Ep. 259: Locke Clarifies Misleading Complex Ideas (Part Two)

0:00 Dylan: Besides the ideas, whether simple or complex, that the mind has of things as they are in themselves, there are others it gets from comparison with one another. The understanding in the consideration of anything is not confined to that precise object. It can carry any idea, as it were, beyond itself, or at least look beyond it to see how it stands in conformity with any other. When the mind so considers one thing that it does, as it were, bring to it and set it by another other, carry its view from one to the other, this is as the words import, relation and respect, and the denominations given to positive things intimating that respect and serving as marks to lead the thoughts beyond the subject itself, denominated to something distinct from it, are what we call relatives. And the things so brought together related.

0:44 Wes: So I think that's clear, we can move on. Locke's tortured syntax, which I actually enjoy.

0:53 Mark: Like, as you were reading it, you said bring to it. It's bring it to. Because that's the weird way he talks about just, I want to bring this to and show it to you and compare it to something else.

1:03 Wes: That's one of the interesting things that relations are comparisons, which it's worth noting, which I don't know if I ever explicitly thought about, that you put two ideas next to each other and do a certain kind of comparison.

1:15 Dylan: He just says that it's what it does. But this is one of those things that's in the same category for me as us witnessing successive acts. It's a power that we have in the mind of just doing stuff that is relatively unexamined. He just says, well, we, as it were, take one thing and we bring it to another. And then we. That thing that we do when we bring it to another, that's a relation. We're making them relatives.

1:39 Wes: And if we were one of those people who liked innate ideas, or if we were a Platonist, right, we would want to say, well, how do I do that? I need another idea, I need sameness, I need a likeness and I need the glue. And then you get into the whole problem of, you know, the infinite regress. Well, then I have to relate that idea to those two ideas, and then so on and so forth. Here he just avoids all that and it's just imminent mental structure.

2:05 Dylan: Well, and I like that because I basically think he's right. I mean, maybe I shouldn't just like it because of that, but it seems as good as anything else as a fundamental characteristic of comparing.

2:15 Wes: And thank God, because without it we wouldn't have have ideas like husband and wider. To give two good examples, which we might not normally think of a husband, for instance, as a relation? Well, no, of course we would maybe not wider, but anyway, widers are longer

2:33 Dylan: or taller or shorter.

2:34 Mark: Clearly one of the philosophical things he's warning against here is that there are a lot of things we might see as simple that are in fact complex. And when there is relationality built into it, that is the complexity that the word itself might not be highlighting. And I think this is a very deep point and gets at the very problem that we are having between individual instances of a qualia being an idea and the term that captures that qualia with other qualia being is it a simple idea or is it necessarily a complex idea? Because we've been talking about white as a simple idea.

3:07 Wes: That's a simple idea.

3:08 Mark: This is why I'm asking this, because it seems to me me that the individual qualia of white is a simple idea once we name it and are connecting it with things that are, you know, of course, white is not the best example, but like yellow, that really goes across a range of similar shades as well as different experiences of over time. And there's a lot of relationality to. I know that if I'm looking at it in a shadowy place, then the yellow is going to look a little different. And all that seems to me captured in the complex phenomena that the word yellow is supposed to capture.

3:42 Wes: Yes, I misspoke, Mark. I meant simple mode. This is the craziness of his taxonomy is that chapter 12. Let's just remind ourselves, modes are always complex ideas. So yellow is a mode of color, and by virtue of being a mode, it becomes a complex idea, as far as I can tell, according to his taxonomy. But it's a simple mode.

4:04 Mark: Yeah. So this seems like there are very few simple ideas and none of them are named by language. Does that seem correct that simple modes are a thing in our experience? Like, how do I know what the word yellow means as well as a simple idea of yellow comes into my mind. But what the term yellow actually refers to, as you said, is a mode, a complex idea that connects up a lot of different experiences and different things together. It is, I think, in anything. Well, once you sort of mull on it and do any sort of processing on it, what Dylan was talking about in our mind. Mind just brings one thing to and next to another thing. Then you're making it complicated, you're making it complex. Does that make sense?

4:41 Wes: Yeah, I think that has to be the kind of counterintuitive conclusion both based on the taxonomy and both based on

4:48 Dylan: your explanation that makes all relations complex.

4:51 Wes: Just the fact that it makes something like the color yellow a complex idea is surprising. I'm not sure now, based on his taxonomy. Yes. And Mark, I think your explanation makes perfect sense. Does he actually in the end conclude that now? I'm a little. I'd say I'm agnostic about it. It's confusing.

5:07 Mark: This is a counter thought. You know, he says in some places that the relations are often simpler than the things related. Right. That fatherhood is a relationship between a father and a child. And the individuals that make up that relation, the father and the child are human beings and human beings are really complex. Like that's definitely a substance that has a bunch of. But fatherhood is not a substance. It's just a way of comparing those two things. So in fact the idea of fatherhood is way simpler. So it's not that the idea of fatherhood is made up of the idea of a father and a child if what we take those to be are the human beings. Because then every single relation would be super complex if it actually had to incorporate all those fully realized. Actually, they're very inadequate ideas. Anything that involves a substance is an inadequate idea. So I think there might be something about just the relation itself that can be simple.

5:58 Wes: Yeah, the relation itself seems. Yeah, he says at least. Least at their clearest.

6:03 Mark: Because it's like the line connecting two things.

6:05 Wes: One thing I will want to say about yellow is. I don't. I mean, he certainly does not explicitly call that a relation in this chapter. And it seems like it wouldn't be, you know, yellower would be the relation. But.

6:15 Dylan: Yes, yellower would be the relation. And it's also not going to. It's not true that just because a relation is a complex idea doesn't mean that all complex ideas are relations.

6:25 Mark: Sorry if this is repetitive. I'm trying to. The phenomenon of relationality is complex. Complex, yes. Because you have the two things and the line that connect them, but the relation is just the line connecting them. So does that mean the relation is a complex idea? Or can the relation be a simple idea that is then being combined with the tooth, the relata. I don't know.

6:44 Wes: I don't think he says whether it's a simple idea. I think he doesn't want to call it an idea. Right. Because then we get into that infinite regress problem and we get into the innate idea problem. Right. He wants to say cognitive capacities and structures are not themselves ideas. The ability to relate and compare. I'm speaking out loud. I fully admit this may be wrong. But I think what he certainly says, though, Mark, as you pointed to, is that the relations are often clearer than the ideas. So paternity is clearer than humanity. And he'll say things like relations terminate in simple ideas.

7:19 Dylan: A relation like yellower or longer or taller is going to be a case where you're on the one hand keeping in mind the relationship, but the relation is one of a characteristic. And so there isn't going to be. You're not going to have the problem of there being longerness, okay? But there's other kinds of relations between roloda where you're going to have that problem of whether or not the relation that Mark's pointing to is its own thing. So, for instance, a ratio versus a fraction, right? So when you have a ratio in Euclidean geometry, you're really always keeping in mind the Roloda themselves. And then when you start talking about a fraction as its own thing, you make the motion of, oh, I'm going to write it as a decimal now. It's its own thing. It's a thing that half is no longer 1 to 2. That move. Actually, it seems like it's such a trivial move, but it just takes generations and generations of mathematicians to even come up with that. And I think we can come up with other sorts of examples that might not be mathematical, which the relation becomes a thing. Think about Heraclitus, right? The tension in the bow.

8:24 Wes: There's actually a good section on this section 6. This is one of the most interesting to me because. And I think, Mark Dylan, it's getting at your point, and Mark, I think you were making a similar point, was that what we think of as a positive thing, as a positive being, can be such by virtue of structure and then by virtue of its related parts. So he says, thus a triangle, though the parts thereof compared one to another, be relative. So they're related, you know, their relations. Yet the idea of the whole is a positive, absolute idea. The same thing may be said of a family, a tune, etc. What the part I read seems to suggest to me is that our idea of a particular thing can depend. It's not necessarily just a concatenation, right, as he's been talking, like a complex idea of a mode, for instance. It's not just a concatenation or conglomeration of simple ideas, but it's structured in a certain way. Those simple ideas are related and structured in very particular ways, and that's why it makes that particular thing. So I think that's important.

9:30 Dylan: Yeah. He gives the example of a family and a tune.

9:32 Mark: Well, you've convinced me, though, Dylan, from what you said, that longerness is a simple idea, because you don't have to be considering the various things that are longer, like it's abstracted from any particular situation. It's just a simple idea. Much like yellow is a simple idea, it's a comparative simple idea. I think you can have that.

9:50 Wes: I'm going to leave that alone.

9:53 Dylan: I'm agnostic. Maybe the great deceiver Mark. I have to be careful.

9:57 Mark: I can't remember which part of the text this comes from, but he says often when we refer to something as a process, we're just actually referring to the end result.

10:06 Wes: Yeah, that's in his causality section coming up.

10:10 Mark: Yeah. So I wonder how this would work in connection to relation, because relation can be a verb. It is describing the process of the mind relating two things. That is the process of actual relation. Or it can be the relationship result, longerness. That's the relation. That is the simple idea. There's an ambiguity that actually we feel like with the word relation. We're talking about the process, but actually we're just talking about the end result. I don't know if that's helpful, but it's a. It's an extra distinction that at least he brings up that could explain some of the confusion that we're having with relation. But we could just move on to cause and effect, whence the ideas of cause and effect got. I love.

10:49 Wes: I love his definition of causality because it's focused on. Normally we would think about this in terms of something out there in the world causing another thing. And he's talking about the production of, you know, causes as anything which produces any simple or complex idea, which is not just to say, the effect of objects on our minds. But he's thinking in terms of sequences of ideas where one idea produces another idea, right? So the complex idea of a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball leading to the complex idea of that second billiard ball moving causally. So it's this fascinating turn to the phenomenology of causality. Dangerously on the precipice of idealism or

11:39 Dylan: skepticism, like this first paragraph is one that he and Hume would have a dog fight about, right? In the. Notice that our senses take of the constant vicissitude of things. We cannot but observe that several particular both qualities and substances begin to exist and that they receive this their existence due to the application and operation of some other being. From this operation we get our ideas of cause and effect.

12:01 Mark: Yeah, we just see causality.

12:03 Dylan: And Hume would just say, you're wrong,

12:05 Mark: or we at least have to change the definitions of those words for that to be right.

12:10 Wes: We don't see causality in the sense that causality is not a sensation. Right. It's a relation. These relations are operations of the mind. These are the spontaneous ways in which we combine ideas.

12:21 Dylan: Yes, but I want to say, like relationships. I don't think he talks about it this way, but it seems like cause and effect is a simple idea. It's born out of our mind.

12:29 Wes: Well, these are all complex ideas. All relations are complex ideas, though.

12:33 Mark: Right, but this is exactly what I was just arguing about, that in a sense, it is simple. It's just that in its actual appearance in the world, there's going to be a constant conjunction. It's going to constantly involve the two things. But you can consider it in the abstract apart from any particular two things. So causality, just like longerness, could be a simple idea, but then just like anything else, when. When you see it in the real world, of course there are real things involved.

12:57 Wes: And I don't think so because you. I mean, define causality abstractly. It's like one thing causes another. That sounds complex to me.

13:03 Dylan: The reason why I was wanting to. It smells like a simple idea, both here and then. Relation smells like a simple idea is the way in which they are brought to our mind's eye. I have two categories of simple ideas. I have the ones that are brought through my senses and the ones that are brought from my mind itself. And relation and cause and effect seem like those. They seem like correlatives of things brought to my mind via my senses and radiate out of the world into my mind. That's what they feel like when he talks about them here. And maybe it's just because he uses words like we cannot but observe. And he uses the same thing with relations. I put one thing beside another. Those seem like simple ideas. Is the way in which color is a simple idea brought to my senses. That's all I'm saying.

13:51 Wes: You know, we need to make the distinction between. So we can talk about volition. Right. As a simple idea of reflection. It is an idea of reflection anyway.

14:00 Mark: It is also a mode because it's something that the mind is doing.

14:02 Wes: So I don't know if it's simple anymore, but it is an idea of reflection. But when we think about particular acts of volition, you know, there's a difference between thinking about these things philosophically. When we make the idea of volition, the object of our thinking and then thinking about how volition actually operates in the realm of ideas. So I think that's kind of what we're. We've done this kind of happened a little bit in the last episode as well.

14:27 Mark: But I'm willing to bracket going forward in this discussion any more talk of simplicity. Like, clearly the whole second half of this book is supposed to be about complex ideas. So it would really make sense if relation. All these things were complex ideas. And certainly the mind, we're all in agreement that the mind is doing things to make these connections and that, you know, the real relevant. I was claiming that the relevant philosophical point in terms of legit ideas and not legit ideas is that if you mistake a lot of these complex phenomena for simple ideas, then you are making a mistake. So we're going to get into that section here. Three here. Relations of time. We talked about time last time as a simple idea. But when we are actually talking about years, that is implicitly referencing the sun.

15:10 Wes: Yeah, I think this is why he says that modes are complex. Right? So like a year is a mode of direction, iteration. And it's complex because it's inherently relational.

15:19 Mark: Everything because it can be in a relation. It seems like it is if you think about it. If you make it the object of philosophical reflection, of course it's going to be complex. And that is the way we think about stuff.

15:30 Wes: Well, it's not being in a relation. Right. Anything can be in a relation. But these are relations. Like to say someone is a man is a positive idea of something. It's a non relational thing. To say he is a father. Father is to talk about a relation. Now man can of course be in a relation.

15:47 Mark: So in section four here he's talking about. You might think that young is just an absolute. It's just a mode. It's a way something a man is doing. It's not a real. It doesn't seem like a relative term. But is that young for a man or is that young for a dog? He's actually using this term young compared to. Exactly. He's bringing this term relative. We are just talking about actual relations in the metaphysical sense. But he's actually bringing in the moral relativity and the context. The context can be something that a term implicitly has a relation to. And so therefore it is a. You're using it relatively.

16:22 Dylan: Yes, it's like strong.

16:24 Wes: Right?

16:25 Mark: Strong for a bug.

16:26 Dylan: Maybe I'd love to be as Strong as a bug.

16:29 Mark: 27. Identity and diversity and in Some ways we've talked about this before. Let me just read the beginning. Another occasion the mind often takes a complete comparing is the very being of things. When considering anything as existing at any determined time or place, we compare it with itself existing at another time. And thereupon form the ideas of identity and diversity.

16:49 Wes: That's another very interesting way of formulating this and drawing our attention to the fact. That should be obvious, I guess, but it's just not the way I classified it in my mind. But identity as a relation, and specifically identity is a comparison of two different things at two different times.

17:08 Mark: And if something has the same generation, the same moment of creation in the same time, in the same place, it is the same thing. We were having difficulty early on in our very first discussion of talking. What the law of non contradiction is, and this was actually the way that he was putting it, is that a thing has to be identical to itself. If you say there are two things but yet they have the same generation, then that's a contradiction.

17:31 Wes: One thing can have two beginnings, and two things can have have one beginning. Which might sound weird because it seems like two different things at two different beginnings could merge into one thing. Or a thing with one beginning could break into two things. But that, of course is the wrong way to think about this 2/3 of

17:49 Dylan: the way through section 1. When, therefore we demand whether anything be the same or no, it refers always to something that existed such a time and such a place, which twas certain at that instant was the same with itself and not no other. From whence it follows that one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning. It being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant in the very same place, or one and the same thing in different places. That therefore that had one beginning is the same thing. And that which had a different beginning in time and place from that is not the same, but diverse.

18:27 Wes: So I was giving the example of concatenation and breaking apart and saying that's the wrong way to think about this, right? So someone might say, well, wait a minute, didn't I have the two beginnings in the sense of an egg and a sperm? And he would say that the beginning is actually in their union. So if I had likewise two parcels of matters, if they get concatenated together, their identity is changed. For the purposes of referring to something as a parcel of matter. It will turn out that when we talk about identity, as he'll get into in the next section, we're always talking about that relative to some type. Right. Identity of what is it an identical man? Is it an identical person is an identical parcel of matter. You always have to specify that. And once we do that specification, you can see that there's no concatenation or breaking apart in this sense. So if it's the same parcel of matter, it's the same all the way back to its very beginning. And if it's the result of concatenation, then those were two different things that became one thing at that moment of concatenation. Concatenation, yeah.

19:29 Mark: Because the obvious counter example can't two things have the same beginning is if you have a dualist idea, as he and Descartes seem to do, of mind and body, then it seems like when you're born, it's like your soul and your body, or your mind and your body started from the same event, but those are different types, so we don't have to worry about. Maybe you could take his like. Well, that just proves that the mind actually is the body in a way, you know, in an epistemically secret way. And that, you know, that's. Spinoza might take that.

19:55 Wes: Yeah. And if you want to say that two different things can't be in the exact same place at the same time, again, two things of the same type. Yes. The same man and person can be in the same place in the same time. Yes. The same spirit and body can be in the place. A spirit and body can be in the place, yeah. Anyway, you get the idea.

20:14 Dylan: When I was reading this, especially right after the causality chapter, I found myself just wondering in what way. Way they're intertwined or conflated with one another or mutually dependent or what the order of dependency, of causality and identity is. I found it just coming up as a question in that I couldn't completely separate it because we have in this first paragraph where he's talking about identity, all of these sequential notions. And also if they're not sequential, you have things like, well, they happened at the same place at the same time, they have the same same source, their beginning is the same. All of those things sound like causality. So that identity is a consequence of a causal chain of events.

20:57 Mark: You know, there's a section in the causality chapter that we did not talk about of the different types of causality that you could have creation from nothing. Only God can do that. Normally it is generation, I think, is it, you know, when the different parts come together in a certain structure or there's a manufacturer, he has a couple variations off of that.

21:15 Wes: But generation in particular is by nature, Right? Right. So it's growth, then you can do rearrangement from an external cause, and that's artificial manufacture and so on.

21:24 Mark: But in all those cases, yes, something is causing the existence of a new thing that will then be identical with itself.

21:30 Wes: Yeah. And I think also, Dylan, you know, once we get to section 4 of this, and we want to talk about what it means to be in a. An identical biological entity. Right. He's going to have to talk about growth and nourishment again. Right. So he's going to say, well, what does it mean to be the same plant or the same oak tree? And he's going to say it's a matter of an identity, of the disposition and organization of its parts to receive and distribute nourishment in a way that he calls it continues the same frame, which is to say the way that preserves its organization and that organization obviously is causal. These include inherently cause causal notions. So you think about identity in a biological entity as an identity of a certain type of organization, even though the matter is changing. Right, because that's what happens with nourishment. New particles are coming in, particles of waste are going out, and what's preserved is structural or formal. And of course, even some aspects of the form are changing, but the essential stuff is staying the same. And that differs from what we would talk about with an identity of a parcel of atoms, where if you. If there are three atoms concatenated and you take one away, then you have a different parcel.

22:46 Mark: Yeah, he just starting in section two here before getting to physical objects, he's talking about a particle of matter. I know you've made comparisons to him and Lucretius here. You know, I think that he has a similar scientific. You know, he likes using atomistic language. It's just that he's more epistemically timid about, like, for sure there are atoms, because this is one of the things just like substance. Like, we just don't know. We have no adequate idea. If we just break things apart and keep breaking them apart forever until the smallest thing, like, it's just like infinity. He had set that up as like, oh, this is a simple mode because I'm just adding, you know, a portion of time to another portion of time, and that could go on forever. And, you know, even the notion of God becomes like, I could just build this up forever. But essentially those are negative notions. Right. We have a lack of, you know, the idea of just keeping going on forever is not anything we've actually had a direct experience, experience of. We've had a direct experience of things stopping. And it's just like, well, what if it didn't stop? So likewise, I'm bringing that back to the particle of matter we can at least talk about as a theoretical entity. And if there were a smallest particle of thing that could not be further divided, then it would have to be identical to itself. It's only when you get multiple of them stuck together that you could talk about it changing by losing one atom.

24:02 Wes: This is actually section three. And what's really interesting about this is he's trying to derive a principle of individuation from the law of non contradiction. So at the level of the atom. So he'll say, what is the individuating principle? It's existence itself which determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place incommunicable to two beings of the same kind. So that's when he says, let's suppose an atom continue body under one immutable superficies, superficies existing in a determined time and place for being at that instant what it is, is and nothing else, it is the same. So if you think about this one identity in terms of the smallest thing you can possibly imagine, to explain what it is that individuates it as a self identical thing and as not anything else, you simply have to analyze the concept of existence as not involving contradiction, it not being some other thing thing, which is really interesting.

25:03 Mark: So what did you think about his take on. He's going to distinguish between living creatures where the identity is not a matter of having the identical matter, because of course, as a thing grows, it's going to replace most or all of its matter over time. And we're still going to say the acorn is the same as the oak between that and material things. Which he says, yeah, actually if you get rid of one particle, it's no longer the same thing. Which seems to fly in the face of. That's not my iPad. You scratched a little bit off of it. It's a different iPad because the iPad is a functional thing. It's not a. It's this Ship of Theseus example is what I was looking up of you ask. If you keep replacing one plank at a time, does it eventually become a different ship or. At one point I think he's committed to saying it is a different ship. Is that.

25:47 Wes: No, no. When we talk about identity, we're always talking about some identity of a type. And when we talk about matter, we Talk about the most generic type. We're talking about these quote unquote parcels. So all that matters for the sake of distinguishing one parcel from is that exactly the same atoms are in that parcel. Atom one, atom two atom three. Same atoms, same parcel, one goes away, different parcel. And that's just because you're talking about identity concerning that prefabricated type parcel. But once you talk about any other type, you've moved beyond that iPad, animal, whatever you want to do with it. Once you've changed type away from simply bare parcel, you can no longer say that subtraction and adding atoms leads to a different thing.

26:31 Mark: I'm just surprised he doesn't have like a section 4.5 in here to actually talk about non living concatenations being the same over time. The ship of Theseus example, he just jumps right to, I'm going to be interested in talking about personal identity. What do I need to do to get there? So identity of vegetables. That's why the oak is the same as the acorn. Identity of animals. It's the fitness of the organization. And insofar as that, then man is also a complex structure. And it's not the matter of having the same soul over time. It's not the matter of having the same matter over time. When you say what makes this the same man as somebody else, it's this complicated structure, this life of a human being. That's not the question of personal identity, but that's. This is where he starts. Identity of a man.

27:15 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right, Mark. It's weird that he doesn't talk about artifacts. I think one of the complications there, right, is that their internal principle of sustained organization, there's no by nature there, there's no work in an organism, there's work being done to stay the same biological thing and artifacts, the unity of the artifacts is in some sense relative to our ends and our, you know, what's useful to us.

27:40 Dylan: And it becomes even more interesting about the way in which an artifact is a thing or a heap of stuff like so, you know, the ship that you've built, how is that different than the parts of water in a bucket of water? Insofar as it has its own function, that functionality seems to be attributed by a human being in either case in a way that's different than the self motion of an organism. So in that way, a battleship is a lot more similar to a bucket of water or a pile of sand than a bug is to either one of them.

28:14 Wes: I think he just decided, yeah, I'm just not going to touch that problem. Let's move on to something simpler, like personal identity.

28:22 Mark: Maybe he just didn't want to encourage the sort of Aristotelian speculation about the essence of inanimate things. Like he's comfortable with talking about something like the form, you know, like what's in De Anima. But it's not a magical thing. It's what we can observe.

28:35 Dylan: The continued life it might be, but we have. I'm going to use the word relation, but I don't mean it the way he meant it. We have relations with inanimate things and mechanical things that are artifacts, at least analogically. We speak of them as having their own functionality and that we think about their functionality and we think through their functionality and how they ought to function better. And we add to their functionality. We invent new artifacts that have new kinds of functionality based upon previous artifacts that we've built. We interact with the world and learn about the world based upon the artifacts we built. So it's a deeper relation. While in fact this whole idea of whether or not an organism is a mechanical object or not, and where the difference between their self moving is and whether that self moving arises out of their mechanical relations. Fundamentally. Fundamentally.

29:20 Mark: But you're talking about functionalism makes me. I sort of want to generalize it into saying that every object has a social face. And this is kind of why he's distinguishing in this section between identity of the man and personal identity. Because there are things, you know, in these sci fi examples, if my consciousness gets moved into my pet pig is one of the examples he give, then I would consider myself, you know, from the point of view of being in the pet pig. I'm still me. It's just I have a different body, but that's not the social face of what being a person, of being the same man is.

29:51 Wes: Well, I just think he thinks man is a kind of hybrid concept which is also physiological and biological. So you're in the shape of a pig now, so you can't be the same man as the word is commonly used. You can be the same person. You can definitely be mark, the same person whether you're in the body of a pig or the body of a human being. But you can't be the same man because man just doesn't in common parlance

30:13 Dylan: mean that if you transferred your, your mind, your essence to Android, robot, it's the same of kind, kind of problem.

30:18 Mark: But maybe the custom could change that. Everybody's doing the move to being virtual to Being in a robot to being in. In a cyberspace area. And that's the kind of thing that could change over time. That's why I say it's the social face by saying that, yes, he does present it as the man is clearly has different functional components. It has the same mind in the same body. But when we get down to brass tacks, is it really the same body over time? Like if you transferred your consciousness into a clone and the old clone is destroyed, I think he would say that you are actually the same man. You're not the same body. But as for social purposes, you know, not only do you have personal identity, it would not be disruptive to just see you as continuing to be the same man. Does that seem right? Or Wes, or do you think that.

31:03 Wes: No, I mean, I get you. I think you're making a very good point. I don't know that that's. I saw Locke's motivation more about man is in a way, a. Just a subdivision of his ideas. Idea of a living creature. Right. And he's already explained how living creature could be identical. It can be identical through the organization of its body. And man is just a particular type of biological organization. And we, when we talk about its identity, that's what we're talking about. The identity of this particular type of biological organization, which happens to have usually human consciousness going along with it and personhood going along with it. But we can tease those two things apart. So we can tease apart this particular human biological entity and personhood. And he's making this distinction because that's important to him, to be able to tease those things apart.

31:49 Mark: Yeah. In our personal identity episode, we can get way more into the silly sci fi examples that commonly come up here. Yeah, if you were making a clone, but like, while you were making the clone, you cured all the diseases because, like, why wouldn't you. If you're remaking it anyway, then clearly that would not be this continuous biological organism in the way that. That he's talking about. Right. It would be related. It's a copy.

32:09 Wes: Yeah, but Mark, I mean, bringing up cloning, I mean, that's a difficult example even for talking about a biological. You know, even if you replicate. Exactly right. Create another clone. Is it the same biological organization and destroy the old clone at the same time? Is that the same biological entity? Just because there's a. A bit of a gap, you know what I'm saying? We start to get into talk about the qualitative criteria for individuation and the numerical time and space criteria. For individuation. If the criteria of individuation were purely qualitative, if it were just that it had to have the same exact structure, atom for atom, then you would want to say those two things are the same biological entities. But because time and place and numerical identity are important, we can't say that.

32:54 Mark: So some of what goes on here is a callback to his discussion of substance. That you might think. Think that what makes you the same over time is you're having the same soul. But we don't actually know anything about the soul. Like, it is not unreasonable to think that there is a substratum under all the thinking and memory and all the stuff that the mind is doing, to say that there is a soul that is doing those things. These are modes of the soul. But we don't know anything more about the soul than we do about the material substratum. What it is that holds all the various properties of gold together or of this particular dog together. Together they are equally mysterious. Which means, again to me, I don't think that we're throwing out either of them. He's fine with them. But they can't do a lot of conceptual work. So for personal identity, it has to actually be something that we experience. Personal identity ends up being, for him, being continuity of consciousness, not continuity of soul. It is very possible that God gives all the souls a turn. You know, it's like a being John Malkovich thing. So that when I woke up this morning, I had a different soul. God had slipped a soul in and taken out the stained old soul and threw it somewhere for laundering or something. But as long as I have personality, the continuity of memory, then I'm still the same person.

34:07 Wes: Yeah, he's going to want to reject the criterion for individuation of personal identity as having something to do with a substratum. So whether that is matter or a substantial soul, it's the same thing. Or whether it's a particular biological organism. So in the same way that you could transfer the person mark from the body of a man to the body of a pig, you can transfer the person mark from one soul as substratum or as substance to another one. That's what he's saying. And it's an important distinction, Mark, as you just pointed out. Because he wants to make the criterion of personal identity essentially phenomenological, right? And he's going to say it's not a matter of the same continuous underlying substance, but it's a matter of the same same consciousness which is itself. We have to wonder if he's done anything useful there. Right? Because then how do we talk about what is the same consciousness? But the way he'll talk about what it means to be the same consciousness is to say that my consciousness in its present state has access via memory to its previous states of consciousness. And that's what makes me the same person. I'm confused about how that can work because you have to appeal to quote, unquote, the same consciousness. And I want to know how you identify what is the criterion of same consciousness.

35:31 Mark: Yeah, he doesn't consider, you know, you've gone through the teleporter and it actually cloned you and so now there are two of you that have the same consciousness, connection to the same source, memories. It's just not a thing that occurs to him. But he does have a number of exceptional situations that he does consider, which again just serve to pull apart man, the sort of social or perhaps functional aspect of human humanity and personhood, which is, I think, a fundamentally moral thing. Right. He's like, what are you going to be punished for? Whose deeds will you be punished for at the end of time?

36:01 Wes: He calls it a forensic term. Right. Person is a forensic term.

36:06 Mark: Who will we hold responsible? You talk about absolute oblivion. In other words, amnesia. Would we consider that regarding Henry or something, that movie guy and that he gets shot in the head. So there's actually some physiological differences, but would we consider that the same person if you don't remember any of your former actions or even like considering maybe we all have past lives, But I don't remember those past lives. So according to him, you are not that person. I want to talk about what happens when the murderer's heart is transplanted in my chest and I start feeling the murderous impulses. Am I in some sense partly that murderer? Not if you can't remember it, but I guess if you can. There's so many great sci fi things that have, you know, or fantasy things that have gotten. What if you have different, you know, I have the memories of this murderer, but I also have my own memories and I separate those and I recognize that those are from two different people. Who the hell knows what they to call that? It's a borderline case, let's just call it that. What about when you're drunk and when you're sober? Because maybe those don't have a continuity of consciousness. I don't remember what I did when I was drunk. But yet we still hold you responsible legally for what you did when you were drunk. I think he Just says, because if we actually separated out those things, people would just lie, say, oh, I don't remember that murder I committed. I must be innocent. We have to, as a social thing, hold them guilty. But the end of time when God is just judging you, he's not gonna. If you did this in a fit of madness and it was like another personality injured you and you did this and you don't remember that, and it's just completely disconnected from your personal life and you are not going to go

37:30 Wes: to hell, you go to prison, but you get into heaven.

37:33 Dylan: Why would you have to go that direction with drunkenness? How is drunkenness different than running? You know, a different configuration of your body or being cold, a different configuration of the physical world acting upon yourself, you still have the continuity of identity that he talked about. If drunkenness is going to make you, you a non contiguous entity, then any physical change at all makes you a non contiguous entity.

37:56 Mark: I take a couple drinks, I don't even know who I am anymore. You're not my wife or I go

38:02 Dylan: out and get a little bit of sun. I mean, you know, I mean, it seems like the argument that we had earlier about what the contiguation of the identity of an organism is going to mean, that you have to be the same person if you're drunk. Now, the question of whether or not you ought to be held morally responsible seems a like different question.

38:19 Mark: Yes, drunkenness is an exceptional case, I think clear. Is this the Day man and the Night band in section 25, which I don't know if you guys watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but there's a whole the Day man and the Date. I was really thinking, could we suppose two distinct incommunic consciousnesses acting in the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night. Maybe this is a Lady Hawk situation, I don't know. And on the other side, the same consciousness acting by intervals in two distinct bodies. I ask in the first case whether the day and the night man would not be as two distinct persons as Socrates and Plato. Whether in the second case there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, much as one man is in two distinct clothings. So there you go. That's at least his version. Should we move on?

39:01 Wes: Well, what do we want to do? We have volition and free will and we have moral relations. And then on the final chapters that we've already discussed a little bit of on good and bad ideas, should we

39:14 Mark: save all the moral stuff? So Both this chapter 28 and the free will stuff to a separate. We're just going to have a one off recording. Those are really interesting. And we gave the groundwork from them already in the pain and pleasure stuff in the last episode. And it's kind of really a continuation of that.

39:30 Wes: And we should remind people, by the way, who think we gave short shrift to the identity stuff that our next episode. Right. Is going to be on personal identity

39:38 Dylan: or next non lock episode.

39:40 Mark: Yes, at. After next. Non lock.

39:42 Wes: Non lock. So in about a year. In about a year that'll be coming up. Yeah, yeah.

39:47 Mark: Let's return to that stuff from the last five chapters. Clear and distinct confused ideas. What makes for a clear. Because you know, this is where he's connecting up to Descartes directly. So that should be interesting to us. Chapter 29, section 2, clear and obscure explained. I'll add by analogy, by sight, we think we have this idea of yellow or whatever. But if the only yellows you've ever seen are when the light is not very good, or it was a very far off thing, then like you could see how that would not be a clear idea. It would be an obscure idea. That's one way that our simple ideas could be a little messed up.

40:21 Wes: And the other way is that they can fade over time. Right. So wanting their original freshness.

40:26 Mark: And so do you even remember what love is?

40:30 Wes: I like his metaphor of the wax because it gives you all the different ways horseshoe the wax, that something could be obscure, right. It could be that the seal is not applied with sufficient force to the wax, which is analogous to seeing things in bad light. Or it could be that the wax itself is too soft, like things not being retained in memory. Or it could be that it's too hard. Not sure exactly what that corresponds to.

40:55 Dylan: But the memory is not sufficiently susceptible to being impressed.

40:59 Mark: Yeah, you have dull organs.

41:01 Dylan: Dull, yeah. Adapt all organs.

41:02 Mark: You're basically colorblind. So of course you're not going to get clear ideas of the various colors. They'll be just like slightly different grays. And maybe you can. If I say that's green, you can say, oh yeah, I recognize that shade of gray as being what you call green. But there might be some functional places where it would fall apart and you would not be able to understand your color ideas would be too confused.

41:21 Wes: Well then we get the interesting stuff where he says ideas cannot be in themselves confused. They can only be as they are perceived to be. And that the confusion comes about only in reference to names. So the way he puts it in section five is that ideas cannot be otherwise than as they are perceived to be. The very act of perception makes it distinct. So if we have a obscure fading memory, for instance, what we're talking about is the obscurity of it is in reference to something else in and of itself. It is the distinct. Right? I can have a distinct when I perceive the memory because. So here he's using perceive in that weird veil of perception way where the perception is of the ideas themselves. That vague idea that's completely distinct to me and accessible to me as an idea. Its obscurity lies in something else. Its obscurity lies in its reference to something else. And I would have thought that that would have been the original perception. Right, the fresh idea. But Here in sections 4 through 6 he says, well, the obscurity actually happens in reference to names. I don't know. Did you guys notice this in section 4?

42:33 Mark: And I didn't see a particular thing that was problematic to me as a clear idea is that whereof the mind has such a full and evident perception as it does receive from an outward object operating duly on a well disposed organ. So a distinct idea is that wherein the mind perceives a difference from all other and it confused it. Idea is such as one as is not sufficiently distinguishable from another from which it ought to be different.

42:55 Wes: Yeah.

42:55 Mark: If no idea is confused, but such as not sufficiently distinguishable for another, it would be very hard to find anywhere a confused idea. For let any idea be as it will, it can be no other but such as the mind perceives it to be. I'm not reading anything problematic in the idea perceiving the mind there just use the word takes as the mind takes it to be. And that very perception sufficiently distinguishes it from all other ideas. Ideas, okay. Therefore no idea can be undistinguishable from another which it ought to be different unless you'd have it different from itself.

43:21 Wes: Right. So it sounds like he's saying there that there's no such thing as a confused idea in itself.

43:28 Mark: I thought he was just presenting an objection that now he's going to refute in that thing about names.

43:32 Wes: Well, he's not refuting it. He's saying to remove this difficulty. So in section six and to help us conceive a right what it is that makes the confusion of ideas characteristics chargeable. We must talk about names. We must talk about ideas in relation to names.

43:48 Mark: Now, every idea a man has being visibly what it is and distinct from all other ideas but itself. That which makes it confused is when it is such that it may well be called by another name as that which is expressed by the difference which keeps the things to be ranked under those two names distinct and makes some of them belong to one rather than another of those names. So you're not going to confuse your qualia of green. You know that's distinct. Every qualia is distinct. It's just when you call it green. No, that's not actually really green. That's more of a dark yellow. Come on.

44:15 Wes: Well, let's talk about a faded memory and like a complex idea, like my memory of going to the store a year ago. Okay. As opposed to the actual experience, direct perceptual experience of going into the store. The memory of it is far more obscure and confused than the actual direct experience. But it's not like the memory itself is something that I can't keep distinct from other mental entities, or it's not confused in that sense. So in itself, it is what it is. It's clearly. It's obscure, but it's clearly obscure. The way I would put it is it's only in reference to that original experience that we could call obscure. It's an inherently relational idea. But he makes this pivot to names, although he does give other examples of ways in which ideas can be obscure that are more intuitively clear to us. Right. So the leopard, you might have a complex idea that it just has too small a number of simple ideas to be adequate. Right. So you could say the leopard is a beast with spots, and that doesn't distinguish it from other animals with spots. And therefore that is an obscure idea. So that I think is much clearer.

45:30 Mark: I don't know if it's obscure. It's interesting, inadequate. I feel like these four different ways of good versus bad ideas, it would be really hard to very precisely distinguish all of them. And I don't know if it's worth it.

45:43 Wes: Starting at section four, we've been talking about distinct and confused, not clear and obscure.

45:48 Mark: Inadequate is again, is a different section altogether. Is what?

45:53 Dylan: Shit.

45:53 Wes: Well, that's. Yeah, no, I'm still in section chapter 29. It's just that everything that we were just talking about from section four on is distinct versus confused. So it's not necessarily about memory.

46:06 Mark: Right. Because it could be complex ideas that you don't have any.

46:09 Wes: So listeners can just benefit from my confusion there and instructive confusion.

46:16 Mark: So what did you think of those sections 15 and 16 that I referred to before, where eternity and infinite divisibility are things that we don't have clear and distinct Ideas about. Because they're really just privations. They're. They're really just negatives. So he can't be Lucretius, who. Lucretius, as his starting point, has infinite divisibility and eternity. There's atoms in a void, and they've always been there. And I just don't think that's available to Locke, given this particular thing in 1516.

46:44 Wes: I think what makes these ideas obscure for him, and this is one of the reasons why substance will turn out to be inadequate. Because, as I'll explain later, if we really want to understand substance, we have to understand the. I think he calls it the internal nature or something like that. We would have to understand the internal physics of the thing and its microstructure and those things we just don't have access to. So this is kind of analogous to that, where the main problem is that divisibility of matter, at least in 15. Right. He says divisibility to matter at the smallest parts exceeds the senses. If we had some way of accessing that, we could say a lot more. But what makes it obscure, pure, is that it just. You know, given the science of Locke's time, there is nothing that can be said about atoms and objects.

47:29 Dylan: I feel like we're kind of dusting the room of the book right now.

47:33 Mark: Yeah, we're wrapping up here. I consider the very last chapter to be eminently skippable about why people just disagree about things. Those are. That's kind of.

47:42 Wes: Well, I thought it was cool in the sense he kind of turns into a psychoanalyst at that point. Right. So he's talking about association associations. And we should think of primary process from Freud on dreams. We should think of Lacan's slippage along signifiers. We make a lot of association between ideas in the mind that have nothing to do with reality. They're just like products of free association. So you get things associated with each other that have no real connection to each other. And this, he says, leads to madness, to which we are all susceptible. But he's thinking specifically in the ways in which. Which we. We make a lot of bad arguments. We can't reason properly. We develop crazy antipathy, hatreds for each other. And he's going to connect all of this to these, what he calls the accidental connection of ideas, especially stuff that's happened during early childhood, where you get these associations between ideas. And that's really, of course, my interest in psychology makes that inherently. You know, I think it's cool that he's honest to that thread.

48:41 Mark: I Shouldn't have said skippable so much as not directly related to the rest of what we've been talking about. But I guess I can make it relate in that he's talking about again relations of Section 5 in there. That there could be a natural correspondence and connection of some ideas with another. But there could be, as in Section 6, some that are just set by custom. I'm trying to see if he has an example. A musician used to any tune will find that let it once begin in his head. The ideas of certain several notes will follow one another orderly in his understanding, without any care of retention as regulators. His fingers move orderly over the keys of the organ to play out the tune once it's begun.

49:15 Wes: He has examples of phobias. He has examples of. So he gives one example of someone who learns to dance. When I think it's when there's a certain, like, trunk or chest in the room and they can't dance well unless that trunk or chest is in the room. Or he gives an example of someone who was cured by this operation and as he lives in eternal gratitude to the doctor who cured him, but is also of that doctor because that associates that doctor with the horrible pain of the disease and the cure and the surgery itself. So, you know, rationally, right, grateful to this doctor, I should be friends with them. Instead, you have to avoid them because you have this irrational association. And it is irrational, although it may not seem so, but it's just. It's almost like you could also think about this in terms of conditioning. With a mouse, you. You play a certain noise every time you play, blow air into its eye to make it blink. And you do a little bit of that. You do that for a while and every time you play the noise, it's going to blink, even when you stop blowing the air into its eye. Not exactly the same, but it gives you a good idea of. There's no inherent natural connection between someone playing a noise and the need to blink. But you can get them associated. And likewise you can associate ideas in the mind that are not naturally associated. And it can lead to pathologies. But it also, of course, it can lead to our own little worlds of meaning and our own little personal languages and ways of conceiving the world. And I think he's right, really. What I want to think a lot more about this. Like, why are people so politically crazy? Because that's part of what he's onto here. Why are we so. And all of us, he says, why are we all so susceptible to thinking in These completely irrational ways about things. And he'll even talk about, you know, you could take the brightest, most right rational people in the world, eminent thinkers and scientists, and they always have some little lacuna or some little area where you just can't talk to them. You can't talk to them rationally because they have. He'll say it's not attributable to prejudice, it's not attributable to bad education. It's just that they have these crazy associations that they're not aware of and they operate according to them. And so they can't think properly about certain things. And I think that's a dead on analysis in part of what goes on with us politically.

51:27 Mark: So as much language there is in here about God gave us this nice set of epistemic tools and abilities. And that would not fundamentally deceive us. This is a more mechanical take on it that, you know, that kind of what you'd expect from an evolutionary picture is that we develop these tools and abilities but because of the way that they work correctly, right association is vital to forming concepts at all. Then there are going to be ways in which they can go, go wrong. And that's just built into the nature of the tool and we should expect it. Maybe it is the best possible tool God could have made for us. Although wouldn't you think there would have been a better one that we could not misuse in this way? This is sounding like something Leibniz would

52:07 Wes: talk about in the best possible world. We need association.

52:13 Mark: That was a nice thing to wrap up with. Any sort of other closing thoughts on this section. How you, how you felt like for me, the overall story was as you get more and more complex ideas, of course things are going to go wrong. I think we've been so caught up on the difference, is it simple and complex really, that it seems like the errors to me could come much earlier than maybe he's anticipating. Because judgment does get involved in even perception. As soon as we put a name on something, then it like seems like it's become complex. It is implicitly associated with other things, even colors, I think having an implicit association, implicit implication of, of other colors on the color wheel. The fact that you're picking out one mode, you know, so everything. This is just to say that knowledge comes in, in sets. It doesn't come individually, you know, sent up to us via simple ideas. But that's just a way of saying that the difficulties, the problems that Locke is anticipating with interpreting really complex phenomena like justice, like rights, are going to apply even more basically. And I, I think this is something that he acknowledges in saying that, you know, back to our first episode, that there are no universally acclaimed ideas. Even these basic things like the law of non contradiction, there must be something that can get in the way. It's not just that people haven't been taught about it, but that could get in the way of somebody. They could just madly, through these association problems or whatever kind of edifices that they have built up in terms of their religious ideas, have something that affects the way that they will acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge what many of us would consider just basic facts of perception and thinking.

53:50 Wes: I think, I guess as a closing, I'll say it's worth repeating that he has two ways of getting us away from the theory of innate ideas. So in the first book he rejects innate ideas. And here a lot of this account is actually telling us how we can have a mind, how we can have all the ideas that we have without innate ideas. And he's going to describe all these faculties, or mental, maybe you don't want to call them faculties because it sounds like you reify it, but all these mental functions that happen to take simple ideas and construct them into higher order complex ideas. So whether it's relation or causality or identity and diversity, that's what I'm calling imminent mental, structural stuff that he doesn't want to say they themselves are ideas or they themselves are somehow applications of platonic forms or innate ideas. I think he has good reason to want to say, no, this is just what the mind does.

54:54 Mark: So folks, want to hear, if you are not a partially examined life citizen or Patreon supporter and you want to hear this discussion that we will record later on Locke on moral psychology to fill in the gaps, then go do that partiallyexaminedlife.com support. Otherwise, we would love to hear what you thought thought of this series on Locke. Whether you like us doing these longer things on longer books. I feel like we have some internal disagreement in the group as to whether this is a good thing we should do again. But there are lots of other books that we could take this approach to and try to get through 300 pages of them, or whether we want to restrict ourselves to short snippets that we can actually dive into in detail. So you can respond to us on Facebook, you can tweet at us, you can just go straight to partners partiallyexaminedlife.com and comment on the blog post associated with this episode, or email us@pelartiallyexaminedlife.com what else should we cover now that we're done? More or less, eventually, with Locke and, yeah, we'll be getting our plans together for 2021 very soon. Good night, everybody.

56:00 Dylan: Good night.

56:00 Wes: Good night.