Business
“When I was in business school, way back when America gave a shit about its economic future, a kid, a freshman came up to me. I was a junior at the time. A little naive, but growing up every day. Anyway, this freshman sat down next to me at lunch and introduced himself. We had a cafeteria where most of the students ate and shot the shit because however business savvy we were, we didn’t have enough capital to put any of it to use.
“He said his name was Boyle and that he thought I looked like a nice enough guy to at least humor him in his bid to make a friend. Well I was flattered obviously, but also annoyed because this was a business school, not a daycare. A man ought to have more confidence than that. But I had just started my lunch so I let him go on.
“Boyle was from Kentucky, eastern Kentucky. Way down in a holler somewhere in the Appalachians, where the people make up what names they please and ignore the maps. Now I was intrigued because what is a man like that, raised trailer park trash, doing all the way out here, at this cafeteria table?
“The answer was he felt the need to inject some truth into business. To learn how crooked business men worked, the same business men who popped up in these hollers at the slightest scent of money, black money that came straight from a mine if you threw enough people willing to die for a living at it. By learning their methods he could do what his great grandfather could not, when he got his family heritage wrapped up in an inherited line of work destined to exploit everything from the Earth to the soul. Say no.
“And then I left. I dumped out my half-eaten chicken salad sandwich and the pineapple I refuse to touch, and I never thought about Boyle again.
“Until right now, here, because you asked me what kind of people hire the homeless and the poor to fight for their own entertainment.
“Exploitation is sexy. You two like to believe that you’re saving the world from madmen or evil-doers. You’re blind. Because what I do is nothing more than what’s been done to you seven times this morning. You’re being exploited right now, hired by someone to dance.
“I have always believed that money is the ultimate litmus. It allows one to see who has the balls to say no and who 90% of people can’t say no to. We never coerced people to fight, they’re not slaves, or puppets, or even servants. I wouldn’t degrade them with picking up my dry cleaning. I have so much I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I hired them for their price. That’s all.
“People die every day at their workplace. Some workplaces more than others. But I would be willing to bet, if I hadn’t already done the research to know the answer, that more people die in coal mines proportionately than in my ‘evil’ operation as you call it.
“All this is to say that Boyle was right about his great grandfather, He couldn’t say no, because he was too weak. And it is that difference that balances the world. It allows me to hire you, and you to earn a living. Who are you going to hire? Who is Boyle going to hire? No one. You can’t. You won’t.
“Hiring those homeless people to beat the hell out of each other was just an afternoon for me, but most importantly, they made a little cash so they can continue to scrape the sidewalk.
“I don’t know what you want to get out of this, but my advice is to move along. Forget about all this unfairness you believe is in the system. Get your coffee every morning, read the newspaper, and smoke your cigarettes. It’s all going to kill you. I’m sure it’s just difficult for you to see who is doing the killing.”
-M. G. Finley
Living in a State of Nature
As I read Hobbes’s Leviathan, I think about how we tend to idealize the way in which human nature operates. We construct theoretical premises upon which we build moral frameworks. But we forget these hypotheticals are just that.
Hobbes’s “state of nature” or any other hypothetical first position of human beings is nonexistent. These placeholders are dreams that have found their way into philosophical debate. I am content with the idea of human development, but the way in which it is posited is incorrect, placing that “state of nature” in the same period of development as human beings’ currently exist. We are animals, but we are animals that have evolved into a state of community. We no longer have the potential to naturally fall into a state of nature, government or no.
This is a little difficult to visualize, but the thesis here is about timing. Human beings may have existed in a state of nature, but that “state of nature” is not something we would revert to in the absence of a sovereign, because we have clearly evolved beyond an animalistic concern with self-preservation no matter how anecdotally selfish humans seem to be.
I truly believe the idea of a first position is merely an incorrect premise upon which moral frameworks are built. It is ironic that Hobbes, so concerned with proper premises, should begin with an irrational premise colored by emotion and the same fear he discusses.
Hobbes’s Leviathan
The Leviathan is the sovereign, the state, and is essential for human beings to achieve liberty and prevent human nature from reverting to Hobbes’s “state of nature.”
Hobbes embarks upon a behemoth task by spending the entire first volume of Leviathan attempting to explain everything there is in the universe essentially. Hobbes loves geometry. It is a good subject to love in this field, because the logical direction of arguments is very clear. Hobbes is most concerned with accurate definitions. I will not go into those here because I don’t believe them to be important. Science has done most of this work for us now.
But Hobbes is on the correct path in my estimation. In philosophical inquiries, the texts are crippled from the outset because of inappropriate or mischaracterized premises. If we are not beginning with true agreed upon premises, then each of us will arrive at a different conclusion. Even Hobbes, almost 300 years before Einstein and Hawking, recognized the importance of the observer and necessary subjectivity in every observation. This understanding inspired Hobbes to promote definitions because without premises which are agreed upon, the observation of nature will lead us away from true certainty.
Hobbes and I differ, however, on what these premises should be. When I contemplate premises for philosophy that every human being can agree upon, my mind immediately turns to logic and math. These are truths that cannot be overcome. I would venture to say they may not be overcome even in a separate contemplated dimension, different names may exist but A=B, B=C, therefore A=C will continue to be true.
Hobbes, like many continental philosophers, finds the need to begin with premises that can quickly give human beings answers to ethical philosophy, metaphysics, and ontological questions. These philosophers want first premises to have substance. I want that too, but a desire for something like this as our first priority will lead us to Hobbes’s recommendation: a leviathan, a monster, that human beings entrust to define terms we can all agree upon and therefore reach truths, achieving peace.
Leviathan’s view of knowledge is largely simplistic and relies upon Hobbes’s understanding of even knowledge being an accumulation of forces. This was a popular and easy understanding of human experience prior to the cognitive sciences. While Hobbes’s scientific understanding may be outdated and therefore not reflective of exactly how human beings formulate knowledge, his concerns are relevant to syllogistic reasoning in a context of subjective observers that cannot agree on major premises.
Relevant as it is, Hobbes conclusion is something that could only be formulated by a monarchist. The easiest answer to the questions that cloud human knowledge is for someone to give us an answer. Answers could come from God or they could come from a human arbiter. An arbiter, for Hobbes, is the Leviathan, whether elected, chosen by God, or installed by force. The mode of power is irrelevant to the good the arbiter can provide to human beings. Irrelevant because without it, human beings will revert to the “state of nature,” our selfish, animal, brutish existence as a fight over resources we all feel we need even if we do not. With no sovereign we would take our worldly appetites into the jungle and destroy everything that stands in our way.
Is a Fabricated Truth, truth at all?
Hobbes answer to the subjective observer dilemma is unsatisfying at best, and insulting at worst. A fabricated truth is no truth at all.
I stated before that no truth can be divined from reason. A different question is whether truth can be arrived at from the observation of nature, from “searching”. I tend to side with Hobbes on the idea that a necessary requirement for observing nature is an observer. This poses a problem because of unavoidable biases, conscious and subconscious, in an observer. Therefore nature cannot provide us with any truths.
One could finish with that conclusion, but Hobbes presumes that truth is so important to human beings that we must “know” it in some form. The purpose of the Leviathan is to provide those truths to us and create peace among the masses in the absence of disagreement.
Hobbes surely knows, yet does not recognize that this leviathan’s “truth” is not Truth. I find it frightening that Hobbes, as a philosopher, does not find whatever that “truth” could be, to be unsatisfying. A sell-out in the face of uncertainty with no recognition that uncertainty may be the answer. Uncertainty may be a truth in itself.
Hobbes accepts this bastardization of philosophical inquiry in the face of fear of the “state of nature.” But the “state of nature” contains many problems, not the least of which is its impossibility.
Hobbes creates a clear dichotomy between a civilized society, peaceful, full of truths and reason, and the “state of nature,” where our lives are brutish and short. If civilized society does not exist and there is no sovereign then human beings are left to their own devices which are only self-preservative. This idea cannot be correct at this stage of human evolution. Ten thousand years prior to today, I would give this conclusion to you, but not today. We have transcended this negative view of human nature, without saying too much about nature that cannot be proven, at the very least we will create communities without reaching some perfect tipping point of preservation.
We Live in a State of Nature
This society is as much a part of our evolutionary development as omnivorous diets and eyelashes. The idea of a clear division between civilized society and a possible “state of nature” is currently one of the most harmful fictions plaguing the major human worldview.
We never left the state of nature because our evolution continues. Human beings are animals. Science has shown us that much. It explains that we in fact evolved, are still evolving, and will continue to evolve as long as we exist. In our evolution we develop survival skills, everything from our diets to mating habits. But Hobbes’s premise is that governments and sovereigns are not part of this development. Hobbes worked before Darwin proposed evolution, but in light of that biological development we need to rethink the utility of Hobbes theories.
Human beings are in a perpetual state of nature. We have developed past selfish, self-preservative tendencies and created communities because reason suggests, and generations of experience informs us, that group survival is wildly more reliable than individual survival. Community development is hardly this simple, but it is at least a good argument for why the state of nature is something human beings cannot return to, because we left it long ago.
There is no difference between civilized society and the state of nature, we have merely outgrown the state of nature. We are still part of that nature of which we are scared. Any truths of that nature, even if we cannot know what they are, are still true. Human beings have the potential to be selfish on a limited level, but they do not and could not have the potential to survive independent of their communities and governments. Humans would find the need to make new ones, to seek out other humans, not avoid, as an individual animal earlier in its development would.
My takeaway from Leviathan is that humans are evolving and have evolved from previous levels of development, one of which is a more brutish iteration. But that state of development is no longer possible because human beings as a species are not independent. We are social and unspecialized and therefore need other human beings. We will always gravitate into communities, toward other human beings. In terms of “searching” for truth, that is still an issue. But perhaps the only premises worth beginning a philosophical inquiry with are those of math and physics, and “searching” will lead us to a dead end. We should observe the way in which human bodies continually “collide” with one another and the way in which human beings interact to get us somewhere near a truth of human nature.
But if “searching” and “digging” are useless and human beings’ states of evolutionary development do not exist at the same time because we did not just pop up on the earth, we are left with our definite place in time which human beings agree upon (even if time is relative to the observer, every observer can agree on the large scale of an era or epoch) and mathematical certainties. We have nothing with regards to human nature since relativism should be avoided. At the very least there must be things we can say about human nature and morals then, but we should be cautious about starting premises. I believe that is the area that is most important because pulling out the bottom story of a building will cause the entire thing to fall.
I did not touch on whether Hobbes’s theory of a leviathan is useful for political philosophy. I do not believe it is, but that is a discussion that is far removed from where I am in my current project.
-M. G. Finley
A Quantum Theory of Existence
Even if a reason exists, I doubt we can find it.
The past couple of weeks I read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Initially this was to supply context for whatever endeavor I am starting. I ended with a tougher question than when I began.
I also thought extensively about how these posts would be organized. I’m going to start with what I have been thinking about and things that I feel are given, axioms maybe. I’ll then work off and beyond those.
In reading a genius discuss the universe as we currently understand it, I am struck with the same conclusion: that no matter what our place in the universe or if there is a reason for all of this, we can never truly put our finger on it, because the closer we examine, the more elusive the answer becomes. Our mind turns in on itself and cannot provide an answer for its own existence.
A Brief History of Time
I am not an astrophysicist. Now that that is out of the way, I can say what struck me about this book. The evolution of thought surrounding the theory of how the universe operates has been a struggle between the forest and the trees. There is a tug of war between the large view, how massive bodies interact with one another, and the small view, how particles interact with one another. As physics stands, these two views do not elicit cooperating theories and therefore create a disconnect in how we discuss the universe, from a scientific perspective. Thus, the search for a “unified” theory of physics persists.
Stephen Hawking and modern physicists pose many different answers to this question that are extremely difficult to comprehend. i.e. superstring theory, the existence of 10 or 26 dimensions, and various space-time bending that suggests the universe is not flat but curved, like the Earth, into a sphere (presumably then if one could travel faster than the speed of light, he could travel in one direction and end up where he started before he began, therefore actually not where he started considering space and time are measurements of the same thing in physics).
All of this said, it seems to me that the large body theory, relativity, must give way to the small body theory, quantum theory, because it is something that we know and can “observe” first-hand. The book seems to suggest this much, as quantum theory threw a wrench in our understanding of the theory of relativity. How quantum theory jives with the theory of relativity is theoretical, so the dialogue is on what theory relativity will submit to in the future.
Quantum theory, simply, concerns the particles that give rise to forces on a molecular level. Think, if a person could pinpoint a particle, he could understand why a body was doing something based on the type of particle that is acting on it. What X force is leading to Y reaction? Heisenberg, unfortunately, found that in attempting to observe a particle, we are giving rise to energy in that particle by virtue of the light that we need to see them. This causes the particle to change positions. So no matter how hard we look, how far down we can dig, we can never pinpoint a particle. The particle jumps and exists in some other position.
It could be that there are several universes and on a large scale, celestial bodies act in the same way that particles do, existing in another place at once. But that is just a musing, because that would also assume some massive observer acting upon those celestial bodies, that exist in universes looking like atoms or molecules (like the end of Men in Black). An unspoken assumption in History of Time is that this all only matters because an intelligent observer gives a damn.
What Are We Looking For?
But, this brings me to my desk. Why do we care? Why is it that any of this matters? Do we want a clearer picture of our universe, to understand why we are here? Or do we want a clearer picture to understand why we want to understand? Hawking discusses God as if He could exist outside the bounds of space-time, whatever that means (those are Hawking’s words, not mine). If a god existed, its existence would clear up everything we could wish to gain from studying the universe, so it would mean that all of this searching is meaningless. It can give us no more knowledge than we need.
I would argue, however, that every human being, every single one of us, wants to understand what is out there in the universe, save the absolutely brainwashed, egotistical, and blind (It is severely egotistical to think that Earth is unique, but that is a discussion for another post). We are intelligent observers and therefore a world exists for us to observe, so we observe it, in its infinitesque glory. But why care?
This is the first question we need to ask ourselves: Why do we care how the universe operates?
We gain knowledge for one, but I believe that it runs deeper than that. The universe is a mystery and if we think about its consequences for the human race long enough, those consequences will hurt our brains. Not to mention lead us to some fairly fatal conclusions. But humans are intelligent and we are always “digging.”
Digging for me means pushing back into our minds to find the source for why we think. We want to know if there is a reason for us that goes beyond a fairy tale. Too often we believe that if not religion, then nothing. That is lazy and is most likely a narrative dreamed up by the dreamers to scare people. Spending time with this question though may lead us to a scary place.
A Quantum Theory of Existence
Digging is difficult. Philosophers have done it for millennia, and where has all that thinking got us? To me, I guess. So here are my thoughts.
A popular position is that humans possess free will. Popular for good reason. The alternative is impossible to prove. It is possible that everything is determined. Initially, theories of the universe attempted to prove this proposition. If we knew how forces affect bodies accurately, we can predict anything. But could that idea apply to human thought?
A reason for existence, which I am using interchangeably with a reason for caring about the universe because practically they are the same (no reason, no caring; no caring, no reason), requires that we either “dig” or “search.” Searching is looking for something outside of us that gives us a reason to exist. This would encompass God or some kind of prime mover; a force, as many early astrophysicists theorized, that made our actions merely equal reactions to actions extending from some place in the universe. Digging, as I mentioned above, is looking inside of our minds, attempting to reason out our existence.
My point here is that digging gives us a “quantum theory of existence;” a reason for why we exist may in fact…exist, but just as that thought is an unintentional pun, so it is with digging. Theoretically, we can refine our questions sharper and sharper, like a microscope, getting us closer to an answer but never reaching it. Because the act of digging, looking for an answer, is an act that must be explained itself. The question becomes infinitely circular. “Why do we think about why we exist?” is paradoxical.
This could be because we are not intelligent enough to refine the question , not that this is about language, but the logical inquiry cannot dissect sharp enough to successfully reason the answer. The very act of questioning is something we are trying to understand. So questioning is not capable of producing an answer.
If X = the reason we exist, the inquiry is “what is X?.” But this question is a function of X, because we must know why we ask the question (which is practically identical to the reason we exist) to solve X. So we have now created a new variable. Assume Y = “What is X?” The function would be f(X) = Y. The new inquiry is “What is Y?” This inquiry is a function of X as well, because we must know X to answer the question. So now assume Z = “What is Y?” the equation becomes f(X) = YZ…. and so on ad infinitum.
The only way to defeat the paradox would be to know X without asking a question. Perhaps the best course of action then would be to stop asking and just live our lives. And as it relates to a large theory, maybe we can never know the ultimate answer we are digging for, so we should focus on the concrete, how bodies interact, how we interact with other humans, to reflect some idea of what we believe the reason for existence to be.
While I set out to create some kind of context, I suppose what I have done is figure out a question that has no answer. But I feel that’s a decent progress. Hopefully this is somewhat meaningful.
-M. G. Finley
An Introduction to A Rebirth
The past few months I attempted to devote myself more to the practice of writing, while also studying for the bar exam. One of those junctures won out unfortunately. What that left me was a website on which I had done nothing for a few months and more time than I knew what to do with after the exam. That is why I am going to take a new approach, one that acknowledges what writing requires.
I have come to terms with my position following three years of law school – that is, in a worse position creatively than I was three years ago. This is because writing takes human experience and spiritual cultivation. Writing lacks maturity otherwise. So, the fear that I feel in writing every word is likely founded. I’m not mature enough to write something that is relevant. Will I? I’m sure. But not now.
Where does that leave me? Again, it leaves me with a website that has nothing on it. So I plan on using this platform for my creations, my growth, and my thoughts. I will be writing an essay every two weeks addressing the reading and the experiences I had over the preceding two weeks. I can’t anticipate how those (essays, weeks, or experiences) will look, but I at least know the target at which I’m aiming.
In the most melodramatic fashion, I don’t know who I am. I find that when I hear a position, I mentally adopt it in order to understand it better. That’s a good practice. It’s a terrible practice if one never lets it go. Because now I don’t know what I believe. I rehash the last subject I thought about and pass it off as my belief, contradicting whatever it was I said to this person before, or to myself for that matter. It’s been going on for so long that I don’t if I’m Ayn Rand or Karl Marx.
My task is to figure out who I am and what I believe, then I’ll decide what to do with it. For the time being, that’s it. I don’t believe I’m looking for the Truth, just what I think sounds right. The universe is to too uncertain for there to be a unified theory that explains everything from the creation to human ethics. I’m just going to focus on what I see and what that means to me. It’s modest and keeps a man from going crazy.
I’d prefer to stay sane if at all possible. Maybe that’s the real goal.
-M. G. Finley
A Volume on Life 