"Yes? or No?" When philosophy becomes the courtroom.

In a recent and lovely chat with my supie he was trying to prove a point and asked me to make a decision on a topic that I thought included one or more grey areas. "No, don't explain." he said "Just answer yes or no." In other words, do I believe a) or b)? I believed neither, but humoured him by choosing one of them prefixed with, "Ah, I see, we are in court now?" It was mildly funny at the time, you probably had to be there.

I did not emerge from that chat with my supervisor agreeing that representationalism about pain was a tenable position. I was not sure why at the time because sometimes, with me, things need to percolate before the solutions present themselves. In this case the solution presented itself during the walk from the car park over two weeks later.

It turns out the problem was the courtroom style of limited choices. Just how good is your philosophical position if you must force agreement from your opponent? The forced choice meant that one of the premises, rather than being a sturdy foundation for a conclusion, had become... crumbly... Of course this is not necessarily fatal to the overall argument, it might be an easily rectified dent, the position might hold just as easily without the premise in question. Nevertheless the point is that if I am forced to agree with an argument's premise I am never going to emerge from a discussion convinced of its conclusion and neither should anyone else.

What his request for my 'yes or no' answer should have highlighted was that we have a disagreement in what may be a significant area: he thinks the issue is a black and white one while I think coming down emphatically on either side is extreme and indefensible. If I am forced to choose what I think is the least problematic answer I have not technically agreed to anything other than a little congeniality for the sake of a quiet life.

It's something to watch for in my own arguments too, if I have to say to someone, "Just answer the question, yes or no." I might as well give the ground to my opponent straight away. If the premise is vital to your position it is much better to get a little sidetracked and delve into the grey area in question to convince your opponent of your premise. Your major point might be lost for a while but you'll still be arguing which, as far as I'm concerned, is the ultimate point of it all.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy Fail

Today I looked up Intensionality again as I can't seem to get the definition straight in my head. This is what the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy had to say:

"Failure of extensionality."

Helpful already, eh?

Then:

"A linguistic context is extensional if and only if the extension of the expression obtained by placing any subexpression in that context is the same as the extension of the expression obtained by placing in that context any subexpression with the same extension as the first subexpression."

All clear now. Not. I'm too tired to wade through it to determine whether a) it actually makes sense or b) the editor had a brain fart that day.

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The paucity of human ova. Seriously.

I was doing some light reading for my thesis on pain and I came across this charming quote about the evolution of traits and their biological function:

"A proper [biological] function of the swimming mechanism in a human sperm", says Milikan (1986), "is to get the sperm to an ovum. But only a minute proportion of these mechanisms actually perform this function - because of the paucity of human ova."

PARDON?

Paucity of human ova???? Not, "Reproduction as a method is so crazily inefficient that we need millions of swimming critters just to reach one egg." No, rather, there is a paucity of eggs.

If there were truly a paucity of ova, then every single egg rotting in my ovaries would have been utilised by the screaming baby-hungry hoards by now. There would be laws about it.

I can't believe that was written in the 80's.

Brief vent about mental illness and judgmental peeps who don't get it.

I have no idea where this came from. I am non-clinically depressed and anxious at the moment. That is, I have reasons for both!

When you’re depressed every act of will requires an extra push, like a low impact excersie routine done in water because the water provides resistance. With depression everything requires more effort, only you’re not wading through water, your universe has taken on the viscosity of a gel toothpaste. Everything you do is pushed through that medium, taking orders of magnitude more effort than the same actions when you’re not in a depressed state. But how to explain this to the happily unaffected?

It is very hard for those who are unaffected to related to the experience of having a brain that is not under their control. But I’m nothing if not tenacious so here is my attempt to explain…

Almost every one has had a crush on another person, right? It seems that everything they do is perfect, you are besotted, and most importantly, you can’t seem to stop thinking about them. Everything you see or do seems to relate back to them somehow, they are the last thing on your mind before you go to sleep, they may provoke stalking behaviour (especially since it is so easy to do these days!), their presence may equate with dizzying happiness accompanied by bouts of invincibility, they may also cause crushing anxiety and the misery associated with unrequited love. During this experience, you probably could not stop thinking about them even if you wanted to, the thought of the person interferes with your work and play. If you are lucky, this interference is painlessly seamless, if you are unlucky, you are unable to concentrate at all. This person, whoever they are, seems to have hijacked your thoughts, taken some of your mental liberty away.

The same could be said for worries, ever lost sleep because you could not switch of your brain for worry? That is an example of your mind being out of your control, you want to sleep, but you can't for worry. Surely if you had control over your emotional state this would not be a problem?

The main message is: Normal folk do suffer from periods when their mind/brain does things that they cannot control. That is a no brainer really, but I claim that it is these experiences that may help them relate to people with mental illness. So, assuming you believe me that normal people can suffer periods where their mind seems to be out of their control for some reason, try to imagine what that would be like without an object, that is without a crush on someone, without a worry to occupy your mind, without a reason to be sad.

Try to imagine a perpetual state of worry without an object of worry (this can be called anxiety).
Try to imagine a perpetual state of sadness without a reason to be sad (this is called depression).
Try to imagine extraordinary happiness, so happy that you believe nothing could ever hurt you, but without a reason to be happy (this is a symptom of bipolar disorder).
Try to imagine that switching off this worry, sadness or happiness is not an option, try to imagine that these feelings do not shift according to what is happening in your life. This is quite like the times when switching off for you is not an option.

What makes you different from the anxious or depressed person is that you have the comfort of a reason. We think you are so, so lucky. But please try to understand how unlucky we are. We have by accident, injury or design brains that will plunge us into the depths of despair, engage a dire apprehension that will gnaw at our guts or provoke swooping episodes of happiness where we become a danger to ourselves and others. Our brains do this for no reason at all and it can be terrifying.

Please also believe that we do not want to be like this, that we would not wish this state of being upon anyone. But we are tired of the labels of self-absorbed, or lazy, or paranoid, as though we were doing it on purpose. We are tired of the lack of understanding.

So next time you hear about or meet someone with a mental illness, when you read about suicides in the paper or are unfortunate enough to know someone who has attempted it. Try, try, try to remember the last time your mind was out of your control, and try to imagine what kind of hell it might be to be stuck there without a reason. Please.