Logos

by Tallis Raymond

And to this small extent, naturalized epistemology seems valid: that what we take to be reality is what is “good enough” for our survival. Where naturalized theory of knowledge fails is at the level at which the epistemological question should be posed: How do we have knowledge of “reality” at all; how does what-is become “reality” in us? And it fails even more signally further down the track, when we pose the question of how we come to challenge that reality, to put it in inverted commas, and actively doubt, and attempt to reform our sense of it, so that we see our everyday knowledge (or some aspects of it) as merely “good enough” for survival; in short, when we stand back from our knowledge to adopt a critical stance on it. And when we address the question that is the concern of this book; namely, how we got to be so smart. And, come to that, why did we, given that, if we could see the world only as it looks to our best account of reality, namely science, we would not function effectively in daily life? That we can make use of only a small amount of what we think to have discovered to be reality is not to be answered in terms mobilized by naturalizers.

  45.

  Mach, Knowledge and Error, 361.

  46.

  A prominent development of Mach’s understanding of science is Popper’s evolutionary epistemology – treated in many places in his oeuvre but especially in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Popper applies the idea of natural selection to the battle between scientific ideas. Humans, instead of exposing their bodies to the vicissitudes of the natural world, expose their theories which are subject to the discipline of the survival of the fittest. Problem-solving and error elimination is driven by “selective pressures”. While superficially attractive, the direct conflict between ideas, posited explicitly in a disciplinary community, the crucial role of key measurements, hardly seems like the direct conflict between phenotypes which will eventually result in preferential replication of a particular genotype, or the indirect conflict arising out of competition for resources. And in the history of humanity, conflicts between world pictures have as often led to body-on-body bloodshed as to polite and reasoned dissent. Science, however, represents an extraordinary (unnatural) triumph over this.

  47.

  Tom McClelland (personal communication) has questioned this conclusion. He argues that our senses might discover things as they are in themselves; and b) if even sense-making is constrained by our needs, this may require us to be sensitive to objects and properties that are wholly independent of those needs. Regarding the first point, the standard naturalistic account of sense experience is that of a material interaction between energy arising from the extra-corporeal reality and the nervous system. What are most directly available are neural effects which seem unlikely to amount to a pure disclosure of what is out there “in itself”. The interaction between A and B does not seem likely to deliver an undistorted portrait of A in B. As for the second point, there is much evidence of the filtering and transformation of experience before it enters consciousness and guides needs-related behaviour. In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that many neuroscientists regard the “outside world” as a construct, even an “illusion”.

  Quine’s own position remains deeply ambivalent, given that he regards material objects epistemologically as “posits” we introduce via linguistic reference in our theories of the material world, irrespective of their ontological standing. Quine (quoted in Keskinen, “Quine on Objects”) describes himself as having “an unswerving belief in external things – people, nerve endings, sticks and stones”. It is often thought that Quine is a realist when he is talking about ontology and it is only when he is talking about epistemology do objects become posits. To be confident of the existence of entities (real objects) that lie permanently beyond the reach of experience is (to say the least) a difficult position for an empiricist. Even so, he believes that to ask “what reality is really like apart from our categorization [as separate from the parochial point of view of another theory] is meaningless” (ibid., 137).

  48.

  This brief note over-flies a vast literature on the anthropic principle and the complex discussion of the different shades and nuances of weak and strong anthropic principles. I wanted only to make a single point.

  49.

  Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology”, 294.

  50.

  Ibid., 82.

  51.

  Still the sense that the universe is a “put-up job”, put up for us keeps returning. Here is another engaging example: “The Milky Way” says [Caleb] Scharf “is smack-dab in the sweet spot of massive super-massive black hole activity. It is possible that this is not mere coincidence” (quoted in Radford, “Gravity’s Engines).

  52.

  Quine is not fazed by any suggestion that thoughts – and their objects – do not readily map on to physical processes in the brain: “Thinking is a bodily activity in good standing, however inadequate our physiological understanding of it” (From Stimulus to Science, 93). The bodily activities he refers to are muscular actions typically associated with speech – the standard behaviourist reduction of thought to “sub-vocal speech”. The founding father of behaviourism – J. B. Watson – had a similar understanding of the nature of thought.

  53.

  Russell, The Analysis of Matter. I am indebted to Philip Goff’s “Bertrand Russell and the Problem of Consciousness”.

  54.

  As Adam Frank has put it, “our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is.” (“Minding Matter”). And this penetrating observation in the same article bears repeating: “The closer you look, the more it appears that the materialist (or ‘physicalist’) position is not the safe harbour of metaphysical sobriety that many desire”. (ibid., 2).

  The identification of matter with what it does leads to a “dispositional essentialism” in which stuff is reduced to its law-like interactions with other stuff. The result is a kind of buck-passing that Russell (quoted by Philip Goff in “Panpsychism”) brilliantly characterized as follows: “There are many possible ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as ‘real’ into mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously, there must be a limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will merely be each other’s washing” (Russell, The Analysis of Matter, 325).

  55.

  Rosenberg, “Eliminativism without Tears”.

  56.

  The role of neural activity in gathering distributed, even diffused mental stuff to a localized viewpoint – one that perceives, knows, remembers, thinks, etc., and serves the needs of an individual – remains entirely obscure. In short, panpsychism and identifying consciousness with neural activity emerge as two equally expensive ways of failing to solve or bypass the traditional mind-body problem.

  57.

  It is very difficult to espouse the mind-brain identity theory consistently – even in the case of basic sensations which should be less tricky customers than, say, thoughts. Quine for example speaks of “the pain that x [neural activity] produces is a dull ache”, as an example of the identity theory (From Stimulus to Science, 86.) But while the identity seems to hold for the pain and the dull ache, it does not seem to hold for x: if the neural activity produces the pain it cannot be identical with it. If A produces B, A must be distinct from B.

  58.

  Goff, “Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true”. Galen Strawson emphasises that it is important to differentiate between panpsychism that says there is only experiential being and panpsychism that says that physical stuff has experiential being in addition to non-experiential being (“Real Naturalism”, 151).

  59.

  One approach to the combination problem is to deflate the conscious subject to a succession of experiences. This hardly begins to address the problem. Firstly, the kind of consciousness putatively enjoyed by an election would hardly scale up to a tingle. And, secondly, we are more than a mere delirium of experiences. This latter point i
s made persuasively by Janko Nesic in “Panpsychism and the Deflation of the Subject”.

  60.

  Discussed in Goff, “Panpsychism”. No-one should dismiss panpsychism before paying this article the careful attention it deserves.

  61.

  Ibid., 16.

  CHAPTER 5

  1.

  The crucial role of the humble gesture of pointing for the sharing of experience and the establishment and maintenance of the trillion-stranded community of human minds is discussed in Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence. Another elementary manifestation of mind-sharing is the “checking” that infants do: looking at the parent’s face to see whether they, too, are seeing what they see.

  2.

  See Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays.

  3.

  Kant’s division of the activity or spontaneity of the mind on the one hand from its passivity or receptivity on the other – which corresponds roughly to schema and content – does not capture the many grades of activity that can be observed between (say) gawping and active disciplined inquiry, between staring into space and space exploration. This is another way in which Kant’s transcendental idealism fails to reflect our gradual, laborious acquisition of knowledge of the natural world – humanity’s hard-won cognitive advance.

  Tom McClelland (personal communication) has emphasized the active nature of our perceptual interaction with the world, and suggested that a sharper contrast is between the informal and unstructured nature of ordinary perception which has no aspiration to yield firm knowledge and the acquisition of intelligence through scientific inquiry.

  4.

  Quoted in Slowik, “The Fate of Mathematical Place”, 24.

  5.

  Galileo, The Assayer from Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, 85.

  6.

  Schrödinger, “Mind and Matter” in What is Life and Other Essays, 119.

  7.

  Stace, “Man Against Darkness”, 2.

  8.

  For a discussion of the case for and against realist interpretations of science, see Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, especially §3.6 “Mathematics and Reality”.

  9.

  Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 5.

  10.

  Ibid., 4.

  11.

  Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”.

  12.

  Locke, Essays II, xxiii, para. 12.

  13.

  Ladyman & Ross, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, 2.

  14.

  Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 344.

  15.

  Von Uexkull, Theoretical Biology.

  16.

  Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, 70.

  17.

  Nagel’s investigation into the problem of combining “the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included” is profound. Combining the two perspectives is “a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole” (View from Nowhere, 3). Only humans, so far as we know, are troubled by this problem. And not many of those, either.

  18.

  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 464, 133e.

  19.

  See Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, especially §3.6 “Mathematics and Reality”.

  20.

  As Wittgenstein said, “Mathematics is a MOTLEY” – quoted in Hacking, “What Mathematics Has Done to Some and Only Some Philosophers”.

  21.

  Nagel, View from Nowhere, 86.

  22.

  Ibid., 87.

  23.

  See Tallis, “Information” in Why the Mind Is Not a Computer.

  24.

  Nagel is again relevant: “We remain, in pursuit of knowledge, creatures inside the world who have not created ourselves, and some of whose processes of thought have simply been given to us (View from Nowhere, 118). And: “[T]he most objective view we can achieve will have to rest on an unexamined subjective base” (86). And, finally: “The very idea of objective reality guarantees that such a picture will not comprehend everything; we ourselves are the first obstacles to such an ambition” (13).

  25.

  My skull, my inner organs, my bone marrow, and so on are for the most part silent. Even when (as in illness) they become eloquent, they are experienced as impersonal, external. There is something fundamentally impersonal about a headache, however much it invades my person. And this applies a fortiori to the vast accumulation of objective facts about my body, such as biochemical and haematological parameters. “What it is like to be Raymond Tallis” is not what it is like to be successive time slices of the material of his body. Nagel’s assertion that “I am whatever persisting individual in the objective order underlies the subjective continuities of that mental life I call mine” (View from Nowhere, 40) overlooks the gap between mental life and whatever it is that secures my place in the objective order – most obviously my body. The gap is most dramatically illustrated by the fact that my brain is innocent of me and I am innocent of what is going on in my brain, even or especially of what accompanies my assertion of such innocence.

  26.

  Quoted in Hillar, “Philo of Alexandria”.

  27.

  Which – to hark back to Chapter 2 – makes the meeting of God and the Word, of deity and truth, in the living, breathing, weeping, bleeding, body of Christ even more poignant. It is odd that the Platonic fastidiousness, even ontological snobbishness, of the philosophical tradition on which Philo drew, should have been suspended. That Jesus assumed earthly form is a scandal, as well as a miraculous intersection between time and eternity.

  28.

  Nagel, View from Nowhere, 104.

  29.

  An especially poignant commentary on the extent to which we are hostage to the bodies in which the possibility of knowledge and sense-making resides is the dementia that darkened Kant’s final years. Thomas de Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant is a harrowing, chastening (and largely plagiarized) account of the disintegration of one of Europe’s greatest minds and most influential philosophers.

  30.

  Superbly described in Mark O’Connell’s witty and perceptive To Be a Machine. O’Connell notes the powerful distaste for the body evident in transhumanism, a distant echo of the Gnostic vision of human beings as divine spirits trapped in corruptible flesh that is a barrier to knowledge.

  31.

  Randal A. Koene’s website, Carboncopies: Realistic Routes for Substrate-Independent Minds, quoted in O’Connell, To Be a Machine, 44.

  32.

  For a critique of these assumptions, see Tallis, Why the Mind Is Not a Computer and “Are Conscious Machines Possible?” in Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur.

  33.

  O’Connell, To Be a Machine, 18.

  34.

  Ibid., 197.

  CHAPTER 6

  1.

  Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 185, quoted in Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 427.

  2.

  Kołakowski, Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle, 146–7.

  3.

  Mach, Knowledge and Error, 171.

  4.

  See Tallis “Seeing Time”, Chapter 1, Of Time and Lamentation.

  5.

  See Tallis, The Knowing Animal.

  6.

  Quoted in Welbourne, Knowledge, 31. Sense-making even at the relatively basic level presupposes certain cognitive capacities, in particular a grasp of concepts. The cat does not have the concepts “bird” or “garden”.

  7.

  See Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Vol. 1, 1.4.2,14–43 and 52.

  8.

  See Tallis, The Knowing Animal for an attempt to do both of these things.
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br />   9.

  Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.4711.

  10.

  Ibid., 7.

  11.

  Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, 297.

  12.

  Ibid., 298.

  13.

  Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, 1.

  14.

  Ibid., 3.

  15.

  Robinson, “The Concept of Knowledge”, 23.

  16.

  Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, para. 32.

  17.

  Ibid., para. 36. This is an opportunity to head off a common claim about animals. Because their behaviour is (necessarily) adaptive, it can be thought of as rational. Given this, we may think of them reasoning themselves to their goals. But of course human reasoning links explicit generalized ends with explicit generalized means and there is no evidence of, or need for this, in animals. In the case of bespoke voluntary action, it is not sufficient that my action should be purposive; I have also to have that purpose in mind. Animals do not, therefore, operate in the space of reasons where items are connected at the level of generality. This Sellarsian connectedness is evident in, say, beliefs. (See Tallis, “Does Rover Believe Anything?” in Epimethean Imaginings). Of course, when I act, not all the moments of my action are illuminated by my sense of the reason for it. They do not have to be. It is sufficient that I should be set going, or set myself going, free-wheel, stop when I have arrived, and refresh my sense of what I am doing if I drift, or am blown, off course.