Theoria to Theory
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THEORIA TO THEORY VOLUME 8 NUMBER 1 Copied from this pdf at the EP’s web site The original is this pdf at the HathiTrust website For Copyright provisions, see the next page File dated 2017-09-14 15:28:52 Theoria to theory; an international journal of science, philosophy, and contemplative religion. London, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015024591490 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike http://www.hathitrust.org/access_use#cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 This work is protected by copyright law (which includes certain exceptions to the rights of the copyright holder that users may make, such as fair use where applicable under U.S. law), but made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You must attribute this work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). This work may be copied, distributed, displayed, and performed - and derivative works based upon it - but for non-commercial purposes only (if you are unsure where a use is non-commercial, contact the rights holder for clarification). If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Please check the terms of the specific Creative Commons license as indicated at the item level. For details, see the full license deed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0. THEORIA to theory VOLUME 8, NUMBER 1 (1974) CONTENTS Editorial 1 TED BASTIN Further Report on Uri Geller 7 WERNER HEISENBERG Double Dialogue 1 1 I: with Vintila Horia, and II: with a member of the editorial group BRIAN INGLIS Faith Healing 35 ATO RINPOCHE The Dalai Lama in Cambridge 43 STEWART BRAND Destination Crisis 47 REVIEW DISCUSSION Supernature by Lyall Watson I Alan Mayne and Bernard Wignall 57 II Roger Bertram 61 COMMENT Transcendental Meditation; Some Implications for Psychology— Hugh Lovesy 65 Elementary Christianity from an Advanced Point of View 71 Living with Leukaemia 76 On Justifying "Double Conversion" 78 REVIEW The Alexander Principle by Wilfred Barlow Elizabeth Dupre 79 DAMARIS PARKER-RHODES Kinds of Retreat 87 SENTENCES Kathleen Russell 92 \otes on Contributors 99 looks Received 101 5 I Editorial From many backgrounds and for many reasons a number of people nowadays are convinced that there are critical points in the sciences where new alignments of concepts are needed. One of the reasons why this journal has focused so much attention on parapsychology is that the diverse phenomena that are dealt with under this label point up the critical areas and offer hints as to the direction in which we must move. Uri Geller, whom we discussed in the January issue last year, has now become a figure of public interest, disturbing many of the comfortable "certainties" of academic science and philosophy. Perhaps he will disturb us more. If Geller can do what he seems able to do, then we are faced with deciding how to respond. There are circles where this sort of phenomenon is greeted as a sign of the failure of science, as a cue to withdraw from the critical pursuit of understanding and embrace the occult. There are others where it is held that a minor revision will do and that the physicists who said that telekinesis was impossible failed to appreciate the power of existing theory. But neither of these responses is right. What is needed is an examination and reappraisal of many of our concepts and a great deal of directed and intelligent research. Even if Geller is a clever trickster there is work to do. For, as the discussion with Heisenberg in this issue shows, there are problems at the con ceptual base of physics itself. We are facing a serious intellectual crisis whose solution will demand hard work from philosophers and physicists. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, academic philosophers have failed to deal seriously with our problems. If, as the parapsycho- logical results suggest, the conceptual framework of physics won't Theoria to Theory Published by 1974, Vol. 8, pp. 1-6 © Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd. EDITORIAL do, then "common sense" and "ordinary language" will do even less. So it is a little disheartening to read Prof. Bernard Williams' recent book, Problems of the Self, a collection of "ordinary language" papers in which he covers a number of problems which are also those raised in a very awkward way in parapsychology. Prof. Williams holds the Knightbridge Chair of Philosophy, which was held once by Broad, who, unlike his successor but one, gave serious attention to the paranormal. An examination of the book shows up some of the inadequacies of a method of which Williams is a first-rate practitioner. The papers in question (basically the first five) deal with the relation between people and their bodies. It might have been expected that Williams would discuss some of the claims that have been made about out-of-the-body experiences in, for example, Robert Monroe's book journeys out of the Body, or Celia Green's Out-of-the-body Experiences. But he does not. The whole argu ment is carried on entirely without reference to cases where these problems actually arise. The case Williams discusses most interestingly is an imaginary situation where two persons swap bodies. But the argument here exemplifies a peculiar philosophical inadequacy of his position. Throughout this paper, Williams seems to presuppose that the only way we can really change a person is to change his body; but this is a large part of what he is trying to show. He considers the case where two men (A and B) have their memories read off their brains (part of their bodies) and stored in, say, a computer. They are then read back; but A's body gets B's memories and B's body gets A's. The question is what A should say before this process occurs if asked whether he would prefer the A body or the B body to be tortured after the change. (All this granted a selfish point of view.) Williams thinks that we should identify with our bodies and not our memories, adding: "It would be risky; that there is room for the notion of risk here is itself a major feature of the problem." (p. 63) Indeed it is; but that is because we do not yet know what sorts of things would happen after such treatment If we insist on discussing cases where no information is available, our conclusions are liable to be "risky." OINUMI- BOOKBINDING CO. ..-.-. 75 2 ' ,,«„„ s 4467 -'-•.* oi3u EDITORIAL QUALITY CONTROL MARK Williams' choice of a computer analogy is an important indi cator. For he belongs to a philosophical school that holds that philosophy requires no contact with science and actual cases. To complain that Williams has ignored conceptual problems that have a (putative) empirical content is to refuse to do philosophy his way at all. Yet here Williams has committed himself to a picture of the human person that derives from work in computers and "Artificial Intelligence." He talks rather vaguely of extracting "information from a man's brain and stor[ing] it in a device" (p. 47) and the word "input" appears later on the same page. And he also says this: Thus we can imagine the removal of the information from a brain into some storage device (the device, that is, is put into a state information— theoretically equivalent to the total state of the brain), and is then put back into the same or another brain. (Such a process may, perhaps, be forever impossible, but it does not seem to present any purely logical or conceptual difficulty.) The notion of "logical or conceptual" difficulty here invoked is surely very odd: from an analysis of everyday concepts we have moved to an assumption of the computer model of the brain. (I take it that Williams' refusal actually to mention the word "computer" is a feature of his method.) There are surely very grave conceptual problems about the idea of separating a man's memories from the rest of his person. Nothing in the "logic" of the concept of "memory" guides one to an understanding of the plausibility of such analogies and this one seems to be question-begging. For a computer memory is a store of discrete units of information, each of which has a numerical label that enables it to be called for by the central processor, which goes progressively through a program, as that program dictates. It is possible for a given unit of information to take the form of a new instruction for the central processor. The plaus ibility of Williams' case rests upon the possibility of clearly distinguishing the memory bank and the central processor and nothing in the ordinary conceptual framework guarantees the separability of a person and his memories. It would have been more instructive in this context to consider EDITORIAL the phenomenon of "possession," which provides us with real problems of personal identity; and, in a sense, Williams does. In the first paper ("Personal Identity and Individuation") he dis cusses a person, Charles, who wakes up with Guy Fawkes' memories. Williams holds that we cannot say that Charles has become Guy Fawkes because two people might wake up with Fawkes' memories at the same time and, though they would both have the same right to be called Guy Fawkes, they couldn't both be Guy Fawkes. But why not? In a recent Aristotelian Society paper, Jonathan Harrison has suggested that, "logically" speaking, it is possible for a person to be embodied in several places at once.