• In the Children's Primer, what work of Wittgenstein's is being referenced?
• Tell me more about Firebelly's final jump.
• Why does Firebelly feel guilty at the end of Part II?
• Why does Claire sit in the mud?
• Free-will is an Illusion, so how is Existentialism relevant?
• What is the beginning of the postscript about?

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In the Children's Primer, what work of Wittgenstein's is being referenced?

in 1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, a book of only 70 pages in which he claimed to have solved all the problems of philosophy. His method was to show the limitations of language and hence the limits of what philosophers can intelligibly say. "The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

After finishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein retired from philosophy for seven years and trained as a primary school teacher and then as a gardener. He eventually repudiated his earlier work and returned to Cambridge, where he discovered he was one of the most famous philosophers in the world.

Tell me more about Firebelly's final jump.

This section of the book is heavily based on Kierkegaard's work Fear and Trembling and the complexities of faith. From Firebelly's perspective, Claire is a wholly other creature in need of help that only he can give. His only way to save her, is to commit his entire will and body into a singular act, a leap.

He rips himself from his old way of living and old the choices of that world. He will never be able to return to that sphere. His jump is not calculated, it is not rational, and yet it is the only possibility. When he lands, he ends up in a new and unknown world.

Why does Firebelly feel guilty at the end of Part II?

We are guilty because someone has judged our actions to be less than what was expected or what could have been otherwise chosen. When Firebelly he realizes how fully responsible he is for his actions, he judges himself to be guilty.

Why does Claire sit in the mud?

Claire's wants to do the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unreasonable. Being irrational is her way of showing she is an autonomous person, an individual that is unique, whose actions cannot be predicted. In the nineteenth-century, there was a very strong belief that the world and human nature, could be understood through science. Dostoyevsky strongly rejected this belief, arguing that we would seek the irrational just to show that we have a free-will.

Free-will is an Illusion, so how is Existentialism relevant?

Many scientists and philosophers argue that, in an age of neuroscience and brain studies, fee-will is clearly a fiction that we create in order to explain our behavior. I disagree with this assessment. I say this as a person with a life-long interest in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and a graduate degree in cognitive and neural modeling.

The debate is usually framed as free-will vs. determinism. The problem begins with using common language to discuss complex actions in the world. Determinism, for example, implies that every event has a cause. Since my actions are physical events, they too must have a cause. In order to have free-will, there must be no physical cause for my actions. Free-will is contra-causal, and therefore suggests that each of us are like little gods creating out lives. While this might be appealing to some, this is not the language of science. The problem, however, begins with the very notion of determinism. Determinism is not a property of Newtonian mechanics and certainly nor of quantum mechanics. There is no great billiard table of the universe with the trajectory of every particle determined. An excellent paper on this is Causation as Folk Science by John D. Norton from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh. I also recommend the book Primer on Determinism by John Earman.

Once we have an understanding of the limits of determinism and causation, then we have a language in which to discuss free-will. I find this one of the most interesting areas of philosophy and science--and one that is vastly more complex than might first appear. My brief comment on free-will is that functionally, free-will is part of our ability to direct our attention when we have competing internal drives. If directing attention is completely causal in the folk-deterministic view of the world, this is an assertion to be proven.

What is the beginning of the postscript about?

This section makes an analogy between number theory and the ontology of being. Two very abstract ideas that are very relevant.  Let's start with an experiment: If a collection of similar objects, say beads are arrange in two parallel rows with one row having more beads than the other but the arrangement of the beads is such that the rows are the same length, a child between 4 - 5.5 years will say that both rows have the same number of items. Children of this age do not yet possess the concept 'Number' that we have as adults.

Around the age of 6, a child begins to develop an abstract understanding of Number and realizes that the number of objects is not related to the spatial arrangement. Number becomes an abstract concept that can be applied to any group of discrete objects. Although we use this concept of 'Number' all the time, it is difficult for most of us to define it. Ask adults to define a specific number, such as 3,4,5 etc. Unless a person has had a course in number theory, they will probably only be able to offer examples such as pointing to three objects and saying 'that's three', or holding up three fingers. These are all concrete examples, not really definitions. This is like asking someone to define 'happiness' and this person shows you a 'happy' face. How can we define a particular number (lower case n) and how can we define any number, or Number.

It was not until the 19th century that anyone had a good definition of Number. How we now understand a number such as '3' is as an attribute of a group of objects in which there exists a one-to-one correspondence between objects that share this attribute, in this case the attribute '3'. You can draw a line between any three objects of one type and any three objects of another. if I have three coins and, three beads, '3' is the attribute of these sets that allows them to be put into one-to-one correspondence.

This is the mountain that I am climbing in those first few pages of the Postscript. For now, we can't go much further. But I want to use that same abstract thinking that we use with number and Number to understand being and Being. Just as number is an abstract attribute shared by groups of objects, being is an attribute of life that I share with each living creature. Just as 3 apples has an attribute that it shares with any other collection of 3 things--no matter how diverse--each of us share a fundmental attribute of existence, being. 

If we look at the infinite varieties of being and consider what they have in common, this is what I am calling Being. This is analogous to the difference between a specific number, such as 3, and any number, which I am calling Number. I don't want to answer question about Being as I think we each answer this in our own way. I just want to open the door so this dialogue is possible. This is the what I refer to as the high-country of the mind.