Logos

by Tallis Raymond

  This ingestion of the outside into the experiencing mind, is as we have noted deeply problematic. It is difficult to see how the self could sustain, even less contain, the multi-loculated, multi-layered, physically limited, space that is available to ourselves as viewpoints; the outside of fresh air and domestic spaces; of packet, cupboard, field, and landscape; outsides that are abuzz with intimations of insides that encompass outsides. Kantian space would not support the nearness and remoteness, dappled hiddenness and disclosure, ignorance and knowledge, the light and dark, of the space in which we pass our lives; nor the fact that while it is shared between consciousnesses, access to it is bespoke to individual viewpoints; nor explain the work that is required to move our bodies or in some other way extend our acquaintance with the contents of space. It does not answer to our sense of being “thrown” (to use Heidegger’s term) beings, cast into space (and time).35

  It seems as if we cannot do without a genuine outside – object-object externality in which the body of the perceiver is side-by-side with the material of the perceived item – if we are not going to lose the difference between self and that which is other than it. Even so object-object externality is not in itself sufficient to create the contrast between self and other, given that no (material) thing is of itself outside (nor, of course, inside) of another thing. Placing “outsideness” inside the mind would seem to collapse the difference between the self and the other; in short lose “otherness” altogether.

  We may be seduced into overlooking the need for a true outside because much of the time we are intentionally related to abstract, absent or merely possible items in our thoughts and memories, that is to say, to items that are not in any sense outside. However, such higher-level intentional relationships, which make connections within the self, are possible only because of the ground floor of perception; perception, that is, of truly outside objects that we may bodily take hold of, bump into, or steer or squeeze past. What is more, truly experiencing a material object is not just a matter of “entertaining” it in the way that thinking of something general, absent, or possible is. In the case of the latter, there is an inside-outside, in that what is thought of is both inside of the mind (“economic trends” are not self-bounding) and outside of it (there would be no such trends were there not a true outside).

  The transcendental standpoint which “considers things in relation to our mode of cognition … from the standpoint of an enquiry into the conditions under which objects are possible for us”36 cannot ultimately ignore or bypass the most fundamental of these conditions – namely that a) these objects exist and that b) we are in their vicinity. The noumenal realm – offered as the ultimate, transcendental outside – is not a particularly promising location for such spatially localized objects if only because it does not seem to be able to house objects in the plural, given that Plurality belongs to the categories of understanding and hence are applicable to the phenomenal realm.37 If anything, the noumenal realm seems to be like the Eleatic One of Parmenides: undifferentiated, single, and unchanging, although Kant may not have seen it like that, given that the One/Many distinction applies only to the phenomenal realm. Be that as it may, it is difficult to think of multiplicity in the absence of the divisions made possible by space and time or even to think of the possibility of change, given that these seem to take time and are localized in space.38 If this is the case, then (of course) the noumenal realm offers no underpinning of, and hence justification for, the subject having one experience rather than another.

  Kant’s claim that “representation in itself does not produce its object insofar as its existence is concerned”39 is self-evident: that which is represented must first exist in order to be a) presented and b) represented. But it is problematic. Noumenal, stand-alone, existence(s) would seem to be “bare existence(s)” or existence(s) not only without properties but also without spatiotemporal location. How would such existence have individuality? We need space and time to distinguish objects. And without individuality how could it have existence? They simply are, without being anything.

  Addendum 3 Kant and the pre-human past

  One of the most influential critiques of Kant in recent years has come from Quentin Meillassoux and the “speculative realism” that he had a major role in inspiring. In After Finitude,40 Meillassoux argued that the incorporation of space and time into the condition of experiences and his denial that they are features of (noumenal) reality makes it impossible to accommodate the idea that there can be true facts about the temporal order of events before there were human minds. How can we say (for example) that the earth was formed before the origin of life, that life emerged before conscious life, and conscious life before self-conscious human life? There is no “before and after” before there is mind; and mind appeared only after, say, the origin of the earth. We seem to be arguing that there is “before and after” before there were experiences conferring temporal order on events – in short before there was “before and after”!41

  At first sight, Meillassoux’s argument seems unanswerable. If we accept the deliverances of the natural sciences, in particular physics, chemistry and biology, we must accept that there was a series of events that had a definite order before human minds occurred. That order is not merely a contingent fact but has an element of necessity built into it: life must have preceded conscious life; the Big Bang that created something out of nothing, must have preceded the emergence of minds out of a mindless universe.

  A response to this is that Kant is not pretending to describe the nature of reality in itself: that would be the aim of transcendent metaphysics. No; his aim is to develop a transcendental metaphysics which is a metaphysics of experience determining the a priori framework of the conditions of empirical knowledge.42 So when Russell pointed out (against Kant) that:

  I accept without qualification the view that results from astronomy and geology, from which it would appear that there is no evidence of anything mental (e.g. transcendental categories) except in a tiny fragment of space-time, and that the great processes of nebular and stellar evolution proceed according to laws in which the mind plays no part.43

  Kant might argue that he (and Meillassoux) were “conflating the empirical and the transcendental, collapsing the latter into the former”.44

  This defence does not, however, seem to work because we cannot shake off the idea that the mind emerged at a particular time in the history of the world, while Kant makes “particular times” and “histories” contingent on mind already being in place. The seemingly stronger argument that the temporal ordering of events occurring prior to the emergence of mind is retrospective unfortunately does not seem to work either. While it is true that “being before the event of the emergence of conscious minds” is not a constitutive property of the event of “the emergence of living beings”, the ordering in which they occur must be true before their truth is established. Mind is required for this truth to supervene on their being; what makes it true must be settled before mind emerges.

  Behind this is a larger issue: that of (to use a phrase of Quine’s) “reciprocal containment”.45 The history of conscious beings is located in physical time (they are latecomers) and physical time is in fact located in conscious beings; that time contains mind and mind contains time. There seems, however, to be a difference between the time that mind shapes to house and order its experiences and the time that is found in the physical world, according to which the natural world unfolds. There is clearly an important (and difficult) job to be done specifying that difference. In doing so, it will be necessary to take account of analogous examples of reciprocal containment – as when, for example, I see myself located in the visual field that I uphold, or make statements about the universe of which I am a small part. We are talking about a capacity to be outside of ourselves and to locate ourselves in the outside – hugely amplified by knowledge – which we uphold. We are close to Husserl’s question: “What is the status of the paradox of humanity … as world-constituting sub
jectivity and yet incorporated in the world itself?”.46

  CHAPTER 4

  Deflating the mystery 2: Logos as bio-logos

  So much, then, for the notion – in its most powerfully worked out form of Kantian philosophy – that the power of mind to make (at least partial) sense of the world is explicable because the world is in some, admittedly difficult to grasp sense, inside the mind. What of the opposite view, currently more fashionable, at least in anglophone philosophy, that the world is intelligible and the mind makes accurate and truthful sense of the world because it is shaped, even created, by the world of which it is making sense? Instead of the “outside world” being inside the mind, the mind itself is outside in sense of being part of nature.

  It is difficult to grasp this directly as a metaphysical thesis. The troubling ambiguity of the relationship between “mind-in-general” and “individual minds” which we identified in Kant’s transcendental idealism remains unresolved in the naturalization of the mind and its knowledge. “Mind-in-general” in “the world as a whole” sounds dangerously like panpsychism; and if we are talking about individual minds, they seem to be located in an outside that they have not themselves constructed. The problem of how their sense-making capacity exceeds their, presumably organic, basis, returns. Even so, it is instructive to examine the form the naturalizing thesis most commonly takes in contemporary philosophy: evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is anchored in the individual experience and needs of the living organism.

  The central claim is that even the kind of high-level sense-making that we are concerned with boils down to a form of awareness that shapes and guides behaviour necessary for survival. What astonished Einstein, so the claim goes, is less astonishing because it is ultimately an expression of a necessary biological function of the organism. The world must make sense to sentient creatures like ourselves otherwise we would not survive. Getting things right is a matter of life and death; and creatures that did not get things right simply would not exist. If we did not make moment-to-moment sense of what was going on around us, there would be no “us”. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with life.

  There are many closely connected reasons why there is no “of course” here.1 As we noted in the Overture, not all organisms – and more importantly not all successful ones – are even conscious, never mind capable of making the kind of sense that we are concerned with in our present inquiry. It is not necessary for the world to be “got right” by an organism serious about survival because it is not necessary to be “got” at all.

  Noting this brings us up against something more basic – the supposed function and evolutionary value of consciousness. It is always assumed that being conscious gives an organism “an edge over the competition”. It is not, however, clear that (for example) seeing light confers an advantage over mere possession of a chemical photosensitivity that is wired into appropriate behavioural outputs. Heliotropic organisms can maximize their intake of sunlight without being aware of light, its distribution, its source, or its fundamental nature. It might be argued that experiencing and valuing sunlight may make sun-seeking organisms more successful in their quest but this does not consider the hazards of the quest which may offset the benefits. In short, there is no need to be aware of light in order to respond to it in a way that has biological utility. It is not evident that natural selection would favour actions that were driven by true beliefs as opposed to automatic responses.

  Self-replicating organisms that depend on making sense of the world to ensure, or maximize, replication, are very recent entrants into the story of life. Until comparatively late in the story of evolution, it has been enough for the replicator simply to incorporate an insentient collection of mechanisms that will give it a reasonable probability of delivering more of itself. Moreover, given that replicators have themselves come into being as an expression of the laws of nature and given also that those laws are unbreakable and, therefore unlike conscious decisions, entirely reliable, becoming conscious would seem to be a foolish move – or not self-evidently a wise one by an organism serious about maximizing replication.2 The last we would expect of insentient living matter would be to become conscious as a means of increasing its probability of survival and replication. Besides, it seems entirely unclear how the blood bath between competing (material) organisms could give rise to something as different from matter as sentience, even less objective knowledge of the properties of matter; something that can clamp inverted commas round “matter”.

  Since this argument seems fairly straightforward, it is worth pausing to consider why the idea could arise that consciousness at any level between dim sentience and higher-level knowledge (never mind at the level of explicit sense-making) is “explained” by evolutionary pressures; that a smidgeon of sentience would confer a survival advantage and a more elaborate mindfulness would confer a greater advantage; that the brighter the better.

  The idea seems compelling if we start in the wrong place: at the end (or the end so far) not the beginning of the evolutionary process; at where we are now – with animals that are smart because they are conscious and are engaged in a competition where the prize goes to the smartest; a world of know-how and know-that. The right place to start is the natural world before there was consciousness: at an imagined fork in the unfolding of the biosphere whose two branches are marked “sentient” and “insentient”. Starting this far back will prevent a retrospective application of the fact that if you are a conscious organism, you may indeed have the advantage over one that is unconscious. However, in many cases it is scarcely an advantage. In the battle of higher organisms against parasites, for example, consciousness has until the last few thousand years only a minimal part to play; and knowledge of what parasites are, and how they can be defeated, even less.

  While certain modalities of consciousness may seem to give an extraordinary advantage in the most potent driver to evolution, namely competition from one’s own species, it is again not true at the beginning of the long journey to animals with present modes of consciousness. For example, vision enables one to foresee what is happening and, what is more, to take in an entire field at a time. But this is a late development, useful only for recently evolved creatures. Most organisms are blind (and deaf, numb as well as dumb, etc.) and the overwhelming majority of the most flourishing ones are insentient.3

  Of course, if you are already a conscious organism relying on making sense of the world in order to function in such a way as to increase the probability of survival it is clearly a good idea to remain conscious. A conscious organism – guided by awareness – rendered unconscious will be helpless and unlikely to last very long. This does not alter the fact that all but a few successful organisms do without consciousness and rely on automatic responses to enable them to flourish and ensure their replication.

  Extraordinary things can be achieved in the absence of consciousness. The growth of most organisms – which are unimaginably elaborate even at the cellular level – is a good example. And the prenatal development of all organisms is another striking case. The intra-uterine growth of the human brain (said by their proud owners to be the most complex object in the world) occurs without conscious intervention and intention. How even conscious organisms continue from day to day is also overwhelmingly unconscious. The complex homeostatic mechanisms that control a thousand parameters in my body – blood pressure, ionic concentration in the blood, temperature – do not involve conscious judgements or deliberate action on my part. I would be doomed if they did. And the entire evolutionary process likewise took place of its own accord, without anyone being in charge. This is the sense in which it is true that (as Samuel Butler famously complained) Darwin “banished mind from the universe”.4 Mechanisms don’t have to get things right because they cannot (even) get them wrong: they don’t have to “get” them at all. Anticipating the preoccupations
of a later chapter, we note that there is no need for something called “truth” which is hard-won stuff at the best of time.

  Evolutionary theory, therefore, does not help to explain even sentience, even less the unfolding of the Great Chain of Being from insentient Gunk to Oxbridge graduates, a journey from an Original Darkness of Basic Stuff to the mind-lit world of the everyday life of human beings. Even if an organism that had a smidgeon of sentience of stimulus X had the advantage over one that simply unconsciously reacted appropriately to X, this would not account for the emergence of sentience in the first place or its elaboration into the kind of awareness evident in human beings that entertains general laws. Differential survival and reproductive rates can only select between a menu of variations that already exist. As Thomas Nagel has put it:

  [Evolution] may explain why creatures with vision or reason will survive, but it does not explain how vision or reasoning are possible. […] The possibility of minds forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn’t explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.5

  In short, natural selection can work only with what is already available.

  The direct and indirect, or mediated, intentionality that lies at the heart of sense-making consciousness does not seem to be the kind of thing that unconscious organisms can manage to requisition as a weapon in the struggle for survival, given that those weapons have to be forged by unconscious processes out of existing materials.

  The attempt to deflate the mystery of our ability to make sense of the world by seeing this as being explained by the capacity to survive in nature thus cuts no ice. The higher-level sense-making we are concerned about has – at the very least until recently – nothing to do with survival. The cognitive gaze of Newton or Einstein would hardly seem to be an obvious elaboration of the consciousness necessary to steer us safely through the leafy jungle of nature (or even the concrete jungle of the cities). Only very recently has it been true that the geek shall inherit the earth. For most of its history, scientific inquiry has been driven by a curiosity that from the biological point of view is unacceptably idle. Knowing that the earth is flat or round, or that the earth goes round the sun rather than vice versa, have hardly given individual humans an edge over the competition from fellow humans or afforded added protection from predators.