We may conclude that, if subjectivity is a prison, the subject spends its entire sentence on parole. Indeed, it is essential to the very idea of a subject that it is aware of, or knows, that which it is not; that it is aware of objects. It is conscious “of” such and such (including itself as a body and conscious experiences including thoughts); of being surrounded by that which it is not. The subject’s egocentric presupposition that “the world is around me” – that I am the centre of what is, that what is happening is happening to me (because it has in some way to happen to me for me to know it) – is redeemed by the knowledge that what is around me is a) not-me; b) largely indifferent to me; c) situated in a boundless extent of not-me, and d) has innumerable other centres. That is why a human world-picture is not a mere organism’s umwelt.
It is time now to reflect more closely on the subject’s breaking out of itself; to consider “thatter” and knowledge – which straddles the subjective and the objective – in virtue of which Being and beings acquire inverted commas and their existence becomes that which is the case; on the subject facing, rather than being merely wired into, the world. This is the theme of the next chapter.
Addendum Subjects without bodies
In recent years, there have been increasingly vociferous claims that it will soon be possible to create or replicate selves that are not attached to the messy, unreliable, and cognitively curdled stuff of the human body. This is a central plank of the “transhumanist” movement that is driven by the fantasy of achieving eternal life.30
The fantasy is built on the presupposition that individual consciousness, the self, consists purely of information. While this information is currently confined to the wetware of the nervous system, it can be liberated from the brain, and freed from the death sentence that hangs over all living organisms, in one of two ways. The first involves a 3-D scanner that identifies the way the brain is connected and its typical firing patterns. These can then be translated into computer code and the latter then uploaded on to appropriate hardware where it can be stored forever and replicated indefinitely. The second exploits supercomputers that are powerful enough to emulate human consciousness. Again, the active software can be stored and replicated indefinitely. Both are ways of realizing the idea of “Substrate-Independent Minds”. Such entities will be able “to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain”. This is a process “analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms”.31
This is, of course, nonsense. The notion of “Substrate-Independent Minds” is based on several unfounded assumptions:
a)
A human consciousness can lose the body (with its history) that gives it its location and its agenda without being fundamentally altered and indeed retaining its identity.
b)
It is possible to identify and extract the essence of the neural activity that reflects the temporally extended individual self of the character who is to be stored.
c)
The self or consciousness in question can be stored in a latent or sleeping form in a holding medium. This is an expression of the dubious but very popular idea that there can be information without consciousness. In reality, for information to be it has to be in the process of informing something that is not (other) information – a conscious, sentient being.
In addition:
d)
It narrows consciousness from a self-concerned openness-to-a-world to a mass of computerizable data. But sunbathing is not information-bathing. Even less is world-bathing, or being actively world-situated, merely a matter of being a conduit for, or a store of, information.
e)
It assumes that a string of 0s and 1s – what computerized scanners would extract from brains – would somehow wake themselves up and interpret and organize themselves: they would “come to” – to themselves and to a world.32
Such nonsense is an unsurprising consequence of the belief that a conscious subject can be identified with a subset of physical events in the brain that, of themselves, amount to data – that is to say, revealing facts located in a world which surrounds them. Nevertheless, it has licensed fantasies of humanity being “uploaded” and “colonising space”: “[W]hat we now think of humanity would be the nucleus … of some greatly more vast and brilliant phenomenon that would spread across the universe and convert a lot of matter and energy into organized form, into life in a generalized sense”.33
Jonathan Swift, thou should’st be living now! It is difficult to resist the comparison with the Academy of Lagado to which Gulliver travels. There he finds characters trying to extract the sunbeams from cucumbers (cf. minds from brains) and to educate students by feeding them propositions written in “cephalic tincture”. This seems not too distant from the claim by Zoltan Istvan that in a decade or two “it would be possible to upload the informational content of a Harvard or Yale degree directly to [his children’s] brains”,34 so there would be no point in saving for their education. The entire Chapter V of Gulliver’s Travels is an extraordinary anticipation of the fantasies of Silicon Valley billionaires.
CHAPTER 6
Thatter: knowledge
[Martin Heidegger] had regained for philosophy “a thinking that expresses gratitude that the ‘naked that’ had been given at all”
Hannah Arendt1
Knowledge is central to our inquiry into the sense-making animal. Our approach has not followed the path of traditional epistemology that addresses questions about the sources and limitation of our knowledge and the criteria for demarcating knowledge from mere belief. Our primary concern has been with making knowledge visible. This has required, above all, highlighting the profound difference between sentience, “raw” sense experience that we may share with many other species, and the kind of sense-making that is mediated by, or delivers, knowledge. The difference is not just of degree but of kind. The feeling of warmth is not to be conflated with the knowledge that it is warm, knowledge that will ultimately lead towards the kind of judgement that it is 5°C hotter than it was yesterday. At the heart of the difference is explicitness, reflected in the word “that” as in “that x is the case”. Hence the “thatter” of the title of this chapter. Denying the fundamental nature of this difference – and squeezing out thatter – lies at the root of a scientism which overlooks or minimizes the radical break between humanity and animality and (ultimately) between humanity and the material world. It overlooks the essential character of the sense-making creatures that we are.
The view of Ernst Mach, one of Quine’s most illustrious predecessors as a naturalizer of knowledge, summarized by Leszek Kołakowski, expresses this with exemplary clarity: “there is no difference between ordinary experience accessible to any being endowed with a nervous system and scientifically organized experiment. There is no break in continuity between science … and modes of behaviour characteristic of the entire animal world.”2 Or, to quote Mach himself:
Scientific thought arises out of popular thought, and so completes the continuous series of biological developments that begins with the first simple manifestations of life … Indeed, the formation of scientific hypotheses is merely a further degree of development of instinctive and primitive thought, and all the transitions between them can be demonstrated.3
Mach’s “primitive thought”, however, is not thought at all but mere sentience, which is “accessible to any being endowed with a nervous system”. Consistent with this extreme naturalism is Mach’s view that conditioned reflexes were “rudimentary concepts”.
This has been hugely influential in psychology where the phenomenon of “stimulus generalization” (discussed in Chapter 4) has been seen to be a behavioural proxy for, or expression of, general terms and the ordering of the contents of the world under concepts, allocating them to general classes. Supposing I have been conditioned to be frightened of a certain kind of spider, this fear may ge
neralize to all spiders, to toy spiders and even pictures of spiders. On this basis, so we are assured, we have the first step in the process of abstracting classes from clusters of objects or events that bear salient similarities. We pass seamlessly, so the story goes, from an organism’s perceptual systems that automatically allocate stimuli to classes defined by a common, appropriate mode of response, and then proceed without interruption to the laws that represent the most general characteristics of the material world.
The main reason for resisting this story is that passivity of stimulus generalization is profoundly different from the activity of allocating items to classes, questioning their classification, and re-classifying them. We touched on this in the previous chapter when we glanced at the contrast between mere gawping and systematic observation. It highlights a fundamental difference between automated responses to stimuli and the kind of active, interrogative sense-making (that may or may not lead to immediate or delayed behaviour in response) we have already discussed. The most striking manifestation of this difference is measurement, a mode of scrutiny that has little in common with the differential response of organisms triggered by sense organs. Measurement is the paradigm expression of our inhabiting a world of knowledge (and its sense of bounding ignorance), of certainty (and doubt), and truth (and falsehood – since truth and its opposite co-emerge). It is the realm of “thatter” that occupies a widening distance between sentience or sensation (that may be wired into reflex or programmed responses) and knowledge.
We can best approach the task of elucidating what is distinctive about knowledge, and what goes into “thatter” by considering a cluster of terms: explicitness, propositions, facts and truth. But first we should begin with their common root: intentionality out of which blossoms an entire world, the common world of shared intelligence, mediated by signs, artefacts, institutions and history. It is in this world that sense-making grows in a soil of referents, carved out of what is actually or potentially present, by communal awareness forged out of the trillions of bridges of joined attention that is the cognitive history of humanity.
Intentionality lies at the root of the distance that is implicit in knowledge and in the many modes of separation of the knower and the known. Sentience, at its most basic level, is not about anything other than itself. A primordial sensation, such as a tingle or a pain or an itch, or a feeling of warmth, is not “about” anything. Or, rather, it is what it is and any “aboutness” it has is ascribed to it from without – as when I ascribe my itch to an insect bite.
Aboutness is not reciprocated in the way that the pushes and pulls of the mechanics of the material world reciprocated. Most of the things I see do not see me: my visual field does not look back at me in turn. And this is true even at a rather humbler level. As I sit on a seat, there is reciprocity at the mechanical level. The downward pressure through my bottom is met by an upward pressure through the chair. But my sense of comfort at sitting in the chair is not complemented by a chair’s feeling oppressed by my sitting on it. The chair I am aware of is not aware of me (I think this may have been a point made by Bertrand Russell).
Let us now consider the distance opened up by intentionality, by “awareness of”. It is most evident in telereceptors that sense what is “out” or “over” there. The dominant telereceptor is vision, which has a continuous field in which contents are arrayed for a subject who is situated at its point of origin; has internal and external limits defined by what is visibly invisible; and it senses items that are explicitly more than it sees.4 We may think of vision as being on the threshold of the transition from sentience to knowledge. That which is perceived is explicitly separate from the perceiving subject. This fact that has two aspects. The first is the (visible) distance between the body of the perceiver and the object that is perceived. This presupposes that the perceiver who sees the object “over there” or “near to me” is self-aware to the point of identifying herself with her body as an item located in space. Such a mode of bodily awareness may be fully developed only in human beings.5 It is connected with a second aspect of human vision: the explicit distinction between the object of perception and the experience in virtue of which the object is perceived. This licenses the intuition that the object has other appearances available to different perspectives, to other knowers, and to different kinds of inspection (that may, for example, reveal its interior or its material properties). This mode of distance built into perception lies at the roots of the more complex difference between seeing as an animal sees and what Fred Dretske has called “epistemic seeing”; between a cat seeing a bird in the garden and a human seeing that there is a bird in the garden.6 Likewise, the cat may see the bird in my garden but not that the garden in which the bird is located is someone’s garden. Animal seeing does not entrain perceptions in a network of (quasi-logical) entailments.
Seeing is the most “epistemic” of all our senses, a fact that must lie behind the presence of light at the earliest moment of creation in various religious myths – as discussed in Chapter 2. “Let there be light!” is “Let there be that!”, the co-creation of Stuff and Sense, both populating the void and revealing its contents in a single, beneficent sense-and-stuff-making act. The epistemic character of ordinary seeing is underlined by the contrast between pure reception of light – as when one is dazzled – and the experience of light as revelatory of a visual scene.
The journey from epistemic senses onwards can be traced in many ways, none of which fully captures the distance between sentience and knowledge. It is sufficient for our present purposes to follow one track to make the point and re-visit something we have discussed already. The epistemic object of vision is a) enduring and b) public. These are the outer aspects of its being ascribed intrinsic properties independent of any individual’s experience of it. Indeed, it exists independently of any particular person’s perceiving it: me, you, or anyone at all. It transcends actual experience.
We have scarcely left ground floor sense experience and we already have arrived at mystery and controversy. For David Hume, objects are collections of sensible qualities but the idea that these sensible qualities – which entitle the object to be called a thing – are underpinned by an underlying substance is “a fiction”. Our belief that sensible objects continue to exist when nobody perceives them is also a fiction, he claims, although a natural and necessary one.7 Subsequent glosses on this view – by J. S. Mill that the material of objects is “the permanent possibility of sensation”, by certain analytic philosophers that objects are “logical constructions” out of sense experiences, and that for Quine objects are “posits” – only serve to underline the gap between sentience and the ground floor of knowledge, namely knowledge of material objects.
Vision points to the invisible, to that which lies beyond the horizon-bounded space in which it locates objects, visibly separate and connected, beyond the actual into the realm of the possible. When I see an object, it is in the same space as me. When, on the other hand, I suspect the existence of an object outside of my visual field it is not spatially related to me, although I may have a rough idea of its position; and it is on the border between that which is the case and that which may be the case. The penumbra around the perceptual field is the antechamber of another kind of outside: explicit, articulated possibility.
The perceptual field is riddled with, and bounded by, possibility. The characteristics of possibility are central to the nature of knowledge and what distinguishes it from sentience. That possibilities are not located in space and time in the way that tables, chairs, and my body are, follows from their necessary generality. The loose association with places and times that some possibilities have does not contradict this. For example, I may hear a rustling in a thicket and postulate the possibility of a bird with a certain location. The possibility does not, however, share the boundaries of any actual bird that may materialize. After all, the rustling may turn out to be due to the wind. This highlights two key aspects of possibilities; namely that a) they
may or may not be realized; and b) they are at some level general. The two aspects are of course connected: a generality falls short of existence which (Platonism and other magic thinking aside) is confined to particulars. My explicit diagnosis of the rustling – based on memory “that” – highlights the different kind of space opened up by knowledge. The articulation of explicit possibility locates it in that different kind of space, as opposed merely (as in the case of animal expectation) to assimilating it to the flow of experience.
Enter at this point the idea of truth – and, of course, its inseparable other, falsehood. Truth, as the saying goes, “supervenes on Being” but something has to make Being true, and beings truth-makers. Evidently, Being cannot supervene on itself, be true in itself, or true of itself: something additional is required to make it be “of” itself. Upper-case Being has to be tasted by a lower-case being, by a conscious subject. Not all consciousness, however, can deliver what we might call full-blown truth. Mere sentience, as has often been pointed out, is incorrigible. This is not because it is infallibly true but because it is below the level at which issues of truth and falsehood arise: it cannot even be wrong because it does not make judgements. It would be inappropriate to speak of an itch as “true” not because it is untrue but because it is neither true nor false. Only when it is remembered as something that happened at a certain time, or interpreted as having a specific cause, does the question of truth or falsehood arise. Itching, unlike the assertion that I had an itch on a certain day, is not a matter of knowledge or a matter for testimony. More generally, I am not (for example) extraordinarily knowledgeable for having a continuous flow of bodily sensations, any more than chronic colicky pains make me an expert on the intestines. Sensations do not supply the “of” that enables Being to be (true) of itself. “Being + sentience” is not sufficient to generate items to which it is appropriate or possible to assign truth values.
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