A short recap

In the last few Meaning of Life posts, where I talked primarily about values, I made the argument that we view the world through our values. Our form of life determines what we value, and what we value determines what we see. We see only that part of the object that interests us. Often our interests differ: One animal's pet is another animal's mate. Sometimes our interests conflict: One animal's mate is another animal's meal. But how are objects differentiated? True, I value food: but how does my value enter into a relation with the outside world?

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The question referred to is "what is the meaning of life?"

Enter the theory of use

The theory of use is essentially a theory about how we relate our values to the outside world. An organism that values ONLY food will see everything as either food or not-food: that is, everything can either be used as food, or it cannot be used as food. Whatever is unusable as food is meaningless. Essentially, this organism can really perceive only two things. There are only two objects in the world, as far as it is concerned. Now, if we add one more value, things get more complicated! The word is further divided. And what if these values conflict? I'll leave that for another post!

So an organism that can perceive more uses in things will see more objects. Thus the world gets populated.

And we can differentiate objects because we can use them in different ways.

Natural selection determines whether the perception of a new use in things will be preserved. If I can perceive that this thing X can be used as shelter, and if this new perception I have gained proves beneficial to my survival, then it will be preserved.

Source: Wikimedia commons.

Is this water, or waters? Chemically, it's waters: many H2Os. Very small organisms are sensitive to that. But for us it's water, cos we use them all in the same way, therefore there's no point differentiating. Compare racism, were we lump individuals together cos we only got one use for them: a platform to step onto and raise ourselves high above.

Source: Wikimedia commons.

Is this stone, or stones? Some are sharper than others, and can be used to cut meat better. Therefore it's plural. A much bigger organism will just view them as sand, and any one will be as good as any other.

Meaningful or meaningless?

The theory of use thus explains which circumstances make life meaningful or meaningless. A person who is ambitious above all, will view everyone and everything as either an aid or an impediment to his chosen goal. If most things prove to be an aid, his life will be meaningful. If most things prove to be an impediment, his life will be meaningless.

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Why is there something rather than nothing?

There is the question, Why is there something there? Obviously, my theory of use is not an attempt to answer that question. That is a job for science, and I will not encroach on their turf. There is something to be said of retinas, of reflected light, of Big Bangs—in short, all that is science. What I am doing is translating all that talk into human talk, or subjective talk, or mental talk. There is, for instance, something to be said of neurons firing and interacting; but there is also something to be said of feelings. What we feel may just be chemicals in the brain, but chemicals in the brain are also just what we feel. Chemicals do not negate feelings, nor feelings chemicals. If anything, chemicals enable feelings. But although the scientific side of things has been worked out in detail, little has been said about the "mental" side of things. Much has been written, for instance, about how we are able to see objects, but little has been said about how this "seeing" is translated into consciousness (short of that most ingenious and profound statement: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. This is the pragmatist maxim, formulated by Charles Pierce in 1902 in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, under "Pragmatic and Pragmatism.").

It has often been said that when we introspect our thoughts or feelings we fail to perceive neurons firing or interacting. The question that follows quite naturally, and yet has never been asked, is "Then what is it exactly that we perceive when we introspect our thoughts and feelings?" (The question has not been asked, because the answer is considered to be self-evident.) The closest we have ever come to answering that question in modern philosophical literature is the concept of "Qualia," which is to say that "What we perceive when we introspect our thoughts and feelings are nothing less than—brace yourselves—our very thoughts and feelings!" (or some similar question-begging statement). My own answer (to the extent that it is any different from Peirce's) [It will be obvious to the student of pragmatism that my answer is in fact quite different from Pierce's.] is that we perceive uses. What we call objects are "use-units."

What is a table?

The question of what individuates objects has long troubled philosophers. How are boundaries set or drawn? Why—or how—do we perceive this table as distinct from the air that surrounds it? What makes the air molecules external to, rather than part of, the object we call "table?" What makes the table-molecules (wood-molecules, metal-molecules, etc.) internal to the table? Why is it—or how is it—that the table-molecules belong to the table, whereas the air-molecules do not belong to it? Why do the wheels belong to the car rather than to the street? I do not believe science has answered these questions to our satisfaction. Science can only answer the question "What are tables made of?" after we have already defined tables—that is, after we have set the limits, the boundaries, and declared this to be table and that to be air.

The answer

My own answer, then, is that objects are grouped according to their uses, or usefulness. It is of no practical use to distinguish the many particles of air, so one lumps them together into a group and calls them, simply, "air." "This air here and that air over there" is an oddity of expression that, if at all intelligible, rarely, if ever, figures in our everyday conversation. On the other hand, distinguishing human individuals is quite important, and one even goes so far as to give each of them a different name—one rarely does the same with, say, one's pencils! Sometimes, however, for political or other reasons, the individual identities of a people matter less than their group identity. For instance, it might further one's goals to speak of Jews or Blacks or Whites rather than of individual persons. Use dictates use. That is, the usefulness of a thing or concept dictates how it will be used in language. If bricks are just as useful as one another, one will talk of bricks in general. If humans are not as useful as one another, one will talk of individuals, in this manner indicating and underscoring each person's special and particular importance, his uniqueness. Of course, one may still talk of different kinds of bricks, especially if one is in the brick business. For the building industry, distinguishing between different types of bricks is of paramount importance. It is useful to distinguish between different types of bricks. But this is only useful to people who are into bricks. For the rest of us, one brick is as good as any other brick, for the reason that there is no difference in usefulness between them. For my brick example here, for instance, any brick will do as well as any other, so any brick is as good as any other as far as I am concerned. This will remain the case so long as I am a writer. If—heaven forbid—I ever need to build my own house, bricks will begin to acquire a more nuanced usefulness, or use-value. The group "bricks" will then be divided into subgroups (though I doubt I will ever need to go so far as to christen individual bricks).

Some carry them in bulk.

Our form of life, then, determines what we see. Organisms that can consume humans as easily as they can munch on wood, and who only care about food, will be unable to distinguish between a man and the wooden chair he is sitting on. Virus-like organisms will view humans as vast colonies of cells rather than single entities. Etc.

Objectivism vs Subjectivism Redux

Does all this mean that all our designations are somehow arbitrary, not objective? Does it mean that there are no real boundaries in nature, that there is really only One thing? Well, to claim this would be to suggest that it is possible to assume a position that is use-less (the use-less here being interpreted as the objective). However, to occupy a position, to have consciousness, is to perceive a use in things. The being that perceives things use-lessly simply does not perceive them, nor does this being have any consciousness. If one can imagine what it is like to be a stone, and how objects look from its perspective—well, that is how objects really are, objectively! I find that the objective view of things is quite uninteresting, so it does not much occupy me.

The ship of Theseus

Source: Wikimedia commons

One of the many thought experiments that trouble philosophers is that of the wooden ship whose boards are gradually replaced. Instead of being thrown away, the old boards are reassembled and a new ship is built from them according to the specifications of the first. Eventually we have two ships, and we do not know which one of them is supposed to be the original ship. I suggest that this puzzle is perplexing for the same reason that the Necker Cube appears to be two cubes at once—or rather, alternating. The cube can be interpreted by our minds in two equally valid ways, so the mind alternates between the two. Similarly, I propose, at any given moment the old board is just as useful as the new board, so the mind has trouble deciding between the two, it has trouble objecting to the replacement, and ultimately it has trouble assigning an identity to the resulting ship. The problem arises because different use-values conflict. One may even use the example to argue against my theory, saying, for instance, "Here we have an object, the ship of Theseus, which has had all its component parts replaced, yet it retains the same use-value. Therefore, according to your own theory, the 'new' ship should be taken to be the actual ship of Theseus, whereas the reassembled ship should be taken to be mere firewood—for that is all it is useful for. On the contrary, we find we cannot decide which of the two is the actual ship. Therefore your theory is false." But actually the reassembled ship does have some use-value, other than its being useful as firewood. It has museum-exhibit value, for instance. Our tendency to assign an almost "holy relic" value to certain things—the same tendency that keeps our flat-apartments stuffed with old things we refuse to throw away—is the same tendency that keeps us attached to the reassembled ship of Theseus. The "new" ship, on the other hand, has seafaring value, since it is still seaworthy. I have not provided an exhaustive analysis of the use-value of the two ships, but what I am saying is this: the conflict between the use-value of one ship and the use-value of the other ship is the cause of the paradox. If one use-value outweighed the other use-value (if one of the Necker Tube interpretations was much stronger than the other), then we would have a solution to our paradox—we would not vacillate. As it is, the paradox is essentially asking us whether a pound of cotton is heavier than a pound of iron—with the difference that the ship of Theseus paradox takes advantage of the fact that we are unwilling to grant two different objects the same identity, whereas one may consistently say that one pound of cotton and one pound of silver are equally heavy.

Who am I?

How about the persistence of identity through time? Regarding spatial grouping, I have already said that we tend to group things together when separately they would lack any use-value. Thus we see sand instead of grains of sand. We see water instead of water molecules. Temporal groupings follow the same pattern: we see the same person (Tom) on Monday and on Tuesday, because the difference in use-value between Monday-Tom and Tuesday-Tom is not sufficiently great to justify giving them different names. Monday-Tom and Tuesday-Tom are identical because they have an identical use-value. But if Tuesday-Tom undergoes a sudden and dramatic change (say, is involved in a car accident that causes him to lose his memory), then this alters his use-value significantly (he may not, for example, be able to fulfill his duties as a parent or a husband any longer). After this dramatic change, we have difficulty perceiving Tom as the same person, and although we may use the same name to refer to him, in our minds the new Tom is a mere namesake of the old.

Conclusion

The question, then, "Why do I see that object there?" has two equivalent answers. One is scientific, and what it does is provide a causal explanation: the light of the sun hits the object, some of it is reflected and hits the retina, etc. The other answer is the philosophical, the mental, the subjectivist: we perceive it because it is useful to us. Why is it useful to us? The answer is again scientific—more specifically, it belongs to the jurisdiction of evolutionary biology and developmental psychology.

Curtain

Almost all the above is actually a single diary entry. The diary entry that follows it says: "A well-written and insightful journal entry makes the day worthwhile." You see, I had managed to put some of my time to good use. Just another example of how people find - or create - meaning!

This completes the 12th installment of the Meaning of Life series. In case you missed the other episodes:

Part 11: Words VS Actions
Part 10: Mothers and Egos!
Part 9: Can People Share Ownership of the Same Body?
Part 8: Against Subjectivism - Is Everything Relative?
Part 7: The Value-Laden View of Life
Part 6: I Am Therefore I Harm
Part 5: Nietzsche vs Christianity: Are Christians Nihilists?
Part 4: Can we desire death?
Part 3: Are nihilists being honest when they say life has no value?
Part 2: Does death make life meaningless?
Part 1: Is it possible to be a nihilist?

I'll see you in the next episode, where I will continue exploring my theory of Use, one of the three theories in the book that explain how life may appear meaningful or meaningless to us.

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