Wow Tina, you unloaded both barrels on this post……. Great job!
“Why do we still hold materialistic views on reductionism and mechanism and a causally-closed universe? Shouldn’t we be beyond that by now?”
We should be, but clearly we are not; and if we are looking to our institutions to take the lead on this matter, it’s not going to happen. It will be individuals like yourself and I working in isolation that will be the ones blazing a new trail.
Additionally, the physicalist's vision of a mechanistic, causally-closed universe is derived from our explicit understanding of tool making. Let’s face it, as a species we are really, really good at what we do. But what does our understanding of tool making have to do with how the universe works……. It doesn’t; and that is the problem!
So: if all of mathematics are just tools, space is not like a fabric and there is no such thing as quantum wave function, where do we go from here. I’m thinking a little bit of maturity and intellectual honesty can go a long way toward progress.
Thanks! It's funny you say I've unloaded both barrels, because I feel like I've only said a small bit of what I meant to say, but each time I sit down to write down all those things I meant to say (those thoughts that arrive at the most inconvenient hour—2AM seems to be the sweet spot) I can't remember what they were. Hume's point about memory and reason was spot on in my case!
"But what does our understanding of tool making have to do with how the universe works……. It doesn’t; and that is the problem!"
A nice filling out of your points in the previous post Tina!
I used most of my ammunition in that thread. I think my concerns here are similar. Overall for me, it comes down to what is simpler, a reality independent of my own mind, or a reality at least somewhat independent of my own mind but constructed together with other minds (or in the mind of God). I can't prove that the reality "out there" isn't a mental construct, but taking it as it reliably manifests to us does seem to involve fewer assumptions.
To your questions!
"Should we privilege quantities over qualities?"
No, and I don't think science does. In grad school I was trained in qualitative research, the study of non-quantitative phenomena. Granted, a large part of that involved developing systems to code those qualitative observations so the resulting data could be quantitatively analyzed. But it shows that quantities are quantities *of* something, qualitative information. And qualities, when you dissect them, appear to always be composed of structures and relations of lower level phenomena, which eventually themselves turn out to be structure and relation. Eventually we get down to quantum fields. Is that the ultimate reality? Are they fields of something? I don't trust any confident answers to that right now.
What I think does get privileged is more reliable impressions and ideas over less reliable ones. Often the more reliable ones involve a lot of quantitative information and analysis, but it takes both.
"Is Kant right that we’ve overstepped our limits when we say things in themselves cause our experiences of them?"
I'm not a fan of the "things in themselves" concept. I think Kant is wrong about a forever unknowable reality. But *something* causes our experiences, and we can construct theories, models, ideas about those causes, and see which ones reliably predict future experiences. Again, the question comes down to which theories that fit observations are simpler.
"Why do we still hold materialistic views on reductionism and mechanism and a causally-closed universe? Shouldn’t we be beyond that by now?"
I think we focus on mechanism, essentially rules based models, because it's been more reliable than other approaches. And my question is, what would we move on to? What benefits would it bring? Would it involve any answers that future generations couldn't just change their mind about? If so, what would be an example?
That said, in the end, it's hard to see how thoughtful idealism and thoughtful realism can ever be adjudicated with any finality.
I'm wondering what you mean by realism involving fewer assumptions, because I think realism makes more assumptions than necessary (things in themselves), at least if we're talking about scientific realism.
Your point about science is well taken. I don't think science itself privileges qualities or quantities, but we do, and we can make science what we want it to be (in theory). So there are really two questions here: Can science accept non-reductive methods that include qualities? Can we?
Reductive analysis turns qualities into something that can be quantitatively analyzed, but in our interpretation it seems we're always looking back on the qualities that made such analysis possible and judging them to be in some way less real. I appreciate your saying that it takes both, as well as your reluctance to accept confident answers to the quantum state we're in regarding ultimate reality.
"What I think does get privileged is more reliable impressions and ideas over less reliable ones."
Maybe in the grand scheme of things (of course, whether that connects with reality is another question). I just worry that reliability isn't enough if we want a scientific theory to be taken to explain reality. If it's simply what the scientific method does and is taken as such, that's fine with me.
"I'm not a fan of the "things in themselves" concept. I think Kant is wrong about a forever unknowable reality."
In what way is he wrong, though, assuming some form of realism? If *something* causes our experiences, how can we know that?
Other options besides reductive mechanism would include any sort of (actually acknowledged) teleological accounting where the purpose of the whole is taken to be prior to, but also explanatory of, its parts. The parts are understood in light of the whole. (I think we actually do this already, but only implicitly, and then we pretend we don't).
Or if you prefer something more science-y sounding, try Erik Hoel's "causal emergence", but applied more broadly, outside of computationalism. And I'd be cool with nixing the supervenience stuff. I'm not even sure I know what it means anymore, or if it means...
It's not that reductionism is wrong, but that it doesn't always provide the best explanation for what we want to know. Theory of mind being a particularly poignant example. And of course I take information to be about us and what we want to know; causality and information are not physical things 'out there'. But leaving that aside, you can have both the reductive explanation (I'm sitting here because x, y, and z physical states make it possible) but that's not the only type of explanation, and it makes a pretty poor explanation for, say, why you want to go to the supermarket. If you say you wanted to buy graham crackers—that's the BEST explanation, not just the most convenient explanation. More causal choices means we get to bypass the super obnoxious super tedious free will debates.
None of this is new, of course. It's just Plato and Aristotle all over again. BORING. ;)
Hope this comment formats correctly. I've had some trouble posting text into Substack.
On realism and assumptions, consider an event that happened 20 years ago this month. A massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean resulted in a tsunami hitting southern Asia, killing over 200,000 people and displacing over a million. To understand the causes of the event, we can study plate tectonics, hydrodynamics, coastal geography, and probably some other physical sciences. But these are just studying the physics. If I understand your position correctly, it isn't that tectonic plates or oceans don't exist, but that they are mental constructs. We can study them as though they just exist, and increase our predictive accuracy of future events. Or we can try to study them as mental constructions. What does the second add to the first? To me, it seems like an extraneous assumption.
"Can science accept non-reductive methods that include qualities? Can we?"
I'd ask why we'd want to? How will we know something is truly irreducible unless we try to reduce it? What would non-reductive methods involve? What advantage would they provide in understanding what the particular qualities are or where they come from?
"I just worry that reliability isn't enough if we want a scientific theory to be taken to explain reality."
The question is, what's the alternative? It seems like, at a minimum, our metaphysical explanations have to at least be compatible with reliable models. But with just that, what are they adding? What forces us to accept one explanation over the other?
"In what way is he wrong, though, assuming some form of realism? If *something* causes our experiences, how can we know that?"
I'd say he's wrong because we can develop models (clusters of belief) and see how predictive those models are for future experiences. If positing that a particular thing is the cause increases the accuracy of our predictions or postdictions, in other words, it fits observations, then it's reasonable to provisionally accept that it exists. That doesn't provide absolute certainty, but if absolute certainty is required, then it seems like all knowledge is impossible. I don't find that a productive version of "knowledge". But one involving more reliable beliefs does seem to be.
For teleology, for me, the question is whether including purposes increase the reliability of our knowledge. In some cases, it can. Biologists often discuss things in a manner that sound teleological, but is really more about adaptive attractor states. But we are story telling entities, and often we do talk loosely in terms of purposes. But the question remains, for the strict theory itself, particularly at the physical level, what does positing purposes add to explanation? If multiple purposes seem plausible, how do we adjudicate between them?
I'm either not familiar with or don't recall Erik Hoel's concept. I might need to look it up. It is true that cause / effect relations are emergent from more fundamental symmetric ones, but I wonder if that's what he's talking about.
"If you say you wanted to buy graham crackers—that's the BEST explanation, not just the most convenient explanation."
I'd say it's the best explanation for certain purposes. Consider if someone suddenly goes crazy and starts shooting people, a physical explanation, such as a brain tumor (or to use a more recent example, intense back pain), might well be more useful than one saying they just went crazy.
This isn't boring for me at all! I love these types of conversations. But noting that it goes all the way back to Plato / Aristotle does raise the question of whether it will ever be resolved.
Yeah, Substack commenting can be a bit primitive, especially if you're used to WP. There's really no formatting capabilities with comments, which is why you'll see me do ALL CAPS LIKE I'M SCREAMING but really that's just meant to replace italics.
I wouldn't call physical things (tangible things like oceans) 'mental constructs'. That's too subjective and creative. Physical things are known as such by the fact that I didn't create them or imagine them. They're simply given. There's more to it than this, like the fact that physical things don't just appear/disappear for no reason, etc.; they follow the rules of nature (which I take to be more basic than scientific theories and not math based, but based in common sense...even Geordie knows the rules). So to answer your question:
"We can study them as though they just exist, and increase our predictive accuracy of future events."
By all means study them as though they just exist! To quote Berkeley, “I do not argue against the Existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by Sense or Reflexion. That the things I see with mine Eyes and touch with my Hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least Question. The only thing whose Existence we deny, is that which Philosophers call Matter or corporeal Substance. And in doing of this, there is no Damage done to the rest of Mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it…”
This is what I mean by idealism making fewer assumptions. Physical things exist in exactly the way we ACTUALLY know them to exist. What we don’t need is the assumption that the physical things we actually sense are mere appearances behind which is some ultimately real—but unknowable—mind-independent reality. That’s the extra assumption, one that accounts for nothing because it can’t account for anything by definition.
Why include qualities and non-reductive methods? Because qualities are far more important than quantities. Because consciousness is qualitative and to reduce it to ‘the physical’ (whatever that is) is to deny its existence, even though it’s the very thing we know most intimately. Because most people (including intellectuals and scientists) think of physical things as being essentially of a qualitative nature, not quantitative…that was the whole point of my bringing physicalist claims to bear on a concrete example of the coffee mug, to show the physicalist must deny what most of us consider to be the mug’s real existence—it’s qualities. To assert that our everyday notion of physical things as qualitative things is not really real, that these qualitative things we interact with constantly are mere appearances, not reality, is a hard sell. I’m not sold. I think no one is really sold. The fact that we go about our daily lives as naive realists thinking the red mug stays exactly the same as it appears to me when no one’s looking at it suggests that’s what we really think, deep down. It seems to me that intuition needs to taken seriously.
“How will we know something is truly irreducible unless we try to reduce it?”
I mean, go ahead. I’m not saying reductionism is always wrong. It’s the reductionists who deny other possibilities of understanding causal relationships, not me. I think it depends on the question we want answered.
“I'd say he's wrong because we can develop models (clusters of belief) and see how predictive those models are for future experiences. If positing that a particular thing is the cause increases the accuracy of our predictions or postdictions, in other words, it fits observations, then it's reasonable to provisionally accept that it exists. That doesn't provide absolute certainty, but if absolute certainty is required, then it seems like all knowledge is impossible. I don't find that a productive version of "knowledge". But one involving more reliable beliefs does seem to be.”
I hear you, but keep in mind, something can exist in an objective fashion, which is not all or nothing—it’s provisional, as you say, since we can talk about something being more or less objective—but to say such and such a thing is mind-independent is not provisional, it’s absolute, it’s all or nothing.
And I have no problem with postulating some scientific theoretical entity and calling it the cause of such and such phenomena SO LONG AS that theoretical entity is not identified as a thing in itself in a mind-independent realm. Because you see, whether that entity exists in a mind-independent realm or not has nothing to do with prediction, accuracy, science, or our daily lives. If a mind-independent reality doesn’t exist, that changes absolutely nothing for science! This is actually a big part of my point: a mind-independent realm is almost never at play. It does nothing. It’s the burst appendix of ontology. The ghost in the metaphysical machine. Science doesn’t rely on mind-independence one bit. Ordinary life doesn’t rely on it one bit. It’s only in philosophical discussions that evoking a mind-independent reality matters because then it involves interpreting what our knowledge is knowledge of.
It sounds like we agree that explanations should suit the question. So that’s something! And I’m glad you’re enjoying the conversation, since I am too. I do think the question of mind-independence can be resolved, but only that. The question of consciousness, whether dualism, physicalism, or something else is the best answer seems the deeper mystery.
In some ways, Substack comments are better, but yeah, worse in others. For some reason, pasting from a Windows text file seems to work better than pasting from a Google Doc. Substack collapses the GDoc version's blank lies, causing the paragraphs to run together. Probably has something to do with the technology they're using. I also keep somehow getting into a mode where I can't expand the comment anymore, with only re-following the link from the email notice to reset it. Weird.
Something I'm struggling with here is the distinction between a mental construct, which you say is not the right way to think about it, and it being mind dependent (as in NOT mind independent). If it's mind dependent, how is it then not a mental construct? What's the difference?
I can understand Berkeley's argument, or at least I think I can (not having read him at length), because he situates objective reality in the mind of God. But you said you found God redundant. Where then did the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean exist before the earthquake and the rest of us finding out about it? Whose mind was it dependent upon?
"It’s the reductionists who deny other possibilities of understanding causal relationships, not me"
I'm wondering which reductionists say this. Although I guess it could be implied with a posteriori physicalism. It's one reason why I think a priori physicalism is more coherent. I don't think we're done until we've explained the logical connection between physics and experience, but it does mean accepting that experience isn't what many of us think it is.
"Because consciousness is qualitative and to reduce it to ‘the physical’ (whatever that is) is to deny its existence,"
I don't see it that way. To me, just because we can reduce something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Chairs, rainbows, planets, and democracy all exist, even though they're all composite entities. The only thing I can see reducing consciousness means is that it's not fundamental. Accepting that does mean we're not separate from the rest of reality, but an embedded part of it. But once we do, it seems like consciousness moves from an intractable metaphysical problem to merely a very difficult cluster of scientific ones.
"SO LONG AS that theoretical entity is not identified as a thing in itself in a mind-independent realm."
I think we've discussed before the confusion between different meanings of "thing in itself". I agree that an unknowable thing in itself adds nothing to science. But I'm not seeing the argument for saying that all mind independent entities are automatically in that category. But this gets back to my question above.
Maybe the one I should be asking is: what do you mean by "mind independence"? Do you mean having no past or future causal relationships whatsoever to any mind? Is this the intrinsic properties epistemic structural realists say we can't know, but go on to talk about anyway? If so, then I'm onboard with denying it. But I don't perceive that as idealism. To me, idealism implies every object is inside some mind. (Except of course for minds themselves, a stipulation that only seems to exist to avoid solipsism.) Maybe I'm just completely confused?
Yeah, Substack's comments have been glitchy lately. For a while you couldn't access the "reply" button...the window wouldn't scroll down. It looks like they've fixed that issue, but there's always something else.
The problem I have with 'mental construct' is the 'construct' part. We don't construct the physical world, but not constructing the physical world doesn't mean we know about it because of its mind-independent existence. We know about it because we experience it, and the way we experience is it as 'given', as simply there—not as invented or created by us.
"Where then did the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean exist before the earthquake and the rest of us finding out about it? Whose mind was it dependent upon?"
Think about it this way: How do we know about the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates? Whose mind is that knowledge dependent on? It's not dependent on God, it's not dependent on mind-independent reality. We know about the pressure only as an inference from similar effects being caused by such events.
Reductionists who call our experience an illusion and/or who think everything about our experience is 'nothing but' whatever mechanism or processes are going on in our brains. There is 'nothing over and above' the physical (of course, what is physical? That's a point of contention). The other causal option these reductionists deny is mental agency, that minds cause effects in the world and in the brain (which is surprising since neuroscience's "plasticity" seems to admit causality goes both ways, at least.)
"Chairs, rainbows, planets, and democracy all exist, even though they're all composite entities."
But what happens to these—or more to the point, what happens to consciousness—after the reduction? Their essential qualitative natures don't get explained. That's just science and how it currently operates. Those who take the philosophical view of scientism extrapolate from this reductive process a metaphysics that doesn't make sense, a metaphysics that says the essential qualities don't exist, not really. The thing's essential nature gets explained away, deemed to be something not quite real. A strictly scientific rainbow is invisible. Fine. But to go from there to say a rain IS invisible, it's nothing but an illusion, is to miss the point. Keith Frankish's description of rainbow is a good demonstration of what I mean by explaining away the qualitative:
"Here’s one: rainbows. Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them.
But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
Whereas I say: Of course there's a colored arc up there! It's real, it's a colored arc, and that IS a rainbow. That is the very essence of "rainbow" and is what we MEAN when we use the word "rainbow"! Rainbows are not essentially water droplets reflecting sunlight. That is merely what happens to rainbows in the hands of scientific reduction...rainbows rainbow-ness gets abstracted away. To say that's all they are is like taking photos of rainbows with black and white film...no it's worse than that.
"what do you mean by "mind independence"?
I was wondering about this from your last comment after I submitted my reply...I wondered whether you thought 'things in themselves' or 'reality in itself' was something different from 'mind-independent reality'. It's not. The mug 'in itself' just means the mug as it exists apart from all minds. I've been wondering about terminology lately and how it distances us from certain thoughts in a way that can be strange and confusing. When I talk about Kantian 'things in themselves' and question whether such a limiting concept is necessary, I don't get nearly as much blowback as when I talk about mind independent reality, which is perplexing to me because those are the same thing. When I talk about 'things in themselves', that just means things as they exist apart from all minds; ie in a mind-independent realm. It's interesting how the difference in terminology changes things for people, even when I explain what I mean. There's something strange going on here, and it's not just you. It's interesting. I don't know what's going on.
Do you mean having no past or future causal relationships whatsoever to any mind?"
Yes. This is what Kant means. Epistemic structural realists want to deny this while not denying that they reject the primary and secondary qualities distinction. At the same time, they haven't given any good arguments that I'm aware of for rejecting the distinction but not causality. This is what I was trying to get at in my post. I'm trying to say, if you reject the primary and secondary qualities distinction, it's because you see that it's arbitrary in terms of coming to know mind-independent reality. Neither primary nor secondary qualities will get you there. Epistemic structural realists see that the reason you can't get to mind-independence from there is because math is also in your mind. Whatever's in your mind must be taken to be a filter for reality—rose colored glasses, if you will—and so must be discounted when you're trying to account for a mind-independent reality. Reality in itself—mind independent reality—can't be assumed to include whatever we have going on in our minds. That's the way it goes. So from there, how do you make an exception for causality? That makes no sense to me. That's my gripe with epistemic structural realists.
"Is this the intrinsic properties epistemic structural realists say we can't know, but go on to talk about anyway?"
Maybe. I'm not sure what you mean by intrinsic properties. Epistemic structural realists do say we can know that things in a mind-independent realm cause us to experience them. I say they have no basis for saying that, especially given that they already accept that whatever's going on in our minds must not be attributed to a mind independent realm. So I'm not saying they're contradicting what they say about causality, but they are going against the general thrust of their reasoning about what we can know about a mind independent realm.
Idealism is not well understood. I think people get all sorts of bizarre notions about what idealists think, but in doing so they're not thinking outside their own conceptual framework. That's hard to do! I expect some people to think I'm nuts.
Idealism in the classical sense is mainly about showing how our knowledge about what we know is quite cockamamie. And I'm not saying it's ridiculous to think objects belong in a mind-independent realm...this is completely normal. We all do it. This belief wouldn't be so weird if it weren't for all the scientific background we now have; we're all infused in science-y-ness through and through, and yet we're all naive realists in the end. That's what I mean about the strangeness of thinking the mug stays red and warm even when no one is looking at it—because that's exactly what I think happens and that's exactly what I think of when I think of a mind independent realm. I think of the mug sitting there on my kitchen counter and no one is in the kitchen. But that's not a mind independent realm. That's an idea in my mind. Weird! So I'm pointing out that we believe, on a regular basis and in a thoroughgoing way, a complete and utter contradiction. We seem to have no problem with this contradiction; we don't even see it. Weird! Even sophisticated scientists go about their lives thinking this way. It's ridiculous how ridiculous we are! I think this bizarre way of thinking should be...well...thought about.
"and the way we experience is it as 'given', as simply there"
My question here would be who or what "gives" it to us? I guess the answer could be other minds, but then what is the medium of exchange? And what about phenomena, like a sudden earthquake and tsunami, that appears to surprise everyone?
"Think about it this way: How do we know about the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates?"
I'd say because the causal effects of it reach us and impinge on our minds. We then form models of what might have caused those effects. It used to be those models included angry deities punishing us for some transgression. Today our models (at least for most of us) are more mechanistic because that's turned out more predictive. The earth isn't punishing anyone (except maybe metaphorically), just doing what it does. But the question for me remains, what generates those effects, what "gives" them to us?
"Reductionists who call our experience an illusion and/or who think everything about our experience is 'nothing but' whatever mechanism or processes are going on in our brains."
Illusionists are usually careful to delineate what they deny, and it's rarely experience itself. They do deny that it or its properties are fundamental or metaphysically private. And they're usually functionalists, with causal relations at the heart of their view. (Dennett's "hard question" is "and then what happens", focused on the causal chain.) It's worth noting that philosophical zombies, which imply a causally impotent experience, come from non-physicalists. And many illusionists are free will compatibilists.
"There is 'nothing over and above' the physical (of course, what is physical?"
Right, there are varying definitions of "physical". I usually take it to mean causal mechanisms, or at a lower level, structural relations. But not everyone does, which is why I've been calling myself more of a mechanist than physicalist lately.
"Their essential qualitative natures don't get explained."
I'd say their nature does get explained, but the "essential" part means it probably can't be explained in a way that someone who's convinced they're fundamental will accept. For me, the issue is that assuming fundamentality doesn't seem to add any predictive accuracy to our understanding.
On the rainbow, I take Frankish to be saying that they exist, but aren't what we naively think they are, a giant physical arc in the sky. I don't think he contests the sensory impression of an arc. Put another way, the model of a physical arc causing our experience isn't predictive of what we'll find if we try to approach the rainbow, but a model of evenly distributed rain drops diffracting light is.
On mind independence, things in themselves, and intrinsic properties, I understand epistemic structural realists to be saying that science only studies what matter and energy DO, not what they ARE. Intrinsic properties are the properties of what they ARE. I've seen that equated with Kant's things in themselves, but I'm not sure it's a good fit, since what matter and energy DO is usually still thought to be external to the mind. What they ARE is as well, but divorced from their causal effects, the ARE part can have no causal effects on the mind.
A key question here is by "mind independence", do you mean external to the mind, including both ARE/IS and DO/DOES from above? Or just the ARE/IS part? I personally think ARE/IS, divorced from causal effects, isn't a productive concept, so I'm onboard with dismissing it (hence ontic structural realism). But dismissing the DO/DOES part external to the mind, yet still having causal effects on it, is a harder sell. That's that I perceive idealism to be denying. But to me that requires accounting for which mind it is happening in.
On primary and secondary qualities, I wonder if a better distinction might not be the scope or universality of the perception, or maybe it's reliability. If I perceive an object to have a particular shape, someone who is color bind, or even someone who is blind and has to feel its contours, will all still agree about the shape. But if I perceive it to be red and green, the color blind person won't have the same impression, nor the blind person. What Galileo called "secondary qualities" are ones that seem to require more evaluation from our nervous system, about what the stimuli mean for us. That doesn't mean no evaluation is happening for shape, just that it's a thinner and more universal one, less idiosyncratic, than color or taste.
"So I'm pointing out that we believe, on a regular basis and in a thoroughgoing way, a complete and utter contradiction."
I fear I'm missing the contradiction. Certainly the naive realist account is different from the scientific one. But I don't think the scientific one can just dismiss the naive one, at least not if we find is useful in everyday life, but has to account for it. For example, the mug seems solid to us and science has to and does account for that solidity. It just calls into question our assumptions about it, since it turns out that "solidity" involves resisting penetration, not being something with no spatial gaps inside its composition. Is that the contradiction, or am I missing what you mean by it?
f“I think we focus on mechanism, essentially rules based models, because it's been more reliable than other approaches.”
Rules based models are derived from our explicit understanding of tool making, not from what we understand about the universe nor ourselves; and understanding ourselves is the big one my friend. Understanding ourselves is the key that will unlock the mysteries of how our universe works, because the dynamics that are at play within our own conscious experience are the very dynamics that are at play across the entire spectrum of complexity.
Additionally, we must be clear about what we mean by reliable. Is the ability to make accurate predictions the acid test for reliability? If so, then the only thing that accurate predictions ensure is that we remain the apex predator. If our only objective is maintaining our status as the apex predator then welcome everyone to the dog eat dog world of planet earth. Our problems are not the result of diminished intellectual capabilities, our problems are psychological.
“And my question is, what would we move on to? What benefits would it bring? Would it involve any answers that future generations couldn't just change their mind about? If so, what would be an example?”
As an example; it would seem to me that if we could identify and subsequently understand the core nature of our species, wouldn’t that understanding benefit everyone now and in the future? Couldn’t that understanding be used to resolve the epidemic of addiction, religious and racial prejudice, phobias, psychoses and all of the other psychological disorders that plague our species?
This inexorable pathology that is the human experience cries out for such a solution, and doubling down on a mechanistic, causally closed synthesis of how the world works “IS” the problem. And I’m not sure you get that Mike.
As it currently stands, our prestigious scientific and academic institutions have effectively reduced the human being to nothing more that a “mind-less” calculating machine……. Seriously??? And this synthesis is somehow helpful?
"Rules based models are derived from our explicit understanding of tool making, not from what we understand about the universe nor ourselves;"
I'd say that tool making is based on what we understand about some portion of reality. It's worth noting that modern science owes a lot to renaissance engineers, which isn't often recognized. Aristotelian philosophers were required to explain all four causes to demonstrate an understanding of something. Engineers didn't have to worry about that. All that was required to make a cannon work was whether it knocked down medieval walls. Early scientists like Galileo had both natural philosophy and engineering training, and so incorporated those methods into what we now call science.
"As an example; it would seem to me that if we could identify and subsequently understand the core nature of our species, wouldn’t that understanding benefit everyone now and in the future?"
It can, but I think that's what's already happening with psychology, neuroscience, biology, and other related fields. It does involve accepting the answers being discovered. People have always struggled with the answers science provides (heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, etc), often because they puncture our conceits.
"This inexorable pathology that is the human experience cries out for such a solution, and doubling down on a mechanistic, causally closed synthesis of how the world works “IS” the problem. And I’m not sure you get that Mike."
I get that many people see it that way Lee. I just disagree. I might think differently if someone could clearly delineate an alternative and demonstrate success with it. Until then, I think looking for mechanisms is our best bet.
"It can, but I think that's what's already happening with psychology, neuroscience, biology, and other related fields."
I strongly disagree with this assessment Mike. The solutions for our psychological dysfunctions are not being provided by the physical sciences. The epidemic of addiction is growing exponentially in stride-step with our technology; religious and racial prejudices are as prevalent as ever, tribalism, phobias, psychoses and all of the other psychological disorders are as bad as they've ever been with no resolution is sight.
None of these psychological disorders have anything to do with (heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, etc). Like I stated in my previous post; our problems are not the result of diminished intellectual capacity, our problems are psychological. And the only way to address the pathology of being human is to understand our core human nature.
Free your mind and your ass will follow..... As always Mike, we will continue to disagree.
A delightful dialogue, Tina! There were two moments of self--deprecating humour that struck a chord with me. The first was when you appeared to be talking to yourself ("See, that’s where idealism gets you,") and the second is when you denied believing in ghosts ("Sure. If you say so.")
With all this talk of "mind-independent reality," has it occurred to anyone that _other minds_ might constitute an independent reality? This would save us from solipsism, but leave us with mysterious presences independent of our own minds.
"With all this talk of "mind-independent reality," has it occurred to anyone that _other minds_ might constitute an independent reality?"
Here I am waving my hand emphatically in the air while yelling "Yes! Yes!"
But I'm not so sure other minds are really all that mysterious. That's something I'd like to get into. Looking forward to bouncing ideas off of you!
BTW, I just started reading Whitehead and I totally see why you were keen that I read him...I had to put away the highlighter. It was getting ridiculous. And my god, he's about to do some sort of Berkeley Leibniz mashup involving monads with mirroring perspectives...monads with windows! I've always felt the monads needed windows. How exciting!
I hesitated over the word "mysterious." For a moment I considered "unknowable," but that gets problematic quickly (as this whole post tries to show, if I'm not mistaken). In the end, pressed for options, I just hit the Reply button and got on with other things.
As a pragmatic physicalist myself, ontic structural realism bodes well with my own novel theory of consciousness because it corresponds with Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics (RQM) as well as Nagarjuna’s interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada) doctrine.
Nagarjuna; IEP: “…all change in the world, including the transformations which lead to enlightenment, are only possible because of interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada), and interdependent causality in turn is only possible because things, phenomena, lack any fixed nature and so are open (sunya) to being transformed.”
“…if there is no fundamental level to reality (which there is), no ultimate stuff (which there is), what else is left to the scientific realist but structure?”
This is where reality/appearance metaphysics (RAM) supervenes upon our traditional paradigm. Unlike our inherited paradigm of subject/object metaphysics (SOM) where our conventional reality is divided into mind stuff and material stuff, RAM make no such distinction. Its only distinction is between the Ultimate Reality and our Conventional Reality.
Therefore, according to the RAM architecture, mind and matter are constituted by the same stuff, and for all practical purposes that stuff is structure, form, i.e., “physical stuff”.
So, to restate a proverbial question of Wyrd’s: Are the rules of baseball physical? The short answer is yes.
"Its only distinction is between the Ultimate Reality and our Conventional Reality."
Interesting. Is this sort of like the difference between Parmenides and Plato where the former says non-being doesn't exist and the latter says, "well, I know you're right, but can we say it kind of exists, because otherwise we can't explain most of experience"?
"Therefore, according to the RAM architecture, mind and matter are constituted by the same stuff, and for all practical purposes that stuff is structure, form, i.e., “physical stuff”."
See, I'm still thinking physical has to be tangible, concrete. It needs to be substantial. Stuff! If we're not gonna get Atoms in the end, if the ultimate building block just slips away...that would seem to mean the world is not physical. (And that would seem to vindicate Berkeley on empirical grounds!)
That said, everyone else seems to be going your way in defining the physical. I'm the one being the stuffy curmudgeon about it.
As far as recorded history goes, Parmenides was the first person to introduce the notion of a reality/appearance distinction. He was venerated by his colleagues for his brilliant insights. Unfortunately, Plato and Aristotle rejected his metaphysical model and replaced it with subject/object metaphysics (SOM), and we've been held hostage by the SOM paradigm to this very day. If there is one thing that the long and arduous history of debate has demonstrated it's this: once one divides our conventional reality into parts, there is no way to reconcile that division. We are held hostage by a metaphysical model that represses understanding.
"Physical stuff" is tangle and it is concrete. It is not a mathematical equation as some ontic structural realist would claim. Physical stuff has "form"; motion, movement, compulsion that results in form, a form, i.e. a system that is totally dependent upon intimate relationships with other systems. As long as we equate "physical stuff" to mean any thing that has form or structure as a result of motion, them we have a basis, a starting point for new understanding.
"I'm the one being the stuffy curmudgeon about it."
I understand your resistance Tina, I really do. The physicalist paradigm as it is currently framed is the very definition of absurdity. I've had several conversations with Bernardo Kastrup about this issue. Bernardo recognizes that idealism has it own intrinsic problems and his "only" justification for sticking with idealism is because of the absurdity of the physicalist paradigm.
But like I told Bernardo, we do not have to choose between either mind or matter as it is currently framed. There are other options. As a pragmatist, it is my contention that we do not have to be held hostage hostage by the physicalist paradigm as it is currently framed. We can scrap it and start all over with assumptions that are inclusive, universal, and make sense.
Solve the "hard problem" of matter first, and the hard problem of life and the hard problem of consciousness will fall like dominos.
I'm not that familiar with Kastrup's form of idealism, but from what I understand it involves some sort of 'dashboard' where the physical turns out to be an image of the experiential or mind? It sounded a lot like Kantianism to me, except if you replace 'Matter' with 'Mind' in the noumenal realm. That seems rather unfortunate, though, since that form of idealism gives up an important benefit, which is that there is no uncrossable barrier between experience and reality, or our mind and other minds. But like I said, I'm not all that familiar with his philosophy. I haven't read any of his books, so maybe I have it completely wrong?
I certainly hope we don't have to choose between mind and matter as it's currently framed. That's my goal, to find that way.
What sort of pragmatist are you? Or do you mean that in the casual sense? I'm a big fan of William James (if that's the sort you had in mind), at least in Varieties. I didn't quite get on board with him in Pluralistic Universe, but it's been a while since I've read that.
"We can scrap it and start all over with assumptions that are inclusive, universal, and make sense."
I’m a pragmatist in the context of accepting as an axiom that our conventional reality including the quantum realm is constituted of physical stuff that is in constant motion and nothing more. And all of this physical stuff has structure regardless of whether we can see it, feel it, detect it or not detect it with our instruments. Now when it comes to the ultimate reality or Kant's noumena, that's another story.
Based upon this original assumption, the first question that comes to my mind is this: although we cannot see a thought or detect it with an instrument, do our thoughts have structure? The short answer is yes. But how did those thoughts come into existence? Through the mentation process, motion resulting in form right?
This synthesis is simple enough. Maybe too simple for some, but we’ll brush that simplicity aside for now because I’m really a simple guy at heart.
I can’t point to anyone in particular as a reference for my ideas because I claim exclusive ownership of those theories. All I can say Tina is that if you're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom of our time and look for original assumptions that are inclusive, apply universally and make sense then you are on the right track.
Wow Tina , you and your audience are really deep in the matter. For what it may be worth and due to my studies (40 years ago...) I have an approach that fits with some of the comments above.
The mug of coffe -sorry I am a coffe lover- has a distinct existence outside my perception because... I need it for my coffe.
As my wife mercilesly reminds me other things like dirt do not exist because I doesn't need to act on it.
Yes my argument seams weack. But the greater discoveries in pshisics happend because were in the path to soembody's mug of coffe.
So , yes it would be nice to grasp the world outside me per se.
But we are only able to see and understand what we need or are ready to accept.
Just going back in the history of Physics teach us some humility. ..Now please allow me to finish. My coffe is getting cold. :)
Thanks for commenting! Actually, I agree with you. I think the coffee mug exists because I need it for my coffee; it wouldn't be fun to drink coffee without it. I just wish dust and dirt could be banished to the realm of things in themselves!
Here's an anecdote that you might find interesting Tina. I was watching a youtube video a while back of David Chalmers lecturing at a university in Europe. His subject matter was the meta problem of consciousness. During the question and answer session someone from the audience asked him a question about Immanuel Kant. Chalmer's candid response was that he didn't know enough about Kant to address the gentlemen's question. And that was the end of it.
Who would have thunk it right? I mean, Kant is one of those geniuses everyone wants to identify with and yet, those same individuals know very little about the man or his ideas. Some think his ontology is some form of idealism as in a uber mind, but his use of the word idealism in transcendental idealism is meant to represent the "ideal" metaphysical model of our world.
As with his predecessors Parmenides, Nagarjuna, his reality/appearance metaphysics was rejected because he refused to define or assign properties to the ultimate reality (noumena). Again, being simple minded as I am, I think our understanding of Kant's noumena can blossom and grow if we are willing to look at it from a completely secular and scientific perspective. But there's this thing about our psychology that wants to correlate it to a god or an uber mind of some kind. We simply have to resist that tendency.
I love this quote from Parmenides IEP:
"The rest of the poem consists of a narration from the perspective of the unnamed goddess, who begins by offering a programmatic outline of what she will teach and what the youth must learn (1.28b-30):
…And it is necessary for you to learn all things,
Both the still heart of persuasive reality
And the opinions of mortals, in which there is no genuine reliability."
Interesting anecdote about Chalmers because I had been wondering whether he'd read Kant, but then I thought surely he must have, as it would be very strange for a philosophy professor not to. Then again, my husband told me it's not uncommon for analytic philosophers to know very little about the history of philosophy, which was in part why he fled the University of Chicago (but that was a long time ago).
Yeah, 'idealism' is a confusing way to describe Kant. I don't think of him as an idealist at all, but in the context of the rationalism/empiricism debate, that label makes more sense. So he's an idealist because he thinks ideas are more than habits of the mind or abstractions. But that's not quite the way we talk about idealism anymore. I don't think anyone considers our minds to be blank slates these days...although who knows, maybe there is someone out there.
As for an uber mind, I'm okay with that, depending on what it means. I would characterize it not as god at all, but as a way of referring to a transcendent collective intersubjective mind. Kind of like a zeitgeist, but more enduring. Collectives that can seem to have a mind of their own.
I'm not into taking some creator god literally, but First Cause, I think a first cause makes sense. :) Whether that's noumenal in the Kantian sense or not is another question.
Mike has, I think, held up the debate from the physical realism end (or whatever label you care to apply). I can't add much to what he's said. I will say that I don't recognize science as I understand it in your descriptions.
For me it boils down to the question of what causes our universally shared experience of a persistent lawful reality? The simplest answer to me, the one that accounts for all our experiences, is that reality is physical, lawful, external to us, and independent of our thoughts and opinions about it.
FWIW, I've said Kant was wrong about noumena all along. OF COURSE we can know a little about "things in themselves" from their consistent and universal appearances to us. They are the source of those appearances.
As an aside WRT Hume, I think the Lagrangian (1760), the Hamiltonian (1833), and Feynman diagrams (1948) are all descriptions of how causality works. Hume (1711-1776) definitely couldn't know about the latter two, and since Lagrange's work wasn't really publicized until 1788, Hume may also not have been aware of Lagrange's work.
--> I will say that I don't recognize science as I understand it in your descriptions.
This is also my biggest barrier to engaging with these posts. I only got as far as the first bit of dialogue from the TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC REALIST and I had to give up because s/he was not even close to speaking for science as I know and understand it. Perhaps it would be better to hold an actual Socratic dialogue with someone from "the other side" so that the best arguments end up being presented more strongly. Right now, this post comes across like an enormous straw man from someone who doesn't really get the scientific worldview and how those of us who hold this position might make sense of things. If you're not really seeking to understand us, it's hard to return the favor.
Well, that's an awfully big question for a blog comment. I'm currently working on a paper (blossoming into a book??) that explores this, but to get the ball rolling I do like two of google's definitions of science:
1) the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained
2) (ARCHAIC) knowledge of any kind.
This has some hypotheses embedded in it, such as methodological naturalism, which I include in my metaphysics. And there are good skeptical arguments to place limits to what one "knows" from science, which I include in my epistemology. And, to paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, you need an understanding of all of those for an understanding of science to "hang together".
(I'm referring to his quote that says, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.")
Since you and I don't seem to share metaphysical and epistemological positions, it's therefore hard to share an understanding of science. But I think all of my positions here "hang together" quite well. And I don't personally see how yours do. You would probably say the same to me. So your "science" doesn't fit with my metaphysics and epistemology. And I'm guessing vice versa. And it would take a lot of unpacking of the entire web to get things straight. Without all of that, I get frustrated by your characterizations of my views of science. And I have a very weak idea of how I would characterize your view of science.
Quickly, I think the long track record of progress and success of the (ever-improving) scientific method is precisely due to it being hammered into place by the singular, mind-idependent reality that seems to exist and remain intact for our collective minds to share and refine all of our intersubjective views until we get closer and closer to truth without ever being certain that we've reached it. Rather than science giving us an objective view from nowhere, the best we can do is to keep improving the scientific method towards giving us an intersubjective view from everywhere.
Any questions about any of that? I'm sure it was perfectly clear and persuasive. : )
PS. Some quotes from your first TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC REALIST that I didn't like:
--> we can’t imagine it without its mathematical properties
--> we agree that primary properties are quantitative and describe objects in themselves, independent of any observer
--> To put it bluntly, qualities are not really real. Matter is what’s really real.
--> We know the mug’s material reality by its quantitative properties, not its qualitative properties. We can know what it is in itself when no one’s looking at it by measuring it.
To put it bluntly, I wouldn't say any of these. These are supported by some footnotes to Galileo and Descartes but those aren't the best understandings of "science" to me. Goff traveled down the same path in his book "Galileo's Error" but I think he's just been a typical English person who specializes too early in life and hasn't kept up with things like "Why Trust Science?" from the philosopher of science Naomi Oreskes.
When it comes to the realm of the mind and basic humanity, not much has changed in at least 10,000 years, and the analysis of everyone from Thales of Miletus on has made useful and interesting contributions. But when it comes to the physical sciences or modern science, I think most philosophers are in metaphorical kindergarten and could stand to take some physics and math classes. *If* they want to talk about science or the material world, that is.
I'm not sure where I've characterized your views of science, unless you're self-identifying as a traditional scientific realist?
What you say here makes me think that characterization wouldn't fit:
"I think the long track record of progress and success of the (ever-improving) scientific method is precisely due to it being hammered into place by the singular, mind-idependent reality that seems to exist and remain intact for our collective minds to share and refine all of our intersubjective views until we get closer and closer to truth without ever being certain that we've reached it."
I would say what you're saying here sounds more like a contemporary scientific realist.
"Rather than science giving us an objective view from nowhere, the best we can do is to keep improving the scientific method towards giving us an intersubjective view from everywhere."
I certainly don't object to this! This is part of what I was saying in the earlier post.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying the Galileo and Descartes quotes aren't the best understanding of science. I didn't think what I was saying there was particularly controversial, since they are standard figures in discussions about the history of science. Of course I didn't include every important figure, but I made it clear that what I was doing had to be simplified for a blog post. Or are you objecting to the primary and secondary qualities distinction? I'm just not getting what you're objecting to.
Okay I realize now I shouldn't have weighed in without reading the entire post. Sorry! I see now that your Traditional Scientific Realist was replaced in the dialogue quickly with Contemporary Scientific Realist and I didn't read all of their lines. Perhaps "Traditional SR" should have been named "Old-fashioned SR"? I reacted to "traditional" as if that were "standard" and was immediately turned off by what they said. Scientists, by definition, ought to keep up with contemporary uses of their field since science (and all knowledge) is always considered provisional and subject to change. And I'm sorry but I don't have time at the moment to dig in and analyze the rest of this. If you don't object to my brief characterization of science in my previous comment then I'll be satisfied with that.
I had a similar experience. It took me about four tries to get through the post because the depiction of the scientific view was so at odds from my understanding of it.
Sorry I missed this earlier. I’ll blame the holidays (just had family visit).
“FWIW, I've said Kant was wrong about noumena all along. OF COURSE we can know a little about "things in themselves" “
It sounds like you’re with the traditional realist then, as are many people today.
Hume has never been disproven on causality; he can’t be, it’s the problem of induction. It’s a problem that comes from trying to make generalizations or laws from facts about the contingent world.
Ha. I don't think of myself as traditional anything, but whatever. The very idea of a taxonomy of positions seems fraught to me. They can be useful for dissecting the difference in views, but I've always been wary of the "trap" of pigeon-holing. I think Mike, and now Ed Gibney, have laid out the case for physical realism very well, and I agree with all they've said.
WRT Hume, what about when we've moved from induction (which is all Hume could have known) to *explanation* and *understanding* of the mechanisms involved? That's what those things I mentioned do. One more: past light cone. We know that to affect something, the cause must be in the past light cone. If effects weren't due to causes, why would that be a limitation?
(BTW Speaking of holiday distractions, you may have also missed my last reply on the wavelengths post.)
Taxonomy of positions seems fraught to me too, which is why I made it clear in the post that what I was doing was an oversimplification brought on by confusion over my last post for those who wanted to know which 'ism' box they could fit me into. I would rather not be fit into any box. But alas, I call myself an idealist and now everything I say looks like solipsism to those who have never read any of the important historical philosophers representative of idealism. So you see, the boxes are not for my benefit, I can assure you.
On Hume and induction, I'm not following. Why could Hume not have known anything other than induction?
Also, just to be clear (this has nothing to do with what you said), Hume wasn't the one who invented 'the problem of induction'. I don't think he even used that phrase. It is we who characterize him that way, based on his numerous arguments against 'necessary connection' as coming from the observed world. The problem of induction is simply a limitation of inductive reasoning that happens to dovetail with Hume's criticisms.
I may have missed your last reply indeed! I'll have to go look for it after I start dinner. (It's always like this. I'm telling you. I sit down to do something and get interrupted the moment I sit.)
> "Why could Hume not have known anything other than induction?"
Because the scientific discoveries I listed came in the hundreds of years after he lived. The notion of past light cones doesn't arise until the early 1900s. All of these things support the notion of physical causality. And there is no evidence to the contrary.
Skepticism about the results of induction is appropriate, and the answers science comes up with are always contingent on future discoveries, but at some point, I think we can have some confidence in those discoveries. Particularly in light of our ability to use them to predict new phenomena and build useful machines.
I just meant Hume must have known about deduction as well.
The problem of induction can't be disproved by a scientific theory. Science assumes causality is empirically grounded, but that's assuming what is thrown into question in the first place. In other words, scientific discoveries that come after Hume's time are irrelevant to the issue.
I didn't say the PoI was disproved, just that it becomes increasing irrelevant as scientific evidence accumulates.
For example, the *induction* from observation that the Sun always rises becomes less and less a part of the whole picture as that picture contains explanations of Earth's rotation and orbit around the Sun. For the Sun to *fail* to rise would require a (physically explainable) catastrophic event or a (physically unexplainable) violation of physics.
Well, I read it a second and a third time. Congratulations on the first part (dialog among Phyl.) it was fun, pedagogic and enlightening. I honestly cannot issue a qualified opinion on the second part; you burnt my CPU...
As a former student of Physics, however I felt slighted at some points. Maybe by those raising philosophical theories on behalf of Physics.
I still recall, when studying electromagnetic fields, having read about how the discoverer behind (Mr. Maxwell) had come up with the idea and the formula. He fantasized on small cogs rotating to allow electricity flow beside, thus creating the pull and push . This idea was an assumption that no longer applies. But for Mr. Maxwell was what led him to write the "math" that proved so successful.
So it was created in his mind and destroyed outside his mind by new experiments.
Developing a physical theory is more akin to writing poetry or sci-fi -in mathematical language- with only two constraints.
1) Those landscapes must fit in with the existing experience (mainly quantitative experience but also qualitative).
2) Your "theory/fantasy" must be able to predict something more not yet measured.
Ahh, and you must be ready to drop your illusion at the first breach with the experience of reality. No wonder how many of my teachers were poets or just crazy.....
So, I don't feel nobody should harbor a new brand of Philosophy based only on a new Physics theory/fantasy. No more than Julio Verne tales weren’t at least.
Wow, thanks for devoting that much time to understanding this, I'm honored. I'm glad you got something out of the first part, if not the second. Breaking down what Kant says in a blog post is challenging, but that has a lot to do with the nature of his contribution—it was big. If you haven't read him, I wouldn't expect you to understand everything I talk about in this post.
Maybe this will help: when I talk about mind-independence, what I mean by that is not "my" mind independence, but all minds. Scientific consensus takes place within brightest scientific minds, and it's ongoing. So imagine a super mind that unites all individual minds—when I talk about mind-independence, this is the mind I...have in mind. :)
I like your description of physical theory as being akin to writing poetry. I guess we all rely on the muses.
Thanks! No, I haven't read Rorty. From a quick internet search I gather he's against the idea of mirroring nature and views that as the beginning of representationalism? I'm on board with instrumentalism, given that science was never meant to be a replacement of ontology (despite what so many think), but I actually like the idea that we are mirrors of the universe, at least the ancient conception of it. I think Kant destroys that metaphor by throwing up an impenetrable wall between reality and our knowledge of it. The Kantian mirror can only self-reflect...but then it can't be a mirror at all. I think part of where he goes wrong is in equalizing all forms of noumena, which leads me to ask: why should those minds (souls, also noumena according to Kant) be entirely out of reach to minds? The whole of reality comes flowing back in once we pull down the wall the mind throws up for itself. "To the things themselves!" as Husserl said. And here we find representations coming back in again, but this time they bring with them the things they represent as well, both of which are knowable or apprehend-able to some degree, in one way or another. And we're back to Plato's forms. We might find they weren't so naive after all.
Yes, Rorty endorses a more Kantian approach than it seems you would want to. (I think the well-worn phrase "the map is not the territory" is a pretty good summary of his position in that book.)
My own view is that the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is at least valid until proven otherwise. Although I am excited at the prospect of somehow having minds directly aware of the "content" of other minds, that doesn't seem to be how things work in our world (at least not now; one could argue that just such a scenario is implied by ideas like moksha or theosis, but that takes us into thoroughly confessional, spiritual territory).
I think that when Husserl speaks of "things", he means phenomena *as phenomena*, not phenomena as somehow also already being the things-in-themselves, hence his insistence on the bracketing of *epoche*. I think his whole method is predicating on respecting, or at least remaining silent on, the noumenon. In that sense, I think Husserl is actually pretty thoroughly Kantian in his method. Indeed, part of my concern with Heidegger (about which one should have *many* concerns) is that he collapses the distinction between how-the-world-appears-to-me and how-the-world-really-is far too readily. In many ways, I think Levinas is essentially trying to reinforce the Kantian position against its 20th century assailants.
Husserl's Kantian in his method, sure. At the outset anyway. I sort of took that as a way of coming down to our level, though, but I could be wrong. The reason I take it that way is, I think there is a phenomena/noumena distinction within the brackets as well, post epoche, which lies behind the process of eidetic reduction, though this version of the distinction is not as sharp as Kant's. Instead of unknowable noumena we find the ancient idea of noumena as the object of thought, the eidos, the Platonic form. So what do we make of this? We find ancient noumena and phenomena—forms and their perspectival particulars—and at the same time we see how Kantian noumena might be an over-extension of that process, and all of this happens within the brackets Husserl sets up at the beginning in order to divide experience from the natural world. It's all a bit mind-boggling, a bit too much like a hall of mirrors. It becomes hard to continue holding up the brackets when you see the beginnings of their formation from within them. And especially when you see lived experience, including the experience of other minds, elucidated so vibrantly from within them through Husserl's accounts of the life world. We begin to suspect that what lies outside the brackets which were stipulated at the beginning must be whatever science is interested in, a special kind of entity for the scientific attitude, but it can't be minds as we experience them. Which means the problem of other minds is a problem created by our naturalistic ontology, our "natural attitude"—this is what Husserl assumes is our epistemic starting point, and rightly so, I think. The natural attitude reduces minds (souls) to a purely bodily, exterior-behavioral inference by analogy. That doesn't mean I can perceive the world from your perspective just as you perceive it, because that would obviously shatter the unity of your experience and I would just BE you. But lived experience 'within the brackets' doesn't reveal a problem of other minds the way many think. Just as the object of perception has many facets and inessential particularities as well as the form of itself uniting it, so too do other minds. It's just that the natural attitude takes the inessential exterior-bodily aspect of other minds to be all there is. But now I'm just riffing. :)
As for Heidegger...I like his readiness and presence to hand distinction, but I didn't care for a great deal of what came later in Being in Time. He's a bit too cavalier and gets carried away with taking his own adolescent hangups as universals. And I don't care for his linguistic relativism either.
It seems to me, though, that our knowledge of other minds always comes through the interpretation of various phenomena present to us in our own minds: for example, I certainly believe that you have phenomenal consciousness, and that as you write and click send the decisions you make as a conscious being are having some causal impact on what words then appear on my screen (I want to be vague about that casual interaction for now).
But obviously, my belief in the reality of your mind is generated solely by phenomena that appear within and to *my* mind. That seems critical, because my belief in my own mind doesn't seem to work this way; it is the bare facticity of the appearing of the appearances themselves to, for, in, and through my mind that I take as *my* mind. That is to say, my access to the phenomenal contents of my own consciousness is either immediate, or certainly far less mediated, than my access to the contents of your mind.
I don't see any way around this; it seems to be a structural feature of consciousness. That said, I certainly don't think this is any reason to doubt the reality of other minds, though as I noted in a previous piece mentioning Levinas, my reasons for that are based more on a sort of apophatic humility than anything else.
And so I tend to read Husserl as consistent with this more Kantian, more apophatic, more cautious, and more epistemically minimalist perspective.
I think you're probably right about Husserl. I have a vague impression (that may be wrong or confused) that he thought other minds were known by negation to my own. I really could be confusing him with someone else though.
But putting Husserl aside, yes, your beliefs about me are generated within your own mind. There is simply no place else they could be, right? But what I think might help is to reframe the question a bit. Do you infer the existence of my mind? Or do you infer its contents, its emotions, its desires, etc., from things I say (or if I were not virtual, from other behaviors)? It don't doubt that it seems obvious that we infer the existence of other minds through some sort of mediation through our own senses. Maybe this is true in some subconscious or subliminal way. I don't know. Logically, it's hard to see any other way. But phenomenologically speaking, does that account of lived experience ring true? I don't find that I engage in any sort of inference when interacting with others. I leap ahead and presume, somehow. And yes, it makes very little sense, but that's the way it seems in my experience.
Now the contents of other minds are a different matter. We can and often do get that wrong when it comes to other minds. On the other hand, have you had the experience of being around someone who "knows you better than you know yourself"? Partners? Close friends? I think many believe this is possible, otherwise therapists would be out of a job.
I just think it's all much more complicated than anyone seems to be acknowledging on any side of the consciousness debates these days. Still, phenomenologists are in the lead by far.
Haven't read Levinas yet. I hear it's no fun. I have a ton of his books, though. I can see them now. Some within arm's reach. But...is it as painful as reading Husserl? I'm getting to old for this stuff.
It seems to me (and again I am using that introduction to my claims here very intentionally—it may very well be that it seems differently to others!) that even when I feel like I know someone better than they know themselves, or have a similar sense of intimacy with someone else's mental life, that I am still essentially extrapolating from my past experience of their behaviors, and basing my predictions about their future actions from that. In other words, I am still making predictions about them via the phenomena presented to and in my consciousness, rather than by having some kind of direct, unmediated access to their Lifeworld as such. (I should say that I am influenced here by the work of the founder of pragmaticism, C.S. Peirce.)
That said, I want to offer two caveats to my own position and reasons that, despite my formal disagreement with you on this issue, I am nonetheless very curious to know more about your views on intersubjectivity:
1) I wish I agreed with you! I find my sense of phenomenological isolation to be a fact, but basically a negative one. And it certainly seems to me that our inability to feel what others experience is a major driver of unethical actions. I am reminded of an episode of the show Futurama where Bender (a robot who is exceedingly rude and abusive) is given an "empathy chip" and ends up experiencing the suffering of those around him. Not surprisingly, it dramatically changes his behavior. So if it somehow does end up being possible for a given conscious being to directly experience the qualitative, subjective phenomenality of another, I am all ears—even though my own experience gives no indication of this happening.
2) It seems like you and I are both, generally speaking, somewhere in the idealist (or at least idealist-adjacent) camp in philosophy of mind. That comes with certain implications, not the least of which is that, if qualitative subjectivity is the heart of reality, then presumably, to the extent that any physical event is real, it has for its own "internal" reality a subjective, qualitative core. In other words, even if I am right that there really is a noumenal in existence which each of us is unable to access phenomenologically, that noumenal is *itself* just someone else's phenomenality. (I am outlining here something in the neighborhood of an idealist panpsychism.)
If this is right (and I am reasonably sure that it is), then in one sense our experience really is a constant intersubjective exposure, though in such a way that each subject reduces all the other subjects they encounter to objects within their own experience. Personally, spiritually, and ethically, though, this remains a tragedy (as I pointed to in point 1 above), and in essence my spiritual beliefs would essentially involve this subjective isolation as a problem which must be solved—though I would see that solution not as the work of philosophy, but of the very ultimate absolute Whence and Whither of all things. But here we take a major detour from philosophy proper, so I'll conclude my remarks!
Wow Tina, you unloaded both barrels on this post……. Great job!
“Why do we still hold materialistic views on reductionism and mechanism and a causally-closed universe? Shouldn’t we be beyond that by now?”
We should be, but clearly we are not; and if we are looking to our institutions to take the lead on this matter, it’s not going to happen. It will be individuals like yourself and I working in isolation that will be the ones blazing a new trail.
Additionally, the physicalist's vision of a mechanistic, causally-closed universe is derived from our explicit understanding of tool making. Let’s face it, as a species we are really, really good at what we do. But what does our understanding of tool making have to do with how the universe works……. It doesn’t; and that is the problem!
So: if all of mathematics are just tools, space is not like a fabric and there is no such thing as quantum wave function, where do we go from here. I’m thinking a little bit of maturity and intellectual honesty can go a long way toward progress.
I have additional thoughts that will follow......
Thanks! It's funny you say I've unloaded both barrels, because I feel like I've only said a small bit of what I meant to say, but each time I sit down to write down all those things I meant to say (those thoughts that arrive at the most inconvenient hour—2AM seems to be the sweet spot) I can't remember what they were. Hume's point about memory and reason was spot on in my case!
"But what does our understanding of tool making have to do with how the universe works……. It doesn’t; and that is the problem!"
Well put.
A nice filling out of your points in the previous post Tina!
I used most of my ammunition in that thread. I think my concerns here are similar. Overall for me, it comes down to what is simpler, a reality independent of my own mind, or a reality at least somewhat independent of my own mind but constructed together with other minds (or in the mind of God). I can't prove that the reality "out there" isn't a mental construct, but taking it as it reliably manifests to us does seem to involve fewer assumptions.
To your questions!
"Should we privilege quantities over qualities?"
No, and I don't think science does. In grad school I was trained in qualitative research, the study of non-quantitative phenomena. Granted, a large part of that involved developing systems to code those qualitative observations so the resulting data could be quantitatively analyzed. But it shows that quantities are quantities *of* something, qualitative information. And qualities, when you dissect them, appear to always be composed of structures and relations of lower level phenomena, which eventually themselves turn out to be structure and relation. Eventually we get down to quantum fields. Is that the ultimate reality? Are they fields of something? I don't trust any confident answers to that right now.
What I think does get privileged is more reliable impressions and ideas over less reliable ones. Often the more reliable ones involve a lot of quantitative information and analysis, but it takes both.
"Is Kant right that we’ve overstepped our limits when we say things in themselves cause our experiences of them?"
I'm not a fan of the "things in themselves" concept. I think Kant is wrong about a forever unknowable reality. But *something* causes our experiences, and we can construct theories, models, ideas about those causes, and see which ones reliably predict future experiences. Again, the question comes down to which theories that fit observations are simpler.
"Why do we still hold materialistic views on reductionism and mechanism and a causally-closed universe? Shouldn’t we be beyond that by now?"
I think we focus on mechanism, essentially rules based models, because it's been more reliable than other approaches. And my question is, what would we move on to? What benefits would it bring? Would it involve any answers that future generations couldn't just change their mind about? If so, what would be an example?
That said, in the end, it's hard to see how thoughtful idealism and thoughtful realism can ever be adjudicated with any finality.
Thanks!
I'm wondering what you mean by realism involving fewer assumptions, because I think realism makes more assumptions than necessary (things in themselves), at least if we're talking about scientific realism.
Your point about science is well taken. I don't think science itself privileges qualities or quantities, but we do, and we can make science what we want it to be (in theory). So there are really two questions here: Can science accept non-reductive methods that include qualities? Can we?
Reductive analysis turns qualities into something that can be quantitatively analyzed, but in our interpretation it seems we're always looking back on the qualities that made such analysis possible and judging them to be in some way less real. I appreciate your saying that it takes both, as well as your reluctance to accept confident answers to the quantum state we're in regarding ultimate reality.
"What I think does get privileged is more reliable impressions and ideas over less reliable ones."
Maybe in the grand scheme of things (of course, whether that connects with reality is another question). I just worry that reliability isn't enough if we want a scientific theory to be taken to explain reality. If it's simply what the scientific method does and is taken as such, that's fine with me.
"I'm not a fan of the "things in themselves" concept. I think Kant is wrong about a forever unknowable reality."
In what way is he wrong, though, assuming some form of realism? If *something* causes our experiences, how can we know that?
Other options besides reductive mechanism would include any sort of (actually acknowledged) teleological accounting where the purpose of the whole is taken to be prior to, but also explanatory of, its parts. The parts are understood in light of the whole. (I think we actually do this already, but only implicitly, and then we pretend we don't).
Or if you prefer something more science-y sounding, try Erik Hoel's "causal emergence", but applied more broadly, outside of computationalism. And I'd be cool with nixing the supervenience stuff. I'm not even sure I know what it means anymore, or if it means...
It's not that reductionism is wrong, but that it doesn't always provide the best explanation for what we want to know. Theory of mind being a particularly poignant example. And of course I take information to be about us and what we want to know; causality and information are not physical things 'out there'. But leaving that aside, you can have both the reductive explanation (I'm sitting here because x, y, and z physical states make it possible) but that's not the only type of explanation, and it makes a pretty poor explanation for, say, why you want to go to the supermarket. If you say you wanted to buy graham crackers—that's the BEST explanation, not just the most convenient explanation. More causal choices means we get to bypass the super obnoxious super tedious free will debates.
None of this is new, of course. It's just Plato and Aristotle all over again. BORING. ;)
Hope this comment formats correctly. I've had some trouble posting text into Substack.
On realism and assumptions, consider an event that happened 20 years ago this month. A massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean resulted in a tsunami hitting southern Asia, killing over 200,000 people and displacing over a million. To understand the causes of the event, we can study plate tectonics, hydrodynamics, coastal geography, and probably some other physical sciences. But these are just studying the physics. If I understand your position correctly, it isn't that tectonic plates or oceans don't exist, but that they are mental constructs. We can study them as though they just exist, and increase our predictive accuracy of future events. Or we can try to study them as mental constructions. What does the second add to the first? To me, it seems like an extraneous assumption.
"Can science accept non-reductive methods that include qualities? Can we?"
I'd ask why we'd want to? How will we know something is truly irreducible unless we try to reduce it? What would non-reductive methods involve? What advantage would they provide in understanding what the particular qualities are or where they come from?
"I just worry that reliability isn't enough if we want a scientific theory to be taken to explain reality."
The question is, what's the alternative? It seems like, at a minimum, our metaphysical explanations have to at least be compatible with reliable models. But with just that, what are they adding? What forces us to accept one explanation over the other?
"In what way is he wrong, though, assuming some form of realism? If *something* causes our experiences, how can we know that?"
I'd say he's wrong because we can develop models (clusters of belief) and see how predictive those models are for future experiences. If positing that a particular thing is the cause increases the accuracy of our predictions or postdictions, in other words, it fits observations, then it's reasonable to provisionally accept that it exists. That doesn't provide absolute certainty, but if absolute certainty is required, then it seems like all knowledge is impossible. I don't find that a productive version of "knowledge". But one involving more reliable beliefs does seem to be.
For teleology, for me, the question is whether including purposes increase the reliability of our knowledge. In some cases, it can. Biologists often discuss things in a manner that sound teleological, but is really more about adaptive attractor states. But we are story telling entities, and often we do talk loosely in terms of purposes. But the question remains, for the strict theory itself, particularly at the physical level, what does positing purposes add to explanation? If multiple purposes seem plausible, how do we adjudicate between them?
I'm either not familiar with or don't recall Erik Hoel's concept. I might need to look it up. It is true that cause / effect relations are emergent from more fundamental symmetric ones, but I wonder if that's what he's talking about.
"If you say you wanted to buy graham crackers—that's the BEST explanation, not just the most convenient explanation."
I'd say it's the best explanation for certain purposes. Consider if someone suddenly goes crazy and starts shooting people, a physical explanation, such as a brain tumor (or to use a more recent example, intense back pain), might well be more useful than one saying they just went crazy.
This isn't boring for me at all! I love these types of conversations. But noting that it goes all the way back to Plato / Aristotle does raise the question of whether it will ever be resolved.
Yeah, Substack commenting can be a bit primitive, especially if you're used to WP. There's really no formatting capabilities with comments, which is why you'll see me do ALL CAPS LIKE I'M SCREAMING but really that's just meant to replace italics.
I wouldn't call physical things (tangible things like oceans) 'mental constructs'. That's too subjective and creative. Physical things are known as such by the fact that I didn't create them or imagine them. They're simply given. There's more to it than this, like the fact that physical things don't just appear/disappear for no reason, etc.; they follow the rules of nature (which I take to be more basic than scientific theories and not math based, but based in common sense...even Geordie knows the rules). So to answer your question:
"We can study them as though they just exist, and increase our predictive accuracy of future events."
By all means study them as though they just exist! To quote Berkeley, “I do not argue against the Existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by Sense or Reflexion. That the things I see with mine Eyes and touch with my Hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least Question. The only thing whose Existence we deny, is that which Philosophers call Matter or corporeal Substance. And in doing of this, there is no Damage done to the rest of Mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it…”
This is what I mean by idealism making fewer assumptions. Physical things exist in exactly the way we ACTUALLY know them to exist. What we don’t need is the assumption that the physical things we actually sense are mere appearances behind which is some ultimately real—but unknowable—mind-independent reality. That’s the extra assumption, one that accounts for nothing because it can’t account for anything by definition.
Why include qualities and non-reductive methods? Because qualities are far more important than quantities. Because consciousness is qualitative and to reduce it to ‘the physical’ (whatever that is) is to deny its existence, even though it’s the very thing we know most intimately. Because most people (including intellectuals and scientists) think of physical things as being essentially of a qualitative nature, not quantitative…that was the whole point of my bringing physicalist claims to bear on a concrete example of the coffee mug, to show the physicalist must deny what most of us consider to be the mug’s real existence—it’s qualities. To assert that our everyday notion of physical things as qualitative things is not really real, that these qualitative things we interact with constantly are mere appearances, not reality, is a hard sell. I’m not sold. I think no one is really sold. The fact that we go about our daily lives as naive realists thinking the red mug stays exactly the same as it appears to me when no one’s looking at it suggests that’s what we really think, deep down. It seems to me that intuition needs to taken seriously.
“How will we know something is truly irreducible unless we try to reduce it?”
I mean, go ahead. I’m not saying reductionism is always wrong. It’s the reductionists who deny other possibilities of understanding causal relationships, not me. I think it depends on the question we want answered.
“I'd say he's wrong because we can develop models (clusters of belief) and see how predictive those models are for future experiences. If positing that a particular thing is the cause increases the accuracy of our predictions or postdictions, in other words, it fits observations, then it's reasonable to provisionally accept that it exists. That doesn't provide absolute certainty, but if absolute certainty is required, then it seems like all knowledge is impossible. I don't find that a productive version of "knowledge". But one involving more reliable beliefs does seem to be.”
I hear you, but keep in mind, something can exist in an objective fashion, which is not all or nothing—it’s provisional, as you say, since we can talk about something being more or less objective—but to say such and such a thing is mind-independent is not provisional, it’s absolute, it’s all or nothing.
And I have no problem with postulating some scientific theoretical entity and calling it the cause of such and such phenomena SO LONG AS that theoretical entity is not identified as a thing in itself in a mind-independent realm. Because you see, whether that entity exists in a mind-independent realm or not has nothing to do with prediction, accuracy, science, or our daily lives. If a mind-independent reality doesn’t exist, that changes absolutely nothing for science! This is actually a big part of my point: a mind-independent realm is almost never at play. It does nothing. It’s the burst appendix of ontology. The ghost in the metaphysical machine. Science doesn’t rely on mind-independence one bit. Ordinary life doesn’t rely on it one bit. It’s only in philosophical discussions that evoking a mind-independent reality matters because then it involves interpreting what our knowledge is knowledge of.
It sounds like we agree that explanations should suit the question. So that’s something! And I’m glad you’re enjoying the conversation, since I am too. I do think the question of mind-independence can be resolved, but only that. The question of consciousness, whether dualism, physicalism, or something else is the best answer seems the deeper mystery.
In some ways, Substack comments are better, but yeah, worse in others. For some reason, pasting from a Windows text file seems to work better than pasting from a Google Doc. Substack collapses the GDoc version's blank lies, causing the paragraphs to run together. Probably has something to do with the technology they're using. I also keep somehow getting into a mode where I can't expand the comment anymore, with only re-following the link from the email notice to reset it. Weird.
Something I'm struggling with here is the distinction between a mental construct, which you say is not the right way to think about it, and it being mind dependent (as in NOT mind independent). If it's mind dependent, how is it then not a mental construct? What's the difference?
I can understand Berkeley's argument, or at least I think I can (not having read him at length), because he situates objective reality in the mind of God. But you said you found God redundant. Where then did the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean exist before the earthquake and the rest of us finding out about it? Whose mind was it dependent upon?
"It’s the reductionists who deny other possibilities of understanding causal relationships, not me"
I'm wondering which reductionists say this. Although I guess it could be implied with a posteriori physicalism. It's one reason why I think a priori physicalism is more coherent. I don't think we're done until we've explained the logical connection between physics and experience, but it does mean accepting that experience isn't what many of us think it is.
"Because consciousness is qualitative and to reduce it to ‘the physical’ (whatever that is) is to deny its existence,"
I don't see it that way. To me, just because we can reduce something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Chairs, rainbows, planets, and democracy all exist, even though they're all composite entities. The only thing I can see reducing consciousness means is that it's not fundamental. Accepting that does mean we're not separate from the rest of reality, but an embedded part of it. But once we do, it seems like consciousness moves from an intractable metaphysical problem to merely a very difficult cluster of scientific ones.
"SO LONG AS that theoretical entity is not identified as a thing in itself in a mind-independent realm."
I think we've discussed before the confusion between different meanings of "thing in itself". I agree that an unknowable thing in itself adds nothing to science. But I'm not seeing the argument for saying that all mind independent entities are automatically in that category. But this gets back to my question above.
Maybe the one I should be asking is: what do you mean by "mind independence"? Do you mean having no past or future causal relationships whatsoever to any mind? Is this the intrinsic properties epistemic structural realists say we can't know, but go on to talk about anyway? If so, then I'm onboard with denying it. But I don't perceive that as idealism. To me, idealism implies every object is inside some mind. (Except of course for minds themselves, a stipulation that only seems to exist to avoid solipsism.) Maybe I'm just completely confused?
Thanks for the Hoel link! I'll take a look.
Yeah, Substack's comments have been glitchy lately. For a while you couldn't access the "reply" button...the window wouldn't scroll down. It looks like they've fixed that issue, but there's always something else.
The problem I have with 'mental construct' is the 'construct' part. We don't construct the physical world, but not constructing the physical world doesn't mean we know about it because of its mind-independent existence. We know about it because we experience it, and the way we experience is it as 'given', as simply there—not as invented or created by us.
"Where then did the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean exist before the earthquake and the rest of us finding out about it? Whose mind was it dependent upon?"
Think about it this way: How do we know about the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates? Whose mind is that knowledge dependent on? It's not dependent on God, it's not dependent on mind-independent reality. We know about the pressure only as an inference from similar effects being caused by such events.
Reductionists who call our experience an illusion and/or who think everything about our experience is 'nothing but' whatever mechanism or processes are going on in our brains. There is 'nothing over and above' the physical (of course, what is physical? That's a point of contention). The other causal option these reductionists deny is mental agency, that minds cause effects in the world and in the brain (which is surprising since neuroscience's "plasticity" seems to admit causality goes both ways, at least.)
"Chairs, rainbows, planets, and democracy all exist, even though they're all composite entities."
But what happens to these—or more to the point, what happens to consciousness—after the reduction? Their essential qualitative natures don't get explained. That's just science and how it currently operates. Those who take the philosophical view of scientism extrapolate from this reductive process a metaphysics that doesn't make sense, a metaphysics that says the essential qualities don't exist, not really. The thing's essential nature gets explained away, deemed to be something not quite real. A strictly scientific rainbow is invisible. Fine. But to go from there to say a rain IS invisible, it's nothing but an illusion, is to miss the point. Keith Frankish's description of rainbow is a good demonstration of what I mean by explaining away the qualitative:
"Here’s one: rainbows. Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them.
But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
https://www.keithfrankish.com/blog/like-a-rainbow/
Whereas I say: Of course there's a colored arc up there! It's real, it's a colored arc, and that IS a rainbow. That is the very essence of "rainbow" and is what we MEAN when we use the word "rainbow"! Rainbows are not essentially water droplets reflecting sunlight. That is merely what happens to rainbows in the hands of scientific reduction...rainbows rainbow-ness gets abstracted away. To say that's all they are is like taking photos of rainbows with black and white film...no it's worse than that.
"what do you mean by "mind independence"?
I was wondering about this from your last comment after I submitted my reply...I wondered whether you thought 'things in themselves' or 'reality in itself' was something different from 'mind-independent reality'. It's not. The mug 'in itself' just means the mug as it exists apart from all minds. I've been wondering about terminology lately and how it distances us from certain thoughts in a way that can be strange and confusing. When I talk about Kantian 'things in themselves' and question whether such a limiting concept is necessary, I don't get nearly as much blowback as when I talk about mind independent reality, which is perplexing to me because those are the same thing. When I talk about 'things in themselves', that just means things as they exist apart from all minds; ie in a mind-independent realm. It's interesting how the difference in terminology changes things for people, even when I explain what I mean. There's something strange going on here, and it's not just you. It's interesting. I don't know what's going on.
Do you mean having no past or future causal relationships whatsoever to any mind?"
Yes. This is what Kant means. Epistemic structural realists want to deny this while not denying that they reject the primary and secondary qualities distinction. At the same time, they haven't given any good arguments that I'm aware of for rejecting the distinction but not causality. This is what I was trying to get at in my post. I'm trying to say, if you reject the primary and secondary qualities distinction, it's because you see that it's arbitrary in terms of coming to know mind-independent reality. Neither primary nor secondary qualities will get you there. Epistemic structural realists see that the reason you can't get to mind-independence from there is because math is also in your mind. Whatever's in your mind must be taken to be a filter for reality—rose colored glasses, if you will—and so must be discounted when you're trying to account for a mind-independent reality. Reality in itself—mind independent reality—can't be assumed to include whatever we have going on in our minds. That's the way it goes. So from there, how do you make an exception for causality? That makes no sense to me. That's my gripe with epistemic structural realists.
"Is this the intrinsic properties epistemic structural realists say we can't know, but go on to talk about anyway?"
Maybe. I'm not sure what you mean by intrinsic properties. Epistemic structural realists do say we can know that things in a mind-independent realm cause us to experience them. I say they have no basis for saying that, especially given that they already accept that whatever's going on in our minds must not be attributed to a mind independent realm. So I'm not saying they're contradicting what they say about causality, but they are going against the general thrust of their reasoning about what we can know about a mind independent realm.
Idealism is not well understood. I think people get all sorts of bizarre notions about what idealists think, but in doing so they're not thinking outside their own conceptual framework. That's hard to do! I expect some people to think I'm nuts.
Idealism in the classical sense is mainly about showing how our knowledge about what we know is quite cockamamie. And I'm not saying it's ridiculous to think objects belong in a mind-independent realm...this is completely normal. We all do it. This belief wouldn't be so weird if it weren't for all the scientific background we now have; we're all infused in science-y-ness through and through, and yet we're all naive realists in the end. That's what I mean about the strangeness of thinking the mug stays red and warm even when no one is looking at it—because that's exactly what I think happens and that's exactly what I think of when I think of a mind independent realm. I think of the mug sitting there on my kitchen counter and no one is in the kitchen. But that's not a mind independent realm. That's an idea in my mind. Weird! So I'm pointing out that we believe, on a regular basis and in a thoroughgoing way, a complete and utter contradiction. We seem to have no problem with this contradiction; we don't even see it. Weird! Even sophisticated scientists go about their lives thinking this way. It's ridiculous how ridiculous we are! I think this bizarre way of thinking should be...well...thought about.
"and the way we experience is it as 'given', as simply there"
My question here would be who or what "gives" it to us? I guess the answer could be other minds, but then what is the medium of exchange? And what about phenomena, like a sudden earthquake and tsunami, that appears to surprise everyone?
"Think about it this way: How do we know about the mounting pressure between the tectonic plates?"
I'd say because the causal effects of it reach us and impinge on our minds. We then form models of what might have caused those effects. It used to be those models included angry deities punishing us for some transgression. Today our models (at least for most of us) are more mechanistic because that's turned out more predictive. The earth isn't punishing anyone (except maybe metaphorically), just doing what it does. But the question for me remains, what generates those effects, what "gives" them to us?
"Reductionists who call our experience an illusion and/or who think everything about our experience is 'nothing but' whatever mechanism or processes are going on in our brains."
Illusionists are usually careful to delineate what they deny, and it's rarely experience itself. They do deny that it or its properties are fundamental or metaphysically private. And they're usually functionalists, with causal relations at the heart of their view. (Dennett's "hard question" is "and then what happens", focused on the causal chain.) It's worth noting that philosophical zombies, which imply a causally impotent experience, come from non-physicalists. And many illusionists are free will compatibilists.
"There is 'nothing over and above' the physical (of course, what is physical?"
Right, there are varying definitions of "physical". I usually take it to mean causal mechanisms, or at a lower level, structural relations. But not everyone does, which is why I've been calling myself more of a mechanist than physicalist lately.
"Their essential qualitative natures don't get explained."
I'd say their nature does get explained, but the "essential" part means it probably can't be explained in a way that someone who's convinced they're fundamental will accept. For me, the issue is that assuming fundamentality doesn't seem to add any predictive accuracy to our understanding.
On the rainbow, I take Frankish to be saying that they exist, but aren't what we naively think they are, a giant physical arc in the sky. I don't think he contests the sensory impression of an arc. Put another way, the model of a physical arc causing our experience isn't predictive of what we'll find if we try to approach the rainbow, but a model of evenly distributed rain drops diffracting light is.
On mind independence, things in themselves, and intrinsic properties, I understand epistemic structural realists to be saying that science only studies what matter and energy DO, not what they ARE. Intrinsic properties are the properties of what they ARE. I've seen that equated with Kant's things in themselves, but I'm not sure it's a good fit, since what matter and energy DO is usually still thought to be external to the mind. What they ARE is as well, but divorced from their causal effects, the ARE part can have no causal effects on the mind.
A key question here is by "mind independence", do you mean external to the mind, including both ARE/IS and DO/DOES from above? Or just the ARE/IS part? I personally think ARE/IS, divorced from causal effects, isn't a productive concept, so I'm onboard with dismissing it (hence ontic structural realism). But dismissing the DO/DOES part external to the mind, yet still having causal effects on it, is a harder sell. That's that I perceive idealism to be denying. But to me that requires accounting for which mind it is happening in.
On primary and secondary qualities, I wonder if a better distinction might not be the scope or universality of the perception, or maybe it's reliability. If I perceive an object to have a particular shape, someone who is color bind, or even someone who is blind and has to feel its contours, will all still agree about the shape. But if I perceive it to be red and green, the color blind person won't have the same impression, nor the blind person. What Galileo called "secondary qualities" are ones that seem to require more evaluation from our nervous system, about what the stimuli mean for us. That doesn't mean no evaluation is happening for shape, just that it's a thinner and more universal one, less idiosyncratic, than color or taste.
"So I'm pointing out that we believe, on a regular basis and in a thoroughgoing way, a complete and utter contradiction."
I fear I'm missing the contradiction. Certainly the naive realist account is different from the scientific one. But I don't think the scientific one can just dismiss the naive one, at least not if we find is useful in everyday life, but has to account for it. For example, the mug seems solid to us and science has to and does account for that solidity. It just calls into question our assumptions about it, since it turns out that "solidity" involves resisting penetration, not being something with no spatial gaps inside its composition. Is that the contradiction, or am I missing what you mean by it?
Oops, I meant to include this link to Erik Hoel's causal emergence. I actually prefer his explanation in his book, but this should give you an idea:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/a-primer-on-causal-emergence?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
f“I think we focus on mechanism, essentially rules based models, because it's been more reliable than other approaches.”
Rules based models are derived from our explicit understanding of tool making, not from what we understand about the universe nor ourselves; and understanding ourselves is the big one my friend. Understanding ourselves is the key that will unlock the mysteries of how our universe works, because the dynamics that are at play within our own conscious experience are the very dynamics that are at play across the entire spectrum of complexity.
Additionally, we must be clear about what we mean by reliable. Is the ability to make accurate predictions the acid test for reliability? If so, then the only thing that accurate predictions ensure is that we remain the apex predator. If our only objective is maintaining our status as the apex predator then welcome everyone to the dog eat dog world of planet earth. Our problems are not the result of diminished intellectual capabilities, our problems are psychological.
“And my question is, what would we move on to? What benefits would it bring? Would it involve any answers that future generations couldn't just change their mind about? If so, what would be an example?”
As an example; it would seem to me that if we could identify and subsequently understand the core nature of our species, wouldn’t that understanding benefit everyone now and in the future? Couldn’t that understanding be used to resolve the epidemic of addiction, religious and racial prejudice, phobias, psychoses and all of the other psychological disorders that plague our species?
This inexorable pathology that is the human experience cries out for such a solution, and doubling down on a mechanistic, causally closed synthesis of how the world works “IS” the problem. And I’m not sure you get that Mike.
As it currently stands, our prestigious scientific and academic institutions have effectively reduced the human being to nothing more that a “mind-less” calculating machine……. Seriously??? And this synthesis is somehow helpful?
Free your mind and your ass will follow……
"Rules based models are derived from our explicit understanding of tool making, not from what we understand about the universe nor ourselves;"
I'd say that tool making is based on what we understand about some portion of reality. It's worth noting that modern science owes a lot to renaissance engineers, which isn't often recognized. Aristotelian philosophers were required to explain all four causes to demonstrate an understanding of something. Engineers didn't have to worry about that. All that was required to make a cannon work was whether it knocked down medieval walls. Early scientists like Galileo had both natural philosophy and engineering training, and so incorporated those methods into what we now call science.
"As an example; it would seem to me that if we could identify and subsequently understand the core nature of our species, wouldn’t that understanding benefit everyone now and in the future?"
It can, but I think that's what's already happening with psychology, neuroscience, biology, and other related fields. It does involve accepting the answers being discovered. People have always struggled with the answers science provides (heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, etc), often because they puncture our conceits.
"This inexorable pathology that is the human experience cries out for such a solution, and doubling down on a mechanistic, causally closed synthesis of how the world works “IS” the problem. And I’m not sure you get that Mike."
I get that many people see it that way Lee. I just disagree. I might think differently if someone could clearly delineate an alternative and demonstrate success with it. Until then, I think looking for mechanisms is our best bet.
"It can, but I think that's what's already happening with psychology, neuroscience, biology, and other related fields."
I strongly disagree with this assessment Mike. The solutions for our psychological dysfunctions are not being provided by the physical sciences. The epidemic of addiction is growing exponentially in stride-step with our technology; religious and racial prejudices are as prevalent as ever, tribalism, phobias, psychoses and all of the other psychological disorders are as bad as they've ever been with no resolution is sight.
None of these psychological disorders have anything to do with (heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, etc). Like I stated in my previous post; our problems are not the result of diminished intellectual capacity, our problems are psychological. And the only way to address the pathology of being human is to understand our core human nature.
Free your mind and your ass will follow..... As always Mike, we will continue to disagree.
A delightful dialogue, Tina! There were two moments of self--deprecating humour that struck a chord with me. The first was when you appeared to be talking to yourself ("See, that’s where idealism gets you,") and the second is when you denied believing in ghosts ("Sure. If you say so.")
With all this talk of "mind-independent reality," has it occurred to anyone that _other minds_ might constitute an independent reality? This would save us from solipsism, but leave us with mysterious presences independent of our own minds.
"With all this talk of "mind-independent reality," has it occurred to anyone that _other minds_ might constitute an independent reality?"
Here I am waving my hand emphatically in the air while yelling "Yes! Yes!"
But I'm not so sure other minds are really all that mysterious. That's something I'd like to get into. Looking forward to bouncing ideas off of you!
BTW, I just started reading Whitehead and I totally see why you were keen that I read him...I had to put away the highlighter. It was getting ridiculous. And my god, he's about to do some sort of Berkeley Leibniz mashup involving monads with mirroring perspectives...monads with windows! I've always felt the monads needed windows. How exciting!
"Monads with windows," I like that.
I hesitated over the word "mysterious." For a moment I considered "unknowable," but that gets problematic quickly (as this whole post tries to show, if I'm not mistaken). In the end, pressed for options, I just hit the Reply button and got on with other things.
I forgot to add that "monads with mirroring perspectives" starts to sound like Indra's net. . . First Cause would like that, I think.
As a pragmatic physicalist myself, ontic structural realism bodes well with my own novel theory of consciousness because it corresponds with Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics (RQM) as well as Nagarjuna’s interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada) doctrine.
Nagarjuna; IEP: “…all change in the world, including the transformations which lead to enlightenment, are only possible because of interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada), and interdependent causality in turn is only possible because things, phenomena, lack any fixed nature and so are open (sunya) to being transformed.”
“…if there is no fundamental level to reality (which there is), no ultimate stuff (which there is), what else is left to the scientific realist but structure?”
This is where reality/appearance metaphysics (RAM) supervenes upon our traditional paradigm. Unlike our inherited paradigm of subject/object metaphysics (SOM) where our conventional reality is divided into mind stuff and material stuff, RAM make no such distinction. Its only distinction is between the Ultimate Reality and our Conventional Reality.
Therefore, according to the RAM architecture, mind and matter are constituted by the same stuff, and for all practical purposes that stuff is structure, form, i.e., “physical stuff”.
So, to restate a proverbial question of Wyrd’s: Are the rules of baseball physical? The short answer is yes.
"Its only distinction is between the Ultimate Reality and our Conventional Reality."
Interesting. Is this sort of like the difference between Parmenides and Plato where the former says non-being doesn't exist and the latter says, "well, I know you're right, but can we say it kind of exists, because otherwise we can't explain most of experience"?
"Therefore, according to the RAM architecture, mind and matter are constituted by the same stuff, and for all practical purposes that stuff is structure, form, i.e., “physical stuff”."
See, I'm still thinking physical has to be tangible, concrete. It needs to be substantial. Stuff! If we're not gonna get Atoms in the end, if the ultimate building block just slips away...that would seem to mean the world is not physical. (And that would seem to vindicate Berkeley on empirical grounds!)
That said, everyone else seems to be going your way in defining the physical. I'm the one being the stuffy curmudgeon about it.
As far as recorded history goes, Parmenides was the first person to introduce the notion of a reality/appearance distinction. He was venerated by his colleagues for his brilliant insights. Unfortunately, Plato and Aristotle rejected his metaphysical model and replaced it with subject/object metaphysics (SOM), and we've been held hostage by the SOM paradigm to this very day. If there is one thing that the long and arduous history of debate has demonstrated it's this: once one divides our conventional reality into parts, there is no way to reconcile that division. We are held hostage by a metaphysical model that represses understanding.
"Physical stuff" is tangle and it is concrete. It is not a mathematical equation as some ontic structural realist would claim. Physical stuff has "form"; motion, movement, compulsion that results in form, a form, i.e. a system that is totally dependent upon intimate relationships with other systems. As long as we equate "physical stuff" to mean any thing that has form or structure as a result of motion, them we have a basis, a starting point for new understanding.
"I'm the one being the stuffy curmudgeon about it."
I understand your resistance Tina, I really do. The physicalist paradigm as it is currently framed is the very definition of absurdity. I've had several conversations with Bernardo Kastrup about this issue. Bernardo recognizes that idealism has it own intrinsic problems and his "only" justification for sticking with idealism is because of the absurdity of the physicalist paradigm.
But like I told Bernardo, we do not have to choose between either mind or matter as it is currently framed. There are other options. As a pragmatist, it is my contention that we do not have to be held hostage hostage by the physicalist paradigm as it is currently framed. We can scrap it and start all over with assumptions that are inclusive, universal, and make sense.
Solve the "hard problem" of matter first, and the hard problem of life and the hard problem of consciousness will fall like dominos.
I'm not that familiar with Kastrup's form of idealism, but from what I understand it involves some sort of 'dashboard' where the physical turns out to be an image of the experiential or mind? It sounded a lot like Kantianism to me, except if you replace 'Matter' with 'Mind' in the noumenal realm. That seems rather unfortunate, though, since that form of idealism gives up an important benefit, which is that there is no uncrossable barrier between experience and reality, or our mind and other minds. But like I said, I'm not all that familiar with his philosophy. I haven't read any of his books, so maybe I have it completely wrong?
I certainly hope we don't have to choose between mind and matter as it's currently framed. That's my goal, to find that way.
What sort of pragmatist are you? Or do you mean that in the casual sense? I'm a big fan of William James (if that's the sort you had in mind), at least in Varieties. I didn't quite get on board with him in Pluralistic Universe, but it's been a while since I've read that.
"We can scrap it and start all over with assumptions that are inclusive, universal, and make sense."
I'm inclined to do that!
I’m a pragmatist in the context of accepting as an axiom that our conventional reality including the quantum realm is constituted of physical stuff that is in constant motion and nothing more. And all of this physical stuff has structure regardless of whether we can see it, feel it, detect it or not detect it with our instruments. Now when it comes to the ultimate reality or Kant's noumena, that's another story.
Based upon this original assumption, the first question that comes to my mind is this: although we cannot see a thought or detect it with an instrument, do our thoughts have structure? The short answer is yes. But how did those thoughts come into existence? Through the mentation process, motion resulting in form right?
This synthesis is simple enough. Maybe too simple for some, but we’ll brush that simplicity aside for now because I’m really a simple guy at heart.
I can’t point to anyone in particular as a reference for my ideas because I claim exclusive ownership of those theories. All I can say Tina is that if you're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom of our time and look for original assumptions that are inclusive, apply universally and make sense then you are on the right track.
Thank you! I hope you'll keep me on the right track. :)
Great
Wow Tina , you and your audience are really deep in the matter. For what it may be worth and due to my studies (40 years ago...) I have an approach that fits with some of the comments above.
The mug of coffe -sorry I am a coffe lover- has a distinct existence outside my perception because... I need it for my coffe.
As my wife mercilesly reminds me other things like dirt do not exist because I doesn't need to act on it.
Yes my argument seams weack. But the greater discoveries in pshisics happend because were in the path to soembody's mug of coffe.
So , yes it would be nice to grasp the world outside me per se.
But we are only able to see and understand what we need or are ready to accept.
Just going back in the history of Physics teach us some humility. ..Now please allow me to finish. My coffe is getting cold. :)
Thanks for commenting! Actually, I agree with you. I think the coffee mug exists because I need it for my coffee; it wouldn't be fun to drink coffee without it. I just wish dust and dirt could be banished to the realm of things in themselves!
Exactly the type of multi dimensional conversation I’d expect to occur in the subliminal mind pub!
Totally. The music is subliminally and sublimely philosophical. Thanks for letting me use it!
Here's an anecdote that you might find interesting Tina. I was watching a youtube video a while back of David Chalmers lecturing at a university in Europe. His subject matter was the meta problem of consciousness. During the question and answer session someone from the audience asked him a question about Immanuel Kant. Chalmer's candid response was that he didn't know enough about Kant to address the gentlemen's question. And that was the end of it.
Who would have thunk it right? I mean, Kant is one of those geniuses everyone wants to identify with and yet, those same individuals know very little about the man or his ideas. Some think his ontology is some form of idealism as in a uber mind, but his use of the word idealism in transcendental idealism is meant to represent the "ideal" metaphysical model of our world.
As with his predecessors Parmenides, Nagarjuna, his reality/appearance metaphysics was rejected because he refused to define or assign properties to the ultimate reality (noumena). Again, being simple minded as I am, I think our understanding of Kant's noumena can blossom and grow if we are willing to look at it from a completely secular and scientific perspective. But there's this thing about our psychology that wants to correlate it to a god or an uber mind of some kind. We simply have to resist that tendency.
I love this quote from Parmenides IEP:
"The rest of the poem consists of a narration from the perspective of the unnamed goddess, who begins by offering a programmatic outline of what she will teach and what the youth must learn (1.28b-30):
…And it is necessary for you to learn all things,
Both the still heart of persuasive reality
And the opinions of mortals, in which there is no genuine reliability."
Great advice eh?
Interesting anecdote about Chalmers because I had been wondering whether he'd read Kant, but then I thought surely he must have, as it would be very strange for a philosophy professor not to. Then again, my husband told me it's not uncommon for analytic philosophers to know very little about the history of philosophy, which was in part why he fled the University of Chicago (but that was a long time ago).
Yeah, 'idealism' is a confusing way to describe Kant. I don't think of him as an idealist at all, but in the context of the rationalism/empiricism debate, that label makes more sense. So he's an idealist because he thinks ideas are more than habits of the mind or abstractions. But that's not quite the way we talk about idealism anymore. I don't think anyone considers our minds to be blank slates these days...although who knows, maybe there is someone out there.
As for an uber mind, I'm okay with that, depending on what it means. I would characterize it not as god at all, but as a way of referring to a transcendent collective intersubjective mind. Kind of like a zeitgeist, but more enduring. Collectives that can seem to have a mind of their own.
I'm not into taking some creator god literally, but First Cause, I think a first cause makes sense. :) Whether that's noumenal in the Kantian sense or not is another question.
That is a great quote!
Mike has, I think, held up the debate from the physical realism end (or whatever label you care to apply). I can't add much to what he's said. I will say that I don't recognize science as I understand it in your descriptions.
For me it boils down to the question of what causes our universally shared experience of a persistent lawful reality? The simplest answer to me, the one that accounts for all our experiences, is that reality is physical, lawful, external to us, and independent of our thoughts and opinions about it.
FWIW, I've said Kant was wrong about noumena all along. OF COURSE we can know a little about "things in themselves" from their consistent and universal appearances to us. They are the source of those appearances.
As an aside WRT Hume, I think the Lagrangian (1760), the Hamiltonian (1833), and Feynman diagrams (1948) are all descriptions of how causality works. Hume (1711-1776) definitely couldn't know about the latter two, and since Lagrange's work wasn't really publicized until 1788, Hume may also not have been aware of Lagrange's work.
--> I will say that I don't recognize science as I understand it in your descriptions.
This is also my biggest barrier to engaging with these posts. I only got as far as the first bit of dialogue from the TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC REALIST and I had to give up because s/he was not even close to speaking for science as I know and understand it. Perhaps it would be better to hold an actual Socratic dialogue with someone from "the other side" so that the best arguments end up being presented more strongly. Right now, this post comes across like an enormous straw man from someone who doesn't really get the scientific worldview and how those of us who hold this position might make sense of things. If you're not really seeking to understand us, it's hard to return the favor.
How do you understand science then?
Well, that's an awfully big question for a blog comment. I'm currently working on a paper (blossoming into a book??) that explores this, but to get the ball rolling I do like two of google's definitions of science:
1) the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained
2) (ARCHAIC) knowledge of any kind.
This has some hypotheses embedded in it, such as methodological naturalism, which I include in my metaphysics. And there are good skeptical arguments to place limits to what one "knows" from science, which I include in my epistemology. And, to paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, you need an understanding of all of those for an understanding of science to "hang together".
(I'm referring to his quote that says, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.")
Since you and I don't seem to share metaphysical and epistemological positions, it's therefore hard to share an understanding of science. But I think all of my positions here "hang together" quite well. And I don't personally see how yours do. You would probably say the same to me. So your "science" doesn't fit with my metaphysics and epistemology. And I'm guessing vice versa. And it would take a lot of unpacking of the entire web to get things straight. Without all of that, I get frustrated by your characterizations of my views of science. And I have a very weak idea of how I would characterize your view of science.
Quickly, I think the long track record of progress and success of the (ever-improving) scientific method is precisely due to it being hammered into place by the singular, mind-idependent reality that seems to exist and remain intact for our collective minds to share and refine all of our intersubjective views until we get closer and closer to truth without ever being certain that we've reached it. Rather than science giving us an objective view from nowhere, the best we can do is to keep improving the scientific method towards giving us an intersubjective view from everywhere.
Any questions about any of that? I'm sure it was perfectly clear and persuasive. : )
PS. Some quotes from your first TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC REALIST that I didn't like:
--> we can’t imagine it without its mathematical properties
--> we agree that primary properties are quantitative and describe objects in themselves, independent of any observer
--> To put it bluntly, qualities are not really real. Matter is what’s really real.
--> We know the mug’s material reality by its quantitative properties, not its qualitative properties. We can know what it is in itself when no one’s looking at it by measuring it.
To put it bluntly, I wouldn't say any of these. These are supported by some footnotes to Galileo and Descartes but those aren't the best understandings of "science" to me. Goff traveled down the same path in his book "Galileo's Error" but I think he's just been a typical English person who specializes too early in life and hasn't kept up with things like "Why Trust Science?" from the philosopher of science Naomi Oreskes.
Well said, and I agree completely.
When it comes to the realm of the mind and basic humanity, not much has changed in at least 10,000 years, and the analysis of everyone from Thales of Miletus on has made useful and interesting contributions. But when it comes to the physical sciences or modern science, I think most philosophers are in metaphorical kindergarten and could stand to take some physics and math classes. *If* they want to talk about science or the material world, that is.
I'm not sure where I've characterized your views of science, unless you're self-identifying as a traditional scientific realist?
What you say here makes me think that characterization wouldn't fit:
"I think the long track record of progress and success of the (ever-improving) scientific method is precisely due to it being hammered into place by the singular, mind-idependent reality that seems to exist and remain intact for our collective minds to share and refine all of our intersubjective views until we get closer and closer to truth without ever being certain that we've reached it."
I would say what you're saying here sounds more like a contemporary scientific realist.
"Rather than science giving us an objective view from nowhere, the best we can do is to keep improving the scientific method towards giving us an intersubjective view from everywhere."
I certainly don't object to this! This is part of what I was saying in the earlier post.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying the Galileo and Descartes quotes aren't the best understanding of science. I didn't think what I was saying there was particularly controversial, since they are standard figures in discussions about the history of science. Of course I didn't include every important figure, but I made it clear that what I was doing had to be simplified for a blog post. Or are you objecting to the primary and secondary qualities distinction? I'm just not getting what you're objecting to.
Okay I realize now I shouldn't have weighed in without reading the entire post. Sorry! I see now that your Traditional Scientific Realist was replaced in the dialogue quickly with Contemporary Scientific Realist and I didn't read all of their lines. Perhaps "Traditional SR" should have been named "Old-fashioned SR"? I reacted to "traditional" as if that were "standard" and was immediately turned off by what they said. Scientists, by definition, ought to keep up with contemporary uses of their field since science (and all knowledge) is always considered provisional and subject to change. And I'm sorry but I don't have time at the moment to dig in and analyze the rest of this. If you don't object to my brief characterization of science in my previous comment then I'll be satisfied with that.
Ah, your reaction makes more sense now. Nope, no objection!
I had a similar experience. It took me about four tries to get through the post because the depiction of the scientific view was so at odds from my understanding of it.
Sorry I missed this earlier. I’ll blame the holidays (just had family visit).
“FWIW, I've said Kant was wrong about noumena all along. OF COURSE we can know a little about "things in themselves" “
It sounds like you’re with the traditional realist then, as are many people today.
Hume has never been disproven on causality; he can’t be, it’s the problem of induction. It’s a problem that comes from trying to make generalizations or laws from facts about the contingent world.
Ha. I don't think of myself as traditional anything, but whatever. The very idea of a taxonomy of positions seems fraught to me. They can be useful for dissecting the difference in views, but I've always been wary of the "trap" of pigeon-holing. I think Mike, and now Ed Gibney, have laid out the case for physical realism very well, and I agree with all they've said.
WRT Hume, what about when we've moved from induction (which is all Hume could have known) to *explanation* and *understanding* of the mechanisms involved? That's what those things I mentioned do. One more: past light cone. We know that to affect something, the cause must be in the past light cone. If effects weren't due to causes, why would that be a limitation?
(BTW Speaking of holiday distractions, you may have also missed my last reply on the wavelengths post.)
Taxonomy of positions seems fraught to me too, which is why I made it clear in the post that what I was doing was an oversimplification brought on by confusion over my last post for those who wanted to know which 'ism' box they could fit me into. I would rather not be fit into any box. But alas, I call myself an idealist and now everything I say looks like solipsism to those who have never read any of the important historical philosophers representative of idealism. So you see, the boxes are not for my benefit, I can assure you.
On Hume and induction, I'm not following. Why could Hume not have known anything other than induction?
Also, just to be clear (this has nothing to do with what you said), Hume wasn't the one who invented 'the problem of induction'. I don't think he even used that phrase. It is we who characterize him that way, based on his numerous arguments against 'necessary connection' as coming from the observed world. The problem of induction is simply a limitation of inductive reasoning that happens to dovetail with Hume's criticisms.
I may have missed your last reply indeed! I'll have to go look for it after I start dinner. (It's always like this. I'm telling you. I sit down to do something and get interrupted the moment I sit.)
> "I would rather not be fit into any box."
Likewise!
> "Why could Hume not have known anything other than induction?"
Because the scientific discoveries I listed came in the hundreds of years after he lived. The notion of past light cones doesn't arise until the early 1900s. All of these things support the notion of physical causality. And there is no evidence to the contrary.
Skepticism about the results of induction is appropriate, and the answers science comes up with are always contingent on future discoveries, but at some point, I think we can have some confidence in those discoveries. Particularly in light of our ability to use them to predict new phenomena and build useful machines.
I just meant Hume must have known about deduction as well.
The problem of induction can't be disproved by a scientific theory. Science assumes causality is empirically grounded, but that's assuming what is thrown into question in the first place. In other words, scientific discoveries that come after Hume's time are irrelevant to the issue.
I didn't say the PoI was disproved, just that it becomes increasing irrelevant as scientific evidence accumulates.
For example, the *induction* from observation that the Sun always rises becomes less and less a part of the whole picture as that picture contains explanations of Earth's rotation and orbit around the Sun. For the Sun to *fail* to rise would require a (physically explainable) catastrophic event or a (physically unexplainable) violation of physics.
Well, I read it a second and a third time. Congratulations on the first part (dialog among Phyl.) it was fun, pedagogic and enlightening. I honestly cannot issue a qualified opinion on the second part; you burnt my CPU...
As a former student of Physics, however I felt slighted at some points. Maybe by those raising philosophical theories on behalf of Physics.
I still recall, when studying electromagnetic fields, having read about how the discoverer behind (Mr. Maxwell) had come up with the idea and the formula. He fantasized on small cogs rotating to allow electricity flow beside, thus creating the pull and push . This idea was an assumption that no longer applies. But for Mr. Maxwell was what led him to write the "math" that proved so successful.
So it was created in his mind and destroyed outside his mind by new experiments.
Developing a physical theory is more akin to writing poetry or sci-fi -in mathematical language- with only two constraints.
1) Those landscapes must fit in with the existing experience (mainly quantitative experience but also qualitative).
2) Your "theory/fantasy" must be able to predict something more not yet measured.
Ahh, and you must be ready to drop your illusion at the first breach with the experience of reality. No wonder how many of my teachers were poets or just crazy.....
So, I don't feel nobody should harbor a new brand of Philosophy based only on a new Physics theory/fantasy. No more than Julio Verne tales weren’t at least.
Wow, thanks for devoting that much time to understanding this, I'm honored. I'm glad you got something out of the first part, if not the second. Breaking down what Kant says in a blog post is challenging, but that has a lot to do with the nature of his contribution—it was big. If you haven't read him, I wouldn't expect you to understand everything I talk about in this post.
Maybe this will help: when I talk about mind-independence, what I mean by that is not "my" mind independence, but all minds. Scientific consensus takes place within brightest scientific minds, and it's ongoing. So imagine a super mind that unites all individual minds—when I talk about mind-independence, this is the mind I...have in mind. :)
I like your description of physical theory as being akin to writing poetry. I guess we all rely on the muses.
Once again you do a wonderful job cutting this issue down to the critical questions. I wonder if you have more to say on this question:
"But how can we know our experiences even are representations if we can’t access what they supposedly represent?"
Have you read Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature? This question is at the heart of his work there.
Thanks! No, I haven't read Rorty. From a quick internet search I gather he's against the idea of mirroring nature and views that as the beginning of representationalism? I'm on board with instrumentalism, given that science was never meant to be a replacement of ontology (despite what so many think), but I actually like the idea that we are mirrors of the universe, at least the ancient conception of it. I think Kant destroys that metaphor by throwing up an impenetrable wall between reality and our knowledge of it. The Kantian mirror can only self-reflect...but then it can't be a mirror at all. I think part of where he goes wrong is in equalizing all forms of noumena, which leads me to ask: why should those minds (souls, also noumena according to Kant) be entirely out of reach to minds? The whole of reality comes flowing back in once we pull down the wall the mind throws up for itself. "To the things themselves!" as Husserl said. And here we find representations coming back in again, but this time they bring with them the things they represent as well, both of which are knowable or apprehend-able to some degree, in one way or another. And we're back to Plato's forms. We might find they weren't so naive after all.
Yes, Rorty endorses a more Kantian approach than it seems you would want to. (I think the well-worn phrase "the map is not the territory" is a pretty good summary of his position in that book.)
My own view is that the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is at least valid until proven otherwise. Although I am excited at the prospect of somehow having minds directly aware of the "content" of other minds, that doesn't seem to be how things work in our world (at least not now; one could argue that just such a scenario is implied by ideas like moksha or theosis, but that takes us into thoroughly confessional, spiritual territory).
I think that when Husserl speaks of "things", he means phenomena *as phenomena*, not phenomena as somehow also already being the things-in-themselves, hence his insistence on the bracketing of *epoche*. I think his whole method is predicating on respecting, or at least remaining silent on, the noumenon. In that sense, I think Husserl is actually pretty thoroughly Kantian in his method. Indeed, part of my concern with Heidegger (about which one should have *many* concerns) is that he collapses the distinction between how-the-world-appears-to-me and how-the-world-really-is far too readily. In many ways, I think Levinas is essentially trying to reinforce the Kantian position against its 20th century assailants.
It's nice to get to talk Husserl!
Husserl's Kantian in his method, sure. At the outset anyway. I sort of took that as a way of coming down to our level, though, but I could be wrong. The reason I take it that way is, I think there is a phenomena/noumena distinction within the brackets as well, post epoche, which lies behind the process of eidetic reduction, though this version of the distinction is not as sharp as Kant's. Instead of unknowable noumena we find the ancient idea of noumena as the object of thought, the eidos, the Platonic form. So what do we make of this? We find ancient noumena and phenomena—forms and their perspectival particulars—and at the same time we see how Kantian noumena might be an over-extension of that process, and all of this happens within the brackets Husserl sets up at the beginning in order to divide experience from the natural world. It's all a bit mind-boggling, a bit too much like a hall of mirrors. It becomes hard to continue holding up the brackets when you see the beginnings of their formation from within them. And especially when you see lived experience, including the experience of other minds, elucidated so vibrantly from within them through Husserl's accounts of the life world. We begin to suspect that what lies outside the brackets which were stipulated at the beginning must be whatever science is interested in, a special kind of entity for the scientific attitude, but it can't be minds as we experience them. Which means the problem of other minds is a problem created by our naturalistic ontology, our "natural attitude"—this is what Husserl assumes is our epistemic starting point, and rightly so, I think. The natural attitude reduces minds (souls) to a purely bodily, exterior-behavioral inference by analogy. That doesn't mean I can perceive the world from your perspective just as you perceive it, because that would obviously shatter the unity of your experience and I would just BE you. But lived experience 'within the brackets' doesn't reveal a problem of other minds the way many think. Just as the object of perception has many facets and inessential particularities as well as the form of itself uniting it, so too do other minds. It's just that the natural attitude takes the inessential exterior-bodily aspect of other minds to be all there is. But now I'm just riffing. :)
As for Heidegger...I like his readiness and presence to hand distinction, but I didn't care for a great deal of what came later in Being in Time. He's a bit too cavalier and gets carried away with taking his own adolescent hangups as universals. And I don't care for his linguistic relativism either.
It seems to me, though, that our knowledge of other minds always comes through the interpretation of various phenomena present to us in our own minds: for example, I certainly believe that you have phenomenal consciousness, and that as you write and click send the decisions you make as a conscious being are having some causal impact on what words then appear on my screen (I want to be vague about that casual interaction for now).
But obviously, my belief in the reality of your mind is generated solely by phenomena that appear within and to *my* mind. That seems critical, because my belief in my own mind doesn't seem to work this way; it is the bare facticity of the appearing of the appearances themselves to, for, in, and through my mind that I take as *my* mind. That is to say, my access to the phenomenal contents of my own consciousness is either immediate, or certainly far less mediated, than my access to the contents of your mind.
I don't see any way around this; it seems to be a structural feature of consciousness. That said, I certainly don't think this is any reason to doubt the reality of other minds, though as I noted in a previous piece mentioning Levinas, my reasons for that are based more on a sort of apophatic humility than anything else.
And so I tend to read Husserl as consistent with this more Kantian, more apophatic, more cautious, and more epistemically minimalist perspective.
I think you're probably right about Husserl. I have a vague impression (that may be wrong or confused) that he thought other minds were known by negation to my own. I really could be confusing him with someone else though.
But putting Husserl aside, yes, your beliefs about me are generated within your own mind. There is simply no place else they could be, right? But what I think might help is to reframe the question a bit. Do you infer the existence of my mind? Or do you infer its contents, its emotions, its desires, etc., from things I say (or if I were not virtual, from other behaviors)? It don't doubt that it seems obvious that we infer the existence of other minds through some sort of mediation through our own senses. Maybe this is true in some subconscious or subliminal way. I don't know. Logically, it's hard to see any other way. But phenomenologically speaking, does that account of lived experience ring true? I don't find that I engage in any sort of inference when interacting with others. I leap ahead and presume, somehow. And yes, it makes very little sense, but that's the way it seems in my experience.
Now the contents of other minds are a different matter. We can and often do get that wrong when it comes to other minds. On the other hand, have you had the experience of being around someone who "knows you better than you know yourself"? Partners? Close friends? I think many believe this is possible, otherwise therapists would be out of a job.
I just think it's all much more complicated than anyone seems to be acknowledging on any side of the consciousness debates these days. Still, phenomenologists are in the lead by far.
Haven't read Levinas yet. I hear it's no fun. I have a ton of his books, though. I can see them now. Some within arm's reach. But...is it as painful as reading Husserl? I'm getting to old for this stuff.
It seems to me (and again I am using that introduction to my claims here very intentionally—it may very well be that it seems differently to others!) that even when I feel like I know someone better than they know themselves, or have a similar sense of intimacy with someone else's mental life, that I am still essentially extrapolating from my past experience of their behaviors, and basing my predictions about their future actions from that. In other words, I am still making predictions about them via the phenomena presented to and in my consciousness, rather than by having some kind of direct, unmediated access to their Lifeworld as such. (I should say that I am influenced here by the work of the founder of pragmaticism, C.S. Peirce.)
That said, I want to offer two caveats to my own position and reasons that, despite my formal disagreement with you on this issue, I am nonetheless very curious to know more about your views on intersubjectivity:
1) I wish I agreed with you! I find my sense of phenomenological isolation to be a fact, but basically a negative one. And it certainly seems to me that our inability to feel what others experience is a major driver of unethical actions. I am reminded of an episode of the show Futurama where Bender (a robot who is exceedingly rude and abusive) is given an "empathy chip" and ends up experiencing the suffering of those around him. Not surprisingly, it dramatically changes his behavior. So if it somehow does end up being possible for a given conscious being to directly experience the qualitative, subjective phenomenality of another, I am all ears—even though my own experience gives no indication of this happening.
2) It seems like you and I are both, generally speaking, somewhere in the idealist (or at least idealist-adjacent) camp in philosophy of mind. That comes with certain implications, not the least of which is that, if qualitative subjectivity is the heart of reality, then presumably, to the extent that any physical event is real, it has for its own "internal" reality a subjective, qualitative core. In other words, even if I am right that there really is a noumenal in existence which each of us is unable to access phenomenologically, that noumenal is *itself* just someone else's phenomenality. (I am outlining here something in the neighborhood of an idealist panpsychism.)
If this is right (and I am reasonably sure that it is), then in one sense our experience really is a constant intersubjective exposure, though in such a way that each subject reduces all the other subjects they encounter to objects within their own experience. Personally, spiritually, and ethically, though, this remains a tragedy (as I pointed to in point 1 above), and in essence my spiritual beliefs would essentially involve this subjective isolation as a problem which must be solved—though I would see that solution not as the work of philosophy, but of the very ultimate absolute Whence and Whither of all things. But here we take a major detour from philosophy proper, so I'll conclude my remarks!