The 12 books that have influenced me the most

Tyler Cowen started this meme, in response to "a loyal reader" who told him:

I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.

Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias, and many others have given their lists. There's no required number of books, but most people seem to be giving around 10.

Some of the recurring authors are Plato, Nietszche, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Thomas Kuhn, Derek Parfit, Paul Johnson, and Thomas Sowell. This is all slanted by the fact that the meme was started by a libertarian economist, so the people who pick up his meme are going to be disproportionately libertarian.

Here's my list:

1. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. (Previously blogged by me and also my dad.) He looks at many of the classic philosophical problems (knowledge, free will, the meaning of life, etc.) in order to illuminate the frustrating interplay between the objective and the subjective, both of which are inescapably real. 

2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Kant's book is famously badly written, while Hume's book is pretty clearly written for the 18th century. Both of them have to be confronted by anyone trying to understand the limits of understanding. They didn't create enduring theoretical frameworks, but they still made progress by waking us up from our "dogmatic slumbers" (as Kant said Hume had done to him).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. Emotions aren't the opposite of reason — they contain intelligent thoughts and allow us to rationally interact with the outside world.

5. What's It All About? by Julian Baggini. An argument that the standard solutions to the meaning of life don't work.

6. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Blogged.) How to structure all the activities in your life to maximize happiness.

7. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. (Blogged.) You could file this under philosophy or self-help.

8. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. (Blogged.) I'm sure there are more recent books on evolutionary psychology that are better supported (at least because more research has been done since 1994), and Wright himself admits that the theory has its shortcomings. But this book offers a compelling explanation of human behavior.

9. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. He applies his dryly, lucidly analytical style to the kinds of questions that continental philosophy more often approaches with overwrought extravagance and obscurantism. The famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of many highlights; others include "Death" (blogged), "The Absurd" (blogged), "Sexual Perversion," and "The Fragmentation of Value."

10. The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn. Why we haven't, and aren't going to, solve the mind-body problem.

11. Rationality in Action by John Searle. A refreshing look at the problem of free will. (His shorter follow-up, Freedom & Neurobiology, deals with similar themes but also extends his analysis into political philosophy.)

12. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. As the back cover says, he makes the case for a revolution in our concern for animals by reasoning from beliefs most people already hold. This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.

Looking over the list, I seem to have been most interested in thinking about thought and its place in our lives, with more emphasis on the inadequacy than the power of rational thought. This emphasis is rather awkward since any such analysis is itself an attempt to think rationally. The View from Nowhere captures this awkwardness explicitly.

Feel free to post a comment either listing the books that have influenced you the most, linking to your blog post with your list, or linking to other people's lists that you've found especially interesting.

Paradoxical theories of language, knowledge, and the absurd

My mom points out "the paradox of 'insisting' that words have no 'fixed or stable set of meanings'":

If you really believed what you are insisting, you wouldn't be insisting, you'd be, perhaps, entertaining a suggestion or toying with a notion or musing about the possibility, now wouldn't you?

She's reacting to this description posted on a wall in the Art Institute of Chicago describing an artwork by Bruce Nauman:

Human Nature / Life Death . . . insists on language's inability to deliver a fixed or stable set of meanings, conveying a deep suspicion about what constitutes truth, especially in the public realm.

She adds a great detail:

[W]hen I voiced these thoughts (to Meade) the museum guard overheard, laughed, and nodded knowingly.

It reminds me of one of my philosophy professors from back when I attended the University of Wisconsin, Keith Yandell, who has a knack for devastatingly concise refutations of theories that contradict themselves. For instance, he defined empiricism as the theory that we can only gain knowledge through sensory experience. Then he pointed out that this theory itself is not known to be true through sensory experience.

Another example of this kind of paradox (is there a name for it?) is the problem of the absurd. It's supposed to be a profound problem that our lives are "absurd," in the philosophical sense. That is, you take your life very seriously from day to day, but you can also take a step back and wonder if the whole thing is ultimately pointless, meaningless.

Now, that problem -- the problem of the absurd -- is itself a paradox, but it's not the kind of paradox that this blog post is about. The paradox I want to focus on is one that Thomas Nagel pointed out in his wonderful book Mortal Questions. The problem of the absurd contains a couple of subtle internal contradictions. And if you grasp these contradictions, you may start to feel that the absurd is not such a problem at all -- or at least, not a deeply troubling one. Nagel explains:

[A]bsurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. . . .

If . . . there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Keeping an open mind on the mind-body problem, part 3

In my previous 2 posts on the mind-body problem (post 1, post 2), I criticized materialist philosophers -- that is, those who believe only the physical exists and thus deny the existence of any kind of mind distinct from one's physical body. As I said (quoting Thomas Nagel), one huge problem with this view is that "all materialist theories deny the reality of the mind," though they're usually not explicit about this point, possibly because very few normal people would accept their conclusion if stated plainly.

Here's Thomas Nagel's view, which I agree with:

To insist on trying to explain the mind in terms of concepts and theories that have been devised exclusively to explain nonmental phenomena is, in view of the radically distinguishing characteristics of the mental, both intellectually backward and scientifically suicidal.

Well, so far all of this has focused on the flaws with materialism. But is this just a negative point, or is there some positive, viable alternative?

I think so, but it requires accepting the fact that we probably don't have a satisfying theory yet. There's That's no reason to assume we'll never have such a theory. [UPDATE: I changed it from "There's" to "That's" because I realized I didn't want to make such a firm statement. Colin McGinn argues that, indeed, we'll never have a good theory.]

Here's Nagel's extended argument to this effect (this is all from chapter 2 of The View from Nowhere (1986), which is one of the best philosophy books I've ever read):

1. "The shift from the universe of Newton to the universe of Maxwell required the development of a whole new set of concepts and theories.... This was not merely the complex application, as in molecular biology, of fundamental principles already known independently. Molecular biology does not depend on new ultimate principles or concepts of physics or chemistry, like the concept of field. Electrodynamics did."

2. Even if these new, disparate concepts have been "superseded by a deeper unity,"* we wouldn't have been able to discover that "deeper unity" in the first place "if everyone had insisted that it must be possible to account for any physical phenomenon by using concepts that are adequate to explain the behavior of planets, billiard balls, gases, and liquids. An insistence on identifying the real with the mechanical would have been a hopeless obstacle to progress, since mechanics is only one form of understanding, appropriate to a certain limited though pervasive subject matter."

* Nagel suggests that this has actually happened; I don't know enough about the relevant science to have an opinion on that.

3. "The difference between mental and physical is far greater than the difference between electrical and mechanical."

4. If you believe that something can be "pervasive" but "limited," to use the words from point 2 -- and it's hard to see how anyone could deny this possibility -- then you should be open to the view that the physical isn't necessarily the only thing that's real, but rather is "only one form of understanding."

5. Given that it certainly seems like the world includes not just the physical but also the mental, "[w]e need entirely new intellectual tools, and it is precisely by reflection on what appears impossible -- like the generation of mind out of the recombination of matter -- that we will be forced to create such tools."

6. It's possible that if we go down this road and come up with a successful theory of the mind, we will not arrive at dualism, but will discover some sort of "deeper unity" of the mind and body. Nagel elaborates on this point:

In other words, if a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it. Otherwise there is a danger of futile reliance on concepts designed for other purposes, and indefinite postponement of any possibility of a unified understanding of mind and body."

I completely agree with Nagel on all this, and I try to keep it in mind anytime I read or hear overly confident materialist philosophers.

Keeping an open mind on the mind-body problem, part 1

I've been thinking about the mind-body problem. One oddity about the problem is that, as Descartes famously recognized, the very act of "thinking" about it provides you with evidence that ties directly into the problem -- namely evidence of the fact that you have mental states.

But Thomas Nagel says (in his essay "Why We Are Not Computers," from Other Minds):

The power of Descartes's intuitive argument is considerable, but dualism of either kind [substance dualism or property dualism] is now a rare view among philosophers, most of whom accept some kind of materialism. They believe that everything there is and everything that happens in the world must be capable of description by physical science.

That last sentence is deeply disturbing to me. There's an obvious problem and a less obvious problem with the assumption that the mind-body problem can be solved purely through physical science.

The obvious problem is: why should we assume we can know everything?

When I was a little kid, I would tell people, "I know everything, and you know neverything." Clearly I had an instinctive desire to "know everything," and I'm sure the feeling is common. But as I say, I was a kid. You're supposed to outgrow that. I don't see the point in doing philosophy if you don't acknowledge there might be things you just can't know about the world. Maybe most philosophers do assume science can explain everything, but if so, then most philosophers are being childish.

The less obvious problem is (again quoting Nagel from the same book):

all materialist theories deny the reality of the mind, but most of them disguise the fact (from themselves as well as from others) by identifying the mind with something else.

UPDATE: Continued here.

Double negative

I didn't set out to blog about grand themes, but that's how it's been shaping up. I can't imagine sustaining a rate of a post every couple days, always on a topic of life-or-death importance. At some point I'll either have to slow down the pace or lighten up the subject matter. But for now, here's another post on life, death, etc.

Having recently graduated from law school to embark on a career, I figured it's an opportune time for me to read up on managing one's personal finances. The consensus seems to be that Your Money or Your Life is the book to get, at least for the big picture of how your money should fit into your life. (Go here for the official "detailed summary" of the whole book.)

So I'm reading it. I'm in no position to critique the book as a whole -- I'm just a couple chapters in. But I do have a couple problems with it. Not only do the authors, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (hereinafter YMOYL), set out to frame your life as negatively as possible (which seems excessive!), but they also botch some basic facts.

They try to break down the amount of time you have left to live. If you're an average 40-year-old, you have 37 years left to live, which is 329,601 hours, which they call "life energy." That's all fine with me. Moving on: "Assuming about half of your time is spent on necessary body maintenance -- sleeping, eating, eliminating, washing and exercising ..." Again, still sounds reasonable -- I have no problem with that assumption. But they go on: "... you have 164,800 hours of life energy" -- that is, only half of the rest of your life -- "remaining for such discretionary uses as:

• your relationship to yourself
• your relationship to others
• your creative expression
• your contribution to your community
• your contribution to the world
• achieving inner peace and ...
• holding down a job." (pp. 55-6)*

You see the problem, right? Now, this is from the revised edition of the book, so no one pointed this out to them in seven years. Assuming they're right that 50% of your time is spent on body maintenance, it doesn't follow that you only have 50% of your time available for things other than body maintenance. You can eat food ... while developing a relationship with someone (or yourself!). You can go for a walk or a run (which, as he says, is body maintenance because it's "exercise") ... while trying to achieve inner peace. You can think creatively in the shower. If you're lucky, you can write a song in your sleep.

The bottom line is they've implicitly eliminated "half of your time" from what counts as your real "life." I don't think that's a minor technicality! As I said, I'm still expecting to get a lot out of this book ... but I have to question whether someone who makes such a consequential calculation error is the person I should be taking advice from about how to make a budget.

This got me thinking about Thomas Nagel's essay Death, from his book Mortal Questions. He asks whether death is really so bad (assuming there's no afterlife).**

Here's Nagel's argument in a nutshell: If death is bad, it is “bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.” His proof of this is that we consider it unfortunate to have a relatively short life, while no one thinks it's unfortunate to be dead for a relatively long period of time. No one would say that Haydn is less fortunate than Schubert because Haydn died in 1809 and has thus been dead for longer than Schubert, who died in 1828.

OK, so death is bad because it takes away life, and life is good. Well, if that's what's bad about death, then death is always bad, because death always takes away your chance at living more life, even if you live to be 100. (This is still Nagel's argument, not mine.) The fact that it's normal to die before you reach 100 should be no consolation: if everyone died in agony, that would plainly be bad even though it would be normal. Death at a ripe old age is really "just a more widespread tragedy" than dying young. And here's the last sentence of the essay: "If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all." That's it! No uplift!

Well, that's about the coldest, most impersonal philosophy of life (let alone death) that I've ever seen. Isn't a whole huge dimension missing from this? Life isn't just some constant that you either have more or less of. It's not just quantity -- it's quality too.*** To point out the obvious, people have different attitudes toward different stages of life. When you expect that something will probably happen (death at an old age at the end of a full life), you're well prepared to accept it. Acceptance is a reasonably good feeling, and feeling good is good. I don't think any further argument is needed to justify a feeling of acceptance (unless it's actively causing harm somehow, e.g. accepting the smell of a gas leak). It may be an arbitrary fact about the world that death at 80 is normal, whereas death at 40 is shocking. But once we take that arbitrary fact as a given, it's not arbitrary to structure our expectations around it.

But that's just what I think, and I'm just a blogger, so what I say has no credibility because it hasn't been checked. If you want to know what the experts think -- the ones who have credibility because their words have been printed on dead trees -- it's: you only have half as much potentially enjoyable life as you thought you had, and ... it will end tragically.

But it's even worse than that. I don't have the space to list all the ways YMOYL tells you your life is not as good as you thought. But suffice it to say that they seem to write off most of your time spent at work, as well as any time running errands. (I'm sure that later on in the book they'll give examples of people who enjoy their jobs, but that's certainly not the picture they've painted so far.) When you add all this up -- or I guess I should say, subtract all this down (?!) -- you really don't have much life left that's enjoyable rather than drudgery. But, as we learn from Nagel, it's all over much too quickly.

Now, aren't Nagel and YMOYL**** both making the same mistake? They both seem to be assuming that experience -- or, in other words, living -- is this fixed thing that's just sitting there, waiting to be objectively analyzed, assessed, weighed. But really, given a particular experience (say, working at your current job), you have tons of flexibility in how you experience it. No matter what you do, you can certainly choose to experience it as meaningless drudgery. (Incidentally, the next essay in Nagel's book is about whether we should see all our endeavors as meaningless.) But unless you have a really low-quality job (I'm thinking coal miner here), it's a pretty good bet that you can decide to just go ahead and be energized by your work, feel a sense of "drive" and "mission."***** OK, I'm making that sound a lot easier than it is, I know. But so far (again, just a couple chapters in), YMOYL makes it sound impossible. And if you can even think about shifting to a more positive mindset for your job, you can certainly do it for walking to the grocery store and buying food to bring home and cook dinner with (all of which the authors would apparently count as wasted time).

I may have an update later, once I've read and absorbed all of YMOYL. But it's 9 steps, and they look like they might take me a while.

* Bullet points and ellipsis in original. [back]

** In addition to excluding the possibility of an afterlife, he also excludes the concerns of people (or things) aside from the person who dies. In other words, he's just asking whether death is subjectively bad for the person who dies, not whether it's an objectively bad thing for the world as a whole. [back]

*** If I'm right about that point, then this has huge implications for a lot of controversial issues. [back]

**** Sorry for the lack of parallelism, but YMOYL is a co-authored book. What was I supposed to say -- "Nagel and Dominguez and Robin both make the same mistake"?! [back]

***** On that topic, I have to eventually read Flow. Without having read it yet, I wouldn't hesitate give it my completely unqualified -- in both senses of the word -- recommendation. [back]