Dear Reader,
Ian Olasov, today's guest author, is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and the founder of Brooklyn Public Philosophers, a public philosophy event series, in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library. Since 2016, he has organized a series of Ask a Philosopher booths around New York City. His new book Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions collects the best questions from the booth, his attempts to answer them, and the funny/affecting/thought-provoking moments that make each booth memorable. Ian lives in Brooklyn with his partner Jen and their two dogs, Scrapple and Gus.
Please welcome Ian Olasov to the book club. Email: ianolasov@gmail.com.
When I was about nine years old, after seeing Terminator 2, I became quietly obsessed with the idea that other people were robots. Here were Tabitha and Crystal sitting at my table in fourth grade, talking (or pretending to talk?) about this or that. But how could I know that they were like me on the inside? Partly I was worried, I guess, that they had metal skeletons like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the trickier problem was how to tell whether their experiences were like mine. In the movie, Arnold's visual field is a heads up display, as if there were some little person behind his eyes looking at a computer screen. Why couldn't Tabitha and Crystal see like that?
At some point, I figured that if there were a robot factory somewhere, I would have heard about it by now. I moved on to other problems. But I never found a fully satisfactory answer to the real question: how could we know what it's like to be someone else?
When people interview professional philosophers, it's more or less obligatory to ask how they got interested in the subject. But we might just as well ask anyone when they lost their interest in philosophy. Every kid, or every kid with enough time to themselves, has some pet philosophical puzzle; if it's not our knowledge of other minds, it's something about God, life after death, identity over time, the epistemology of unobservable objects--or, a bit later on, what it means to be yourself, what a just world would look like, the objectivity or otherwise of moral and artistic value.
Who knows where these questions go? Do we find more important things to worry about? (More important how?) Do we get bored or frustrated by their intractability? Are they embarrassing? Do they die from a lack of sunlight, in the slippery dark of our private thoughts?
It takes work to bring these questions back to life, or to find new questions that do for us as adults what the old questions did for us as kids. Of course, public discourse in the United States in 2020 isn't always the most fertile environment for philosophy. But there are plenty of philosophical communities out there. Look for meetups, lecture series, podcasts, and public events put on by local university philosophy departments. With a little luck, you'll find a version of philosophy that works for you.
-- Ian Olasov
Drop Ian an note or thought about philosophy: ianolasov@gmail.com. You can also check out the Brooklyn Public Philosophers Facebook page.
* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. If you're one of the winners, or your entry is an honorable mention in this year's Write a DearReader Contest, it will be featured as a guest column. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them here.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ITALIAN SHORT STORIES, introduced, edited and with selected translations by Jhumpa Lahiri. I have a copy to share, start reading and enter today
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