This is the second in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

When we left off, I had expressed my disappointment with Descartes: he’d achieved a new start, but at the cost of excluding most of what he knew from experience. (And at the cost of throwing away most of what had come before in philosophy, though I didn’t understand that, then.) To be fair, his was a methodological rather than real doubt—he fully expected that everything he excluded would be pulled back in during the course of his analysis.

Then along came the Empiricists; and they agreed with me (if I’m allowed to put it that way) that ignoring sense experience was a Big Mistake. The three major Empiricists were Berkeley, Locke, and Hume, and given the time available we spent our time on last of the three, David Hume.

Like Descartes, Hume was happy to start from scratch. And his basic principle was that the only way we come to know anything is through our senses. I was overjoyed. At last, here was some sense.

And yet, there was still something wrong. Hume said that the only way we come to know anything is through our senses—and our senses are not always to be trusted. And consequently, how can we know anything for sure? How can we know anything at all? It became clear to me that Hume’s point of view, if followed to its end, led inexorably to solipsism: I exist; I imagine that other things exist, but I can’t know that for sure.

This struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a reductio ad absurdem, a reduction to absurdity. Clearly something had gone deeply wrong.

Part III

If I intend to blog regularly, I can see that I’m going to have to spend more time writing about philosophy, because that’s one of the main things I’m spending my time thinking about these days. I shall try to make it interesting. But the problem with writing about philosophy is that it’s hard to start in the middle, and the middle is where I’m thinking. So I plan to begin by writing a post or two about my own philosophical journey, so that you all can see where I’m coming from.

My first exposure to philosophy was in an Introduction to Philosophy class my first semester of college. The format was simple: we were given a number of original sources, we were to read them, and then we discussed them in class. Occasionally we wrote papers. We started with a small smattering of Plato, because you have to start with Plato; not enough to really appreciate him, but enough to have some notion of who he was and of who Socrates was.

And then we jumped almost two-thousand years to Descartes.

Let me repeat that again. We jumped almost two-thousand years to Descartes, as though nothing in between mattered.

This didn’t concern me at the time, mind you—and from the standpoint of modern philosophy, there is a sense in which the instructor was perfectly right. From the standpoint of Descartes and those who came after him, little of that intervening time mattered because they explicitly and consciously chose to ignore it. I’ll get to that later.

The main thing for now is that Descartes consciously chose to reject that which had come before, and to start fresh. He was a mathematician, and he chose to proceed mathematically: he wanted to start with as few principles as possible, and build up everything else from them logically. He said (I paraphrase ruthlessly), “There are many things I know…but I’m going to pretend that I don’t know anything that I’m not absolutely positively logically sure of.” As all the world knows, he finally came down to one principle, Cogito ergo sum!, “I think, therefore I am.” That was his starting point, and he worked up from there.

This process made a certain amount of sense to me; though I didn’t know it, I was a budding math major, and the certainty of math appealed to me. Descartes was trying to bring the same kind of certainty to philosophy, and I liked that. At the same time, it bugged me that he was ignoring the things he knew from experience—that he was, as I’d put it now, trying to make himself stupider than he was. And the trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you are, as C.S. Lewis noted multiple times, is that you very often succeed.

From Descartes we went on to Spinoza, who followed the model of Euclid’s Geometry much more closely; his book was full of definitions, axioms, and theorems, and first I found it fascinating. I also found it impenetrable; all I can remember now is that he went on and on about substances and their modes (very little of which I’d been given the background needed for understanding), and that he ended up with something like Pantheism.

But I hungered to get on to the Empiricists: Berkeley, Locke, and Hume. They looked at the world empirically. They paid attention to what they knew from the world. They didn’t foolishly throw all that away. Surely they’d make more sense.

Part II

Yesterday I rambled on a bit about the difference between natural and artificial things. The gist of it, which possibly I conveyed rather badly, is that natural things, and particularly living things, have a nature that determines what they can do and how they behave—and that this nature isn’t entirely explicable in terms of a collection of atoms arranged in a particular way. This last point is controversial, of course. There are many today of the “materialist” (or, sometimes “physicalist”) camp who would disagree with me.

Be that as it may, I was recently surprised to find this distinction between natural and artificial things illustrated in a rather odd place—the computer game Minecraft.

In Minecraft you inhabit a world made of blocks. You can mine these blocks out of the world, and then make new things out of them. And there are two ways to do it.

First, you can treat the game like the world’s biggest Lego set, and build things (including truly massive structures) out of the blocks by placing them back into the world as blocks. Second, you can “craft”. This means creating a variety of things—tools, armor, new kinds of blocks—out of blocks by using something called a “crafting table”. The resulting objects are either items, things you can carry and use, or blocks that you can place in the world.

Let me give a couple of examples. First, here’s an artifact: A Dark Tower of Wizardry. It’s made of blocks. It has certain behaviors; for example, fire burns on it in various places. But it’s an artifact—its behavior is the behavior of the blocks from which it is made. It has no behavior of its own.

You can make quite amazing artifacts in Minecraft: Star Trek-style doors that open with a woosh when you walk up to them, elevators, logic circuitry, and the like. But all of them are simply artifacts that exploit the behavior of the blocks of which they are made.

Here, on the other hand, is something quite different.

That thing in the middle, with a book floating on the top of it, is called an enchanting table. You can use it to enchant your weapons, armor, and tools to make them more powerful. It’s a single block, made on a crafting table from four blocks of obsidian, two diamonds, and a book. And the point is, it has significant behavior that does not in any way derive from the things of which it is made. Not only can you enchant things on it, the book on top moves around by itself, and letters magically fly towards it from the books on the shelves around it. It is its own thing, with its own behavior. You might almost say that it’s alive.

It has, in fact, a nature. For all that you have to make it from other things, it’s a natural object in the Minecraft world, rather than an artifact. Unlike the Dark Tower of Wizardry, it has its own Java code in the Minecraft application that gives it its nature.

And this is the thing that’s so cool. All of the neat stuff that happens in Minecraft ultimately depends on blocks and items with natures given to them by the application. The neat artifacts you can build work by combining these natural elements in ways that they work together.

Just like in the real world. Everything comes down to the natures of natural objects, which are not necessarily explicable purely in terms of the parts from which they are made.

They say art imitates life. Does it ever!