Filed under: David Hume, Joseph Flanagan | Tags: emergence, Joseph Flanagan, probability, self
The expression of my individual experience requires that I engage in general or universal explanations consisting of relations and correlations. If any attempt at reflecting on myself requires the use of general facts to articulate my individual experience, then my experience is largely the same (in terms of expression) as others’ experiences. In order to claim something, such as the assertion that I am only a single possibility or the result of an intricate solution to a problem, then I must draw on universal understandings of possibilities and solutions. My common sense reasoning can provide the data needed to evaluate a problem of emergence (in this case, how to flourish or grow in the world), but in order to express this problem, I must appeal to universals, such as the process of flourishing and what it means to grow.
Physicians have meticulously calculated charts and dates of how to best solve the problem of simply growing by taking the average of a large group of children in the past, and finding the most efficient interim between shots and checkups as a child. The only way I can speak of “flourishing” or “solving the problem of survival” is by appealing to these generalities or averages, and assuming that the way I solved the problem, or the way the problem was solved for me (as I was unable to take care of myself as a child) was to take the general method that works for most, and apply it to my individual experience. The same process is at work in my attempts to claim that I am merely a single possibility in an endless list of possible selves. By using words such as “individual” and “possible,” I am using explanatory generalities (common understandings or comprehensions of the words) in order to articulate my seemingly individual experience, rather than expressing my solution to survival in a unique way, free from universal preconceptions.
My contrasting of individual instances from events governing the specific instance was faulty. By individual instances, I was referring to particular points of time, whereas events governing the instance were the amalgamation of instances that led to or caused another specific instance. However, to highlight an “instance” is impossibly vague, for any instance can be divided into infinite instances, such as in the parable of Zeno’s arrow. Additionally, an amalgamation of instances is not only arbitrary in its composition (when did the first cause of an event happen?), but any answer to this question is ultimately subject to the same Xenoian scrutiny. By assuming cause and effect, I was not only overlooking how this could not only lower the chances of an event happening or not happening, as a particular setup is (generally) more prone to occur than another different setup of events, but this overlooking also rejects probability as a whole, entailing that events happen because of other events, not because of random happenstance. For instance, if my claim is that my self is the probable solution to a series of problems, then the problems I initially face after birth largely shape the way I will or can solve them. Further, the events that set up my birth into a Western hospital required wars over land disputes, years of research and development, as well as the incentive to build the hospital in the first place. If I were to continue this path, it would assume a primary first event, from which all events happen prior to or because of its existence. Probability, then, only factors in to the possibility of that single event to even occur, or to occur in the particular way in which it did.If I were to express how probability is responsible for my development, I would need to appeal to universal understandings of probability and experience, as well as find a way to reconcile the problems in distinguishing instances from processes, and processes from instances.
Probability is one of the most perplexing processes of the human experience, likely due to its intimate relationship with our experience. The sheer magnitude of which we overlook our willingness to take probability as a meaningful quality is of extreme importance. The only way in which one might legitimately attach any degree of importance or significance to an event is to acknowledge its sheer improbability, never anything more than an individual possibility. In order to satisfy our insatiable desire for meaning within our world, we confuse these possibilities with meaningful acts worth analyzing, reflecting upon, and serving as an accessible platform for common sensical truth claims.
Flanagan claims, “Any given plant is just one of an endless range of possible solutions to the problem of emergence and survival within a physical and chemical environment” (Flanagan 103). If a plant is simply a solution to a problem, and not a purposeful being in itself (outside of its ability to complement its environment of other possibilities) then how does this translate into the human experience, who are also a part of the natural world? The chance of our births happening exactly as such, in the particular time and place to a particular person are unimaginably low. What insights into meaning within the human experience does this shift from truth criteria placed wholly within the world of immediate experience to wholly within the world of probability produce? If no event in the world was ever meant to happen, but happened of mere chance, why should any one moment have a regard as more or less significant than another moment?
Surely there are events that are unique in their own right, such as a 100th birthday, or the birth of a child, or breaking your hand on a bike ride. These events are just as much up to probability as any other, but they are unique within one’s life as milestones or particularly pleasant, unpleasant, or simply memorable. To search for meaning within the question, “Why did I break my hand?” beyond the insight of mere chance is to fabricate a world of meaning for self-fulfillment or peace of mind; something caused this, we’re not alone or stranded in our world. When I think of the two choices with seriousness, the option to fabricate a world of meaning rather than acknowledging omnipresent probability is on the contrary less comforting. As Jean-Paul Sartre stated, “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” I am comforted knowing that each event is merely up to probability, for probability is a comforting process to invest one’s mind to. It appeases the unpleasant times by removing agency to the event, and the pleasant times are even more so, simply because of the sheer luck that the moment happened to involve a pleasant experience, when it could just have as (un)likely have happened to involve unpleasant ones.
If the parallel between the probability of a plants emergence is directly applicable to the emergence of human life, what problems of emergence and survival have I adapted to, and had the problems consisted of another set of possibilities, how might I be a totally different being in the world? To begin, the number of variables determining my first experiential moments are inexhaustible: whether or not I was born in a hospital or into a dumpster, the country and society into which I began, the position I came out of the womb, the skill of the doctor to not drop me on the ground, or the fact that the doctor decided to show up to work, etc. Even more, there is a very common debate within contemporary societies about when exactly a person’s life begins (in regard to abortion positions). As far as I can tell, my earliest memories that are easily recalled are from when I was supposedly about three years old. I have no recollection of ever being a fetus in a womb or having been born, but I was by definition alive at both times. What processes did I adapt to or assimilate during this time of unconscious consciousness? What solutions did I adapt to manifest, like the plant growing towards the sun?
The most primary process I probably adapted to make sense of the world around me would have been, like Virgil, the struggle to see, and not simply look. The difference is primarily the use (or not) of interpretation. To look is to simply have visual input, whereas the ability to see entails the creation of depth perception and the differentiation of objects from the raw data from looking. This process allows me to differentiate the letters (at least in Latin-based languages) in my own name, then in other words, then in sentences, then I learned how to translate my thoughts into letters like I am doing now, silently typing, with no linguistic or visual references of any kind. This process is specifically tuned to the location of my birth, and had I been born in another location, I might only recognize another set of visual linguistic clues, thus changing the process with which I process my thoughts. For as far as I can tell, I primarily think in English, unless I am intentionally trying to fit into another natural language, like Spanish or French, or an artificial language, like logic or HTML; but doing so requires a specific effort, and the results are usually a translation of my thoughts in my birth language of English, simply because I adapted to solve the problem of communication within my primary environment. The fact that I grew up thinking in English and not Chinese (or thinking at all!) was purely an instance of probability, and has no significance or implication of preference.
Another primary process needed in order to function in my environment that came after seeing but before reading was the ability to form sounds with my vocal chords. By learning how to cry, I was able to notify other humans that had learned to differentiate a baby’s cry from Mozart that I was in need of something. By mimicking the sounds I heard and attributing various meanings to them, I was able to form words and eventually sentences. Additionally, as I grew older and more adapted, I was able to distinguish the voice of my family from other voices, and voices from music, and music from jackhammers. However, this differentiation itself is learned, and what distinguishes voices from music from jackhammers is an arbitrary process, learned in order to function and flourish in the world around me, much like how the flower opens its petals as it buds in order to flourish in its environment. The fact that the flower opens its petals to the sun and not the moon is also an instance of probability—it just so happened that the sun is beneficial to some organisms like flowers, but harmful or undesirable to others, like bats. Further, in order to designate the sun as beneficial and not merely a coincidence of its presence causing flowers to open and bats to hide is to attach some sort of meaning that is beyond purely within probability.
Another naturalized process I had to learn was the ability to use my body within my environment. I had to learn that the arms I saw were not just arms, but my arms, and not someone else’s arms. From there, I learned how to reach and grab through the learned depth perception. Eventually I could do things like play instruments and sports, where I could strategize and practice a learned set of movements, and even anticipate and learn from the movement of others. I learned how to move my body around other bodies, manners and customs, as well as the ability to judge the movement of others and determine their mood or intention. All of these systems of meaning that I learned to apply upon the world are compacted together into the same conclusion: probability. The many systems of constructing meaning are merely coincidental amalgamations of probable outcomes.
Once I was able to look, see, speak, read, write, and eventually gain fluent mobility, I started to form webs of meaning within other beings that happen to have had conformed to the same or similar problems of existence as I had. From this, I fabricated a sense of morality and values or judgments. Thinking in terms of solely probability has puzzling implications on morality. If all instances are merely products of probability, and insofar as instances that are deliberate have more meaning than probable ones (which have none), then all instances have little to no meaning. How then, could one justify that it is better to not kill your neighbor’s wife than to actually kill her? Thinking in terms of pure probability is not at all practical for any sort of functionality in a society, which is why we are taught these systems of meaning, which is a pitfall for this examination.
The underlying problem with my inspection is that by even finding probability possible to inspect requires the use of generalities to describe a probable set of events, ultimately incapable of being generalized without applying a learned sense of cause and effect. I am also, as was previously mentioned, only able to remember things from about my third birthday onward, and even then it is probably highly inaccurate, meaning that the order I learned the processes in, if I even truly learned them at all, might have occurred differently than I presume. My presumptions are based on past knowledge, passed on from general education of typical child development. Even my personal history is dependent on my learned values and expectations, despite my specific history’s extremely low probability to even happen at all, let alone in the increasingly specific way as I continually learn more modes of operating correlations into meanings.
Our actions, thoughts, and expressions are all coincidental and independent of each other, and it is only through learned modes of understanding and correlation can we form a coherent world. Although learned actions, or reactions to an environment are merely fabrications, they are useful to us in terms of efficiency. Without systems to translate correlations into meanings, science would be impossible and logical and moral analyses of instances would be futile. I have found the truth is rarely practical, and the practical is rarely true. The further I disavow my systems of meaning, the less I am able to efficiently function in society, and the better I can function in society, the more caught up I become in comm(non)sensical interpretations of my experiences. Whether or not a middle ground is reachable is still debatable. If I were to accept some probability and some common sense meanings, I would be unable to decide which ones to keep and which to disavow without drastically skewing my investigation into the possibility of my experience. Because of this, I am only able to see one side or the other if I am in to investigate the instances of my history in good faith. Each side comes with a price to pay, but whichever side one decides is a solution to their particular problem. Whether one operates from pure probability or common sense, irregardless; everyone must choose.
