Episode #018 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

I’ve sat up the last few nights thinking about the best way to describe where we are, where we’ve come from, because we’ve covered quite a bit. I found myself trying to think of the best metaphor I could use to tie it all together and give a little bit of context to this period of time we’re moving into, because we’re going to need some context. I know where this is all heading. I think many of us know where this is all heading. Things are about to get really awesome in philosophy. And I had all these examples and metaphors I was throwing around in my head, and none of them really captured what I was going for. And then it hit me, philosophy in so many ways is like the process of starting and maintaining a fire.

Fire doesn’t just start out of nowhere. It needs to be sparked by something. It needs a spark. And that spark doesn’t just instantly erupt into roaring flames—well, unless you live in Southern California and you throw a cigarette out your window. But barring that one exception, that spark takes work. You know, we’ve all seen Bear Grylls start a fire. You got to put it inside of the handful of tree shavings and leaves, and you have to blow on it, make sure it gets oxygen. You have to nurture it.

We talked for a long time on this show about the pre-Socratics. Now, none of these guys had ideas that held up to scrutiny for very long. I mean, sure, we still talk about people like Heraclitus and Parmenides, but their ideas were more landmarks of thought than philosophical end games. But these pre-Socratics were incredibly important, nonetheless, if for no other reason than they began that discourse that was necessary. They are the sparks that started the fire. Yeah, one spark may pop up and just instantly fade away not starting the big fire. But we needed people like Thales to exist. We needed someone to look around them and say, yeah, I think all this stuff is made of water. So that then somebody else could say, wait, what are you, stupid? You think air is made of water? So that then Thales could say, alright then, prove me wrong. They started that discourse, and that discourse was the spark that eventually turned into the roaring white-hot flames of Athens during antiquity, during the Hellenistic age.

But then with the political troubles, the looking back to years past when things were better, the radical shift in the average person’s philosophy of self, the popularity of skepticism—all these things led to philosophy slowing down. Things headed in a more dogmatic direction at that point. We ran out of fuel. We ran out of logs to keep the fire of philosophy going, and it started to get smaller. It started to get less hot. And then came the rise of these new monotheistic religions that didn’t see much value in looking for truth other than what they saw as the truth. I mean, why would you really? These monotheistic religions were like taking a bucket of water and dumping it on the fire. And here we are in this smoldering phase.

Now, if you’re listening to this and you’ve taken any sort of outdoor safety class or camping safety class, then you know what I’m talking about here. A fire can keep its heat for a long time. I mean, you got to be really certain that you’ve stamped out every bit of fire, or else those embers at the bottom can hold heat for a long time. They could catch a leaf or a twig or something and start back up. You got to be really careful. Well, this period of time in philosophy that we’re heading into really is like that smoldering phase, where once every couple hundred years some genius comes along and stirs up the embers. And you can see the red and orange, and you can feel the heat of the fire of philosophy again even if it only lasts for a moment.

A philosopher named Avicenna was one of these people that stirred up the fire of philosophy again. By stirring it up and tending the fire, he helped keep it alive long enough for it to get to this point in history that all of this is leading up to. It’s a point in history where someone basically comes up and dumps a bucket of gasoline on the fire. But today’s episode is about one of the most brilliant men who’s ever lived: Avicenna.

Now, personally, I have a deep, deep respect for Avicenna just because of the circumstances he was born into. We’re talking 950 AD. There’s an Islamic saying that goes, the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr. Now, this was the thinking in Baghdad during the centuries leading up to Avicenna. It was truly an incredible time in history. Just imagine a culture of people where one of their top priorities was collecting the world’s knowledge. They wanted all the world’s wisdom translated into Arabic. Well, it turns out it was a good move for them. They experienced what in modern times we know as the Islamic Golden Age.

While the people in the West were going through the Dark Ages, you know, blackness all around them—they’re stubbing their pinky toe on the end table in the middle of the night—the Arabic-speaking world is having monumental leaps forward in almost every single category: mathematics, medicine, architecture, science, and—most importantly for us—philosophy. Really, if it weren’t for eighth, ninth, and tenth-century Baghdad, we might not know who Plato and Aristotle were, really. This Arabic-speaking world were the guys that translated it and kept writing commentaries on it. They kept the fire going.

Now, the head and shoulders fan favorite above everybody else for them was Aristotle. He was the gold standard if you were living as a philosopher in this region. And look, just to illustrate how influential Avicenna was, people think of this region and time period’s philosophy in two big chunks. They think of it in terms of all of the philosophy that came before Avicenna, where they made commentaries on Aristotle, and all of the philosophy that came after Avicenna, where they made commentaries on Avicenna. He’s kind of like Socrates in that way. That’s how much he changed everything.

But the interesting part is that Avicenna didn’t even live in Baghdad. He was born into a small town that we’d know as modern-day Uzbekistan. So, how did he benefit from all this? The political dynamic of the time reminds me of listening to Adam Carolla rant in recent years. Don’t you just hate it when you’re so talented, rich, and successful that your personal maid hides your remote control from you, and you can’t find it for 12 seconds? What a terrible inconvenience. Well, that’s kind of how the Caliphate was feeling in ninth-century Baghdad. They were having problems dealing with being so successful—all the quandaries that come with having a sprawling empire that was as big as Rome at its height. They changed the capital city around. There was some in-fighting concerning the direction that all this was going in.

But the important part is that this cultural center of Baghdad—this mylar balloon filled up to the brim, just stretching and bursting at the seams with culture, ready to explode—the centralized control over it dwindled a bit. And what happened was, some of these outlying towns near Baghdad started getting more access to this Hellenic philosophy translated into Arabic. Now, there was still no Academy or Lyceum that taught a structured curriculum of philosophy for Avicenna to attend, but at least he had access to the information. Avicenna was a mostly self-educated guy. And not to belittle how brilliant he was, but that self-education probably contributed to him having such a unique perspective on Aristotle, not unlike Adam Carolla.

The loosening of the grip on Baghdad, the heightened access to knowledge and education, the ambition and brilliance of someone like Avicenna—all these things remind me of modern times. When have we ever had as much access to educating ourselves for free as we do today? You see when you have a very special person like Avicenna what even a little bit of education can do. What happens when Avicenna has the entire internet? What happens when Avicenna has podcasts to listen to? We live in amazing times for realizing human potential. Bryan Cranston himself couldn’t make meth strong enough to give to the printing press to make it as influential as the internet’s going to be. Google is the modern-day ninth-century Baghdad in my eyes. And I really wonder how many Avicennas have been flipping burgers and digging ditches over the last thousand years. I guess we’re going to find out.

So, like all the other philosophers in his region, Avicenna was most heavily influenced by Aristotle. But he wasn’t just going to roll over and accept everything Aristotle had to say is the gospel truth. In fact, I guess he already had his own gospel truth—Islam. He reads Aristotle, finds the parts he doesn’t agree with, and dismantles it with his own brilliance. But it’s important to note that Avicenna wouldn’t see it as dismantling. He saw it more as healing. In fact, his most famous work actually directly translates to The Healing. He heals Aristotle to be compatible with Islam. And this is one of those hallmarks of medieval philosophy. This is one of those reasons most universities skip over giant sections of medieval philosophy. Because it becomes less about the search for truth and more about the quest to validate what you already believe is the truth. There’s still a lot of brilliance in it, but this is why it’s kind of seen as inferior by some people.

By far, the thing Avicenna’s most known for is his flying man thought experiment. But before we can talk about that, we have to understand a big area of disagreement among philosophers, an area where Avicenna heavily disagreed with Aristotle—the relationship between mind and body. You can think of Aristotle’s thoughts on the relationship between mind and body by thinking of an iPhone, or really any other cell phone or electronic device for that matter. It could be any kind of smart phone. But using the term “mind” might be a little misleading if we think about it in modern times. As we’ve touched on a little bit before, the definitions of words get a little hazy back then. We see Aristotle using the word “soul” to describe this concept a lot, but what he’s really referring to is the rational soul, our ability to reason, whatever existence is present in our minds.

Now, what he says is that the mind and body are one—indivisible, inseparable. Now, the importance of this is that it’s the opposite of what Plato would say, who would say that the soul and body are separate, with the soul somehow being chained to the body, shackled within the body waiting to be released. But for Aristotle they were one. And it’s not that he has some deep argument proving this to be the case. He just kind of points out how silly it would be to focus on that question because we don’t do it in any other area of existence. We don’t do it with any other thing that we look at. He says, “It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one just as it is not necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, nor generally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one. For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.”

Now, what he’s saying here is that, if you took an iPhone, that iPhone has a certain contoured shape and form. And when we think about things, the shape of the iPhone is one thing, and the materials it’s made out of is another thing. But do we think about them as two separate things when we think of an iPhone? Now, some of you might answer no; some of you might answer yes. If you answered no, you agree with Aristotle. If you answered yes, Aristotle would argue that you could say that that shape or form is actually what makes an iPhone an iPhone, because if you melted down the iPhone into just a hunk of burnt electronics, it wouldn’t be an iPhone anymore. And when you do that, does the shape of the iPhone remain there in some mysterious way? Of course not. It’s not an iPhone if it doesn’t have that form of an iPhone.

Well, based on this concept, Aristotle says, “It is not unclear that the soul—or certain parts of it, if it naturally has parts—is not separable from the body.” Now, at this part, you’re probably like I was when I first read that. You’re probably going, wait a second, how did we get there? Weren’t we just talking about the shape or form of something in relation to the materials it’s made out of? How does that make the rational part of the soul inseparable from the body? Why do those things have anything to do with each other? Well, to Aristotle, the rational part of the soul is the form of a human being. I mean, think about it. There are many things that look like humans all around us. I mean, you could see a humanoid robot. You could see other monkey-like creatures—things that definitely have the shape of a human but aren’t human. What shapes a human, to Aristotle, is our ability to reason and the other functions of the rational soul.

So, maybe the better example to explain how Aristotle thinks of the relationship between mind and body for humans is that if you had an iPhone, if you took the IOS software off of that iPhone, you wouldn’t have an iPhone anymore. You’d have, like, a really shiny brick that you could ward off street criminals with, but certainly not an iPhone. The relationship between mind and body, to Aristotle, is similar to the relationship between an iPhone and its software. What the word “iPhone” symbolizes to us—it can’t exist without that software on it. It wouldn’t be the complete definition of an iPhone.

This is something Aristotle talked about a lot. He would give all kinds of examples. If you put an iPhone in a blender and turned it into a powder, is that still an iPhone? No. Well, actually, in that case, I’m pretty sure that’s how they make most weight-loss shakes nowadays. They definitely taste the same. But I mean—you know what, I’m getting off topic. iPhone, if you took the electronics out of the middle of it—is that an iPhone? Well, at some point it needs to become an iPhone. What is that point? When does it become an iPhone? Well, Aristotle would say that that blended powder of the iPhone—the iPhone with the electronics out of it—is only potentially an iPhone. Only when it’s assembled does it become an iPhone.

Well, Avicenna didn’t agree with Aristotle at all about that. He didn’t think the mind and body are one. And this was a huge rift between the two of them. The reason why is because—think of what Aristotle is saying by saying that the soul and body are inseparable. Just like there’s no reason to believe that the shape of an iPhone sticks around after you’ve melted the materials down, there’s no reason to believe that the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist. Now, this obviously wasn’t compatible with the idea that you’re a spiritual being inhabiting a body that can look forward to an eternal life in paradise afterwards.

So, what Avicenna had to do is somehow prove that the mind and body are separate entities from each other. What he creates is genius, and it’s known as the flying man thought experiment. And, quick aside, by the way, be ready to hear a lot more thought experiments. These things are all throughout philosophy. Thought experiments to philosophers are like a hammer is to Jesus—you know, carpenters. It’s the most important tool that they have. The idea behind using them is that we exist in a very limited framework as humans, and because of that framework, our thought patterns are limited. Thought experiments change something about that framework, usually some fundamental thing. They pose some hypothetical situation and then ask, what if? And that “what if” usually makes us look at our current existence a little more open-mindedly. I mean, if you need an example, every sci-fi movie ever made is a thought experiment.

Well, Avicenna gives us one of the best ones ever written. “One of us has to consider that one has just been created in a stroke, and that one has been thus created fully developed and perfectly complete, yet created with one’s vision shrouded from watching external entities created falling in the air or in empty space in a fall not buffeted by any felt air that buffets it; its limbs separated and not in contact or touching on another. Then let it contemplate whether it would affirm the existence of its own self. It would not then doubt the affirmation that its self is existent, yet not affirming the existence of any other limbs nor inner bowels, nor heart, nor brain, nor anything of the external things. Rather it was affirming the existence of itself without affirming that it had length, breadth, or depth. And if it were possible for it, in such a state, to imagine a hand or any other limb, it would not then imagine it to be part of itself nor to be a condition of it.”

What he’s saying is, imagine yourself being reborn with all of your memories wiped out of your hard drive, floating through space. But there are no stars, only complete blackness, no sound, no smells, nothing to sense at all, arms and legs separated. You’re just floating through space. Now, if this existence was possible to just be dropped into, you certainly exist, right? Maybe a different way of thinking of it is, if you were wiped of all your memories and put there right now, would you cease to exist simply because your body can’t sense anything? It seems reasonable that you’d have some sense of awareness. You just wouldn’t have any idea that you have a body. You wouldn’t know to expect that you have a body.

So, what is this self? What is this thing that you have awareness of? It’s certainly not your body parts because, in this analogy, you wouldn’t even know that you have them. You don’t know that you have a body. You don’t know how big you are. I mean, you could be an elephant for all you know. What you do know is that you exist. What this thought experiment proves to Avicenna is that the human body and the human mind are separate from each other.

Now, this might be kind of a strange line of thinking. I mean, chances are, if you’ve taken the time in modern times to ask yourself, “How do I know that I exist?” you’re probably a little weird. But don’t worry, I’m completely there with you. Don’t worry, Lady Gaga writes songs about us. It’s okay. Embrace it. And look, to be fair, there’s just way too many good TV shows and video games around nowadays to ask yourself questions like this. Who would actually do that? I mean, really, if Avicenna had Grand Theft Auto V, I’d be sitting here doing a podcast about the progression of Doritos flavors over the years. None of this stuff would have gotten done.

But one interesting thing to think about is that we actually address this question a lot more often than we realize. Whenever we think about the quality of existence, we think about the nature of existence. Despite the fact that it may seem unimportant, we think about it a lot. For example, there’s a character in Breaking Bad; I think it’s Tuco’s dad. He’s this really old guy, wheelchair bound; he’s got that little bell that he rings with his weird finger. Well, he has an existence where his body doesn’t work except for his finger, but his mind works. As humans, we still see him as existing, albeit in a lesser sense. He’s actually a really good way to remember Avicenna’s flying man thought experiment.

But flip that around. What happens when someone is completely brain-dead but their body is still functioning? Their heart is still pumping; their nervous system is still working. What is that person’s existence like? The fact is, if someone we know was in a terrible accident, most people would be far more likely to end life support on the person who’s brain-dead than the person whose body is next to useless but their brain is still functioning. We just see it as a better quality of existence. And by making a judgment on the quality of existence, we’re asking at some level what it is to exist at all.

And actually, it’s important to note right now—because this is something I hear a lot from people—with the flying man thought experiment, Avicenna wasn’t trying to prove that he knows we exist simply because he’s able to be self-aware. This is one of the rare occasions in the show where I’m going to jump ahead a little bit, just real quick. The flying man thought experiment has a lot of similarities to one of the biggest moments in the history of philosophy, a few hundred years from now when a guy named René Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am.”

Now, for the record, this is another reason why philosophy seems boring to some people. Because if you’re an outsider talking to someone about philosophy, and you go, “What’s one of the big, awesome moments in the history of philosophy? What’s a moment that I should be impressed by?” And the other person says back to them, “René Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’” And then the outsider goes, “Really? Wait, really? Well, that’s underwhelming. That’s literally the most obvious statement I’ve ever heard in my life. That’s the sum total of thousands of years of human thought?”

What that outsider doesn’t realize is the history we talked about at the beginning of the show—the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the rise of skepticism, the coexistence of skepticism with all the schools of the Hellenistic age, the Pyrrhonists, generation after generation of philosophers asking, “How can you know anything for certain? Can you?” It was all but accepted that humans never could arrive at truth about anything because you can always say, well, how do you know that? Then the rise of monotheism, and for a thousand years, humans claimed to have arrived at the truth. And then, bam! Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo. All of a sudden, we don’t exist within an ordered cosmos as the Greeks saw it. We live in the middle of chaos. And what’s worse, we don’t seem that important in this chaos. Given our role in all this, how can we say that we know anything for certain? And along comes René Descartes.

You know, Avicenna’s flying man is not the same as Descartes. It’s similar, but it’s not the same. I think Avicenna’s would be, “I think, therefore I’m not only my body,” or “I think, therefore my body is separate from my rational soul.” But for the record, I think it’s just as brilliant as Descartes. And really, if you want someone to be Descartes before Descartes, I think you’d be better off looking at Saint Augustine who makes an extremely similar claim hidden in some obscure chapter of not his most famous work. He gives a good refutation of radical skepticism too.

“By not positively affirming that they are alive, the skeptics ward off the appearance of error in themselves, yet they do make errors simply by showing themselves alive; one cannot err who is not alive. That we live is therefore not only true but is altogether certain as well.” He also says on that same note, “Who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to have doubt about all of these.”

Well, above all else—and this is something we’re going to talk about more in future episodes. I mean, there’s no way we can be done with Avicenna right now. There’s just too many people that comment on him later—although in many ways Avicenna’s healing of Aristotle helped to make it compatible with Muslim teachings, his flying man thought experiment really was the complete opposite of that. It flew in the face of Islam. By saying that the soul is immortal, and therefore doesn’t need the body to live on in the afterlife, he was going directly against the orthodox Muslims of his time period who believed that both body and mind are resurrected into the afterlife. The downside was that he was ruthlessly attacked for this. The upside is that he found favor with many later Christian thinkers.

And this brings me to the question of the week. Philosophize this: is what Avicenna said true? Does his flying man thought experiment really make it impossible for the body and mind to be inseparable? I wonder if there’s any way to link the feelings that we have in the body with the thoughts that the rational soul has.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you soon.