Ignorance, as we have noted particularly in Chapter 7, begins close to home. Understanding ourselves is necessarily incomplete, and falls short of humanity’s self-knowledge for a variety of reasons. Two are entirely obvious. Firstly, to build on a point just made, understanding must be a matter of moments and there is no moment that can capture the entirety of the understanding self to which it belongs. No second can capture an hour, even less a day, a week, a year, or decades. Secondly, we are irreducibly singular and there are no individual differences that can be guaranteed not to make a difference. I have no idea how the general theory of relativity is present in the lives of my fellow men. This may be thought of as irrelevant, given that it belongs to a public body of knowledge and is not a matter of a private succession of experiences. Even so, how knowledge is actually known touches intimately on the question of the cognitive advance of humanity.
We have already noted how our subjectivity is invaded from below by the sub-personal characteristics of embodiment. Here, it is the invasion from above by the collective consciousness out of which the language of self-understanding grows that is highlighted. We do not understand ourselves entirely from within. First, we judge ourselves from an imaginary standpoint of an understanding superior to the part of ourselves we are passing judgement on. Secondly, the language we use to characterize ourselves is external to us; self-ascription is mediated through the voice of the General Other whose authority can be devastating as when we are driven to suicide by guilt or shame. We shall return to language presently.
How little we are aware of our ignorance is a tribute to our capacity for self-deception, as we sometimes aim to deceive others, regarding the extent of our mental reach. We can refer knowingly to things we do not know, nod allusively to many things we do not truly understand.5 The shallow trickle of internal soliloquy can imagine it has sufficient draft to contain ideas and concepts and theories that are in fact little more than recited sentences, phrases echoed with ditto-head subservience in our internal soliloquy. We can entertain many thoughts without truly having, or being, had by them: this would include all thoughts containing the word “universe”. Even on those rare occasions when we busy ourselves with the things of the mind, they are reduced to cognitive splashes and shards. The most examined life is mostly not in the business of examining; and the examination is often just a flow of words, shells uninhabited by that to which they refer, as it would appear if it were truly imagined. We all have ideas above our station because our station cannot ascend to even the most commonplace ideas.
The flow, the inner momentum of thought, drives us on and past, even where it is not deflected or interrupted by outer events. We are like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, endlessly nattering to ourselves, in a barely controlled monologue – scarcely less random than the rain of events – that we hardly listen to, or into, not pausing to inhabit what we are articulating, or which effortlessly, articulates itself, a jabbering that at times threatens to become mental tinnitus. This incessant low-grade activity (poised between happening and agency, between activity and passivity) is not entirely verbal of course.6 Images may be swept into and out of the flow of consciousness, particularly since the latter draws heavily on the uniquely human episodic and semantic memory.7 It seems that, without the scaffolding of a coherent external world collectively constructed inside a physical universe that is stable and predictable, we would be in a state of delirium. And some of that delirium still remains in the most supported moments of engagement with larger ideas. Plato’s dialogues present a flattering image of individuals fully, undistractedly engaged in philosophical dialogue. The joke that “a lecturer is someone who talks in other people’s sleep” acknowledges that there is the slenderest of tightropes of articulation connecting one inner chaos on the podium with rows of such chaoses in the auditorium. These are the unflattering truths about our token minds, that reflect so little of what the notional collective mind knows, though such minds are the only place where knowledge is actually known and understanding understood. They are minute compared with the collective consciousness and the boundless archive where our cognitive achievements are stored. They are pinprick drops in a waterfall.
This is one of the reasons why our individual minds often cannot follow where the collective mind indicates. It is most obvious in the case of those very large and very small numbers which are found everywhere science looks. Highlighting this is to focus on one of the consequences of what we might call “the fall of the mind” from a supernatural entity to something scattered through humanity; of Logos from an eternal soul, made in the image of God and able to mirror His creation, to manifestations of living, local, parochial human beings. Our sense-making is realized inside a biography, of an unfolding self-consciousness that is not a timeless category reflecting the universe as a whole, offering the opportunity to the universe to tell the truth about itself. This dialogic, social mind, indexed to historical and intersubjective contexts, cannot aspire to encompass all that is known, to achieve a full understanding of what is now understood.8
Our minds, then, are not The Human Mind. Even less are they Cartesian timeless substances curated by God to ensure their access to truth and transparent to themselves. Of course, Descartes’ mind left certainty as soon as it left itself; or, indeed, went beyond the self-evident truth that it was thinking. I cannot be mistaken over the fact that I am thinking because such a mistake would be composed of thinking. How much, however, the cogito argument – “I think therefore I am” – delivers is highly controversial. Once we get beyond the existential tautology – “I am thinking therefore I am thinking” – there is not much on offer. The most intimate barrier comes not so much from uncertainty about what I am thinking about – although the “I” is somewhat indeterminate – as what I am thinking with or, more precisely, what I am thinking in: language.
In the last chapter we touched on semantic externalism – the thesis that “the meaning and reference of some of the words we use is not solely determined by the ideas we associate with them or by our internal physical state”. We alluded to the dream of an entirely transparent, rational language that would not be subject to the accidents of cultural and intellectual history.
The semiotic utopia of a characteristica universalis was most famously articulated by Leibniz although the notion of an entirely transparent language has haunted thought since Plato’s Cratylus. The allegory of the Tower of Babel may indirectly express the worry that “discourse is the violence we do to things”.9 Leibniz avoided that violence by privileging abstraction. His ideal language would encompass mathematical, scientific and metaphysical concepts. A less ambitious version of this was Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift or “Concept Script” that was influential in implanting in twentieth-century analytic philosophers the dream of an entirely transparent mode of philosophical discourse conducted in the terminology of formal logic. Using such a language, we would know exactly what we are talking about: our words would not get in the way of the thoughts they express. By not employing terms and grammars that have developed through the accidents of history, we would avoid the risk of finding that we have taken on board conceptions and assumptions that we are not aware of, or that our interlocuters have done the same. Consequently, we would not waste our time quarrelling over implications and connotations lurking in the untidy lexical “crannyware” that fills potential hiatuses in the fabric of everyday discourse and the idiolect out of which we weave it.
Unfortunately, disinfecting discourse of baggage might result in emptying it altogether – rather analogous to removing the knowing subject from knowledge. Nothing particular, or even substantive, can be said in the characteristica universalis as is evidenced in the models that Leibniz referenced – notably mathematics. The characteristica universalis would be suitable only for the Theory of Everything – or highest level mathematico-physical discourse – which seems like the Theory of Nothing-in-Particular and hence perilously close to the Theory of Nothing-at-All. The fact that the centur
y-long endeavour to get philosophy to speak in a kind of characteristica universalis – namely formal logic – has delivered so little itself speaks volumes (just how little it has delivered is concealed by the fact that it has become a branch of philosophy of its own, happily getting on with its own thing).10
The idea of such a language is not far from the notion of the language that God might speak.11 The secular equivalent would be the native language of the givenness of things. It is perhaps too frivolous to characterize it as the language that pebbles, or a field, or a landscape might choose to speak if they were inclined to talk about themselves. It is probably not necessary to add that if a stone could name itself it would not call itself a “stone”; that is to say, it would not locate itself in the network of concepts, categories, and classes we place over the world, even if per impossibile it were able to allocate itself to a general type.12 If the whole universe uttered itself, the pandiculation – and res ipsa loquitur – would be insufferable as well as incomprehensible (cf. the question “If God truly spake, could any bear to hear?”).13
An idea (touched on in Chapter 3) that has attracted some attention and even in some quarters commanded belief is that the universe is identical with information; that, to use John Wheeler’s formulation, “It [arises] from Bit”.14 If this were true, and the idea of information retained anything of what it means in daily life, this would suggests an intrinsic language of the universe, in which Being would be identical with a givenness that would articulate itself.
It is worth dwelling on this briefly because inadvertently it shows the absurdity of the very idea of a shadowless language that discloses, without distortion, the givenness of things. Such a language presupposes that givenness, even things in themselves, are intrinsically linguistic or at least composed of information and that the latter does not require for its standing as information recipients who are distinguished from information itself. Wheeler’s “It from bit” – which derives its rationale from observer dependency in quantum mechanics – gives ontological priority to information:
It from bit. Otherwise put, every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely – even if in some contexts indirectly – from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. It from bit symbolizes that every item of the physical world has at bottom … an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions; and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.15
Bits are “individual, detector-elicited electron hits”. As Julian Barbour expresses it, for Wheeler “anything physical derives its very existence from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes-or-no quantum binary choices: bits”.16 Information “is the ontological basement and is more basic than quantum fields or energy”.17 It is the ground of being, or ultimate reality.
There are obvious problems. If every “it” derives not only its function or meaning but its very existence from apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, to binary choices, we are left having to explain the existence of the (macroscopic) apparatus, of material elevated to the status of being apparatus, of questions being posed, of the posers of the questions (characters such as Wheeler and his colleagues) and choices being made. In short, if Wheeler were right, very sophisticated behaviour on the part of very recent (and minute) parts of the universe (quantum physicists), would appear to be necessary for a universe to come into being. The existence of everything, in short, depends on the existence of certain items (and associated activities) that seem only recently to have emerged from everything, the kind of items for whom what happens counts as information.
“It from Bit” derives some of its respectability from an interpretation of quantum mechanics according to which the universe is a) digital – bitty, granular – rather than analogue or smooth; and b) indeterminate until measured. Claims to respectability are, however, groundless. Firstly, the notion of a field or a wave function presents the world as a continuum that becomes granular only in response to questions that bump up against the limits of certainty; and, secondly, uncertainty is in the eye of the beholder and without beholders there is neither certainty nor uncertainty nor resolution of the latter into the former.
There is an irony in the invocation of hard-headed physics to support idealism, as reflected in Wheeler’s claim that “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon”.18 This may at first seem like a truism, given that a phenomenon is etymologically “that which appears” and there can be no appearing without a sentient being to whom appearing appears. However, the use of the word “real” suggests that it is identical with what-is, with something that exists independently of sentient subjects.
The echoes of Kant in Wheeler’s idea of the participatory universe – that the observer has a key role in bringing law-governed nature into being – were touched on in Chapter 3. They are only distant echoes because what Wheeler calls a “phenomenon” is in fact the outcome of a measurement, a highly mediated experience, that generates a somewhat dephenomenalized number or a “0” v. “1” answer. Wheeler’s claim also raises questions about the entity in virtue of which there are observers. Presumably observers themselves are not real until they have been observed – but by what? At any rate, it is a striking expression of what may seem to be counter-intuitive – namely that hard-boiled materialism can lead, via extreme scientism, to idealism.
Here is not the place to argue with this ontologizing of the procedures of fundamental science. Wheeler’s ideas earn their place in this chapter on the grounds of their heroism: they take to the limit the idea of the intrinsic language of reality, the pure accent of the givenness of things in themselves. For Wheeler, reality, observation and discourse (embedded in the idea of information) are all one. What the rocks and trees and mountains and planets utter is a sotto voce 4-dimensional utterance of the 0s and 1s that they themselves are. It is clear that neither existence (things19), meaning, or reference could be constructed in this way. If the condition of cognitive completeness were that our sense-making – knowledge, thought, speech – should be expressed in the language of things in themselves, then it will be an impossible goal.
As we have seen, the wider the application of the sense that is made, the less it seems to grasp reality. The aseptic discourse of theories and laws and equations lacks nutritious content. The seeming precision of, for example, E = mc2 – true to many decimal places – conceals the fact that its vision is blurred: particulars, qualities, here and now, are sacrificed to generality, an entire world utterly out of focus; the world is seen from an aeroplane, a space-ship, a distant galaxy, from increasing remoteness until it vanishes. It is a world that is flattened by distance, without the depth that comes from the odour of significance. But in using ordinary discourse we are hostage to the constraints, unchosen implicature, the tints and accidents, of a language that has grown without a guiding purpose or directing mind.
It is an exaggeration to think that ordinary language “speaks us” (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase20). While being “spoken by” this language we may be liberated to some degree from the parish of ourself, we are still hostage to the unrecorded jumble of influences that determined how language takes hold of the world. And there is a price even for this modest transcendence. We are distanced from ourselves such that the abstract thoughts that we have, and are had by, may seem alien, stale, and empty even as they are uttered. They lack existential weight. And what they shake off, even mislay, may be precisely that which is central to our own existence.
The limits to our understanding do not, of course, begin only when we think of the universe as a whole. Our token minds are rooted in token selves and those selves are invested in other selves. Trying to understand those other selves is fraug
ht with difficulty. The romantic-pessimistic notion that we are monads, each entirely sealed off from the other, is a distraction from less absolute quotidian limitations. For much of the time, we know “very well”, or “damn well” what X or Y is up to, what he or she means by it, and how it is experienced by others. Being justifiably despised by another person for bad behaviour torches off the layered distances that seem to insulate and conceal one person from another. Successful deception is built on an at least instrumental understanding of the way the other person sees or imagines the world. And we know, too, how to be kind and caring and to help in a way that is truly helpful. While we can journey towards romantic pessimism and play with the idea of ourselves as windowless monads, therefore, we do not quite arrive there. All but the most solipsistic among us are aware of what will make another person happy or sad, annoyed or pleased, notwithstanding that there are always surprises, not always gratifying, even in the most communicative and longstanding relationship.
Even so, there are scotomata at the heart of our understanding even of those closest to us, never mind the hordes with whom we interact as members of other hordes, or who stream past us in parallel crowds or who are simply known to us by a name (sometimes attached to a smidgeon of reputation or a cluster of attributes). We have little inkling of how they cohere inwardly, how they experience us from moment to moment, and what it is like to be them. The hearts of others sometimes seem more opaque even than the material world, if only because it matters so much more to know them and because there is so much more of moment to know.
There is a poignant reflection on this in the case of Einstein himself. At the time of his greatest intellectual triumphs, when he sensed most acutely that he was getting close to the Pythagorean dream of a mathematical understanding of the universe, he was in the midst of distressing family conflicts. He could make no sense of his older son’s marital choices or his younger son’s severe mental distress.21 There could be no more tragic illustration of a fundamental disconnection within sense-making between objective knowledge – the classic path by which we mark cognitive advance – and lived meaning. We can share knowledge but not experience, even when we are exposed to the same events. My experience of what happened is registered in the context of a different viewpoint steeped in a different history.
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