I have been
wanting for some time now to write another highly philosophical post that
almost nobody reads, and a couple things that have caught my attention in my
latest forays in the field of philosophy of mind may provide me the excuse, as
I have noted:
·
The
inability of the field as a whole to go much beyond Hume. I mean, I’m the first
fan of ol’ Davey, and devoted a good deal of my dissertation to his thought,
but is this really the best we can do as a culture? As a civilization? As a species?
Well, most of what you read out there that doesn’t come directly from the
playbook of the Scot comes from Aristotle anyhow, which isn’t exactly breaking
news either, so… I do get that some issues never get entirely settled, but the
baffling thing about this particular one is that there seems to be only one
“official” position, that every philosopher since Plato seem to be discovering
anew, and announcing loudly how daring, unprejudiced and deep of a thinker he
is for revealing it to the world. It essentially comes down to the fact that
there are no innate ideas, and everything that is in the mind has been first
perceived (so the mind builds itself through the accumulation of impressions of
the external world). Not that original for Hume, as both Hobbes and Locke had
already said it almost with the same force, and they were not that original
either, as “nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu” was already
stated in the XIIIth century by that most obscure and marginal figure, none
other than St. Thomas Aquinas, only reckoned as Doctor of the Church and the
most influential thinker of Christendom in the late Middle Ages and thereafter… but again, when devoting a good deal of the
first book of his Treatise on Human
Nature to convince us of what a self-evident truth that is, Hume seems to
think that he is being a courageous, bold and innovative thinker, fighting
against the obfuscations of “the schools” (the inherited corpus of scholastic
thinkers, although the most scholastic of them all was Aquinas, who as we have
seen had exactly the same opinion as the Scottish philosopher). You would think
stating the predominant position of his age as if it were marginal and obscure
was a peculiar trait of Hume, but you read the same statement, similarly
accompanied by the claim of being unusually valiant, uninhibited, sagacious and
discerning, in Condillac, Brentano, Freud (his Project of a Psychology for Neurologists is a poor remake of the
mentioned part of the Treatise with
barely the addition of confused references to a mysterious “neuronic energy”
that gets “deployed” or “associated” to certain memories –besetzung in the original German, that for some reason the Standard
Edition under the supervision of Strachey decided to translate as “catechted”
in what has been a much maligned and frankly quite boneheaded choice), Ryle,
Russell and practically every recent philosopher of mind.
·
The
extent to which two apparently different questions are intermingled. “What is
it really out there” and “What can we know about what is really out there” are
endlessly confused (may be endlessly confusing), and any philosopher of mind
worth his salt jumps from ontology to epistemology shamelessly in any of his
writings (as I’ve done in the title of this post, by the way). One would expect
Kant to have settled this one once and for all (we can not know what is really
out there, so any time devoted to the first question is misspent), and the
logical positivist (and the whole thrust of the “linguistic turn”) to have put
the last nail on that particular coffin, but…
After some
thought, it seems to me that both confusions/ distortions are intimately
related, and that they can be explained by a common worldview (you probably know
where this is heading) that has developed historically until it came to be seen
by any thinking person as the only “sensible”, “rational” one. Let’s devote the
rest of this post to make that view explicit and potentially debunk it.
To that
extent, let’s think for a moment about the opposite view that all the
philosophers of mind were raising against, assuming collectively that it was
widely held (while in reality you would be really hard pressed to find a
philosopher that actually held it). What is the opposite of thinking that you
only find in our mind things that have been previously grasped by our senses?
Who has actually defended the opinion that there are those “innate ideas” that
Hume so carefully wanted to prove that couldn’t exist? Plato, of course, for
whom knowing was really remembering (“anamnesis”), but not remembering just of
any previous sensory experience (that is, after all, the same that the
empiricists, and the scholastics, and the peripatetics and the stoics were
later to defend in opposition to him), but remembering how the “soul”, which
was distinctly non-material, had experienced the “ideas” of which material
reality was but a mere, washed-down shadow. So Aristotle, the scholastics
(harder to explain in their case, but we’ll get to that), Hobbes, Locke, Hume,
Condillac, Freud and Ryle (and countless others) are essentially telling us,
over and over again, each of them claiming to be uniquely original and
perspicuous and contrarian, that there is no soul, no stuff different from
everyday matter that can explain how we “know” things, and specially no stuff
that can exist independently from the body.
OK, fair
enough, I’ll be the first to admit that the idea that there is this “spooky
stuff” is problematic, and distinctly in the minority nowadays. I’d just like
to point than when you hear that it has been “thoroughly debunked”,
“exhaustively disproved by science” and “demonstrated as false by the best and
most reliable ways of thinking of our epoch” you may want to take all those
authoritative declarations with a grain of salt, as they all come down to a
bunch of guys repeating endlessly what Aristotle already said two and a half
millennia ago (when, let’s be honest about it, there wasn’t much scientific
method going around) but for some odd reason each of them claiming to be
extraordinarily original and presenting the claim as the most counterintuitive
breakthrough ever presented to humanity. Especially because Science (with a
capital S) has surprisingly little to say about “what is really out there”, and
every discussion between monism (“there is only one real kind of stuff, namely matter”) and dualism (“may be there is
something else than matter, namely minds, which can not be entirely explained
in terms of, reduced to, supervenient on or caused by the aforementioned
matter”) is metaphysics or, as our
forebears liked to spell it, metaphysicks.
Now you will
hear (and read) a lot of guys trying to pass their metaphysical speculations as
plain ol’ honest-to-god physics (even the very admirable Stephen Hawking did a
good deal of that in his quite abominable The
Grand Design, but I tend to think the fault lies mostly in his ill-chosen
coauthor rather than in the great man’s dwindling capabilities –which, let’s
not forget, still have a long, long way to go while still being far above the
average man capabilities, including my own), but I encourage my readers not to
be fooled by the noise of the multitude, and bear with me for a while. Any
sober evaluation of the independent force of the multiple (or rather, multiply
repeated) arguments for the implausibility of the existence of anything
distinct from matter rests in the end in a single claim: matter (the stuff
described by physics without really knowing what it consists in, but again more
on that later) is enough to describe, explain and predict what goes around us,
so there is no need to “postulate” any additional stuff and, by neatly applying
Occam’s razor (of which I’m the first fan), such additional stuff does not
exist.
Which is all
well and good, and as I just said I’m the first enthusiastic proponent of the
thorough and merciless application of the Franciscan friar’s implement, but
let’s gain some perspective before we accept such application is pertinent in
this case. I think we can all agree that physics and chemistry have accumulated
a vast store of knowledge that rings undeniably “true” and that allows us to
confidently model (represent with
mathematical tools) how certain entities evolve and, given their current
conditions, how they were arranged in the past and are likely to be arranged in
the future. Those entities are characterized by being extended in space and
having mass (according to Hume, the knowledge about them pertains to quantity,
measurable quality and geometry). Negatively, they are also characterized by
not being conscious (unless for Galen Strawson, but again more on that later),
for there not being “something there is like to be” any of those entities. It
doesn’t matter how imaginative we are or how hard we try, we just can’t put
ourselves in the place of a rock, a chair, a meteorite or a pool of water and
somehow conceive what we would be experiencing. The furthest we can go down
that path leads us to intuitively believe that we would be experiencing nothing
at all. Such negative definition effortlessly drives our attention to other
entities that indeed do have consciousness: human beings all round us, which we
can easily imagine as having experiences just like ours, only from a different perspective.
Whole fields of human activity have been developed on the premise of making
each one of us feel “how it is like” to be somebody else (mainly literature,
but it may be argued that it is a common feature of all great art), so I think
it is safe to assume such other minds do indeed exist, and are as real as our
own (for the record, the opposite opinion, called solipsism, is logically
unassailable but ranks low in the list of skeptical arguments that may be true
after all so you may legitimately lose some sleep over them).
I think even
the most hardheaded physicist or chemist will admit that their disciplines do
not have much to tell us about the individual or collective behavior of those
other entities (human beings) except in the most limited situations. Being
composites of carbon, if you heat them a lot they will burn, and suffer a
number of very predictable reactions (with quite adverse effects). Being
physical bodies, if you throw them from a sufficient height they will
accelerate at the rate of 9.8 m/s each second (and, when they reach the floor,
will experience effects potentially as adverse as the ones in the previous
case)… I’m sure you get the gist, hard science tells us a lot about how the
matter we are made of would behave, but not much about what we call “behavior”
(choices initiated by “us”, initiated by what, for a time, were called our
“superior faculties”). But no biggie, we have a host of equally scientific disciplines
that deal precisely with such actions that are dependent on us having a mind:
psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, whose track
record is as resplendent as that of physics and chemistry, that have developed
models for understanding human behavior that attain similar levels of precision
and reliability and that, given the current conditions of any person or group
of persons, can similarly predict both how such persons felt and thought in the
past and how they will feel and think in the future.
For those
with super-high threshold irony detectors, that was indeed an irony.
It is not
just me that says that the “humanistic” disciplines have a terrible, terrible
record reaching any kind of unified conclusion about what is true and what is
false in their respective fields, and using such conclusions to produce
reliable predictions: I already touched on the results of the initiative by
Brian Nosek to replicate some of the better established experiments in
psychology (Me flogging a dead horse),
and along similar lines I read this most recent post in Aeon: Economics is the new astrology,
although this confession by an economist may be more telling: The Money Illusion discovers some truth,
(note especially this acknowledgment “People used to mock economists by
saying that it wasn’t a science, that it didn’t know anything. Economists
would reply that they knew a few things. For instance, they knew that
free trade is good and that price floors create surpluses. Now they’ve
even abandoned those EC101 ideas, and admitted that their critics are correct.
The field has trashed its own reputation. Economists are implicitly
admitting that their profession is an empty shell, completely devoid of knowledge.” And that comes from a reputable economist, Scott Sumner,
which has been mostly in the right since I started following him a few years
ago). And let’s not forget Economics is the “queen of the social sciences”, the
one with most reputable credentials and considered as most serious by almost
all the educated public. Nothing really surprising here for regular readers of
this blog; when we come to the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften, it is high time to admit it is “empty
shells” all around, which truly “don’t know anything”. In the language of older
times, they are all doxa (opinion)
and very little episteme (knowledge).
But back to
the main argument of the current post, so we have in one hand some disciplines that have developed solid,
valid knowledge to know a portion of how the world around us works (riding the
coattails of a methodology which we will call “the scientific method” whose
broad outlines can be agreed upon by most practicing scientists, although there
may be some differences in the fine details of what constitutes such method
which doesn’t need to concern us at this point), the part of the world constituted
by stuff describable by “quantities, measurable qualities and geometry”, or to
put it shortly, matter. And we have in the other hand a bunch of additional
disciplines that so far have been utterly unable to do something similar, so
the part of the world described by them (a part of the world characterized by
including mind, and/ or consciousness –I won’t enter yet in the discussion of
to what extent one requires or implies the other) is not very well understood,
and the little understanding there appears to be is highly disputed, and has
shown to be unable to produce consistent, reliable predictions, BUT we
confidently claim that for all we know the same methodologies and the same
basic building blocks that successfully explain the first part of reality (the
ones characterized by the lack of mind) are all we need to describe this other
part. Well, sorry but no, such claim is unwarranted, and such application is
illegitimate. We just don’t know enough (hell, we don’t even know if we know anything at all!) to make such
inference.
The position
of the materialist monist claiming to have Science (again, with a capital S) on
his side reminds me of the drunkard seeking for his keys under the lamppost,
because that’s where there is more light, although he most likely lost them on
a totally different section of the street. Yes, we have as a species developed
a methodology that has allowed us to expand and deepen mightily our knowledge
of a part of what surrounds us. But that methodology is of no use to decide if
that part is everything that there is or not, especially on the light of the
recurrent failures of its intended application to matters of the mind. Coming
back to the title of this post (and to Kant’s original insight, that we seem to
have mostly forgotten), we have a solid foundation for a materialist
epistemology (that it, for an epistemology pertaining to matter, geared to
decide what knowledge about matter is
true). We have a robust set of criteria for what constitutes well based,
sufficiently warranted knowledge in the field of the “natural” sciences (the
sciences that deal with objects), but such epistemology almost by definition
has very little to say about what are the ultimate building blocks of reality,
about what reality “is made of” because by definition that’s the realm of
ontology.
Hogwash, you
may claim. That “ontology” I speak of is a bunch of confused thinking and smoke
and mirrors, and there is no need to question “what reality is ultimately made
of”, what we should really direct our attention to is how we can instrumentally
manipulate it (that’s what me make models for, to enable us to pick the most
salient features, like mass, energy and position, and predict how they will
evolve without needing to grasp what they “are” in some mysterious ultimate
sense), which is what the natural sciences teach us to do now, and what the
social (or mind) sciences will teach us to do in the future, without any need
to include in their field of inquiry references to “spooky stuff” like substantially
different minds, which lead unavoidably to souls, ghosts, fairies and similar
superstitions. The only difference between both (natural and social sciences)
is that one is more developed than the other, but with time (and as long as
they don’t get distracted with all this nonsense of minds being somehow
essentially different from the rest of matter) they will reach a similar level
of advancement. The less evolved are just in an infancy crisis, but it is
nothing that a good, healthy dose of empiricism, mathematical formalism
(although the maths they rely upon rarely go beyond statistics 101 and basic
algebra) and looking up to their elder sisters won’t cure.
I remain
unconvinced by such arguments, and I think the need for a good ontology to
complement a coherent epistemology is nowhere more clear than around one of the
key concepts that separate my (vastly in the minority) view from that of the
monist materialists: the possible existence of free will. The monist and I both
agree that in a world of pure stuff (a world where only matter really exists,
and where a thorough description of matter and its interactions, according to a
few, simple, elegant laws, is enough to describe everything that has happened
or may happen) there is no place for free will. Where we differ is in the
consideration of what really obtains in our world, and thus the consequence we
can deduce from it:
·
Materialist
monist: the world is made only of matter behaving predictably => there is no
free will
·
Me
: there is undeniably free will => the world can’t be made purely of matter
behaving predictably
Now, we can
analyze a bit further the claim that the world is purely made of predictable matter
by breaking it down in two subordinate claims, one regarding what there really
is, and one regarding what we can now (or put in other terms, one ontological
and one epistemic):
·
M1
(O): there is only matter
·
M2
(E): matter behaves in a way that is describable by simple, elegant laws, which
allow for no exception. Given the knowledge of such laws, and the state of the
Universe in a certain moment, all other states in all other possible moments
can be known
Note that the
materialist monist needs the two claims to be true, as a material world that is
not predictable (that doesn’t follow those simple laws or, in older terms, that
is not deterministic, where M2(E) is not true) doesn’t allow him to use the
successes of natural sciences in support of the first claim (if there are no
universal laws with no exception, all bets are off and all the usual skeptical
arguments about other minds not being real or the universe having been created
five minutes ago obtain). But remember that all the plausibility of that first
claim came indeed from the successes of natural science (in what is an
incorrect inference, in my view). I, on the other hand, require just one of the
previous claim to be false to be right (both a purely materialistic universe, as
long as it is non deterministic, or a dualistic universe would allow for the
existence of free will, although only the second one provides a straightforward
solution to the problem of consciousness).
However, in
the last century Science (with as capital an S as you may dream) has leaned
more and more heavily towards “proving” that M2 (E) is almost certainly false.
The dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics establishes that there are
“uncaused”, truly stochastic, events that no hidden variable can predict (so,
in some sense, using Einstein’s sentence, God does indeed play dice). And the
hodgepodge of mathematical intuitions and curiosities somewhat petulantly
referred to as “chaos theory” allow us to understand how the microscopic
effects of such indeterminacies can scale up to have vastly macroscopic
consequences that we can observe, measure, but not in any way predict either.
The theory presents us, in other words, with incontrovertible evidence that
there are highly significant events in nature of a non-linear nature, that to
be predicted (specially using finite elements modeling and Fourier series)
would required an almost infinitely detailed knowledge of their initial
condition. But Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle sets an unbreakable limit
to the level of detail we can achieve, so…
I’m sure a
materialist monist could still say “very well, then, we do not live in a
deterministic universe, but that kind of indeterminacy doesn’t buy you the
space you need for your wishy-washy free will. All you would have is soulless,
inert matter behaving sometimes (mostly, I dare say) predictably, and every now
and then unpredictably. The occasional (and infrequent, I dare say again)
unexpected macroscopically observable indeterminacy is just random chaos, it
doesn’t allow for the kind of “character-dependant” “agent-originated”
causation that you surely want to claim”. Indeed, I would answer. Just the
falseness of the epistemic part of the materialistic vision does not provide me
yet with the kind of Universe I think we inhabit. I do need at least the
ontology part to be similarly false, as I require more than “soulless” matter,
I require true, substantial, non-material minds to get to the kind of free will
that I believe we are actually endowed with, and the falsity of M2 (E) does in
no way entail, or even point to, the possible falsity of M1 (O).
However, I’ll
leave you with three last things to ponder before closing this record-length
post:
1. Once we accept that M2 (E) is false
(not just “I’d like things to be this way, so I give more credence to evidence
that points towards them actually being so” false, but “the best theory
humanity has ever developed to explain how the material world behaves, QED and
the standard model, point towards its falseness” false), coupled with the
failure of the so-called social “sciences” to predict reliably their supposed
field of interest, how warranted M1 (O) turns out to be? (my contention is that
not much).
2. One statement usually derived fromM1
(O) flies in the face of our first-hand experience: according to the purest
materialism (remember, “there is only matter”), our own consciousness is
illusory. We think we experience and feel and think, but it is just an elaborate
ruse nature plays on us (by complete chance, evolution just happened to produce
creatures that believe they are conscious, but that are really not, as there
could not “be” something as being conscious). The only reason that such
counterintuitive statement has not been used as a definitive argument for the
falsity of M1 (O) is because “the whole weight of modern science” seemed to be
behind it. But if M2 (E) is false ,then the whole weight of modern science is
not behind M1 (O) any more, and what seems in the face of it absurd (that we
are not conscious after all) may be, indeed, absurd.
3. Finally, any statement X has its
plausibility undermined if we find some features of the world that may explain
how X arose and have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of X (that’s the
argument materialists have been using against any religious claim since the
times of Feuerbach’s Wesens des
Christentums, by explaining them as a product of the manipulation of
priests, or of the psychological need of humans for an all-powerful father
figure, or of evolutionary psychology and the like). Is there, then, some
explanation for how M1 (O) got to be so widespread that doesn’t appeal to its
coincidence with some set of observed facts? To how it got to be such a central
part of the dominant reason of our age (aha!)? well, of course there is. In the
transition from Baroque reason to Economic reason it was obviously beneficial for
the increase in the social production of material goods to have people’s minds
distracted away from a possible afterlife and focused instead into the material
betterment of their conditions in this life. And to justify lives devoted more
obsessively to the pursuit of material well-being (to the exclusion of anything
that could only be detrimental for that pursuit) it was as obviously beneficial
to convince them they were but lumps of matter blindly obeying the dictates of
their instincts. And of course, the societies that most successfully
indoctrinated their citizens in such set of beliefs vanquished the societies
that did not espouse them so fully and became the sole survivors of a scenario
of inter-societal competition.
I’ll let my
readers reach their own conclusions.
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