Richard Wright

My fiancee has just relayed the following exchange with our daughter, who on seeing a church exclaimed “You and daddy should get married there!”

“I don’t think so darling,” my lady said. “That’s a place for people who believe in God to get married in.”

“I believe in God.” A bold statement for a nearly-five-year-old, and something of a surprise, given that religious instruction has been low* on our list of parental priorities.

“Really?” said my lady. “Do you know who God is?”

“Dunno.” This is often the answer, when challenged. “What’s God?”

“Well, people who believe in God believe that he lives in the sky, and made you, and me, and Daddy, and all the things in the world.”

My daughter at this point paused, and then burst out laughing.

I love my daughter.

* Erm, non-existent, if you want to be pedantic.

I used to love philosophy, in all its forms, but slowly got away from the habit of reading and thinking about it when I left University (where I studied it for a couple of years). Last year, I decided to dip my toes back, and searched around for simple primer to reintroduce myself with some core concepts, and see if my interest still held. The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe seemed an entertaining way to do so. Basically, philosophical concepts can be found at the core of many science fiction movies of the modern age, both big dumb movies, and notably more intelligent ones. Mark Rowlands finds some of those movies, and uses them as the basis to discuss the basic premises of philosophy. If you’re worried about why you should bother being moral, whether you have free will or not, or what reality actually is when it comes right down to it, then you might well have already studied some of the arguments in your local cinema.

Strange idea? Truly, but it works. Here’s what’s covered.

The Nature of Reality from The Matrix – What better film to guide you through ideas of what is and is not real, given that the premise was invented by Descartes tears ago.

Good and Evil from Star Wars – Is there such a thing as good and evil, or is it all a matter of perspective. In which Vader stands in for both Napoleon and Osama.

Morality from Aliens, Independence Day, Hollow Man, and The Lord Of The Rings – Why be moral? And what is morality? Don’t bad people think they’re also moral, from their own point of view? And is there an absolute morality that can be identified across cultures, which everybody recognises? These four films lay out the arguments for and against, with help from orcs and face huggers (neither of whom think they’re all that bad, when it comes down to it).

Personal Identity from Total Recall and Sixth Day – In which the intellectual giant that is Arnold Schwarzenegger argues the nature of identity. With guns.

The Mind-Body dilemma from Terminator – More from the powerhouse intellect of Schwarzenegger. What is your mind? Just your fleshy brain, or something more? If the latter, where the hell do you keep it, and how does it work? With guns and time travel, thankfully.

Free Will from Minority Report – Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg combine their skills to argue the toss over whether your choices are the result of free will, or whether that’s all an illusion and you have no choices at all.

Death and the Meaning of Life from Blade Runner – Four replicants fight for the right to live past their fourth birthday. Why? What difference will it make to them if they die? What’s so bloody great about life anyway?

Where the book succeeds is in giving a framework for these arguments (popular films) that a newcomer can get their head around, and which doesn’t involve naked old men in baths shouting Eureka. It covers all of the most important areas in modern philosophy with accessible wit (not ignoring the history of the arguments), and really did get me fired up about them again. If the book has a flaw, it is that Rowlands pushes his favourite theories to the fore, often causing readers to believe that counterarguments are incorrect simply because he says so, rather than properly pushing them to explore the various ideas further. On the other hand when the leading philosopher batting for your team is big Arnie, you might be tempted to use him to encourage your opponents to see things your way.

A good, accessible start to philosophy, that might cover everything you ever want to know, or might make you go that little bit further. After all, when your mind is engaged, it’s hard to turn it off. I’ll definitely be pursuing some further reading from here.

(PS – proper update coming soon, just catching you up with what I’ve read since New Year)

The most interesting thing about colour is not, I have discovered, that it can affect your mood to positive or negative effect, or that it can enhance your surroundings and reflect your personality, but rather that it does not seem to exist at all. It appears nowhere in the real world.

Bear with me here.

Imagine you’re looking at a ripe lemon. It is, you believe, yellow. Seeing is believing, the lemon is in front of you, and you would swear by all the gods that it is yellow in colour. Very few people would argue with you.

However, the lemon is not yellow. It is made up of atoms and molecules that have no colour at all.

The scientist in you may choose this moment to sigh, perhaps even groan. So that’s where he’s going, you think. How disappointing. Obviously, the colour itself comes from the electromagnetic spectrum, or light. In layman’s terms, light hits the lemon, and parts of that light are absorbed by the fruit. The bits of light that bounce back off form the colour yellow.

Yet any fool can see that the lemon is not throwing off rays of yellow light. If it were, you would probably assume that somebody uncharitable had dropped something exciting and mind-altering into your coffee. The world would look like one big acid trip if objects started throwing off light left, right, and centre.

All right, you say. I see what you mean. In fact, the parts of light that make yellow are invisible too. They travel from the lemon to your eye. Your eye then tells your brain what bits of the electromagnetic spectrum has just entered it, and the brain transforms that information in your mind into the colour we call yellow.

Think about that for a moment. How can that work? Electrons bounce around in your brain, and you see something as yellow? Yet, obviously, no part of your brain actually turns yellow at any point. The colour has still not existed in the real world. The lemon has no colour. Neither does light. Your brain does not physically create the colour you see (your brain stays, as you would expect, grey and gooey through the whole thing). At no point in the process is there a real colour yellow, a physical, tangible thing.

Yellow, to all intents and purposes doesn’t exist. Your brain is lying to you, telling you something about the world that is not real. It does this all day, every day, and while the world is nicer because your brain tells you there are colours in it which actually aren’t there, it’s a vast self deception.

There is no spoon.

If you take it further, having accepted that yellow is just a mental construct with no basis in reality, then think about the fact that your mind and my mind are each unique from one another. My mind has created a lie that it tells me is the colour yellow. So has yours. But, given that our minds at no time consulted each other on what yellow should look like, what are the chances that they’ve created the same thing? Statistically, the odds are very low. And if we don’t see colour the same way as each other, then the two of us are looking at very different versions of the world. We’ll never know, of course, because you can’t step inside my head and find out what my experience of yellow is like, and so you can’t compare it with your own.

If we were in a pub, devouring beer, we could go much further, but I’ll leave you to it for now.

It’s been a long and complicated month, and I’m very tired. The above is a perfect illustration of this. Goodnight.

PS – Kirsty is much better now. Thanks for all the well wishes.