Philosophy Returns to the Real World

[C C]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...eal-world/

EXCERPT: . . . Studying with [literary theorist Stanley] Fish and [arch-postmodernist Richard] Rorty, it was awfully hard not to pick up a sense of the end: the end of their own disciplines — which Rorty, for one, explicitly declared — and vaguely the end of many things that they said had expired long ago: objective truth, determinate meanings, noncontingent values, a material external world. That certainly presented a quandary for a graduate student trying to generate a dissertation topic under their tutelage.

An eminent analytic philosopher of my generation, Timothy Williamson, writes this about his supervisor at Oxford, Michael Dummett, now deceased: “He was remarkably tolerant of the strident realism of my thesis, which effectively presupposed the futility of his life’s work and pursued other issues from that starting point.” Dummett’s anti-realism was more limited and technical than Rorty’s, but they were closely related (both men were influenced by Wittgenstein, for one thing). Dummett held that truth was internal to our linguistic practices of justification, rather than denoting access to external realities. And one thing that I think both Williamson and I were trying to do was find a way to keep going, or somehow to bulldoze exit routes from what seemed like a cul-de-sac.

But the ‘80s heyday of Rorty and Fish is beginning to seem like a long time ago, and a backlash seems to be in progress. More recent work in philosophy includes various forms of realism about the world: the idea that reality is not the product of consciousness, or of human perceptual structures or languages or interpretive communities, but exists independently. We don’t make the world, as one might put it; the world makes us. Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices. Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism – “popomo” for short....

[C C]

The irony here is that while such movements in philosophy and the social sciences make another predictable oscillation back to commonsense realism, the "hard" physical sciences continue to go the other direction. Some brain-related scientists [#2, #3] are adopting a skeptical stance about our popular or native intuitions that's ancestrally descended from the eliminativism[#1] which Rorty and Paul Feyerabend originally introduced.

Theoretical physicists also still crank-out their constructs of a mind-independent world which are so bizarre or removed from the everyday world that the latter is likewise hopelessly demoted to an illusion when crouched in that context (well beyond the tame incongruities between ordinary perception and scientific realism which Bertrand Russell[#4] tooted back in his day). Physics, in this sense, has taken over the job of a Platonic and even pre-Socratic metaphysical pursuit to expound about an intellectual version of the cosmos which accordingly disparaged the mundane one of experience / perceptions[#5]. Kant[#6], however, would contend that physics is actually engaging in an internal investigation of the extrospective world of experience rather than something beyond it, a superior successor to a kind of inward speculative metaphysics that concerned the phenomenal realm.

Anglophone philosophy has historically bounced back and forth between phases of indirect and direct realism, etc, as Russell happens to indicate when mentioning the behaviorism-influenced scholars of a particular era being shocked by his view: "I maintain an opinion which all other philosophers find shocking: namely, that people's thoughts are in their heads. The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation. I maintain, in fact, that the brain consists of thoughts --using thought-- in its widest sense, as it is used by Descartes. What I maintain is that we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads, and that we cannot witness or observe anything else at all." --My Philosophical Development

The wrinkle which postmodernists like Rorty and the like introduced to the oscillation was an indifference [call it "irrealism"] to the whole issue of the battle between assorted realisms. In effect, "all realisms are practical bunk". Crispin Sartwell: "Rorty challenged me, over and over, to describe an undescribed object, to tell him about something outside language. He didn’t, according to himself, deny the existence of the world, he simply held that the assertion that there was stuff outside of language was itself a linguistic practice."


[#1] Teed Rockwell: [Wilfrid] Sellars takes the implications of this even further, saying that even our experience of our own inner states is theory-based. This means that if scientific evidence is what justifies the claim that mental states are brain states, it does so by establishing a relationship between mental concepts and neurological ones. This relationship is not significantly different from what occurs when one scientific theory advances beyond another one, which means that the history of science becomes an essential discipline for philosophers of mind.

[...] Scientific discourse usually adopts new concepts to refer to newly posited or discovered entities during what Kuhn called scientific revolutions. The thing that makes the introduction of these new concepts revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, is that there aren't anything like bridge laws to relate new theories to old ones. Instead the old theory is often eliminated, and replaced with a better theory that rejects or ignores the ontological assumptions of the old theory. For example, there are no identity relationships between the alchemical essences and the chemical elements, because we now claim that there are no alchemical essences.

Rorty (1965) and Feyerabend (1963a and 1963b) thus concluded that if scientific progress was the model for the relationship between brain states and mental states, then there is no need to establish identities between the two. Once we have a sufficiently sophisticated neuroscience, we may be able to simply say that there are no mental states. This effectively disposes of the problems raised by Shaffer and Feyerabend mentioned above. The differences between identity and causal correlation were no longer of significance, because we were now talking about only one entity--the brain state-- the mental state having been consigned to the ontological trash heap.

Feyerabend had nothing more to say on this subject after writing the two articles cited above. Rorty, however, continued to defend his position against critical articles. Rorty had originally called his position the disappearance theory of mind, but he later adopted the term eliminative materialism, which had first been used by Cornman [...]

Lycan and Pappas point out that if Rorty claimed that it is only possible in principle to replace mental talk with neurological talk, this would mean that mental states are as real as tables and chairs, because in principle all talk about tables and chairs could be replaced by talk about atoms and molecules. This would make Rorty's brand of eliminative materialism only trivially true. Lycan and Pappas claim that Rorty was somewhat equivocal in his 1965 and 1970 papers about whether the elimination of mental language was actually desirable, or only possible in principle. Paul and Patricia Churchland, however, developed a more aggressive form of eliminative materialism. They claimed that the elimination of talk about mental states was not only possible and desirable, but a fully viable goal for a neuroscientific research program.... --Eliminativism, Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind


[#2] Michael S. A. Graziano: The brain builds models (or complex bundles of information) about items in the world, and those models are often not accurate. From that realization, a new perspective on consciousness has emerged in the work of philosophers like Patricia S. Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett. Here’s my way of putting it:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

You might object that this is a paradox. If awareness is an erroneous impression, isn’t it still an impression? And isn’t an impression a form of awareness?

But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience. --( Are We Really Conscious?).


[#3] Temma Ehrenfeld: [...]Jarrett addresses aspects of this huge thought as well. Under “Myth #33: The Brain Perceives the World As It Is,” he breaks the news that we’re actually living a self-created “virtual reality experience. .  .  . The truth is that we catch mere glimpses of physical reality.” Three or four times every second, for example, you close your eyes and see nothing—a mechanism to prevent blurring when you shift your gaze. To compensate, your brain seems to backdate your sense of how long objects have been in their current locations. It takes about a tenth of a second for information to come in, but your brain hides the lag, “constantly predicting how the world probably is now based on how it was a moment ago.”

Although such adjustments may sound minor, the overall illusion creates overconfidence. Jarrett quotes a sobering study that concluded that women with eating disorders who weren’t especially fat or thin were unusually accurate—not less so—about how attractive their bodies would be rated by a panel of strangers. Healthy women, on the other hand, were biased in their own favor. Healthy people also can easily be induced to feel that they have three arms, or that they are floating outside their bodies. You can “hear voices” without being psychotic. The very human idea of I-know-it-like-the-back-of-my-hand is wrong: We tend to see our fingers as shorter and our hands as wider than they are. At last, some good news!

We are overconfident, too, about what passes for popular knowledge, as Jarrett reminds us, pointing out how bad neuroscience sells dubious products and causes. He weighs the research on whether the Internet is making us stupid or lonely, sugar makes kids hyperactive, girls are wired to prefer pink, and left-handed people are more introverted or creative. The answer is no.... --Gray Matters


[#4] Bertrand Russell: Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. --An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth


[#5] Immanual Kant: The dictum of all genuine idealists from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: "All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only, in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason there is truth." The principle that throughout dominates and determines my [critical] Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth." --Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics


[#6] Immanual Kant: [...] the whole speculative use of our Reason never reaches beyond objects of possible experience [or hypothetical entities which can be brought via experiment into conjuction with circumstances of outer experience]. For if it can be proved that the categories, of which the Reason must make use in all its cognition, can have no other employment whatever, except merely with reference to objects of experience (in such a way that only in them [viz. the categories] is the form of thought possible...)

[...] For it lies generally beyond the horizon of our [theoretical] Reason, to comprehend original forces a priori as to their possibility; all natural philosophy consists rather in the reduction of given forces in appearance diverse, to a small number of forces and powers, adequate to the explanation of the effects of the former, but which reduction only extends to fundamental forces, beyond which our Reason cannot proceed. And thus, metaphysical research, behind what lies at the foundation of the empirical conception of matter, is only useful for the purpose of leading natural philosophy so far as is possible to the investigation of dynamical grounds of explanation, as these alone admit the hope of definite laws, and consequently of a true rational coherence of explanations.

This is all that metaphysics can ever accomplish to the construction of the conception of matter—in other words, for the application of mathematics to natural science, in respect of properties whereby matter fills its space in definite amount—namely, to regard these properties as dynamical and not as unconditioned original positions, such for instance, as a mere mathematical treatment would postulate. --Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

[Magical Realist]

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

But haven't they precisely determined that the story is wrong? Somehow, thru thought alone, they have arrived at the conclusion that the impression of consciousness is a mere illusion, but not such an illusion that it can't be inferred to be such. I have toyed with the notion that consciousness may be a sort of folk artifact of our own culture. That a certain way of speaking about and referring to our experience and mental states reifies awareness as a thing in itself. It's certainly part of our Cartesian tradition, this objectification of the mental as over and above its own contents. It might be along the same lines of mistaking life as some force in itself separate from all the chemical reactions that comprise it. But then the alternative seems even more ludicrous. That the experience of awareness, consistent over a broad range of sensory data, memories, feelings, and conceptualizations, is only an illusion. It seems to be the most immediately accessible fact about us, that we are aware of events, and that this awareness is not those events.

[C C]

When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. [...] there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

Similar incorrect conclusions would be applicable to extrospection, like the qualitative character of "green" being superimposed over tree leaves. The external world would similarly be infected by the brain's supposed errors in data processing (naive realism).

But haven't they precisely determined that the story is wrong? Somehow, thru thought alone, they have arrived at the conclusion that the impression of consciousness is a mere illusion, but not such an illusion that it can't be inferred to be such. I have toyed with the notion that consciousness may be a sort of folk artifact of our own culture. That a certain way of speaking about and referring to our experience and mental states reifies awareness as a thing in itself. It's certainly part of our Cartesian tradition, this objectification of the mental as over and above its own contents. It might be along the same lines of mistaking life as some force in itself separate from all the chemical reactions that comprise it. But then the alternative seems even more ludicrous. That the experience of awareness, consistent over a broad range of sensory data, memories, feelings, and conceptualizations, is only an illusion. It seems to be the most immediately accessible fact about us, that we are aware of events, and that this awareness is not those events.

Somewhere in the 20th century adjectives like subjective and personal and private and qualitative got conflated with nouns like showing, manifestation, exhibition, presentation; appearance. So that when illusion-advocates suggest that there is no self or consciousness pertaining to a subject -- and accordingly no subjective experience and no personal properties like qualia -- they are [mistakenly?] taken to be asserting that there is no content to perception and thought. This potential misunderstanding occurring because in this era subjective, personal, private, qualitative, etc seem to have replaced the old direct-to-the-point "showing, manifestation, exhibition, presentation; appearance".

Daniel Dennet: Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia.

[...] I want to make it just as uncomfortable for anyone to talk of qualia--or "raw feels" or "phenomenal properties" or "subjective and intrinsic properties" or "the qualitative character" of experience--with the standard presumption that they, and everyone else, knows what on earth they are talking about. [...] The term "phenomenal" means nothing obvious and untendentious to me, and looks suspiciously like a gesture in the direction leading back to ineffable, private, directly apprehensible ways things seem to one. --Quining Qualia

I disagree with Dennett's dismissal of "phenomenal". Its etymologically roots amount to "show forth" without any additional attachment to a self or subject. If it happens instead that illusion-advocates literally are contending that we're actually wallowing about in nothingness [i.e., there's not even a selfless version of consciousness or experience], then validation of anything goes out the window since one still needs manifested evidence that the reason and experimenting of science is correcting the supposed incorrect data-processing transpiring in the brain (regardless of how error-prone that manifested evidence might be).

[Yazata]

It seems to me that modern philosophy is congenitally estranged from the real world.

The reason for that isn't what one might think, the baleful influence of religion. That is a contributing factor though.

I see philosophy's estrangement from the world of nature more as a reaction to the rise of natural science.

Natural science was originally natural philosophy, very much a part of philosophy, the philosophical specialty that considered the natural world. But during and after the Scientific Revolution, science struck out on its own. It came into possession of a whole set of new methods (like the use of mathematics in physics), developed its own institutions (like the Royal Society), acquired new sets of issues and problems all its own, along with its own specialized practitioners. What's more, science acquired tremendous social prestige during the Enlightenment, and was seen by much of the public as the road leading to an earthly utopia, a secularized 'Kingdom of God'. Then as the modern university evolved, the place of science was institutionalized in the form of science departments and PhD programs. And today, science departments are where all the grant funding goes, where most of the academic world's advances and discoveries emerge, and where a disproportionate amount of academic hiring takes place.

The departure of natural philosophy and its unprecedented success left the rump of philosophy in a severe identity crisis. What was philosophy's role and purpose in these new circumstances? Was it something to be abandoned, just failed speculative science? Or did it still have something of its own to contribute?

It seems to me that modern philosophy might possibly be distinguished from ancient and medieval philosophy by its strong subjective emphasis. Modern philosophy specialized in the subjective world, while science took over responsibility for objective reality.

We see it in Descartes and in the British empiricists, who began with their own subjectivity and then tried to construct an entire universe out of pure reason and their own sense data, while responding to ancient skeptical doubts. We see it in Kant and the German idealists, who spun elaborate systems out of their own heads as if they were spiders. We see it very explicitly in phenomenology and phenomenalism. We see it in the dramatic post-60's ascendency of political and ethical concerns in philosophy. (Many of which presuppose an alienated oppositional stance towards the objective world and a hostile and dismissive attitude towards facts and truth, as exemplified in 'standpoint epistemologies'.) We even see it in the current popularity of anti-physicalist so-called 'hard problem' currents in the philosophy of mind.

Subjectivity has been the recurring, underlying theme of philosophy, ever since the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century deprived philosophy of its age-old Aristotelian-style authority when speaking about the objective world of nature.

[Mr Doodlebug]

We get no impression of the physical world except through our senses.
The physical world, excepting ourselves, and creatures like ourselves, has no sensory input.
What we gain through our senses is information about the physical world.
Our basic nature, like the computer that we invented, is the storage and interpretation of that information.

What is real about the world that we experience?
Only the accuracy of sensory information, and the statistical predictions we can make based on that information.