Tell Me Another One
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: The taller the tale, the shorter the teller.
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A couple of weeks ago The Boston Globe published a piece by Jonathan Gottschall, whose recent book, The Story-telling Animal: How Stories Make us Human had already made my woefully long list of books-I-must-pretend-to-read. “Until recently,” Gottschall writes, “we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.”
The New York Times also has a short piece on the research of Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar detailing the ways narrative not only accesses those parts of the brain—social and experiential—that light up when we actually experience what is described, but also seems to make us better at navigating the social complexities of everyday life.
Despite mountains of residual institutional animus, empirical research into things literary continues to grow in profile. Over the course of twenty years, Joseph Carroll has managed to bootstrap what was a heretical cult of science nerds into a full blown intellectual movement. For me, all of this smacks of inevitability. Once the human brain became genuinely permeable to science, the obsolescence of the traditional discourses of the soul—the ‘Humanities’—was pretty much assured. Why? Simply because prescientific theoretical discourses always yield when science gains some purchase on their subject matter.
E. O. Wilson only sounds radical the degree to which you are Medieval.
Make no mistake, I was mightily impressed by post-structuralism and post-modernism back in the day. I had no fucking clue what that bespectacled, scarf-wearing twit at the front of the class was talking about, but I knew a powerful ingroup social status display when I saw one. I made it my mission to conquer all that French wankery, to master the ‘po-mo’ language game, and I did. Soon I was that obnoxious prick in the back who actually argued degrees of semantic promiscuity with the twit at the chalkboard.
But it didn’t take me long to burn through my enthusiasm. And now, when I find myself reading new stuff written in that old mould I always suffer a stab of pity—not so different, perhaps, than the one I feel upon hearing that another species of amphibian has gone extinct. The naive social constructivism. The preposterous faith in bald theoretical assertion. The woeful ignorance of some of the crazy and counterintuitive things that science, the Great Satan, has to say.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the integration of the sciences and the humanities is a good thing. Science is far too prone to level nuances and to provide psychologically indigestible facts for me to believe this. Only that it is inevitable, and that any discourse that fails to engage or incorporate the sciences of the soul are doomed to irrelevance and amphibian extinction.
Besides, the naturalization of a field of discourse only entails the death of a certain kind of theory and speculation. As certain questions are removed from “the realm of speculation” new ones arise, proliferate. The very foundation of interrogation moves. This is likely the most exciting time, intellectually speaking, for any wanker to be alive, the dawn of an Enlightenment that will make the previous one look as profound as a trip to Home Depot.
Gottschall, for instance, has an answer for one of the things that has consistently puzzled me about the fracas over my books. Why does fiction motivate so much moral defensiveness, the blithe willingness to pass summary judgment on the worth of an entire life in defence of a mere reading? According to Gottschall:
“Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.”
As I suggested not so long ago, we seem to understand this at some instinctive level. As Alan Dershowitz likes to say, everyone is censorious somehow. Who is saying what to whom is something that we are exquisitely sensitive to: We are literally hardwired to wage and win communicative warfare, and morality, it seems, is our principle battleground.
Again, Gottschall writes:
“Since fiction’s earliest beginnings, morally repulsive behavior has been a great staple of the stories we tell. From the sickening sexual violence of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” to the deranged sadism of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, to Oedipus stabbing his eyes out in disgust, to the horrors portrayed on TV shows like “Breaking Bad” and “CSI” — throughout time, the most popular stories have often featured the most unpleasant subject matter. Fiction’s obsession with filth and vice has led critics of different stripes to condemn plays, novels, comic books, and TV for corroding values and corrupting youth.”
Narratives make us nervous simply because they can be dangerous: Gottschall references, for instance, the way Birth of a Nation revived the KKK. But they also, he is quick to point out, tend to increase our overall capacity to empathize with others, and so reinforce what he calls “an ethic of decency that is deeper than politics.” The research he cites to support this case may seem impressive, but it’s important to realize that this is a nascent field, and that some warts are likely bound to come into focus sooner or later. One might ask, for instance, the degree to which that ability to empathize is group specific. Could it be that reading makes us more likely to demonize perceived outgroup competitors as well? (If anyone comes across any research along these lines be sure to pile in with links).
But what I find most interesting about the article is the pervasive role accorded to fantasy, not in the literary, but the cognitive sense. According to Gottschall, the vast majority of narratives not only depict morally structured worlds—ones where events mete out punishments and rewards according to the moral rectitude of the characters involved—they also tend to strengthen what some psychologists call the ‘just-world bias,’ the projection of one’s own moral scruples (particularly those involving victimization) onto the world…
Moral anthropomorphism.
And this, Gottschall argues, is a good thing. “[F]iction’s happy endings,” he writes, “seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.”
I have this running ‘You-know-the-Semantic-Apocalypse-is-beginning-when…’ list, and at the top are instances like these, discoveries of deceptions we depend on, not only for personal, mental-health reasons, but for our social cohesion as well. Narratives may delude us, Gottschall is saying, but they delude us in the best way possible.
The evopsych explanation of the survival value of narrative probably predates the field of evolutionary psychology: narratives affirm ingroup identity and reinforce prevailing social norms, thus providing what Gottschall calls the ‘social glue’ that enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. Perhaps, given the benefits of self-sacrifice and cooperation in times of scarcity, the promised ‘happy ending’ wasn’t nearly so far-fetched for our ancestors. Gottschall concludes his article with a study of his own, one suggesting that the traits most commonly associated with protagonists and antagonists line up rather neatly with the moral expectations of actual hunter-gathering peoples. Narratives, on this account, provide a collective counterweight to the cognitive conceits and vanities that serve to communicate our genes at the individual level.
But whatever the evolutionary fable, the connection between narrative and the fantastic, not to mention the antithesis posed by the scientific worldview, is out-and-out striking. Narrative, according to Gottschall’s ‘social simulator account,’ is an organ of our moral instincts, a powerful and pervasive way to organize the world into judgments of right and wrong, punishment and reward. Their very nature imposes a psychological structure onto the utterly indifferent world of science. The Whirlwind doesn’t give a damn, but we do. And, when it comes to the cosmos, it seems we would much rather be hated than go unnoticed.
This happens to be something I’ve pondered quite a bit over the years: the idea of using the assumptive truth of nihilism as an informal metric for distinguishing different varieties of fiction. (I self-consciously explore this in Light, Time, and Gravity, where the idea is to stretch story so tight over recalcitrant facts that the fabric rips and death shines through). On this ‘sliding semantic scale,’ fantasy would represent the ‘maxing out’ of meaning, where the world (setting) is intentional, events (plot) are intentional, and people (characters) are intentional. Drain intentionality out of the world, and you have the story-telling form we moderns are perhaps most familiar with, narratives with meaningful people doing meaningful things. Drain intentionality out of events, and you have something that most of us would recognize as ‘literary,’ those ‘slice of life’ stories that typically leave us feeling pompous, mortal, and bummed by the ending. Drain intentionality out of the characters—abandon morality and value altogether—and you have something no one has attempted (yet): Even the most radical post-modern narratives cowtow to meaning in the end, an incipient (and insipid) humanism that falls out of their commitment to transcendental speculation (post-structuralism, social constructivism, etc.).
A few weeks back I finished reading Luciano Floridi’s wonderfully written Philosophy of Information, and I’ve been surprised how the first two introductory chapters, which I blew through, have remained stuck in the craw of my imagination. (For those of you into the wank, I heartily recommend you give it a read, if only because of the inevitability of the ‘Informatic Turn.’ Just think: If you start now, you will never need to race to keep up! Even though it fairly bristles with brilliance, I personally found the book sad, largely because of the extreme lengths Floridi is forced to go in his attempt to defend a semantic account of information. At every turn, it seemed to me, the easiest thing to do would be to simply abandon the semantics and to just look at information in terms of systematic differences making systematic differences. The only reason I can say as much is simply because I think I might have found a means, not only of explaining semantics away, but of explaining why it seems impossible to circumvent—why, in other words, philosophers like Floridi have to heap rationalization upon ambiguity upon outright obscurity in order to accommodate it. I was hoping PI would show me a way out of the Void, and all I found was another indirect argument for it.)
For some reason, reading Gottschall reminded me of this particular passage from the opening chapter:
“From Descartes to Kant, epistemology can be seen as a branch of information theory. Ultimately, its task is decrypting and deciphering the world, god’s message. From Galileo to Newton, the task was made easier by a theological background against which the message is guaranteed to make sense, at least in principle. So, whatever made Descartes’s god increasingly frail and ultimately killed it … Nietzsche was right to mourn its disappearance. Contemporary philosophy is founded on that loss, and on the irreplaceable absence of the great programmer of the game of Being.” (20)
As crazy as it sounds, fantasy is also founded on that loss. With Descartes, remember, it is God that assures the integrity of nature’s message. The world is a kind of communication. Of course, everything will ‘make sense,’ or ‘turn out for the best,’ because we are living a kind of story, one where punishment and reward will be dispensed according to the villainy or heroism or our role. The death of God, Nietzsche points out, forces us to abandon all such assurances, to acknowledge that the world makes no narrative, or moral, sense whatsoever.
And that those who insist that it does are probably living in a fantasy world…
Telling the tallest of tales.
Three Pound Brain 
I don’t think you write fiction that particularly subverts the just-world heuristic. In a narrative absent of meaning, consequence emerges from mechanistic interaction, like the behavior of a physical system. Structures from the personal to the political inform characters’ behavior and determine the endpoint of the story – clouded, of course, by stochasticism and chance. Characters receive not what they deserve but what the system calculates for them, based on actions that have in turn been calculated. The game plays itself and the author does not try to alter the game beyond setting the initial rules.
I think your fiction departs from this (as almost all fiction must) in your attempt to make an argument for the pervasive nature of social systems. You create a world that is not absent of justice but actively unjust, where systems are less sensitive to the behavior of individual agents than their real counterparts. I think this is probably at the root of some of the criticism you draw: people see an attempt to engage with realistic problems in an unrealistic fashion. By creating a world where solutions are impossible you seem to suggest that the same may be true of our world, to a degree that – in the eyes of some readers – seems preposterous given empirical outcomes on ‘our side’. Why fantasize about a world where nothing can be done, they ask? How is that productive?
I read in your commentary on the psychology of fiction something of a rebuke to these critics, yet I think it falls into a common trap – deriding or demeaning a conclusion because it is the product of a heuristic or an identifiable psychological process. In the long run, we’ll be able to name and track every process in the mind. The fact that Gottschall can identify a specific tendency with regards to fiction does not inherently render that tendency counterproductive or ‘irrational’, or suggest that we should ignore discussion of the content of fiction because the brain processes it in a specific way.
Very interesting. My fantasies can be read as explorations of ‘just-worlds,’ where the ‘justice-as-represented’ doesn’t fit comfortably with the reader’s own moral heuristics. It’s one of the few things I feel I’ve done a pretty damn good job on! (And for better or worse, the internet is littered with evidence of it). I’m not sure what you mean about the ‘system’ and it’s ‘calculations.’ The apparent ‘irresolvability’ of the moral situations I present has everything to do with the moral expectations of the reader – I’m not sure how it could be otherwise. Given this, your question, ‘Why fantasize about a world where nothing can be done?’ actually becomes, ‘Why fantasize about a world where I can’t be right?’ My answer is, Because it raises a battery of fascinating questions! People will (and have!) use their feet to decide for themselves…
The purported trap you mention is something I’m accused of all the time. I think would understand the criticism, IF it were the case that I thought I was doing anything more than raising problems. All I do is split the difference, and yet everyone seems to assume I’m trying to steal the family farm. That’s your reading, I say. Well, that’s fine, but kindly remember it is your reading and nothing more. IF you think it’s canonical (and so very many do), then we need to consider all the ways we all manufacture the rats we think we smell when we read – or in other words, why NO reading is canonical.
IF it were the case that I thought I was doing anything more than raising problems. All I do is split the difference, and yet everyone seems to assume I’m trying to steal the family farm. That’s your reading, I say.
Oh yes, you give us the wheels, the panels, the frame. But the cart is totally our own…
I have a problem with your criticism of Gottschall about fiction ‘deluding’ people into thinking the world is more just than it actually is. Surely the nature of fiction is that it doesn’t just describe the world, but reconstructs it in some way… if we accept that, then it’s not so much people being deluded about the world as being persuaded to see it in a way which might be more positive for them and others. The kind of thing I’m thinking of is the Afro-american taking on of the exodus narrative, using this to see the legacy of slavery as being not entirely negative, but rather as something from which some positives can be derived. I don’t really see how that kind of fiction can count as a simple deception.
It wasn’t so much meant as a criticism as another example of how fact and human need continue to drift further and further apart.
Ok, so fiction provides a sense of meaning which serves a function in the communities humans evolved in, but which doesn’t do what we expect in our modern networked world? I just don’t see how that can provide a full explanation of how fiction is made, as it seems to me like this is surely one area where humans show the ability to assert some genuine creativity and not just be determined by unconscious influences. Yes stories do group around certain concerns, but surely that’s just another way of saying that human brains and bodies are shaped by certain broad constraints? The amount of invention in fictions says to me that we are able to do a lot more than just create literature which serves a particular defined function (and I think your reinterpretation in TSA of certain common categories of fantasy proves that).
Yep. Yep. And yep! Understanding, of course, this is all rank speculation, and the field is in its infancy.
As for your final point, I think you’re entirely right on the compositional side: one of the things I love so much about this field is all the *crazy* new ways it gives me to write. But on the reception side, do you really think mass readership will be willing, let alone able, to escape those “certain broad constraints”?
But again, for me the critical thrust, or at least the thing I think warrants the most scrutiny, is the way these scientific depredations on the humanities lead to this bifurcation between what we know and how we relate, between knowledge and experience.
I can see what you’re getting at when you ask what the point of a fiction is if no-one reads it, no matter how positive a force it might be. What seems to me to follow from that though is how your style of communication can work to bridge that gap… is the transmission, in a submerged form, of radical ideas in a traditional format going to be enough to change people’s minds?
And that leads me on what you write about the bifurcation between knowledge and experience. The cognitive perspective which supports that kind of conclusion also creates a very limited idea of what communication is – it becomes the transmission of ‘knowledge states’, as Steven Pinker would put, where much of the point of communication is to make someone believe what will further your own ends. Our experience is that that doesn’t encompass what communication does, especially when we consider shared understandings which are not about enlisting allies or attacking enemies, and it seems that fiction exemplifies a kind of communication which is not just about getting something done.
All of which makes me wonder whether the bifurcation of knowledge and experience through cognitive science is really as inevitable a process as you describe, or whether it might be just another overblown attempt to falsely sum up how the world works. And I’m not coming at this from a social constructionist stance by the way… most of the ideas I’m using come from somewhere you really won’t like, namely theology. Reading things by Rowan Williams, Marilynne Robinson etc have done a lot more for my understanding of human communication than cognitive psychology has, and coming from a very atheist background I’ve started to appreciate the real explanatory (and not just consolatory) power of the idea of God.
I’m interested in hearing more about the ‘explanatory power of God.’ Who, in the schizophrenic crime scene that is my soul, I haven’t entirely given up on, btw.
You’re right about the picture I’m painting being overly binary and overly simplistic, but I do think it captures something of the dilemma we find ourselves in. The problem really seems to be the case that the more science tells us about ourselves, the less warrant we have to trust ourselves outside the institutional rigours of science. The more we know about ourselves, the less we can call ‘knowledge.’ So the question becomes, when looking at the theoretical claims generated by other traditional institutions, like the claims of theology (in this case regarding communication), Why should we look at this as anything other than yet more tradition-conserving guesswork?
Trust me. I see this as a pernicious trap.
The explanatory power of God? Ok, well I’ll give it a go, but sorry if this gets very garbled!
I think one of the things sophisticated modern Christian thinkers would focus on is that a structure for living successfully doesn’t just naturally occur (by structure I mean ethics, society in general etc etc).
Now I know you agree with that, but your interpretation is negative, in that you suggest that the structures which have worked for us in the past came out of evolutionary imperatives and no longer function effectively, a process that will only get worse as time goes on. So for example, there is no natural structure of ethics which promotes compassion for all, but one which promotes compassion for the particular person’s in-group. You further suggest that as the only structures we have are these evolutionarily determined ones, we have absolutely no way of creating ones meaningful in today’s terms, as the process of creating meaning has never been anything to do with conscious human action (if indeed this actually exists).
The challenge someone like Marilynne Robinson or Rowan Williams might make to that is that structures of ethics have been created in the past which have gone far beyond evolutionary pre-determined functions. Perhaps language began as a functional tool, but inherent to language is the inevitability of referring to more than just immediate need. Williams says that it ‘puts us into relation with something more than ourselves’, and it seems plausible to think that this could predispose us to create structures of ethics, society etc which are not reflective of evolutionary predispositions, but of the transformations allowed by us being linguistic creatures. This isn’t a natural process though, but one that requires divine inspiration at some level.
It’s worth noting that what Williams and Robinson particularly value about this focus on language is that it allows the world to remain open to interpretation, not closed. Your suggestions about the findings of cognitive science suggest that you fear that we might eventually discover the world to be a closed system, which works in certain pre-defined ways; looking at how language works suggests the opposite.
These links have some interesting stuff in them if you’re interested in looking further:
http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/marilynne-robinson-on-the-art-of-fiction/ (the part on science and Richard Dawkins fits particularly well into this discussion)
http://cruciality.wordpress.com/category/rowan-willams/ (because the top two blog entries in particular describe a mode of thought which actually seems to fit quite well with your outlook about certainty)
Hey there! Hope this time the message gets through LOL.
hmmmm… where was I…
Well, I can’t help pointing out that in carefully constructed laboratory experiments the effect of fiction seems far more easily detectable than in the “real world”, and (the most interesting thing, to me) that the strength of “in the field” findings regarding media effect seems kinda falling, along the lines of “regression to mean” effect.
The Payne Fund studies found some pretty massive effects (Payne Fund studies were largely regarded as un-rigorous later on, but they were all the roar at their time), current studies mostly focus on tiny tweaks to teen behavior or framing effects (which are kinda elusive). And while in lab conditions (like in Appel and Richter’s study of fictional persuasion which had fairly impressive results), effects are quite notably found, usually consistently (though, of course there are Malamuth-style replication anomalies), in naturalistic / epidemiological studies, the increasing prevalence of content of particular type does not reliably correlate with anything important, and, at the very best, relatively trivial results are obtained (such results also quite often suffer of the nefarious chicken-and-egg problem of the presence and direction of the causal link, which plagues Cultivation theory research)
By default I of course assume that some people are oh-so-slightly biasing their lab studies (with sample sizes near ~100 and a distinctly non-blind recruiting process typical of experimental studies in this field, a clever person could probably oh-so-gently and oftentimes unconsciously nudge the results), but, to be fair, it might be that “IRL” there are just too much confounders which themselves bias and attenuate the effects, and/or there are too many media types and messages simultaneously interacting in weird ways leaving a kind of “white noise” instead of a coherent effect.
Or, perhaps (and this would be pretty cool if it were ever tested and found true) over time the strength of discounting factors rises because, people exposed to numerous intense media forms become “desensitized” to its effects due to both rate of exposure and being burned a few times by poor choices made due to excessive trust in unscrupulous fictional information (this would also explain why early/mid twencen studies found such awesome results and modern studies are so meh – overall exposure was lower back then across all media types)
Anyway, capacity of fictional depictions not specifically engineered for a “marketing campaign” to affect a measurable, meaningful effect are definitely grossly exaggerated (disclosure: I have a bit of a conflict of interest in re:marketing efficacy)
There is of course Ayn Rand ;), but I guess there remains the question of whether Rand turns (almost)normal people into scumbags and sociopaths or scumbags and sociopaths merely are more eager to embrace her badly written scifi
P.S.:
I also recall there was a thesis by some UK dude which deals with effects of heroic fiction on mate selection and effects of heroic fiction… will try to track it down, must be online somewhere – it had hilarious results there
Having taught at Vanderbilt University, I can personally attest to the efficacy of Ayn Rand. Me and my buddies loved her so much because she made it so easy to look like a bloody genius up there.
I had a similar debate with 01 on this, 03, which leaves me with one burning question: What the fuck happened to 02?
Otherwise, I concede all the difficulties you raise – the difficulties in this particular research field are daunting to say the least. But as I said to 01, the overall abductive argument is quite strong: it’s not like there’s no such thing as intellectual history. But otherwise, don’t fall into the ‘all or nothing trap.’ It’s like I say when people jump on me about evopsych: sure it’s speculative, tentative, and so on. But thank God it’s naturalistically grounded! What was your theory grounded on again? ‘Rational reconstruction’? Huh.
In other words, it’s a more a matter of whose shit stinks least.
Not that I mean to sound like an ingrate: The important thing is that you reminded everyone that it is only a more pleasant brand of bullshit I’m talking about here!
” Having taught at Vanderbilt University, I can personally attest to the efficacy of Ayn Rand. Me and my buddies loved her so much because she made it so easy to look like a bloody genius up there. ”
Was it Rand that made you seek out opportunity to look like a bloody genius, or were you already looking to do so and merely found Ayn’s Grand Tomes of Poor Scifi a fitting hammer to hit a particular social nail with, so to speak ?
Though I must admit, aesthetically and subjectively, I much prefer to think of Rand as first successful memetic malware 😉
“I had a similar debate with 01 on this, 03, which leaves me with one burning question: What the fuck happened to 02?”
Full disclosure: Third and me are in a relationship of sorts, so you can expect quite a bit of “memetic cross-polination” so to say :).
02… wait, 02 posted here too ? When 😀 ?
” Otherwise, I concede all the difficulties you raise – the difficulties in this particular research field are daunting to say the least. But as I said to 01, the overall abductive argument is quite strong: it’s not like there’s no such thing as intellectual history. But otherwise, don’t fall into the ‘all or nothing trap.’ It’s like I say when people jump on me about evopsych: sure it’s speculative, tentative, and so on. But thank God it’s naturalistically grounded! What was your theory grounded on again? ‘Rational reconstruction’? Huh.
In other words, it’s a more a matter of whose shit stinks least. ”
I don’t remember whether I managed to elaborate further last time we discussed this… but it seems to me that there are two distinct families of claims at work here.
One are claims along the lines of “fiction can, under some circumstances, reliably affect beliefs in a directed manner” or, at most, “under circumstance X, fiction can reliably affect beliefs in a directed manner”.
Those are claims that indeed can be supported via abductive reasoning and as well as confirmed/falsified empirically.
The other family are claims like “Scott Bakker’s books (can) cause an increase/decrease in misogynistic attitudes among readers”
The latter family are very strong, very empirical claims about the nature of causal relationships between phenomena in the “externally observed reality” (ooooofffff 🙂 )
Such claims need some serious empirical beef to hold any water, and, in my humble opinion, are not fundamentally different from claims about whether injection of additional insulin will cause a decrease of blood sugar concentration in a live human.
Well, I think that we should struggle to move away from bullshit and towards a coherent and accurate account of media influence and the change it experiences over time (because it is entirely plausible that the faculties involved in interpreting media content change with experience, not unlike 01’s beloved self-modifying programs that self-modify the algorithm guiding their modification).
Desperate attempts to maintain theories and claims that obviously go against naturalistic, epidemiological studies is, in my opinion, counterproductive and potentially dangerous.
I’ve noticed this fascinating trend in your ruminations to regard science as the highest form of epistemological methodologies given its successes. The problem is, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum and scientists are human. A great many ideas have been put forward as “scientific facts” and “demonstrably true” only to be overthrown or overturned after generations. Indeed, scientists themselves form a priesthood or tribe of sorts, complete with in-group jargon and language, rites of initiation, and truth-assumptions that enable them to identify fellow in-group members and ascertain their position within the hierarchy. Scientists who dare to devise competing models are laughed at (re: Immanuel Velikovsky, whose theories later inspired the current theory of the Moon’s origin) and symbolically stripped of their membership. When faced with external opposition, scientists behave just like any other tribe that Haidt describes–they close ranks and proceed to reduce their opponents’ credibility through ridicule. If scientific theory shifts, it always shifts in similar manners to religions–through progressive revelation. Thus, whenever I am presented with something that people consider a scientific “fact” I become skeptical because scientists themselves are prone to the many and various mental gymnastics that you’ve been discussing since this blog began. I’ve read a lot about experiments and theories whose “fact” basis rests on the interpretation of scientists–interpretations that can be just as suspect and biased as anyone’s. Scientists are as subject to whim, emotion, irrationality, and vested interest as others (Siegel, 1989).
I’ll give one example–dark matter and dark energy. They’re TREMENDOUSLY inelegant, scientists are desperate to prove them, so far have made little headway. It’s a bad model. For us to advance further beyond a specific point, we’re going to have to re-address this issue just like Einsteinian physics had to re-address Newtonian.
I don’t believe the humanities are, or ever shall be, obsolete until there are no more humans. Considering the approach of the Singularity and the fact that psychology/psychiatry and the sciences of the brain are being utilized by scientists to inadvertently reduce humans to robots or programmable animals (re: Pavlov’s dogs), what is actually becoming obsolete are human beings. What the Humanities are attempting to wrestle with are immeasurable ideas. In a world in which the Humanities are not taught or pursued, but humans still exist, there will still be priesthoods (like scientists, lawyers, psychiatrists/psychologists, medical doctors). These priesthoods will still have hierarchical powers and questions of freedom, tyranny, social responsibility, and individuality will still exist even if no one asks them. Narratives will arise out of the interrelations between governments, corporations, the priesthoods, and the populace, even if no one seeks to investigate, explore, or codify them.
Narratives exist everywhere. Jokes often take narrative form. Our memories often take narrative form. It’s a part of the human condition to arrange things into narratives in order to give them meaning. The multitudinous nature of the interpretations of Hamlet should demonstrate the inability to effectively measure the impact and reception of a narrative given the varying uniqueness of individuals. Priesthoods may want to claim these variations are illusory–I don’t buy that.
I’ve read an interesting opinion piece by Philip Kitcher in The New Republic entitled “The Trouble with Scientism.” (http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103086/scientism-humanities-knowledge-theory-everything-arts-science?page=0,0).
The great nihilism brought about by Nietzsche never really took hold anywhere. Some might argue it did in Nazi Germany. However, very shortly after the Second World War, it became important to find or create meaning and morality. Even if God does or doesn’t exist, meaning is integral to the survival of the species. Otherwise, the massacre of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, et. al. in Europe during the 1940s was meaningless and there’s no real reason to argue for or against it beyond pragmatism.
Thus, if it is pragmatic to slaughter millions, why not? There’s a real dangerous line of thinking there. Science, psychology/psychiatry, etc, cannot really establish any moral or ethical reasons not to cause gratuitous amounts of human misery and suffering. Economics can’t tell us, either.
But I don’t think it is the job of the Humanities to really create morals and ethics. Those who participate in such an activity, especially those who indulge in postmodern wankery, are misusing the disciplines. The Humanities are really meant to explore the human condition and attempt to understand why human societies always result in misery, oppression, intolerance, etc. and perhaps THROUGH that improve the human condition as a whole by educating people.
Perhaps, at this point, I’m talking in circles. Part of that is because these topics are so fraught with a multitude of causal threads and even more myriad responses and interpretations that perhaps we’re never going to really comprehend it.
As for the survivability of the Humanities… if they ever do become obsolete, it will be due to the extinction of humankind, either through the Singularity or through the reduction of humans as walking chemical reactions that can be manipulated through behaviorism. Sorry, that’s not any kind of world I want to inhabit.
Source:
Siegel, H. (1989). The rationality of science, critical thinking, and science education. Synthese, 80 (1), 9-41.
Not much to disagree with here. You seem to be assuming that I’m idealizing science (as is the case with scientism), but if so, how and where? I’ve mentioned everything above in many different ways and times. My guess is that you’re attributing to me some kind of naive understanding as to what counts as ‘truth’ and ‘theoretical fact.’ But posts like the one previous should make clear that this isn’t the case. The two platitudes I rely on are, 1) Not all claims are equal; and 2) No claim-making institution in human history has been so transformative as science. If you accept these two statements, then it seems to become a matter of conditioning your epistemic commitments accordingly. You say you are skeptical of scientific fact, as am I. But the important question is simply, Compared to what? Are you saying that you are more skeptical of scientific theoretical claims than you are of philosophical claims or religious claims or… My guess is no.
Science, for all it’s failings, is far, far away the best set of practices we’ve devised for sorting between competing theoretical claims, for determining which are ‘more equal.’ Are you suggesting we should trust philosophy, which has never decisively arbitrated between claims (short of becoming science), to… Arbitrate instead of science?
As for the obsolescence of the humanities as they stand, I’m making a simple historical induction. The domain of ‘the human’ will survive, certainly. But as it stands it almost exclusively consists of armchair – which is to say, philosophical – theorizing, primarily because the complexity of the human brain defied scientific scrutiny. Are you suggesting that the facts – understood as the most reliable claims we happen to have at the moment – provided by the sciences of the soul will not have a profound impact? That, unlike any other domain cracked open by science, they will not revolutionize our understanding of innumerable things?
I think I should clarify my position vis-a-vis what I assume you idealize. If I implied that you idealized science, that wasn’t my intention. You’re absolutely correct–scientific methodology is far and away the most successful when investigating facts and sorting truth from falsehood.
What I mean to say is that the sciences of the mind frighten me…and with good reason. The latest advances seem to nullify the idea of free will and choice in favor of behaviorism and determinism. These can be utilized as justification for tyrannies of the sort we haven’t even begun to imagine. There’s no room to allow speculation that the human is capable of overcoming the base stimuli and chemical reactions that comprises the physical brain. As I said, it reduces us to Pavlov’s dogs.
Call it a conceit of mine. I like being human and I like to believe that specific human traits and qualities set us apart from the other animals. I admit to this as a bias. And I admit that I, as a classical historian who enjoys philosophy, have a very deeply vested interest in it.
Modern philosophy may have descended into navel-gazing about semantics, certainly. A sure-fire way to a humanities PhD seems to rest on writing some convoluted, incomprehensible investigation into epistemology through Derridean linguistics and post-structuralist semiotics–basically intellectual wankery that may or may not have a seasoning of anti-establishment politics rubbed in. As for me, I find that stuff entertaining at times. Perhaps this is because between Socrates and Hegel all of the real metaphysical stuff has already been hashed out or rendered obsolete in some way.
Frankly, I don’t buy it. Maybe it’s my bias. But psychology and brain-science cannot make me think about “the good life” like Plato.
Perhaps it’s not the death of God, but the death of philosophy and the humanities as a whole that has brought about this nihilism in society–a nihilism that you admitted a few posts ago has failed to free us, but instead simply enslaved us to a whole new set of masters.
In the end, though, as CP Snow pointed out in his monograph based on his essay “Two Cultures” back in the late 50s/early 60s, the current nihilistic tyrannies to which we subject ourselves are brought about by technological advances made possible not by scientists or the humanities, but by entrepreneurs.
Then welcome to the life-boat! Let’s kick back, light a reefer, watch the Titanic roll into nonexistence…
Listen to the last screams succumb to the cold.
I’m always averse to treating science, capitalism, and liberal democracy as functionally independent entities. I see them as three heads belonging to the same nihilistic, Enlightenment beast. The efficiencies provided by science fund the growth required by capitalism fund the legitimacy required by liberal democracy which (precisely because it refuses to define the ‘good life’) fund the freedom required by science… and so on and so on. Scientists have always been entrepreneurs. Galileo made a mint on his ‘Dutch spy-glass.’
As I mentioned above, I think you read me as suggesting that the domain of the human will disappear, which isn’t what I’m saying. Post-singularity, who the hell knows, but it’s called the singularity simply because we’re trapped on this side of it. The reason I separated this was to keep the two different claims you are making distinct. The first seemed to consist of an epistemological critique of the infallibility of science – something which very few people would ascribe to. It’s simply a matter of comparing theoretical track records and adjusting your commitments accordingly, always remembering that each brain in the equation only weight three wee pounds!
The second has to do with the question of meaning and morality. Again I find myself agreeing with most everything you say, Dave, and wondering where you think your observations have critical bite. For me, what you describe simply is the primary problem posed by the science: the ever growing gap between our scientifically derived knowledge of human nature and our intuitive understanding of the human condition. This is literally the primary thematic hinge of Neuropath: the more we gain of the former, the more we discover the latter is skewed, deceptive, or outright hallucinatory. And you’re right: the vast majority will reject the knowledge of their nature for some understanding of their condition – I think this is happening as we speak. The problem lies in the way science renders nature transparent to desire: all you have to do is look at neuromarketing to see the trends in action.
Are you familiar with Adorno at all?
Theodor W. Adorno? Yes, we discussed him in my European Historiography course back during grad school. This course was pretty much what you described above: “I had no fucking clue what that bespectacled, scarf-wearing twit at the front of the class was talking about, but I knew a powerful ingroup social status display when I saw one.” As a classicist, I was mightily unimpressed. Try translating Aristotle from Greek and you’ll see what I mean. I read hundreds of pages of pure sophistry (although calling it that is an insult to sophistry). I got a B- in the course and was lucky that I did. I remember reading a paragraph in seminar and challenging anyone in the room, including the professor, to make sense of it and they couldn’t.
Anyway, back to Adorno. I remember discussing him but I don’t remember actually reading anything of his, possibly because he wasn’t socialist enough for the professor. I also recall that he was heavily influential of the later New Left in European philosophy and historiography.
As for an epistemological critique of the infallibility of science–again, that’s not what I intended. It was a critique of the scientists themselves and their assemblage into a priesthood of sorts, complete with liturgy, ritual, hierarchy, jargon, rites of initiation, and most importantly political and social influence. Science itself is simply a most excellent and amazing tool. But like any tool, it is only as good, evil, useful, or useless as the person or people who wield it.
If our measurable and scientific understanding of human nature demonstrates that the reality of the human condition is entirely based on self-deception, meaning, truth, everything is seriously up for grabs, including science itself! Nihilism is truly triumphant, there’s no reason to do anything anymore. Perhaps I’m engaging in an argumentum reductio ad absurdam here, but if the whole of reality as I’ve perceived it is 100% skewed by my ego, then everything and anything becomes wholly untrustworthy, including and especially myself. When empirical evidence has to be viewed skeptically, then you know something is wrong. It’s like being on a bad acid trip 100% of your life. There’s nothing for me to anchor onto except satisfying banal desires.
I’m presented with a quandary. As an intellectual, I want to live a meaningful life. If meaning is something I have to inject into life, if it is something I’ve got to create, I’m going to create it based on what I value. But again, how can I really trust myself?
In the end, I can’t even trust the Cartesian principle of cogito ergo sum. Is my consciousness itself just an illusion caused by chemical reactions and firing synapses in my brain? I feel, I perceive, that I’m more than that through EXPERIENCING consciousness… but… what if its all not real, illusory.
What if I really am just a robot, or one of Pavlov’s dogs?
Horror. Absolute horror. Complete and undeniable, palpable terror should set in when you really start considering these things. We’re talking Lovecraftian, tentacles-out-of-space, Yog-Sothoth fucking terror here.
My argument honestly lacks critical bite. I think that is appropriate. At the point that I am at, I am still creating meaning and that meaning is encapsulated in what the Japanese call 物の哀れ (mono no aware), the pathos of things, a sad wistful nostalgia for those beautiful things that are impermanent.
To that end, one may as well believe that an Jewish carpenter-cum-deity preached love and altruistically died for humankind 2000 years ago. It makes a nice story, at the very least. Fantasy or fact, it provides a happy ending. I can willfully delude myself into believing it, if that is what I am doing, and frankly, I’d rather do that than face the alternative–emptiness.
Ergo consumerism.
Man as meaning-maker: this is last of the ancient delusions, or so contemporary cognitive neuroscience seems to be demonstrating. I’ve always thought that you have to feel the dilemma to truly understand it – and I think you very clearly understand.
The epigraph I chose for Semantica comes from Lovecraft!
What if I really am just a robot, or one of Pavlov’s dogs?
Horror. Absolute horror. Complete and undeniable, palpable terror should set in when you really start considering these things. We’re talking Lovecraftian, tentacles-out-of-space, Yog-Sothoth fucking terror here.
Not a dog person, eh?
The weird thing is, how many animals live on this world? Should they be in the same terror as well? If not, why? They weren’t special?
Scientists who dare to devise competing models are laughed at (re: Immanuel Velikovsky, whose theories later inspired the current theory of the Moon’s origin) and symbolically stripped of their membership.
Peter Duesberg is maybe the best current example (excepting the “climate change” fiasco).
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/15-aids-dissident-seeks-redemption-and-a-cure-for-cancer
Click to access 2007,%20Bauer,%20JAPSfinal.pdf
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller18.html
I agree with most of your post, but not with this:
… human societies always result in misery, oppression, intolerance, etc. …
First, I don’t think this is true; human societies generally result in the decrease of all of the above.
Second, you are assuming that these traits are orthogonal to society-building (and -maintaining), and they may be essential.
pdimov, you make a GREAT counterpoint. You’re right… overall, history has seen a decrease in MATERIAL miseries. Oddly enough, anthropologists have been discovering more and more that so-called primitive peoples actually live happier lives so long as they are able to hunt, gather, and perhaps farm enough food to survive and prosper a little. Meanwhile, in America, everyone’s fat and miserable. We don’t die from gangrene or amoebic dysentery, but we do die from congestive heart failure.
It depends on your perspective. The technology we have lets us live like kings but we’re miserable, angry people. Everywhere, groups claim victimization.
The most successful regime will be the one that can keep everyone fed, entertained, and allows them to have enough sex to satisfy themselves but denies them any kind of political freedom. Maybe Francis Fukuyama was right and we’re entering the era of “men without chests?”
Callan: Interesting point. Being a classicist, I have an admitted bias that humans are higher life-forms, capable of reason, creativity, etc. So what if apes can talk through sign language, they don’t build rockets to the Moon. But that’s just my bias. I’m aware of it. It’s tough to let go. I like it. Perhaps I’ve got to let it go. But would it benefit me and others if I did? I dunno.
Bakker: Can’t really disagree with your last two comments. I’m the cold, scared, wet kid huddled shivering in the corner of the life-boat watching a lot of the stuff I value and cherish hit the drink. Strangely, that reefer looks really appealing, though.
You’re right… overall, history has seen a decrease in MATERIAL miseries. Oddly enough, anthropologists have been discovering more and more that so-called primitive peoples actually live happier lives so long as they are able to hunt, gather, and perhaps farm enough food to survive and prosper a little. Meanwhile, in America, everyone’s fat and miserable.
I think that this is at least partially explained by a “recalibration” of misery. In a high mortality environment, the mere fact that you’re still alive makes you happy. If nobody dies, life becomes less valuable. You now want not just to be alive, you want a Porsche.
Re America, something else that may be of interest is that happiness studies have shown women getting more and more unhappy, both in absolute terms and relative to men. This has coincided with a decrease in “oppression” effected by the repeal of some societal norms.
The most successful regime will be the one that can keep everyone fed, entertained, and allows them to have enough sex to satisfy themselves but denies them any kind of political freedom.
So you believe in hedonism? I’m not sure that it will work very well. On the other hand, haven’t the late Roman emperors already done the experiment for us? 🙂
1) I’m not sure that Roman emperors were very successful in the “fed” and “entertained” department for majority of population. I’m pretty sure modern McDonald’s burgerflipper is both better fed and better entertained than majority of ancient Romans.
2) a sustainable hedonism would require removal of need to motivate people towards being “productive” in the economical sense.
Problem (and possibly solution ;)) is that it is quite likely that in less than a century majority of population will be completely debrided from any semblance of having an opportunity at an economically productive activity whether they like it or not, since, you know, unless there is something irreducible and intrinsically human about a given type of employment, a machine could be plausibly designed to do it faster, better, and at less expense to the employer.
And I sincerely doubt that there is anything to human mind or body that is immune to a (significantly more efficient) isolated re-implementation in an artificial substrate
@ Dave Cesarano
Do those studies control for age and how do they establish a coherently similar definition of “happiness” across different cultural and physical environments ?
Cause you know, in a decade-old “slow” warzone, “nobody I care about died today” is probably a significant cause of feeling happy and relieved
“As for the survivability of the Humanities… if they ever do become obsolete, it will be due to the extinction of humankind, either through the Singularity or through the reduction of humans as walking chemical reactions that can be manipulated through behaviorism. “
No offense, but I don’t see a reason to believe that humans are anything more than complex probabilistic chemical systems that can be manipulated by various tricks incl. behaviorism (things are a mite complicated due to extreme complexity and “probabilistic” nature of any real-world decision making hardware, but all in all, I really see no viable alternative to the description provided above)
“Scientists who dare to devise competing models are laughed at (re: Immanuel Velikovsky, whose theories later inspired the current theory of the Moon’s origin) and symbolically stripped of their membership.”
Cursory examination suggests that Velkovskeyism is both methodologically fragile and, at least as conceived, neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Some of his claims also appear to radically contradict physics as currently known, with no alternative coherent physics to account for such a problem.
Essentially, due to the latter fact (stuff CAN’T move like that IN SPAAAACE with current physics being in place!) Velkovsky’s “astronomy” doesn’t live up to being borderline-plausible scifi. It appears to be clever fantasy that had the misfortune of being presented as “SRS SCIENCE”.
If you need a story of a scientific theory being laughed at, then being proven undeniably right through experiment, look no further than h.pylory story, it’s verily inspirational.
” If our measurable and scientific understanding of human nature demonstrates that the reality of the human condition is entirely based on self-deception, meaning, truth, everything is seriously up for grabs, including science itself! Nihilism is truly triumphant, there’s no reason to do anything anymore. Perhaps I’m engaging in an argumentum reductio ad absurdam here, but if the whole of reality as I’ve perceived it is 100% skewed by my ego, then everything and anything becomes wholly untrustworthy, including and especially myself. When empirical evidence has to be viewed skeptically, then you know something is wrong. It’s like being on a bad acid trip 100% of your life. ”
Hmmmm…Yes, you can not be 100% certain in your perception of empirical facts.
But, know what ? You don’t need advanced neuroscience to come to that conclusion, you merely need awareness (which I have, due to having a shrink friend) that there are mental conditions that both a) completely disrupt your reasoning and perception and b) render you incapable of detecting anomalies of your perception and reasoning, making your condition the only “norm” you are capable of conceiving.
That is, you might very well be hallucinating this entire discussion while lying in a pool of filth completely catatonic, the arguments you might be presenting to your hallucinations might be complete gibberish (despite seeming reasonable to you), and unless a social worker or a concerned citizen find you before you die due to dehydration, you could very well turn out to be unlucky enough to spend the rest of your existence in this miserable condition. And there is no way of detecting it from “inside” – kinda like IRL “brain in a jar” thing philosophers are so fond of.
Our grasp of reality is painfully fragile at best and hardly ever complete. If that causes you SAN loss… well, hard cheese.
” What if I really am just a robot, or one of Pavlov’s dogs?
Horror. Absolute horror. Complete and undeniable, palpable terror should set in when you really start considering these things. We’re talking Lovecraftian, tentacles-out-of-space, Yog-Sothoth fucking terror here.”
To be honest, I never conceived of myself as anything other than a particularly intricate and oddly designed “biochemical robot”.
I find this condition to be remarkably un-terrifying, comfortable even.
Maybe I would have gotten along with Cthulhu and Yogie quite okay, if they were to exist…
Curious where Raymond Carver fits in the intentionality drainage.
I only know of Carver because of Cheever. What were you thinking?
quick question for bakker (i was reminded by the citation in dave cesarano’s post):
was the choice of “Synthese” in your novels an inside joke related to the name of the journal?
i remember thinking that it might be when i first read TDTCB. was it?
I honestly have no idea. If it was, it was a bad one!
This is interesting. I agree that there are Darwinian insights that can help understand what’s going on in narrative and why; but I think that literature, philosophy, and some literary theory have at least as much to tell evolutionary psychology – about what needs explaining – as evolutionary psychology has to say about literature.
The question is whether there can be a science of the irreducible. Obviously that begs the question is anything irreducible, but the simple answer to that is: of course. What’s irreducible is whatever reduction really gets rid of. It’s arguable that hard science isn’t reductive in its own domain, since what it gets rid of are our artifacts of our perception of the natural world, rather than something in the natural world. But when it comes to literature, the artifacts of perception that reduction would get rid of are not contingent but the very objects of its study, the artifacts themselves. Now I do think there can be a science of the irreducible (call it philosophy or perhaps economics), but not a reductive one. (That’s what my engagement with Darwinian thinking aims at, and what I think Carroll and others miss.)
You asked for citations about demonizing outgroups. Some of the better articles in the way overhyped but still interesting collection called Pathological Altruism, published this year by Oxford UP, discuss this, especially the articles on genocide and on suicide bombing.
“It’s arguable that hard science isn’t reductive in its own domain, since what it gets rid of are our artifacts of our perception of the natural world, rather than something in the natural world.”
If I’m understanding this correctly, you’re saying that science is able to circumvent the limitations of human perception. I don’t think that there are any human enterprises capable of doing that, and I most definitely consider science to be a human enterprise. Science is obviously a great tool for surmounting individual biases and constraints, but at the level of the species it is just as limited as every other human undertaking.
This all goes back to Scott’s mention that science is pretty much the best we have. I hope I didn’t misinterpret what you were saying there.
No, I doubt that science is able to circumvent, etc. But I’m a Quinean on such matters: science as we practice it is prima facie entitled to make reductive claims about the natural world.
But even if we grant that, such claims are nevertheless unlike claims that would capture what perception or consciousness or first person experience is like, partly because first person experience or consciousness, etc are like something irreducible, so all deflationary accounts deflate away what they claim to explain.
William, I am very skeptical of claims that consciousness is irreducible.
We may have pragmatic trouble conceptualizing methodologies for reductionist consciousness modelling (quite possibly for reasons reminiscent of trouble we have taking a look at our ears as long as no mirror or photographic equipment is at hand 😉 ) or we may simply need more information to be gathered before we have a theory that allows us to construct a human-like intelligence from ground up, but I really see nothing fundamental about our trouble.
A hard drive or a video card can be claimed to have a limited introspective experience too – they all have self-monitoring and response mechanisms after all. There’s nothing mysterious or irreducible about them, though.
Thanks for the reference! Looks fascinating.
The ‘reductionism’ debate is one I’m inclined to side-step, simply because it strikes me as both metaphysical and unnecessary. I look at things in terms of claims, actual things said by actual people in actual circumstances, and ask which families come to predominate for what reasons. My own notions as to what’s going on between claims, the ways they can and cannot be translated, are quite idiosyncratic.
What I’m interested in is the bifurcation between the instrumental and the persuasive viability of these two families of claim-making. So, I think we clearly have hardwired predispositions that exagerrate the intuitive force of intentional claims, and at the same time minimize the intuitive force of causal claims. Our native inclination, absent specialized training, is to find the former appealing and the latter alienating. The problem, of course, is that the bulk of the instrumental goodies lie with the causal family, and given that markets are designed to exploit instrumentalities, these are the claims that the institutional movers and shakers in our society will fund and utilize. At the same time, I think culture will be bent on fetishizing the intentional family, no matter how logically incompatible with the causal family it proves to be, and that this will simply intensify the craziness we already see in our society, where appeals to the ‘human condition’ all too often become a shill for various forms of economic and political manipulation. Whether meaning is hallucinatory or not, my fear is that our society is increasingly organizing itself around the assumption that it is.
The debates swirling around Eliminativism, I think, particularly the arguments of Stephen Stich, do a good job of laying out how fraught the whole ‘intertheoretical domain’ is.
@CoachPinhead It seems that one of the things that makes first person experience first person experience (for humans) is an infinitely recursive sense of its being MY experience. To allude again to Nagel and Davidson, no scientific description, no matter how detailed, could show what makes my experience mine. Whereas a hard drive or other cybernetic (i.e. self-governing) device is part of a system which scientific description, indeed which engineering, can capture completely: that thermostat is turning on the furnace because the resistance in the thermocoupler (or whatever) has gone up.
First, recursive functions in computing aren’t uncommon at all, and second, I am not convinced that human conscious experience is a case of (near)infinitely recursive process. Indeed, I doubt that existing descriptions of “consciousness” are precise enough for such a question make sense.
Now, while consciousness is rather imprecisely defined and problematic to investigate (my provisional opinion – there might be limits to our capacity for self-modeling that render intellectual analysis of the very component that does intellectual analysis problematic), we already know a whole bunch of stuff about this subjective experience. We know that “self” can be manipulated to accept foreign independent constructs as part thereof, that body model can be both added to and subtracted from without surgical modification of the involved extremities, we know that self can be shut down to the point when one’s own actions become “third person” actions (depersonalization). There is no particular reason to believe that we will not learn more, at least, all arguments in favor of “fundamental” elusiveness of subjective states/qualia that I have, so far, encountered, seem to be rather sophistic and unconvincing.
The fact that so far we have not, with utmost precision, narrowed down what process makes “your experience” “yours” and what function (if any 🙂 ) such arrangement carries, does not mean that we will never do so. If anything, we already know how to make “you” perceive “your experience” as “not yours” (induce depersonalization), and that is a solid start 😉
@CoachPinhead again – I said I thought first person experience was recursive in a way that couldn’t be grounded on any last empirical or scientific fact (I called that “infinite”), not that consciousness was, though I think it probably is. As for the fact that depersonalization can be induced is interesting and may indeed shed some light on all this, but it goes the wrong way. The question isn’t how I may be brought to depersonalize something to which I once had a first person attitude, but what a first person attitude actually is. That’s the hard problem, and while there may be a solution, the arguments of Nagel and Davidson that nothing we mean be science can solve it seem a priori irrefutable. Unless of course you accept some idea à la Dennett that there’s no such thing as consciousness, i.e. that the problem isn’t hard at all but easy. But if it’s not easy (and I don’t think it is) it’s a priori impossible for science to solve.
That doesn’t mean that there will be no solution. It may be that we can’t think in the right ways to understand it. It may be that panpsychism is the solution (cf. Penrose), and that’s what we can’t think in the right ways to understand.
As for recursion in computers, etc., just to clarify my last: of course there is. (Just Google “recursion” for the neat easter egg.) What I meant is that cybernetic systems work through sometimes complex and many-leveled, sometimes recursive cascades towards equilibrium. That’s a kind of equilibrium impossible for consciousness (or let’s say self-consciousness, just to be clear). If (as Kant thought) there was a possible equilibrium to self-consciousness it’s not of what he called the empirical or scientific sort.
I am all for neuroscience and neuropsychology. I think the stuff it discovers is fascinating and I am against the dismissiveness of people like Jerry Fodor. But science can only hope to explain a deflationary version of first-person experience, and not what’s irreducible in that experience.
” I said I thought first person experience was recursive in a way that couldn’t be grounded on any last empirical or scientific fact (I called that “infinite”), not that consciousness was, though I think it probably is. ”
Okay, indeed I haphazardly conflated consciousness with “subjective first-person experience” (which was of course inaccurate of me – after all, people in depersonalized state are very much conscious and active).
Still, my point stands.
There is no particular reason to believe that first-person subjective experience is irreducible / immune to investigation (to the contrary, the very fact that we can pharmacologically suspend and reinstate this “first-person thingie” suggests otherwise).
Same about consciousness.
Yes both are kinda confusing and poorly understood. BUT.
But our understanding is now better than ever, and keeps improving.
” That’s the hard problem, and while there may be a solution, the arguments of Nagel and Davidson that nothing we mean be science can solve it seem a priori irrefutable.”
I’m not very familiar with Davidson, but Nagel’s account for “unfathomability” of subjective states strikes me as unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and exceedingly contrived.
His account of “first person experience” isn’t just about an experience that is subjective and first-person (after all, and I’ll get back to that later, a robot’s navigational and self-monitoring routines can be viewed, in my opinion, as perfectly credible examples of private first-person experiences, even though they are quite different so far from what we see in humans), his account of first-person subjective experience is one that pre-supposed (okay, more charitable interpretation might be “strongly implies”) free will and “true agency”.
Sorry, but I don’t see any particular reason to share his (implied) premise of a “free will” or “true agency” of any sort, and find that the very existence of chemicals that can shut down or reinstate first-person subjective states to be evidence of that 1) such states are not immune to empirical investigation 2) such states arise due to particular arrangement of chemical processes in the brain which can be chemically manipulated to the point of shutting the “first-person subjective” down.
Also, Nagel’s argument seems to be constructed in a manner that is neither falsifiable nor verifiable, but given that he’s not in the business of making a “scientific” claim, that’s neither here nor there (I also disagree with his assessment of bats, but that’s neither here nor there too 🙂 )
” Unless of course you accept some idea à la Dennett that there’s no such thing as consciousness, i.e. that the problem isn’t hard at all but easy. ”
Depends on what you include in your “consciousness”/”first person subjective” definition.
If it includes stuff like “free will” and “true agency”, then I am quite confident that such a consciousness / state does not exist.
If it does not… well, those depersonalization-inducing drugs are shutting down something, aren’t they 😀 ?
“As for recursion in computers, etc., just to clarify my last: of course there is. (Just Google “recursion” for the neat easter egg.) What I meant is that cybernetic systems work through sometimes complex and many-leveled, sometimes recursive cascades towards equilibrium.”
A fully functional desktop PC under use, or better yet, a roomba, would be examples of cybernetic systems that never reach such an equilibrium under normal operational conditions.
” That’s a kind of equilibrium impossible for consciousness (or let’s say self-consciousness, just to be clear). If (as Kant thought) there was a possible equilibrium to self-consciousness it’s not of what he called the empirical or scientific sort. ”
I am not convinced that a kind of equilibrium is at all unreachable with humans, it seems to me that, much like with roombas, it’s merely not part of “normal” operational envelope .
” But science can only hope to explain a deflationary version of first-person experience, and not what’s irreducible in that experience.”
Try as I might, I have a hard time imagining what exactly is irreducible about my subjective experience… but, like I said, I never thought I am anything other than an intricate biological machine.
This post, and the previous blog entry (that degenerated into some Vox bullshit about the world being a simulation) has prompted a re-read of Disciple of the Dog.
William Flesch wrote:
“I do think there can be a science of the irreducible, but not a reductive one”
I am pretty skeptical of this statement. Systems can only be explained with reference to their compositional parts and assuming some kind of cause-effect relationship at that lower level. Therefore, if you identify that something is ‘irreducible’, it immediately becomes immune to scientific scrutiny.
For example: if you want to understand an organism, you have to see how its organ systems allow it to maintain a steady state and allow reproduction. If you want to examine an ecosystem, you need to have an understanding of the major compositional taxa and their trophic relationships. If you want to understand why human being philosophize, you need to understand what it is about the way the brain is wired that leads to philosophizing.
I have yet to be convinced that anything other than a pure reductionist approach qualifies as science.
How do you know that systems can be explained only wrt their compositional parts? And how do you know what those parts are? Some systems, sure. But you have very little warrant to make this a blanket statement. Even by your own lights, you’d have to look at the compositional parts – that is every system – that go into making up the system of systems that you’re implicitly describing.
I’m not saying that what you’re saying is circular (though it might be: but that’s not my point); I’m saying that you don’t and can’t know the truth of what you claim.
And it seems unlikely anyhow, since no one has yet given the ghost of an explanation of how to build up first person experience from its compositional parts. As Nagel and Davidson and a host of others point out, an exhaustive scientific description of every person – every cell, and every atom of every person – in a room we were in couldn’t tell me a priori which one was having my first person experience and couldn’t tell you a priori which one was having yours.
Causality cannot go top down. It doesn’t work. Causality flows upwards from the small to the large. If there can be no reductive explanation of consciousness, then it is intractable to science and that’s that.
“As Nagel and Davidson and a host of others point out, an exhaustive scientific description of every person – every cell, and every atom of every person – in a room we were in couldn’t tell me a priori which one was having my first person experience and couldn’t tell you a priori which one was having yours.”
This is at the heart of the Hard Problem (why should any matter have experiences at all?), and the last bastion of intentional concepts against the scientific reductionism of everything. However, see Scott’s Blind Brain Theory for why the Explanatory Gap may not last forever.
As for what I can and can’t know… you are right. But I reserve the right to be skeptical that anything irreducible can be explained scientifically. In my view, science depends completely on reduction.
My own guess – the one that horrifies me to no end – is that once we finally get rid of all the ghosts, bracket all our intentional intuitions and traditional theoretical commitments to things like truth, representation, and normativity, the ‘irreducibility of the intentional’ will be shown to be an artifact of the informatic bottleneck that constrains attentional awareness (BBT).
Bracket the semantics, and it really is just a question of translating between different kinds of information-packets – different brands. What I find so interesting is the systematic nature of these translation difficulties, as well as the way they all feed into, as you say Jorge, the Hard Problem. To me, it seems very likely that the same short-circuit underwrites all these incompatibilities, only in different guises. (BBT is just one way of trying to get a grip on this short-circuit).
Once you do this, the notion of ‘reduction’ becomes moot. Information is information. The differences between the ‘causal cognitive family’ and the ‘intentional cognitive family’ can be charted, compared, etc. It’s not so much that the intentional is folded into the causal as the two will have been superceded by a more versatile idiom.
This is why Floridi’s book bummed me out: trying to pack the whole of information into the semantic box the way he does simply plants it within the very problem it should be able to solve – once, as I say, we give up the ghost, and do explicitly what so much science seems to do implicitly any way: adopt some kind of methodological nihilism.
“How do you know that systems can be explained only wrt their compositional parts?”
This is the most interesting part of the discussion for me. If I type the word “holism” here, will I be cast out? In all seriousness, the scientific method of understanding involves the reductions and separations required by humans so that our world can be comprehensible. The recognition of holism is that when those reductions and separations occur, something elemental to the object of study is completely obliterated.
The very act of scientific study appears caught in some version of composition fallacy, where it assumes that if it can be determined what all the pieces do, then we necessarily know what the whole system does. It very clearly gets things mostly correct, but then there are the anomalies and unintended consequences that arise when industries begin operating under scientific information whose ramifications can never be completely determined. For instance, I doubt that Henry Ford would have foreseen a need for traffic engineers or highway interchanges.
My skepticism of science is predominantly based on this one idea.
Thing is, Jonathan, that a) there appears to be no better-than-reductionist-science-and-engineering (in terms of pragmatic results) approach and b) science as a real-world institution does not make claims of being a Universal Prediction Engine (thus, the point regarding inability of predicting late-term remote consequences is moot, though I doubt that highway interchanges specifically would be unpredictable with Ford level of knowledge via scientific method)
“Thing is, Jonathan, that a) there appears to be no better-than-reductionist-science-and-engineering (in terms of pragmatic results) approach and b) science as a real-world institution does not make claims of being a Universal Prediction Engine”
Indeed. I believe humans to be innately scientific beings. There really doesn’t appear to be any better method for enabling understanding in a human brain. And while science doesn’t self-identify as being a UPE, if you will, civilized societies, industries, and the like appear to be more than comfortable identifying and using it as such.
Then, at some point, science is co-opted almost entirely by the technological manufacturing component of a society. This leads to the aforementioned science-enabling-technology-enabling-science feedback loop. When that occurs, science is no longer the innate discipline of humanity but a tool for production and “progress”.
Right now, my estimation is that we’ve set a goal for science that includes the revelation of every mystery. We believe that just asking a question and then applying the scientific method will open a gateway to The Truth, and all who understand the method will be equally privileged to receive it. We want to make a map of the universe so accurate that any person can find her way from ignorance to enlightenment simply by opening to the appropriate page and referring to the legend.
I don’t believe that any true scientist believes any of this about his discipline. But he is greatly outnumbered by the people in civilization who do, which I believe explains a great deal about our current quagmire regarding the fact that we are rapidly turning this world into a place that may no longer be able to support human life.
” Indeed. I believe humans to be innately scientific beings. There really doesn’t appear to be any better method for enabling understanding in a human brain. And while science doesn’t self-identify as being a UPE, if you will, civilized societies, industries, and the like appear to be more than comfortable identifying and using it as such. ”
No, they simply have no other tool. Other tools so far have failed to produce practically meaningful predictions reliably.
Seriously, what should industries rely upon, if not science ? Astrology ? Divination ?
The problem with “everything else” that “everything else” doesn’t get stuff done.
“Then, at some point, science is co-opted almost entirely by the technological manufacturing component of a society. This leads to the aforementioned science-enabling-technology-enabling-science feedback loop. When that occurs, science is no longer the innate discipline of humanity but a tool for production and “progress”. ”
I don’t see how “science begets science” is problematic. It’s not like science is “subverting” some kind of field that can be addressed – with better or at least comparable output of results – through nonscientific means.
For some reason (and no offense please), “science/engineering are OVERSTEPPING THEIR BOUNDS” arguments seem to be proposed by “Lovecraft County” inhabitants like our friend Vox.
” Right now, my estimation is that we’ve set a goal for science that includes the revelation of every mystery. ”
Well, there is certainly the THEORETICAL possibility that science might eventually pull that off.
Anyway, science has a better shot at “solving all them mysteries” than pretty much anything else (well, unless we discover magics or something :D)
” I don’t believe that any true scientist believes any of this about his discipline. But he is greatly outnumbered by the people in civilization who do, which I believe explains a great deal about our current quagmire regarding the fact that we are rapidly turning this world into a place that may no longer be able to support human life. ”
No offense, but at this point you start spiraling into some weird natural-luddite eschatology.
Oh boy. Well, natural Luddite is close, but anarcho-primitivist is closer. 😉
“Seriously, what should industries rely upon, if not science ? Astrology ? Divination ?”
I’m not so sure we should have industries at all. I’m saying that science is the best that we have and is marvelous at human scale, where the difficulties created by a reductionist approach are mitigated by size. When an industry picks up that scientific information and engorges it to industrial scale, all of a sudden your fuck-ups are gigantic and unmanageable. They may not have any other tool, but there is definitely the option to cease operation altogether, and I ultimately think that the situation is going to force that option upon us at some point anyway.
“I don’t see how “science begets science” is problematic. It’s not like science is “subverting” some kind of field that can be addressed”
I’m not going the conspiracy route here. I don’t think it makes sense to say that a discipline is overstepping its bounds, either. It’s not so much that science begetting science is problematic, since the discipline is question-based. Science is just science. It’s the way we do things for some reason. I don’t think we can really have a choice in the matter.
You kinda glossed over the part about science being co-opted by the technological manufacturing wing of society, and this is where I perceive the danger. At this point, most of what we manufacture and produce industrially isn’t at all necessary for healthy and happy people. In most cases the industrial production itself is responsible for the “problems” that industrial production seeks to “solve”. Hence the loop. Nobody needs a computer, a car, or a two thousand square foot house. These things ultimately end up as “necessary” only because we started to make them in the first place. What science as co-opted by industry is in the business of doing, then, is meeting an ever-increasing number of invented needs. This is a whole different subset of science from the type used by people in their everyday lives. I hope I’ve been more clear about this.
“Anyway, science has a better shot at “solving all them mysteries” than pretty much anything else (well, unless we discover magics or something 😀 ”
Well, here again, there’s the idea that solving all the mysteries is a foolish and impossible endeavor. Our notions of progress are based on an idea that solving them is not only possible, but “right”. There is the constant problem of trying to answer questions about a universe that is apparently always in flux. This issue goes far beyond my capacity to address, but I stab at it.
To address the natural Luddite thing again: at some point we’re going to need to come face-to-face with the fact that no matter what else we do, we need a planet that can support human life. Everything that has ever been done or will be done by humans requires a planet capable of this support. Industries and technology just don’t exist without a land base to support them. It is readily apparent that these two things are reducing the earth’s capability to support us. It’s a matter of sound judgement that you shouldn’t piss in the water you need for drinking. I’m not anti-technology, but I am definitely anti-stupid. 🙂
” Oh boy. Well, natural Luddite is close, but anarcho-primitivist is closer. “
Dude, looks like I’m gonna run into bigger “Hume fork” / “Lovecraft County” issues with you than with Vox (and that guy believes in honest to Cthulhu demons) 😉
” I’m not so sure we should have industries at all. I’m saying that science is the best that we have and is marvelous at human scale, where the difficulties created by a reductionist approach are mitigated by size. When an industry picks up that scientific information and engorges it to industrial scale, all of a sudden your fuck-ups are gigantic and unmanageable. They may not have any other tool, but there is definitely the option to cease operation altogether, and I ultimately think that the situation is going to force that option upon us at some point anyway. “
I am reasonably confident that you are posting this using products of industry from an industrially produced and maintained shelter while consuming industrially produced rations which were industrially monitored to not have any Immensely Horrible Parasites tucked inside. I am also reasonably confident that you have your immune system augmented via artificially constructed vaccines allowing you to remain unconcerned with such trivial and unimportant things as polio and whatnot.
Which renders suggestions of shutting down industry… severely ironic.
Having said that, I don’t see a reason why science can’t allow us to make our industrial processes reasonably sustainable, especially if sustainable is defined as “permitting further development of technological civilization” and not “preserving mother earth forever”.
” You kinda glossed over the part about science being co-opted by the technological manufacturing wing of society, and this is where I perceive the danger. “
I think that it’s a bit akin to saying that your stomach is “subverting” your gut by pushing the semi-digested matter further along for processing.
Technological and manufacturing components are so closely married to both science and society at large that distinction, let alone isolation, may seem problematic.
” Nobody needs a computer, a car, or a two thousand square foot house. “
Heeeeereeee weee go…
Excuse me, but could we please kindly refrain from telling other humans what they are universally supposed to need and want ?
I mean, I find it entirely plausible that you don’t need all those things, and that on a subjective level they are not part of your “ought”, but I would kindly suggest that it just so happens that it is a subjective affair of your experience that does not reliably extend to other people (who seem to be quite keen on procuring, enjoying, and in some rare cases even productively utilizing all that stuff)
” These things ultimately end up as “necessary” only because we started to make them in the first place. What science as co-opted by industry is in the business of doing, then, is meeting an ever-increasing number of invented needs. “
All needs above basic self-preservation are ultimately invented
And even basic self-preservation is more a matter of silly ancient wiring towards pain/damage avoidance than anything solemn and fundamental.
The very status of “human”, our self-awareness as we know it, are largely invented, constructed through education and social interaction.
Take a look at feral children – that’s pretty close to “non-invented” human (maybe as close as we can get), h. sapiens stripped down to basics, to core functions. And it’s remarkably violent, helpless and, might I endeavor to say, pathetic.
” Well, here again, there’s the idea that solving all the mysteries is a foolish and impossible endeavor. “
I doubt one can prove or disprove such a statement before trying.
Unless you happen to be an exalted being which tried and failed ;), we will just have to fence baseless assertions here.
” Our notions of progress are based on an idea that solving them is not only possible, but “right”. “
At this point I gotta recall that old fox Hume and his “Is/Ought” fork.
There is simply no way to reasonably decide what is “right” – I happen to be organized in a manner that sides with those who declare that ripping the secrets of the universe out of its hostile and ever-changing metaphorical heart is the right thing to do.
Unfortunately Hume suggests that there is no way to “prove” this to you. But then again he also suggests that you won’t be able to “prove” opposite to me. Cunning old man, that Hume 😉
” To address the natural Luddite thing again: at some point we’re going to need to come face-to-face with the fact that no matter what else we do, we need a planet that can support human life. Everything that has ever been done or will be done by humans requires a planet capable of this support. Industries and technology just don’t exist without a land base to support them. “
Or we could, you know, refine and improve the human to the point that other kinds of environment will be able to sustain us as well. Or reach a level of technological ability when we can build artificial offworld habitats (living at the bottom of a gravity well sucks for a variety of reasons – including the simple fact that large stuff tends to fall down such wells from time to time, so to say 😉 ). Or re-engineer the world to our spec.
Or a combination of all the above.
Given that we have already reforged our immune systems to resist diseases well above natural specifications, and that we have already extensively augmented our reasoning and perceptive capacities via things called “education”, I find nothing particularly implausible or outrageous about such a development.
After all, the flesh is a machine 😉
Of course, we need to survive long enough to grow strong enough to pull off such tricks, so it is wise to drink this planet slowly
“Dude, looks like I’m gonna run into bigger “Hume fork” / “Lovecraft County” issues with you than with Vox…”
Ha! Well, I never said I wasn’t nuts. But you at least got around to my point:
“I would kindly suggest that it just so happens that it is a subjective affair of your experience that does not reliably extend to other people.”
It’s incredibly subjective. Can any person help but be this way? I definitely do not believe “that ripping the secrets of the universe out of its hostile and ever-changing metaphorical heart is the right thing to do” and I can’t tell you that it’s wrong, either. I’m not saying this is the absolute truth, but rather The Truth According to Hontz. Everything that I type always has an implicit “I think” or “I believe” in front of it. I put in in front of all your stuff too. 😉
“I am reasonably confident that you are posting this using products of industry…”
I’m not meaning to be overly glib here, but I wasn’t exactly given a choice about this. It’s here, so I use it. If I didn’t use it, I don’t believe that it would change one damned thing that I see as harmful about its use. I could be living a zero-carbon life in a teepee using the skills of my ancestors, but none of it really makes much difference because it’s the sum total of all our actions that matter, not mine alone.
You also glossed over another point, which was that much of the disease and general nastiness that industry claims to be protecting us from was unknown before industries began operating. In parallel, uncivilized societies did not (do not) experience many of the diseases that are only allowed to grow when we begin to civilize. That’s a whole different can of worms, but at least humor me on the idea that perhaps ailments are caused by our own activities and not only cured by them. My personal experience is that we do at least as much harm as good, so it’s a crapshoot.
I’m also not suggesting that we shut down industry. I’m predicting that it won’t be able to continue since its very operation pretty much necessitates the degradation of those things that allow it to exist at all. We won’t have to shut it down. It will just fail. And considering the fact that its operation is an act of depletion and not one of regeneration, the idea that further technological development can ever be sustainable is an impossible one, in my mind.
“Of course, we need to survive long enough to grow strong enough to pull off such tricks, so it is wise to drink this planet slowly”
This is really the crux of our discussion, 01. You have every reason to believe that our technology and human ingenuity will be enough to allow us to pull off the tricks, and I am more pessimistic about this. I have a book full of reasons why I believe what I believe. We each just make our predictions using the best of our abilities, and in the end, something resembling one or the other will end up happening.
” It’s incredibly subjective. Can any person help but be this way? I definitely do not believe “that ripping the secrets of the universe out of its hostile and ever-changing metaphorical heart is the right thing to do” and I can’t tell you that it’s wrong, either. I’m not saying this is the absolute truth, but rather The Truth According to Hontz. Everything that I type always has an implicit “I think” or “I believe” in front of it. I put in in front of all your stuff too. “
Well, as long as you admit that when you say “people don’t need that” you’re actually speaking about yourself and maybe some specific people you know well enough, I’m fine.
“You also glossed over another point, which was that much of the disease and general nastiness that industry claims to be protecting us from was unknown before industries began operating. In parallel, uncivilized societies did not (do not) experience many of the diseases that are only allowed to grow when we begin to civilize. That’s a whole different can of worms, but at least humor me on the idea that perhaps ailments are caused by our own activities and not only cured by them. My personal experience is that we do at least as much harm as good, so it’s a crapshoot.”
Well, most infectious stuff was pretty at large long before industrial revolution, so it would be reasonable to blame on early agricultural societies 😉 not industrial ones.
The kind of “menaces” we’re experiencing now look frankly pathetic compared to what pre-industrial societies (the ones that were really “already fostering new wonderful diseases” but didn’t yet have power to investigate and address those issues) were facing.
I agree that we have made quite a few new diseases specific to post-industrial age (most of which mind you, are stuff that shows up because we live waaaay past our “evolutionarily established” operating time envelope) but it seems to me that we have fought and defeated an unspeakable array of shit that was running rampant before industrial revolution, and are now equipped well beyond precedent to wage a figurative war on anything that pops up, so while I admit that there *are* problems and diseases civilization spawned, it has IMHO done more good that you give it credit for, and is quite fit to fight whatever trouble it has unleashed.
” I’m also not suggesting that we shut down industry. I’m predicting that it won’t be able to continue since its very operation pretty much necessitates the degradation of those things that allow it to exist at all. We won’t have to shut it down. It will just fail. And considering the fact that its operation is an act of depletion and not one of regeneration, the idea that further technological development can ever be sustainable is an impossible one, in my mind. “
Even ignoring the fact that new technology is enabling more efficient exploitation of existing resources, this planet is far from the only resource-rich body in Sol, and we’re not that far from being able to tap into other astronomical bodies for sustenance (though it doesn’t make much economical sense till this rock is thoroughly depleted)
” This is really the crux of our discussion, 01. You have every reason to believe that our technology and human ingenuity will be enough to allow us to pull off the tricks, and I am more pessimistic about this. I have a book full of reasons why I believe what I believe. We each just make our predictions using the best of our abilities, and in the end, something resembling one or the other will end up happening.”
Yeah, time will tell, I think.
First a little bit of nitpicking. Causality as far as I understand, is a relation between events, and so it should go neither top down nor upward, it is not a relation between different descriptions of the same event. That some description at one level, implies the truth of a description at another level, is more logical or maybe semantical.
“If there can be no reductive explanation of consciousness, then it is intractable to science and that’s that.”
For me, one difficulty with the problem of consciousness is that until know it cannot even be posed in a clear way. Reduction might be a way to do that. But if the solution (or the dissolution) of the problem is possible, it might be of a completely different type. For example, by an analysis of the way we speak and how the problem arise, showing that what we saw as a problem is just bad grammatical or bad logic (This is the kind of approach Wittgenstein introduced in philosophy. Personally, I consider this approach as solving brilliantly other, less difficult, philosophical problems.). Such solutions (or elimination) of the problem would be non-reductionist.
We should not forget either that at least fundamental physic cannot be reductionist and is scientific. Therefore, reduction is not essential to the scientific method.
Exactly
You do see how much of an epistemological hardass this makes you Jorge!
This might sound paradoxical, but the thing I always try to remind myself is how little I understand my understanding, that experience is so ‘low resolution’ that it really is cartoons ALL the way down. This is where something like Dennett’s ‘stances’ becomes theoretically useful, I think.
So psychology and sociology are both obviously ‘sciences of the irreducible’ (note that my preference would be to simply swap ‘irreducible’ with ‘intentional’ and so remain intertheoretically agnostic) that make claims whose reliability ranges across the big fat gap between natural science and philosophy. Isn’t it really just consilience you’re talking about? ‘Cause-effect relationships’ just happen to be the big unexplained explainers that bind together a great deal of natural science in a manner that makes investors rich. Is the step down into fundamental physics any less precipituous than the step up to intentionality? Like I say, it seems much easier to stick to level of claims.
Just remember that Disciple likes to hide his baggie in dropped ceilings.
@endosymbiote
Science is used both to explain and to predict. I find your picture of explanations as proceeding by some kind of reduction compelling, but science in it predictive function might be completely non-explanatory and non-reductive. Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, postulated a force, described it and its effects and he was able to make predictions. It does not explain gravity in any way. So Newton made a science of something he couldn’t reduce, in accordance with W. Flesch’s “I do think there can be a science of the irreducible, but not a reductive one”.
I have to humbly disagree, endo, “Vox bullshit about the world being a simulation” was actually the most interesting part of that thread, since, combined with some evidence as to Vox’s somewhat concealed conviction of demonic interference provided by a kind third party it gives impressive insight into that particular person’s decision worldview. And the view of the world he has is what I call a “cool Lovecraft County”, it’s a place where Eldritch Magic and superhuman supernaturals are all around.
Of course, reducing the entirety of an interlocutor’s position to observations regarding his perceptions and the priors he is running with could be interpreted as a milder sort of bulverism, but I believe that understanding the extent and nature of radical experience divergence with an interlocutor is nonetheless very helpful.
Still reading the article on academia.edu in between thesis chapters, Scott. I’ve got comments I’ll make legible at some point, if you are interested.
Have you read any of Joyce’s stuff on moral naturalism? Or, maybe more interestingly, Kitcher’s stuff on science and democratic society?
Fire away when you’re ready!
As for Joyce or Kitcher, nope. Anything glaring I should look at in particular? I’m always looking for ways to streamline my ignorance…
I only know of Carver because of Cheever. What were you thinking?
Not sure myself, just thinking of some of short stories where little seems to happen. I suppose it could be a call to compassion, since most of his stories hit that place of being uncomfortable -possibly disgusted- with one’s self.
This just seems like an incredibly bold statement without examples to elucidate what you’re getting at:
“Even the most radical post-modern narratives cowtow to meaning in the end, an incipient (and insipid) humanism that falls out of their commitment to transcendental speculation (post-structuralism, social constructivism, etc.).”
For someone seeking to divorce himself from the language of religious rhetoric, many of these posts seem to jump – perhaps unconsciously – into bold and at times prophetic claims. 😉
that degenerated into some Vox bullshit about the world being a simulation
Whoah now. There was far greater bullshit in the last post, simulation-world was actually interesting.
Sorry, I mean in the comments of the last post, not trying to attack Roger who is a fellow Marvel true believer. Apologies!
Cool shit:
I think I’ve watched too much doctor who, given where my imagination goes…
I saw this on the Rachel Maddow Show last night and though it was awesome and just a little scary, too.
Posting too much, but I think it’s worth noting how fiction has a sort of scientific process of examination as well. If you think of cognitive science studies, how they put people in a situation where, for example, an instructor bullies them into apparently providing an electric shock. How many stories involve characters in certain scenarios, looking at how they react? Studying them? It’s not particularly rigorous (though the situations the characters are put in are far more problematic than ethics allow in scientific studies). But swirling amongst everything else, is a bit of scientific examination in there?
This is what Zola meant by “the experimental novel.” That’s a term that we now think of as meaning experiments in non-traditional literature. But when Zola wrote the essay of that title, and when he wrote his novels, his idea was to put more-or-less average people from a family with a collection of inherited traits in different configurations, under intense social pressures to see what they would do.
What’s weird, at first glance, is that he was the one making them do what they did, so how’s that an experiment? It’s not even what Wittgenstein called the film of an experiment (talking about mathematical proofs).
But I think the answer is that we have an extremely strong sense of verisimilitude based on our strong and accurate folk psychology or theory of mind. What Zola did was akin to what linguists do: testing formulations to see whether native informants accepted them as well-formed. We’re all native informants as inhabitants of the world (also, more narrowly, his audience were all native informants about French society), so when Zola makes characters with certain traits behave in certain ways under certain conditions, that’s analogous to his seeing what sentences sound right to him in his own language. (Like a thought experiment.) The check on that experiment is whether other competent observers agree: do we recognize his characters and their behavior as likely? (Compare: do we think his sentence is well-formed?)
Tangentially related, Vernor Vinge on the Singularity:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-vernor-vinge/
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