Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  AGATHA: It’s a choice between the indeterminacy of too many explanations and the incoherence of none at all.

  SHOKET, to Agatha: Don’t you worry. We’ll find a way of getting the coherence and the determinacy. It’s still the early days. Everything that’s true of a person is there in his brain, so why shouldn’t we eventually be able to get everything by knowing the brain?

  PLATO: Perhaps. Perhaps you will arrive at both determinacy and coherence. And if you do, I hope I’ll be around to see it.

  SHOKET: Well, that would be the moment for you to retire at last.

  PLATO, smiling: Let’s wait and see you do it first.

  SHOKET: And until we do, you philosophers will always be pointing out that we haven’t done it yet.

  AGATHA: And they’ll be accounting for the coherence that everybody needs, including the scientists.

  PLATO: That is my hope, for I think it means that there will always be a need for philosophers.

  Shoket laughs. Plato smiles. Agatha smiles.

  AGATHA, to Shoket: And until you do arrive at coherence it’s premature to go around banishing things like persons, together with all the intentionality that they bring along with them—deliberating and agonizing, deciding and second-guessing, acting and regretting—just because you can’t find all that down there among the synapses.

  SHOKET: Deliberating and deciding and second-guessing? Agonizing and regretting? My synapses don’t know from such things!

  AGATHA: But you do.

  SHOKET: Maybe I just think that I do.

  AGATHA: And can you find your just thinking that you do any better down there among the synapses?

  SHOKET: I can find patterns associated with confabulation and rationalization in the orbitofrontal and ventromedial cortices.

  AGATHA: And the self that’s doing the confabulating and rationalizing?

  SHOKET: No such thing.

  AGATHA: So there are confabulations but no confabulator? Rationalizing but no rationalizer?

  SHOKET: You got it.

  AGATHA: Who got it? There’s nobody here but us synapses!

  SHOKET laughs and says to Plato: You’re definitely having a bad effect on her. It’s a battle between us for her soul—and when I say soul, I hasten to add, I’m only speaking metaphorically! Which is what all of us are doing most of the time, whenever we invoke such things as those fascinating selves, each a star in its own story. It’s a way of telling ourselves stories that correspond to nothing at all down at the level of the neurons, where we’re talking about what is—where we’re talking about all that there is.

  AGATHA: Self-starring stories that we can’t do without, in one form or another, and retain any semblance of coherence.

  SHOKET: Listen, that way of thinking is going to lead you to utter incoherence. You open the gates to what people think they need in order to make sense of it all, and you’re going to get all kinds of mishegoss.

  PLATO: Mishegoss?

  SHOKET: Lunacy. People claim to need all kinds of chazerai in the name of coherence.

  PLATO: Chazerai?

  SHOKET: Stuff you like to eat but shouldn’t. You’ve got people who need their flakey puff pastry with the bitter-herbed God-filling, which has been hanging around way past its expiration date, so you have to wonder how they can choke it down. And then you’ve got the lighter fare bunch, the spiritual vegans, with their quantum-crackery energy fields, served up with some psycho-deli slices of aura or just a shmear of Jeez-whiz. What’s the difference once you start speaking of what people need for coherence? It’s going to be a metaphysical fres-fest. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what it is, at least outside the walls of the Shoket lab.

  AGATHA: I don’t think so. There are other labs on this campus, and they’re every bit as scientific as the Shoket lab, even though they use psychological concepts that we can’t make use of at the level that we’re studying.

  SHOKET: How are they scientific when they’re invoking things that don’t exist?

  AGATHA: You’re begging the question when you say they don’t exist just because they play no role in the Shoket lab. Those things are scientific because they’re featured in testable law-like generalizations. That’s the criterion for scientific, not whether or not it’s studied in the Shoket lab. Imagine if the chemists went marching en masse over to the geology department and demanded that the geologists stop discovering laws about rivers—say, how rivers affect the outer banks more than the inner banks—because the chemists don’t see anything at all like rivers down at the level of the water molecules, which is, the chemists declare in unison, all that water really is, and so they deny any allegedly scientific laws the geologists might have discovered about rivers. We can’t give up rivers and all that we know about them without shrinking our landscape of coherence, and we can’t give up sense-making, story-starring selves and all that we know about them without shrinking our landscape of coherence.

  SHOKET: Yeah, well I give you your selves, Agatha, and next thing I know you’re going to be demanding that they have free will. And that we simply can’t have. Free will is inconsistent with what we’ve determined in this lab.

  AGATHA: I’ll freely give up free will, at least as it’s usually understood, and trade it in for accountability.

  SHOKET laughs: Accountability? What’s that supposed to mean?

  AGATHA: It’s supposed to mean this. Exactly this.

  SHOKET: What, this?

  AGATHA: This that we’re doing. Offering each other our reasons, evaluating them, accepting and rejecting and reconsidering them and maybe even changing our minds. To be accountable means to be prepared to give reasons for the things we say and the things we do. I’m demonstrating accountability right now by giving you an account of accountability. I’m prepared to provide you with a reason for why we’re always providing reasons. I’m prepared to give you a reason for why we ought to be providing reasons.

  SHOKET laughing: Sounds like some kind of self-referential paradox that you’re toying with there. Agatha, I’m getting more worried about you by the minute. Hanging out with those philosophers at the Cognitive Science Center has given you a dangerous taste for paradox.

  AGATHA: And by saying what you’ve just said you’re offering me your reason for why you think we can get by without offering reasons? I’d say that’s more of a paradox!

  SHOKET, laughing and shaking his head, to Plato: I’m holding you accountable for this situation.

  PLATO, smiling: I gladly accept accountability.

  SHOKET: Then it’s yours. Whatever it’s supposed to be, this mysterious accountability, and wherever it’s supposed to be, it’s yours, Plato. And since it’s yours, I should be able to catch sight of it there in your brain. Speaking of which, it’s time to get this show on the road. So, Norma Desmond, are you ready for your close-up?

  Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles. Plato smiles.

  SHOKET: You both don’t have any idea what I’m speaking about, do you?

  Agatha and Plato shake their heads. Shoket sighs exaggeratedly.

  SHOKET: It’s Plato, isn’t it?

  PLATO: It is.

  SHOKET: And you’re keen to get a look at that brain of yours?

  PLATO: I am. It is as Agatha described it. I cannot say why one’s own brain should matter so much to one just because it happens to be one’s own brain, but it does. It undeniably does.

  SHOKET: You might as well ask why your own self should matter so much to yourself just because it’s your own self.

  PLATO: That’s right. One might just as well ask.

  SHOKET: Which means you think that the question about why your own self should matter is also a question worth asking.

  PLATO: Oh, it is a question well worth the asking. I myself have never stopped asking it from the beginning until this moment.

  Shoket looks for a moment as if he will laugh, but then he doesn’t, and he is at a loss to say why. They move to the room where the brain scanner is, and Agatha gets Plato settle
d onto the scanning table. She covers him gently with a blanket and gives him some last-minute instructions. He lies there calmly, earplugs in his ears and panic button in his hand.

  AGATHA, softly to Shoket: Don’t you think that we might give Plato what he’s asked of us? He’s waited such a long time.

  SHOKET, softly: Of course we can. Of course we will.

  And with that they slide the philosopher into the magnet.

  * * *

  1In the Timaeus, Plato located our thought processes in the brain. He analyzed the brain as a sort of marrow, connected with marrow encased in bones that extend throughout the body. Not knowing of nerves, he saw this connective marrow as being the means of transmission between the brain and the rest of the body. The materialist conception of mind put forth in the Timaeus stands at odds with the dualism of the Phaedo, with which Plato is more characteristically associated. His student Aristotle disagreed with him and located thought processes in the heart, assigning the head only the task of cooling the blood, which became overheated in the thinking process. Aristotle based his mistaken conclusion on observation. He noted that all animals have sensations and yet only vertebrates and cephalopods have brains, whereas all animals have hearts or heartlike organs. He noted that the brain is relatively bloodless, and if it is laid bare it can be cut into without pain, whereas the heart is the source of blood and full of sensation.

  2The alert reader will notice that David Shoket is referred to by his last name, while Agatha Fine is referred to by her first name. This difference is meant to reflect not only the disparity in their respective standings, most especially within the Shoket lab, but also the fact that I like calling the one “Shoket” and the other “Agatha.” I hope the alert reader will impute no sexist tendencies to me.

  3Among themselves, neuroscientists often facetiously refer to the equipment for performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as “the magnet.”

  4Some of the best analysis of the philosophical implications of the neuroscience have come from Adina Roskies, a philosopher with a Ph.D. in neuroscience. See A. L. Roskies, “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006): 419–423. There are more recent experimental results from which broad philosophical consequences have been drawn, especially those that have come out of the laboratory of John Dylan Haines, who used advanced analysis of fMRI data and claimed as much as a 7- to 10-second gap between neural activity predictive of an action and the time of the subject’s report of deciding on the action. Here, too, the philosophical implications have been challenged, with Roskies a leading voice. See “Neuroscience vs. Philosophy: Taking Aim at Free Will,” Nature 477 (2011): 23–25.

  APPENDIX A

  Socratic Sources

  Aristotle writes in his Poetics (1447b) of an established genre of Socratic literature, Sōkratikoi logoi, all of which was written after Socrates’ death in 399 B.C.E. In an extant fragment from his own lost dialogue, The Poets, Aristotle is said to have mentioned Alexamenos of Teos or Styra as the originator of the genre, but nothing of Alexamenos remains. We do have fragments of four other Socratic writers: Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Euclides. There is anecdotal material concerning a fifth Socratic writer, Aristippus. Phaedo, Euclides, and Aristippus were all non-Athenians. In the years immediately following Socrates’ death, Antisthenes was probably considered the most important of the Socratic writers.

  The two writers whose Socratic literature survived intact are Xenophon and, of course, Plato. Xenophon left Athens in 401 for Persia to help Cyrus unseat the Great King Artaxerxes. The Anabasis is his account of the fifteen months he spent on the adventure. At the end of that time, he was placed under Spartan command—which led to his being exiled by Athens. His contributions to the Socratic literature are the Apology, Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, and Symposium. His Apology, like Plato’s, presents itself as offering an account of what Socrates actually said at his trial, although Xenophon was away from Athens at the time. His account differs from Plato’s, perhaps most significantly in stressing that Socrates had perhaps wanted to be executed by the state, since he had only old age and the diminution of his powers to look forward to. He’ll be missed more if he dies with his mental faculties intact. (The Athenians had concocted a hemlock solution that led to a not overly unpleasant death.)1 Memorabilia consists of many anecdotes about Socrates, meant to illustrate that Socrates’ life in every way possible confuted the two charges brought against him of impiety and corruption of the young. Xenophon’s dialogue, the Symposium, is of an altogether different sort, quite playful and even naughty. It presents Socrates at a dinner party, although instead of long speeches, there is repartee and wisecracking. Each guest describes what it is about himself that he most values, his most cherished aretē. Socrates’ response is that he most values his art of pimping. He also argues that he is more beautiful than the guest who had singled out physical beauty as his aretē, since Socrates’ eyes are so protuberant that they can see more and so are more beautiful, and the flailing nostrils of his snub nose can take in more smells, and his thick lips can give softer kisses. Oeconomicus is a Socratic dialogue on household management and agriculture that features Socrates, pleading ignorance on these matters, quoting what he has heard from Ischomachus.2

  For many years, Xenophon was regarded as more reliable than Plato on the historical Socrates, precisely because he was considered a dullard, devoid of the creative genius of Plato that reshaped the person of Socrates to philosophical and literary requirements. Bertrand Russell, for example, remarks: “Let us begin with Xenophon, a military man, not very liberally endowed with brains” (A History of Western Philosophy, p. 102). This attitude has been criticized in recent scholarship. Those who argue for Xenophon’s historical accuracy are more likely to do so on the basis of his substantial contributions to history. His Hellenica takes up where Thucydides left off. Vivienne Gray argues, “Xenophon creates a coherent image of Socrates no more or less historical than those of the other Socratics.”3

  * * *

  1The death that Plato describes in the Phaedo is calm and dignified, his mind remaining clear until the end. And yet hemlock, many have claimed, would have produced a far more agonized death, characterized by violent seizures. Was it really hemlock then? Plato mentions only to pharmakon, “the drug,” not specifying hemlock, kôneion. Or did Plato distort Socrates’ death for dramatic or philosophical reasons, as some have claimed? So have argued Christopher Gill in “The Death of Socrates,” Classical Quarterly 23 (1973): 25–28; William Ober in “Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning?” New York State Journal of Medicine 77, no. 1 (February 1977): 254–258; and Bonita Graves et al., in “Hemlock Poisoning: Twentieth Century Scientific Light Shed on the Death of Socrates,” in The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. K. J. Boudouris, pp. 156–168 (Athens: International Center for Greek Philosophy and Culture, 1991). Enid Bloch does some fascinating detective work in “Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?” in The Trial and Execution of Socrates, ed. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Her conclusion: “In the end I have been able fully to align Plato’s description with modern medical understanding. Socrates suffered a peripheral neuropathy, a toxin-induced condition resembling the Guillain-Barré syndrome, brought about by the alkaloids in Conium maculatum, the poison hemlock plant. Plato proves to have been entirely accurate in every clinical detail, while Gill, Ober and Graves were mistaken in the violent demise they imagined for Socrates.”

  2Michel Foucault has a chapter, “Ischomachus’ Household,” that uses Xenophon’s depiction of the way in which both wives and slaves are to be trained as a paradigm for studying the ancient Greek ideology of power. The History of Sexuality, volume II, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990), pp. 152–165.

  3Vivienne Gray, The Framing of Socrates: The Literary Interpretation of Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998
).

  APPENDIX B

  The Two Speeches of Pericles from Thucydides’

  The History of the Peloponnesian War

  Thucydides was born an Athenian and was, at one time, an important general in the Peloponnesian War. But after a military campaign in which he participated was bungled, he was banished, and thereafter devoted himself to recording, with self-imposed objectivity, the events of the protracted war. He always speaks of the Athenians in the third person.

  Thucydides’ attitude toward Pericles is still a matter of debate. There is no doubt that Thucydides admired Pericles’ intelligence and political skills. But did he think that his imperialistic goals would have led inevitably to Athens’ downfall? Or was his judgment rather that, had Pericles not died prematurely, he might have seen Athens through to victory? Did Thucydides approve or disapprove of Pericles? Academics still argue.1

  In Book 2, there are two important speeches of Pericles. Together they shed light on how classical Athens transformed the Homeric ethos into an ideology of Athenian exceptionalism.

  The first speech is the famous Funeral Oration that Pericles delivered after the first year of what would be a twenty-seven-year war. It was at a commemoration for the war dead, a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, at public expense, “as was the custom of their ancestors.” Pericles begins by pointing out an alleged fact about Athens that Herodotus also mentions in the context of acknowledging Athenian exceptionalism. They alone, of all the poleis, were reputed to be autochthonous: “Because they have always lived in this land, they have so far always handed it down in liberty through their valor to successive generations up to now.” For the bulk of the oration, Pericles extols Athenian superiority, emphasizing that it is a participatory superiority in which all its citizens share. The very character of the Athenian, his psychological traits and dispositions, is intrinsically superior—free and yet law-abiding, open-minded, generous, productive, elegant, tolerant, original, manly, responsible, self-sufficient, courageous, civic-minded, honest, daring, just, and unique. Also modest. These personal attributes derive from the polis in which Athenians are fortunate enough to have been born. The superiority of the polis is a consequence of its citizens’ inherent superiority, but it also furthers their exceptionality, especially since their form of government requires them to participate actively in the life of the polis. Therefore, more than any other state, Athens is a genuine reflection of its citizens’ own qualities, and they can lay claim to its exceptionality as their own.