You may have heard of the hard problem of consciousness. But there’s another hard problem that doesn’t get discussed nearly as much, though it has bearing on the more popular issue. That problem is about objectivity: how can the mind know the world as it is in itself?
If reality is “mind independent”—not just independent of my mind, but all minds—and if we can only know anything with our minds (surely this is granted?), then it’s at least baffling, if not outright contradictory, to say we can know mind-independent reality.
I’ve been reading Thomas Nagel’s book, The View from Nowhere, and I believe he is trying to address both hard problems head on.
You might know his name from the bazillion online references to “what it’s like to be a bat” to describe experienced consciousness. Like Chalmers, Nagel refuses to reduce subjective experience to an illusory by-product of the brain:
The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality—without which we couldn’t do physics or anything else—and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time, and numbers…
…any correct theory of the relation between mind and body would radically transform our overall conception of the world and would require a new understanding of the phenomena now thought of as physical.
—Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Introduction
I haven’t finished the book, but I think it’s safe to say Nagel is a brilliant writer and an earnest thinker. He’s particularly good at expressing various philosophies and points of view in the best light, even when he disagrees with them. (His explanation of idealism may be a tad bit confused, but much of what he said about it rings true to me.) His defense of the irreducibility of consciousness combines somewhat awkwardly with his defense of objectivity because he takes them both in their purest forms such that it’s hard to see how they could ever come into agreement with one another. What I found most surprising about him is that he’s something of an old-school realist and even talks about primary and secondary qualities—a throwback to the early moderns, Locke in particular. Actually, I find it most helpful to compare him to Immanuel Kant, but to do that, I’ll have to back up a little.
Evolving notions of objectivity
The concept of ‘things in themselves’ has a long history that’s too complicated to adequately capture here, so please take the massive simplifications below for what they are.
Let’s start with an example. There’s a cup on the table that I can drink from, but we want to know what the objective cup is, not just my perception of it. For this example, we would likely be content to say the cup is whatever most rational people can agree on. We might run into a few problems with that, but for the most part we’re happy to go with the consensus.
But how can we be sure we aren’t all wrong, together? We want a kind of objectivity that precludes this possibility.
How far can we take objectivity? Suppose we want to understand the cup as a scientific object, does that make it a cup no one can drink from? If so, you might say it’s not even a cup anymore. We strip it of its cup-ness. What is it, then?
Objectivity 1.0
Newton, Locke, Hobbes, Descartes and other rationalists overthrew the teleological worldview in favor of a purely physical, mechanical universe which boiled reality down to mechanistic, material causes. So much for Aristotle’s four causes (whatever you may think of Aristotle, his more expansive view of causality at least had the virtue of not giving rise to the hard problem we are here discussing).
Our cup can now be said to be subjectively apprehended through sense perceptions, just as before—the secondary qualities of taste, touch, scent, and the like—and it can be objectively known through its primary qualities as measurable stuff extended in space. (Remember the Cartesian coordinates you learned about in grade school?)
At this point the cup is more removed from my particular perception of it, but it’s still a cup I can drink out of.
Objectivity 1.0 fails
Hume threw causality under the bus. Who knows whether the sun will rise tomorrow.
Berkeley threw matter under the bus. Matter turns out to be an abstract idea not derived from experience.
The new mechanistic worldview appeared to be, as they say, ‘existentially’ threatened.
Leibniz came up with a pre-established harmonious universe of non-interactive monads in an effort to reconcile the new science to traditional teleology. Petty-minded intellectual infants made fun of it. (And it is pretty weird, but beautiful too.) In any case it was becoming clear that the new mechanistic philosophy was not quite cutting it on a philosophical or conceptual level.
Objectivity 2.0
Kant attempted to solve these problems in such a way that skepticism could no longer threaten the conceptual foundations of Newtonian science; he called it a Copernican revolution that would change the way we thought about knowledge.
To do this, he argued that space, time, causality, and what you might call primary qualities, were not things in themselves, but essential features of our minds that make experience possible. Space-time-colored glasses, if you will, except you can’t take them off.
This means our objective cup can’t be something extended in space—that’s far too human to count as a thing in itself! No, what we’re looking for must be truly beyond human, perhaps even the opposite of anything we can conceive of—or not, who knows?—but whatever it is, it’s an intangible something beyond all possible experience.
Objectivity 2.0 needs an update
If we agree that the reality which science seeks to uncover is truly mind independent in this radical way, then the scientific object will indeed be impossible to “wrap your mind around”.
We are in a sense trying to climb outside of our own minds, an effort that some would regard as insane and that I regard as philosophically fundamental.
—Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Introduction
You can’t imagine or picture the view from nowhere because you are somewhere and will always be somewhere looking out from a particular viewpoint (unless you eat the magic mushroom).
There are problems when looking back on Kant’s work today. Space and time are not spacetime, they’re not things out there—they might also be out there, but we can never know if this is the case. That’s because space is the innate—or a priori—form of outer experience, and time is the a priori form of inner experience. In other words, you can’t think about, much less perceive, anything external outside of space, and you can’t experience anything at all outside of time.
Space and time cannot be derived from experience, so they must be what shapes our experience.
Imagine going to the edge of space and throwing a rock out. Where does the rock go? It goes into space. Which means you really weren’t at the edge of space. That’s because you can’t even imagine going to the edge of space. The same is true for time (an insight I consider even more potent). Try to imagine anything at all outside of time. Maybe you picture a still image, or darkness filling up your field of vision with nothing moving inside it, but then there’s always you, thinking about it, being bored by it. You can’t imagine experience outside the passage of time.
This is not a verbal trick. It’s something you have to engage with and intuitively grasp for yourself; it lies at the foundation of experience, which means there’s nothing below it to explain or ground it. It is the ground.
Space and time may or may not exist in the world as it is in itself. We can’t know.
But if space and time are a priori forms of intuition—that’s the fancy way of saying not given in experience, but structures of our minds—none of this says anything about what space and time are in themselves. They might be something, or nothing at all. There’s simply no taking off the space-time glasses.
I’ve often wondered how such a conception of reality could be seen as a support for scientific inquiry. If anything it seems to undermine the scientific endeavor, at least as we conceive of it, and I’m apparently not alone in thinking so.
Of course it’s important to remember that when Kant was trying synthesize the various philosophies of his day, he wasn’t thinking about general relativity or warped spacetime. But it’s not entirely clear he was specifically thinking about Newtonian physics either. I think he admired the rationalist ideals driving both Newton and Leibniz, and, operating in that spirit, he helped to expel theology from science. But I don’t think his system shielded Newtonian physics from skepticism any more than it shields the physics of today. Nagel describes the problem succinctly:
“The Kantian view that primary qualities, too, describe the world only as it appears to us depends on taking the entire system of scientific explanation of observable phenomena as itself an appearance, whose ultimate explanation cannot without circularity refer to primary qualities since they on the contrary have to be explained in terms of it.” —The View from Nowhere, IV, 3, Kant and Strawson.
Nagel’s solution is to preserve the Kantian view of things in themselves while saying we can know some of it:
Those primary qualities (space and time in particular) may be features of our minds, but there’s “no reason” to suppose they don’t also exist out there:
“If we agree with Kant that the idea of the world as it is in itself makes sense, then there is no reason to deny that we know anything about it.” —IV, Thought and Reality, Wittgenstein.
If we accept Nagel’s view, our objective cup can be known scientifically through the usual methods of mathematization and reduction. He wants objectivity to be taken to its absolute limit; the world is real and exists entirely outside of all minds. While knowledge the world itself will always be incomplete, it is somehow possible.
His assessment is barely distinguishable from the way science is usually viewed today: Science uncovers reality, albeit on a provisional, ongoing basis.
Still reading the book…I hope the ending doesn’t reverse everything I’ve said here!
My take on Nagel’s solution
You can probably guess by now that I’m not convinced by Nagel’s argument that we can have knowledge of reality in itself—or rather, that there’s no reason we can’t, which is somewhat different. If knowledge of reality really depends on climbing outside all minds, I’d say we’re in an impossible epistemic situation. And I know Nagel understands where I’m coming from:
“Still, the fact that objective reality is our goal does not guarantee that our pursuit of it succeeds in being anything more than an exploration and reorganization of the insides of our own minds.” —Nagel, The View from Nowhere, V, 3. Self-Transcendence.
Part of what makes Nagel fun to read is his openness to mystery, which I think comes from his incredible ability to take contradictory views seriously. My problem isn’t so much with his well-earned belief in realism, but with the unquestioned faith many others have in it, which is reminiscent of that obnoxious bumper sticker phrase, “I believe in science”. The public “believes in science” mainly because of the technologies that come from it, and anyway, they should be allowed to trust authorities. Unfortunately when it comes to what’s being fed to them, many, if not most, popular scientific articles thoughtlessly presume realism, even when they question whether science uncovers reality. And this is not a matter of experts attempting to make complex ideas accessible, but of not engaging with the deeper philosophical question at all.
Has anyone actually demonstrated that science is anything more than “an exploration and reorganization of the insides of our own minds”? Or that time and space actually exist outside our minds? These are not rhetorical questions. This is what I mean by the other hard problem.
For my part, I think Kant was essentially right about space and time, which makes the scientific accounts somewhat off-putting. To make any sense of popular scientific articles I have to think of ‘spacetime’ as something entirely different from what space and time really are. In other words, I can’t take the scientific accounts in the way they’re intended to be taken because they fail to address Kant’s fundamental insight about the nature of time and space—that’s the impact Kant had on me. Yes, a Copernican revolution indeed. I can’t seem to shake it off to “believe in science”, although I admit I don’t know what’s true about reality.
That said, I can’t help but be somewhat suspicious of how deftly Nagel avoids this issue to align himself with the science of our day. (Or I should say his day, seeing as he wrote the book when I was still learning to tie my shoelaces).
To recap: Nagel assumes the most extreme Kantian objectivity is partially knowable via the primary qualities of space and time, (he doesn’t mention causality).
I think we need to ask ourselves how we got to the point where only the unthinkable can be real. Is this notion what really drives science?
Nagel solves the other hard problem by saying we can know Kantian things in themselves.
I would rather solve the problem by denying that Kantian things in themselves are really what we mean when we talk about reality. (To those who have read Nagel’s book, I think I’d agree with Strawson, or at least the way Nagel describes his position.) Maybe this is cutting reality down to size, as Nagel suggests. But maybe that’s what’s needed.
I’ve noticed more and more people of a scientific bent identifying as Kantian. (Chalmers did it in his book Reality + in the section on Kantian humility.) But Kantian humility means believing science cannot grasp reality as it is in itself—at all. Saying we can know any part of it is not Kantian humility, it’s an overestimation of what scientific knowledge achieves, at least by Kantian standards.
But that’s only by Kantian standards. Do we need Kantian things in themselves to preserve the concept of objectivity, to preserve a concept of the unknown? There’s plenty of mystery in life without it. You might notice that my argument is no stronger than Nagel’s, logically speaking. I see “no reason” to put all of reality on the other side of our comprehension to preserve an unthinkable objectivity. What I’m saying is more of an appeal to common sense, but if there is some usefulness in assuming objectivity in the extremest sense, I’d love to hear it.
The real problem is our paltry, mechanistic view
I think the mechanical worldview of the moderns is in part to blame for our “hard problems”. I wrote about this a million years ago in my undergrad thesis. The modern mechanistic worldview—which we continue to believe in today—tells us: Subtract yourself, what’s left over is reality.
But is this true? It’s not clear to me that today’s science even operates in this way.
The notion of subtracting ourselves does amount to a kind of objectivity, and to some degree it makes sense and is fruitful, though I suspect the concept of “things in themselves” originally stems from a healthy desire to remove our biases, but not ourselves, from the world.
The ancients, Plato in particular, emphasized just how difficult it is to obtain knowledge of reality, but they did so without feeling the need to put reality entirely outside of anything we can conceive of. There’s something that’s both hopeful and realistic about that.
…I discovered that the fellow made no use of mind and assigned to it no causality for the order of the world, but adduced causes like air and aether and water and many other absurdities. It seemed to me that he was just about as inconsistent as if someone were to say, The cause of everything that Socrates does is mind—and then, in trying to account for my several actions, said first that the reason why I am lying here now is that my body is composed of bones and sinews…and that is the cause of my sitting here in a bent position…and never troubled to mention the real reasons, which are that since Athens has thought it better to condemn me, therefore I for my part have thought it better to sit here, and more right to stay and submit to whatever penalty she orders. Because, by dog, I fancy that these sinews and bones would have been in the neighborhood of Megara or Boeotia long ago—impelled by a conviction of what is best!...But to call things like that causes is too absurd. If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true. But to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best—although my actions are controlled by mind—would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression.
—Plato’s Phaedo, 98d-99b.
Is there a reality independent of mind? We can only know anything with our minds. Then it is truly baffling to say we can know mind-independent reality.
I believe this puzzle can be solved only by enquiring into the nature of knowledge itself. <a href="http://shajanmathew.com/2023/11/01/3-what-is-knowledge/">What does it mean to ‘know’ something?</a> Such an enquiry will eventually lead us to conclude fundamental reality is neither material nor mental. It can only be described as unknowable 'nature-in-itself’.
I looked at the Nagel book at Amazon, and it's $31.49 for the Kindle version (more for paperback and almost $75 for hardcover). So, I don't think I'll get it anytime soon. I did buy /Mind, Language And Society/, by John Searle, and so far am really enjoying it (just read the first section so far). It's in large part his defense of external realism and a critique of idealism.
I cracked up when I read this bit:
"Famous examples [of what he views as philosophically weak arguments] are David Hume’s refutation of the idea that causation is a real relation between events in the world, Bishop George Berkeley’s refutation of the view that a material world exists independently of our perceptions of it, and the rejection by Descartes, as well as many other philosophers, of the view that we can have direct perceptual knowledge of the world."
So, he's way on my wavelength! :)