is it the same river? Well, the water’s all different now, and not only that but the bank has eroded, the course shifted, and so on. It’s pretty close, since we’re talking about a human time-scale, and the “two” rivers are not wholly unrelated—the river won’t change course utterly randomly, or turn into a hippopotamus—but does anything justify my saying it’s the same, apart from its being in most respects similar, which it won’t be if I wait long enough? That’s where I’m not sure. And the plant is the same as this (as am I).

Now, it’s not at all clear to me that you can actually go around living as a human being perceiving the world this way. (Or seeing the world as God does, or whatever.) I think utility likely demands that we make concessions to the scale of our perception. It’s just not obvious to me whether permanent self-identity (or plant-identity) reflects something more deeply true or just this practical concession.

And Nick wrote:

…though I would say Zhuang Zi is more philosophical than poetical…

I didn’t mean to suggest that he is merely poetic, as if that were somehow reductive, or that he has no philosophical substance— only that his bearing on this particular conversation seems to me more a poetic resonance than a philosophical participation. I do suppose we could identify something like a “Zhuang Zi” position—the identification of which would probably be contentious—but if we then turned to him for something like an argument for that position, we would mostly have anecdotes and poetic juxtapositions. (Which I don’t say to detract at all from him. Those anecdotes and poetic juxtapositions are powerful and provocative and often beautiful.)

What to my mind has more obvious philosophical bearing here is some Buddhist suttas (as the one you mentioned, for instance), and maybe some Śaṇkara or somebody, which in fact address and argue over this topic more-or-less directly.

Nick,

Reading back over what I just wrote, where I said that I did not mean to suggest that Zhuang Zi has no philosophical substance, I suddenly began to wonder whether he himself would not object to my suggesting that he does have philosophical substance. (Nevertheless, I think he does.)

——

Thinking more about this, the two authors who in my mind are most plainly, explicitly, and provocatively arguing over this question are Nagarjuna and Śaṇkara— the former being a Buddhist, the latter a Vedantin (a school of orthodox Hinduism) whose writing is sometimes credited with essentially killing Buddhism in India (and who has also been called a crypto-Buddhist himself).

The big thing at stake for them is the Ātman, sometimes misleadingly translated as “soul” but which really means “self,” and which is a major preoccupation of Indian religion and philosophy. The Buddhists reject it utterly, which is rather heretical to the orthodox schools. But in their discussions Nagarjuna and Śaṇkara both speak more broadly of all permanent substrata, and not merely this one.

For Nagarjuna (and other Buddhists), the principle of “śunya” (translated as “emptiness,” which of course fails to suggest its complexity and subtlety for Nagarjuna) means that nothing has “svabhava,” or “self-being.”

What is to me the must powerful attempt at rejecting this claim, though I’m still not sure quite what to think of it, is Śaṇkara’s, who divides the schools of Buddhists into three degrees of nihilism (Nagarjuna would be the most nihilistic of all), and makes many arguments against them, including the claim that the continuity of the self is so plainly evident, manifests itself so readily and irrefutably to us, that we can’t but believe in it, that it precedes reason, that we can’t even trick ourselves out of believing it, and that the Buddhists who say they don’t believe it must be liars. What else is so plainly evident to me as that I am the same self from moment to moment, and which I would nevertheless doubt? And what ought I to think about people who claim that they do?

Anyway, I don’t mean rudely to go on about some texts that we don’t all have in common, so I won’t indulge myself in that further. What I meant for it to add is this idea, which I incidentally got from Śaṇkara, that in fact I do act and think as though I believe in these permanent essences, and I can hardly imagine doing otherwise, and convincing myself that they’re not more deeply real is akin to convincing myself that physical space is actually Lobachevskian. My meager Euclidean spatial perception remains what it is.

And so I still don’t know what to think about it.

(And actually, maybe I got some of that from Hume, too.)

Took some time off, re-read the whole thing.

Joe: I would quibble with Deleuze insofar as you characterize him as saying the “other” particles want to glom on to the living thing of their own accord. Some particles, or other ensouled arrangements, undoubtedly do this, while other sorts of “other particles” must be taken in by the living thing and suited to its own ends, thus conditioning it, but remaining subordinate in some way to its arranging principle. I get how he (you) try to account for this by the term “interpretation of itself,” but I can’t help but privilege, in a metaphysical sense, the being that is the living thing over the free radicals, say, that seek it out because, in spite of being endlessly conditioned, the ensouled thing (the composite) does seem to have a different and stronger principle of motion and rest from that of the glomming things. I do this because even in your play example the altered, conditioned, being remains in some fashion in the house-rocket. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t admit to having some real difficulty with species; on the individual level, the substantiality of the house seems manifestly worth distinguishing.

On the interpretation of the comic: The text seems to imply a large gap between panels two and four. I’ve tried to get at how big this gap is in earlier comments. It doesn’t seem to me to be doing justice to the text to say that positive causes like “why not,” or “presumably she’s ordinary enough to think, even fairly passively, that it’s a good thing to help somebody who needs it,” are commensurate to this gap, which is played to such effect by the artist. In other words, something one holds “fairly passively,” seems, on its face, inadequate to explain why a person would get up, literally, in this case, off of one’s duff following a conversation about Legos and go register for organ donation. (I hang this interpretation on the fact that she’s still holding the Lego in panel three, at the DMV.) I made fun of Munroe—lightheartedly—for making this such a big fucking point, but he is actually drawing a situation with a big fucking point. That’s what he does, all the damn time, in his comics. He loves taking a seemingly small work of the understanding and pointing to its cosmic consequences. And here he has a character bring the thought from small to cosmic back to small again. And that’s meaningful. Or at least more so than “fairly passive,” since the girl’s actions are, at very least, fairly active, in that she has to do something that most people only do casually, when they’re doing something else, namely renewing their driver’s license every ten years, immediately after this conversation. I mean, how many people do ANYTHING in their daily lives based on conversations and arguments, let alone arguments about such abstract things? Munroe’s entire aesthetic is about doing crazy shit in our daily lives based on the great power of the understanding (and eros), and it just doesn’t seem right to value his particular artistic choices less than they deserve.

I’ve asserted that this positive thrust—to do this thing, at this time—has a particular meaning that is illustrative of a certain thing said by some old philosophy dude. This dude didn’t have all the hang-ups Munroe is trying to puncture. He agrees with Munroe about a very specific thing. And he describes a larger phenomemon of which I assert this girl’s choice is part. Or so at least I’ve argued. I’ve yet to see a fuller account of the text, although there’s much to argue about that old dude’s opinions. (And those who might doubt the possibility of a five-panel comic—no one who’s commented, surely—to convey a depth of meaning like unto what I’m asserting can suck it. I’m pretty well experienced in the literature.)

Nate: No need to worry about personal code or personal meanings of things: we know each other fairly well. I wanted to ask this particular question because it seemed like your personal account was skipping over some rather hard work to get to where you wanted to go poetically. To that end, I asked what causes were at work in the DNA and of what sort they were. The closest you got to answering this was, “But there’s no thinghood to the ripples: they’re just a chain of causes, with resemblances created by the particularities of their causation: mathematical relationships that hold for a while, then fade into noise.” I hope you won’t think it forward of me to say that this adjective ‘mathematical’ is a hand-waving on your part for a sort of work you’re not entirely comfortable with. I could supply lots of possible things that you might mean by it (particles hitting each other, maybe?) but I’m not sure that would be useful (I’m only too ready to use Aristotelian language here, but you’ve already disavowed that, for yourself, in this thread). So, let me ask again, what is it that you mean when you said, “a chain of causes?” What are those causes, specifically? Of what sort are they?

Robbie: You said, “And the plant is the same as this (as am I).” I suspect that, in some important sense, what you mean by “I,” and I’m interpreting that as, “my self,” is not in the same category as the plant, since the “self” is a wholly contingent thing, composed by a particular compositional act of a thinking thing. I do want to respond to that thread from Google Reader, where you asked about the difference between a soul and a self, but I think I can only do it here, and only after some time to write an answer. Your quoted statement reminded me of that earlier thread, and how I don’t think that Aristotle, for instance, or me, for another, would call the “I” as you were using it, a substance.

“I’m not sure I can point to a permanent and unchanging substratum without invoking a kind of essence whose existence I can’t defend to my own satisfaction.” Another fair statement. Your further refine your concern below, it seems, when discussing Śaṇkara. I’m not sure I’d agree with his critique, not least because I don’t know the men whom he’d call liars. It does seem to me a problem to assert that becoming is, while being is not. If someone were to say, becoming is, they’d rather clearly be contradicting themselves. Thus, before even opening one’s mouth, one would have to assert that being is, in order to cut off becoming at all from itself, substantiating it through speech. Śaṇkara and I are describing it in practical (though to my mind differently so) terms, but I think the question can be answered on the level of things themselves. It’s not clear, for instance, where Heraclitus actually came down on this question.

For what it’s worth, I don’t at all think that this question leads one down solid ground on this inquiry: “What else is so plainly evident to me as that I am the same self from moment to moment, and which I would nevertheless doubt?” The self just isn’t a great candidate for a substance.

I mean, honestly: that’s what he does.

HB: So, let me ask again, what is it that you mean when you said, “a chain of causes?” What are those causes, specifically? Of what sort are they?

These are physical causes, of the kind cataloged via observation and careful inference. All of my cells are doing something right now: moving, growing, reproducing, etc. The sum of their actions causes the me of a moment from now. Because these actions all are in respect to properties and physical laws, there is continuity of a sort—thus a chain—between these two mes.

hb:
Deleuze (he actually writes with another guy, Guattari, together referred to as D&G) is a pretty deep cat with a whole science (that he punningly calls “nomadology”!) of substance. He employs a whole slew of precise technical terms to explain what he’s talking about. It literally sounds insane until you see the sense in it, and then it becomes difficult to think *not* in his terms. What’s great about Deleuze is that he saves substance by investigating what living things _do_ as they approach and fall away from “being” something. In the Aristotelian approach and certainly in the neo-Aristotelian approach the substance is determined by establishing an arbitrary focal point for the being of the organism.

As an example, Thomas is happy to assert that there is a proportion between the soul and the body, and this proportion is preserved in the soul after the death of the body (the soul can just jump into its new, proportionate body at the resurrection!). This doesn’t make sense, though, because *the body constantly changes*! If there is a proportion between the soul and the body’s _last state_, chances are that would be one feeble, grouchy, senile old soul at the resurrection, right? Since this obviously isn’t what Thomas wants, the proportion that holds between the soul and the body is an invariant proportion that exists across an entire life, from the 40th day after conception (!) until death. This is a proportion that can’t be changed by mental illness or loss of limbs. So, basically, the “essential” proportion between the soul and the body is established by looking at an able-bodied 30-year-old. This is where you get the critique of Aristotle and the doctrine of substance as promoting the “normative ideal”.

So Deleuze’s big move is to associate substance (although he never uses this word; he refers to “assemblages”) with the “line of variation”, the kind of unity that a random walk has _in retrospect_. So, first, life is seen as a series of furtive motions guided mainly by desire. In terms of large-scale evolution, his view lines up with cladistics, on the individual scale with Freudianism. Then, Deleuze has this stuff about “the virtual” as the pre-existence of the line of variation and a sort of backwards causality that I make sense of by considering that you can’t know what a thing (an object, a person, a acountry, etc) is until you see where it goes and what it does.

Finally, he has this really trippy thing about “double-becoming” that is illustrated by the example of the orchid-wasp, a wasp that tries to mate with an orchid that has evolved to look like a wasp mate. His point with double-becoming is that each of the pair has to interpret (my term) the other into itself in order to become the other. An example that works for me is the drag queen who has to change what it is to be a woman as in order to “become” a woman; so “woman” changes and “man” changes in the drag queen. Anyway, this is how I/Deleuze would account for the house-rocket ship. It’s not like it’s really a house and then it’s just a house reassembled into a rocket ship, even if the rocket ship is very house-like. It’s a rocket ship interpreted by the house. I figure that human lives are similar, for example the way that 20-somethings have to interpret themselves into an interpretation of adulthood.

Oh, and speaking of pedigrees, Deleuze gets his philosophy from Spinoza, who gets it from Hobbes, who gets it from Lucretius and Epicurus. Every Aristotle text begins with a cursory attack on the atomists before addressing the serious and worthy disagreements with the Platonists. Of course, it’s actually the atomists who have the strong position that isn’t easily displaced. It’s the same fundamental argument spiraling down through the ages.

I’m staying out of this fight in this forum at this time, but—

Of course, it’s actually the atomists who have the strong position that isn’t easily displaced.

Says the atomist!

I hadn’t noticed the block still being in her hand, HB, which does seem important. I think I’d still be inclined to see her gesture as more humanitarian than immortality-seeking, though; probably because the latter seems so grandiose, and also to undermine the point of the analogy. She doesn’t reuse the legos because she so wants the house to live on in some small way, but because the rocket is a worthwhile thing itself.

I suspect that, in some important sense, what you mean by “I,” and I’m interpreting that as, “my self,” is not in the same category as the plant, since the “self” is a wholly contingent thing, composed by a particular compositional act of a thinking thing.

We might be meaning different things by our words, but it’s not totally clear to me why I ought not to consider that my body and my awareness and the plant (and everything else) are wholly contingent things, “composed by a particular compositional act,” which might be better described as a complex and ever-shifting aggregation of conditions.

It does seem to me a problem to assert that becoming is, while being is not. If someone were to say, becoming is, they’d rather clearly be contradicting themselves. Thus, before even opening one’s mouth, one would have to assert that being is, in order to cut off becoming at all from itself, substantiating it through speech. Śaṇkara and I are describing it in practical (though to my mind differently so) terms, but I think the question can be answered on the level of things themselves. It’s not clear, for instance, where Heraclitus actually came down on this question.

It might not be quite right to represent Nagarjuna’s or the Buddha’s view with the claim that “becoming is” but “being is not.” They certainly wouldn’t put it this way, and precise understanding of the language presents the problem you suggest.

The more likely language of those guys would be that both positions, “being is” and “being is not,” (or “the river is” and “the river is not,” or “I am” and “I am not”) lead to problems, and the solution is in the “Middle Way” of the doctrine of dependent origination, or of the concept of śunya.

Extrapolations of these things might use some language like “all is becoming, nothing is being,” to something like the effect of “all is flux,” but there is of course the suggestion of being in becoming, so perhaps that language is unhelpful. A more faithful use of traditional language would be to say, “All is dukkha.” This is actually the first of the Four Noble Truths, all of which concern “dukkha,” which is usually translated as “suffering” but which, since it describes the entire cosmos, and is not necessarily even always unpleasant, is perhaps better understood as something like “tumult,” or “unsteadiness.” (These might be more inline with the suggestion of the etymology, too.) I don’t think there’s any stake in the word “becoming,” but just the rejection of permanent essences or “own-beings” of things.

(And the suitability of language as a tool for understanding such things, or its propensity to introduce errors, or to impede more immediate perception of reality—long questioned by the Taoists and others—becomes more explicitly addressed later in the Buddhist tradition, as famously in Zen.)

Method wrote:

…Deleuze gets his philosophy from Spinoza, who gets it from Hobbes…

Incidentally, I was told by a tutor whose word on the matter I’m inclined to trust that at some time or other there was some speculation about Spinoza’s access to books from India, or his access to people who had access to books from India, as some of his writing bears such a remarkable likeness to some aspects of Vedanta. (About 30 seconds of Googling didn’t turn up much of note, but there were a number of hits for “Spinoza Vedanta” and “Spinoza Brahman” and similar things.)

Though this same tutor also talked a lot about the similarities between Śaṇkara’s discussion of Brahman and Aristotle’s of the prime mover— and a lot of tales attributed to Aesop turn out to appear in extremely ancient Sanskrit versions, too. So maybe the world’s not so easily divided up, after all, in any era.

Robbie:
Anything’s possible. From the Hobbes/Spinoza course I took last semester it seemed that Spinoza was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes, Maimonides, Machiavelli and Epicurus, as well as the tenets of Calvinism. The professor was arguing for the strong inspiration of Hobbes, both for the political and the metaphysical ideas. Without definitive evidence I would suspect parallel development. One thing I’ve been struck by with the history of thought is the extent to which the greats *hadn’t* read each other.

I, like Mr. Sullivan, am largely going to remain a wallflower in this discussion due to a lack of available time but I do have one serious question and one superfluous question I would like to make.

Superfluous Question:
How is it possible for so many bright, witty people posting on this thread to not have already made the legos-logos pun?

Serious Question with preamble and postscript:
I don’t want to dwell on the technical operations of DNA because that would place a metaphor over the true meat of this discussion, but when other people brought up DNA it raised a question to me which I would like to hear how HB and others answer.

Does the phenomenon of cancer illustrate the concept of the behavior of matter directed toward a goal?

Cancer is defined as unregulated cell proliferation. For the body to function as a whole its cells need to work well with their neighbors. Unchecked proliferation of a single cell takes that cell outside of that homeostatic, neighborly work. This frequently becomes deleterious for the body as a united organism to such as an extent that we often speak of a tumor as something wholly other to the rest of the body from which is came. Interestingly, the body itself changes its behaviro toward these cells and walls them off if not directly trying to destroy them. Despite this divorce the tumor cell is still a human cell with the same DNA et cetera. Its only difference is its propensity to divide and by doing so - conquer. I wonder whether a tumor is an exception to HB’s concept of growth toward a goal that proves its rule.

Martin,

I admit that the pun did occur to me when I wrote, in comment #1 above, “if there is no girl guiding the legos according to her will….”

Also, when I alluded to cancer above, I thought that far from being the “exception that proves the rule,” it rather was illustrative of the rule more properly understood: the same natural mechanisms indifferently bring about “growth” toward an ideal, “decay” from the ideal, and defects and cancers that are destructive of the ideal. And thus it’s not so clear to me that the ideal is more fundamentally real than our predisposition to favor it.

Robbie,

I don’t think that many people would argue that a tumor is not a real biological product obeying biological rules, but I think few would dispute that it is a departure from what is supposed to happen. Fundamentally, are you questioning whether the notion of “what is supposed to happen” is a form of sentimentality? Is the notion of health itself privileged because of a similar predisposition toward favoring it?

Martin,

Calling it “sentimentality” may come off unnecessarily disparaging, since I don’t doubt that we need it to live ordinary human lives; but, basically, yes: that is what I’m wondering. What, precisely, is the basis for that “supposed to”? Should we believe it reflects a fundamental reality that is prior to our cognitions?

I think that we should believe that health or growth reflects a fundamental reality.

I think to argue otherwise calls us to reject our experiences; we know what health and decay are as concepts because of what we experience in the world. While I surely grant that perceptions can be faulty it seems brazen to reject them altogether without first having a very good reason. In short I don’t think that it is always wise to question beliefs simply because they are capable of being questioned. We should have another reason for doing so first, such as seemingly contrary perceptions.

That said, is there an alternative way of perceiving the world which rejects growth and decay as fundamental realities which has good evidence in its favor over and above simply being an alternative logical possibility?

Is there “an alternative way of perceiving the world […] which has good evidence in its favor”? I don’t know, which is why I don’t quite mean to be rejecting one position here and advocating another one, but just expressing some degree of reservation.

I tried to describe something of the contour of that uncertainty above, but if it remains unclear, perhaps it would be helpful to quote something I wrote over here about Buddhism, since whatever doubts I have about this were mostly provoked by certain texts from (and from near to) India, and maybe primarily Buddhist ones (though some others, too):

Perhaps the central metaphysical claim of Buddhism is that of impermanence, or of conditioned and dependently-arisen nature. Take the life-span of a table: you have dirt, then tree, then lumber, then table, then scrap and firewood or termite food and dust. The start- and end-points here are functional, but otherwise arbitrary, the “transformation” being basically continuous and infinite in both directions. It is for practical considerations that we draw a box around part of that span, take it to be a discrete unity, and call it a table. But this is a purely conventional assertion and not a reflection of the most fundamental reality.

To put it another way: You can give the river a name, but the water is always moving, the banks always eroding, the path and boundaries always shifting, with no permanent substratum giving it unity through time. In the language of Buddhism, to assert that there is thus no river is nihilism (the same term is sometimes translated as annihilationism); to assert that there really is a river, a permanent unity, is eternalism. For the Buddha, the truth of his teaching is neither nihilism nor eternalism, but the “middle way.” And both nihilism and eternalism are manifestations of clinging — of attempting to reify and make permanent what is conditioned, dependently-arisen, impermanent — and lead to suffering.

It is this understanding that leads to the so-called “denial of the self,” which is more a denial of the permanent substratum, the unity of the Self. I am an aggregate, too, like the table or the river. I am a heap of cells and tissues and desires and cravings and habits and so on. And it is quite easy to deny that the person in a childhood photograph is the same me. I’ve inherited a lot from him, to be sure, but it’s not hard to say that the “I” is different. And though it’s much harder to say this of myself yesterday, the line is arbitrary.

Now, as a simple matter of fact, as a matter of living as a human being in the world, I find that I do believe in the table and the river and perhaps especially in the real unity that I call myself. And so, insofar as I believe in those things, I also believe in the reality of growth toward, and decay away, and health and so on. It’s just not clear to me why I believe in them, and if I do merely because it is useful, or because it a necessary feature of awareness, or because it is in fact fundamentally true, even prior to and apart from any awareness. The Buddha, at least, seems to suggest that if I could lift this cognitive veil and perceive (or intuit?) the most fundamental reality, I would be enlightened. I have no idea if that’s a bunch of hooey or what, but if I try with my meager resources to imagine what it might be like, it sure sounds like some sort of impersonal, naturalistic god-vision. It doesn’t seem human to me, and I’m not so compelled that I’ll spend the rest of my life in meditation trying to attain it, but neither have I been able to justify my contrary belief to my own satisfaction.

Now that I’ve re-read some of the comments after being pulled back here by Martin, I want to add, in belated response to Method:

I wouldn’t discount parallel development, either. What I meant to suggest by saying that the world can’t be so neatly divided up in any era was not just that there has been more exchange between relatively isolated peoples than we often suppose (which is certainly true), but also that human beings tend to think the same sorts of thoughts, wherever and whenever they happen to be, and they often go surprisingly far in very similar directions.

The same tutor I alluded to above (who is known as something of an Aristotle/Aquinas guy) claimed that he routinely asks students in the EC program, after reading Śaṅkara with them, whether they were disappointed. He explained that he thinks some people might expect some sort of hippie-dippy “Eastern” esoteric mystical stuff, and are surprised to find what he half-jokingly called the Hindu Aquinas. But of course those people would be disappointed: there are atomists and materialist atheists and dogmatists and scriptural fundamentalists and mystics everywhere, and all are represented even within Sanskrit literature alone.

(None of our precept was disappointed, FYI.)

Martin wrote: I think that we should believe that health or growth reflects a fundamental reality.

I think to argue otherwise calls us to reject our experiences; we know what health and decay are as concepts because of what we experience in the world.

We use growth and decay as principles in interpreting the world because they are so near to our own experience. We are born into the world in a body that rapidly changes, making us steadily more like the adult humans caring for us. We will never be exactly like them, but we will share an amazing array of commonalities. We see abstracted diagrams of these commonalities in anatomy books. We discover, later, that the bewilderingly complicated machinery of our bodies are controlled to a relatively precise degree by DNA, a code that perpetuates common traits in a body and in a species. It’s not perfect, of course: things go wrong with these operations all the time, as in cancers and birth defects and so forth. And its code actually appears quite mutable give a longer timeline.

In short: our own personal growth toward and decay from something ends up being an illusion: there’s nothing that antecedes the working arrangement of our bodies, nothing that resides afterward, and nothing save causal continuity that makes them the same at one moment as they are in the next. An end for one to grow toward or decay from ends up being nothing more than a rough and ultimately inaccurate way of seeing ourselves. It holds a certain usefulness, but constantly fails when interpreted strictly.

“In short: our own personal growth toward and decay from something ends up being an illusion: there’s nothing that antecedes the working arrangement of our bodies, nothing that resides afterward, and nothing save causal continuity that makes them the same at one moment as they are in the next. An end for one to grow toward or decay from ends up being nothing more than a rough and ultimately inaccurate way of seeing ourselves. It holds a certain usefulness, but constantly fails when interpreted strictly.”

I must just axiomatically disagree because I don’t see how this paragraph is connected to its predecessor. That’s not a criticism of Nate at all, but I think the result of an incommensurability of our thought.

I want to keep talking about this, but I don’t know how to do so productively.

I would argue strongly against any suggestion that our respective thoughts are incommensurate, if only to defend my own experience: I was once a passionate defender of the forms and of beings and became convinced, over time, due to contradictory evidence, that these beliefs were not tenable. The road between those two thoughts, at least, has steps that can be examined and traversed.

I may not, however, be the person to argue this. Robbie’s comment may be the more fruitful one to examine, as I consider myself to be in at least broad agreement with his point here.

Lately I’ve seen a few people on facebook link to a 10-minute cartoon produced by the National Film Board of Canada (!) about what is presented as an ontological conundrum, and which might bear (if somewhat obliquely) on this conversation. Sci-fi bonus: it involves a hypothetical matter teleportation machine!

It’s over here.

What a chilling cartoon. It’s kind of a masterpiece, really, for a lot of reasons.

SPOILER — don’t read the following comments ‘til you’ve watched the cartoon. It’s only ten minutes. You can do it.

The one part that left me scratching my head a bit was the decision to have both scientists in the delay-destruction-by-five-minutes scenario believe themselves to be the authentic (copied) Scientist. I grant that both would have the feeling of authenticity, but wouldn’t the original have the memory of getting out of refrigerator #1? (Am I misreading this? Do you think the original knows himself to be the original and simply lies to try to preserve his life?) Shouldn’t the tension between what that scientist knows to be true — that he is the original, self-damned version — and what he now feels to be true — that regardless of history, he knows himself to be the real scientist — be an essential part of this narrative?

Update, and continued spoiler.

On watching the video again, the order is very clear. Both scientists in the five-minute destruction scenario first argue that each is the original one, due—I infer—to his feeling of being authentic. Only when the narrator says that five minutes are up does each suddenly switch his position and argue that he is in fact the copy, due to his desire not to die.

To me, this still seems strange for the reasons I mention above.

The same thing occurred to me, Nate, but I think the only hint either man would have is whether, when walking out of his “refrigerator,” he noticed the other one to his right or his left. If the two were oriented to be facing each other, or back to back, it’s not clear how they could know at all, unless there’s some otherwise obvious difference in the appearance of the devices. The point being that in the moment just before the (originally planned) annihilation of the “original,” both men are exactly the same, and it takes some extra observation after the fact for either one to deduce which he “really” is. (And the reality of the distinction is suspect.)