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The Non-Existence Of The Real World (book)

#1
C C Offline
The Non-Existence Of The Real World, by Jan Westerhoff

Reviewed by Sean M. Smith
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-non-exis...eal-world/

EXCERPTS: Jan Westerhoff’s most recent monograph is a densely argued and highly systematic attempt to undermine a number of realist convictions. In this book, we have four long chapters, each arguing for a brand of anti-realism beginning with the mind-independent external world (Ch.1), our introspective access to an inner world organized around a self with a continuous stream of conscious contents (Ch.2), ontological foundations (Ch.3), and fundamental truths (Ch.4). Each chapter is meticulously organized and full of arguments worthy of careful consideration.

Those familiar with Westerhoff’s work will be aware that he has made substantial contributions to our understanding of Indian Buddhism (Westerhoff 2018) [...] This book is interesting in that its approach is clearly inspired by Westerhoff’s understanding of Madhyamaka Buddhism (which he interprets as a kind of wide-scope anti-realism), and yet, by design, the book does not directly engage with any of the core ideas of Buddhist philosophy.

The goal here is to offer a “systematic development of key Madhyamaka claims” (Preface, xxx) using only the resources of analytic philosophy and contemporary science. [...] the arguments on offer do not require the reader to know anything about the subtleties of Indian Buddhist thought. [...] But for those of us who do know Buddhist philosophy well, the book presents as an intriguing and sophisticated double entendre...

[...] The book is systematic and well-organized. ... The book’s level of coverage is impressive, so it will be impossible for me to say anything comprehensive. Therefore, my goal is to raise one critical question for each chapter.

In the Chapter 1 we get a series of arguments against the existence of a mind-independent external world. What replaces it is a neural-representationalist theory of simulation or virtual reality. Instead of a distinction between a neural map, on the one hand, and the territory of the world that it represents, on the other, Westerhoff maintains that:

"For the irrealist, map and terrain will coincide: we use the concepts to move through a represented world that is already conceptual through and through, built around a conceptual scaffold of notions like causation, time, space, logical implication, physical, mental, abstract, concrete, and so forth. Without the scaffolding there would not be any internally coherent world-like entity at all. For this reason we cannot assume that there is something beyond the map, something which cannot be captured by our brain-generated model." (63)

[...] The worry I have here is twofold. The first is anticipated in fine style by Westerhoff: “Brains are as much part of the external world as broccoli” (67). Further, brains don’t seem to be part of the representational interface but its origin. How can the brain be the ground of the representational interface if nothing exists outside the interface?

Like the eye that facilitates sight without being part of the visual field, the brain (on this view) is the engine for the representational interface, but is not part of that matrix (because it is what generates the interface). This seems to commit the view to a noumenal conception of the brain all the while denying that anything exists outside of the interface that the brain generates. It’s not clear to me how the two commitments can coincide.

Westerhoff’s reply to this worry is the following: “The system has not only incorporated the external world and turned it into a representation, it has also swallowed up its own physical basis, thereby regarding it as a representation as well” (67). I find this reply difficult to understand, as it seems to imply that the neural-representational interface has somehow consumed the external world and itself.

But if that’s right, then the external world and the brains in it pre-exist the functioning of the representational interface only to be eventually subsumed by it. I suspect that what we have here is something of a semantic bind whereby even in our attempts to articulate a vision of anti-realism we run up against the ways in which our language invokes a world outside of itself as a condition of its sense-making.

What this means for the coherence of Westerhoff’s approach won’t get fully cashed out until the final chapter of his book where he’ll argue that there are no foundational truths (in Ch.4). Even so, the radical conventionalizing of all truths doesn’t seem to assuage the worry that we can’t not think of the world as something outside of us that we are passively affected by in being finite organisms trying to survive in it.

To this latter point, I want to further amplify my worry that these arguments for an anti-realist neural-representationalism do not give adequate attention to the way that evolution gives us reasonable grounds to conclude that the history of life and the world in which it has slowly developed vastly eclipses our representational capacities.

That our access to that world remains mediated by our capacities for representation and sense-making is one thing, but to claim that there is nothing outside of this seems directly contradicted by the evidence we have of a world full of life that has existed for millions of years without humans in a universe many times older besides.

In Chapter 2 we are presented with a battery of arguments against two key claims that are very much at the heart of untutored introspection.. (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (scivillage): The Interface Theory of Perception
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote: Like the eye that facilitates sight without being part of the visual field, the brain (on this view) is the engine for the representational interface, but is not part of that matrix (because it is what generates the interface). This seems to commit the view to a noumenal conception of the brain all the while denying that anything exists outside of the interface that the brain generates. It’s not clear to me how the two commitments can coincide.

It is indeed the problem at the core of anti-realism, that the whole basis for a physical reality outside of us is itself just another physical object, namely the brain. That is, assuming the scientific assumption of materialism. That is apparently what is being assumed here--that our consciousness emerges from a non-conscious physical brain. I don't profess to know the answer to this problem. If anything needs more study in philosophy, it is this one thorny issue. I suspect, along with Chalmers, Schrodinger, etc, that the solution has to do with the irreducibility of conscious or mind as an ontic substrate in itself, and that what we are left with is some sort of dualist scenario for ultimate reality. Not really as satisfying as a monism. But who said reality has to conform to our craving for resolution?
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