Alien Philosophy
by rsbakker
The highest species concept may be that of a terrestrial rational being; however, we shall not be able to name its character because we have no knowledge of non-terrestrial rational beings that would enable us to indicate their characteristic property and so to characterize this terrestrial being among rational beings in general. It seems, therefore, that the problem of indicating the character of the human species is absolutely insoluble, because the solution would have to be made through experience by means of the comparison of two species of rational being, but experience does not offer us this. (Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 225)
Are there alien philosophers orbiting some faraway star, opining in bursts of symbolically articulated smells, or parsing distinctions-without-differences via the clasp of neural genitalia? What would an alien philosophy look like? Do we have any reason to think we might find some of them recognizable? Do the Greys have their own version of Plato? Is there a little green Nietzsche describing little green armies of little green metaphors?
I: The Story Thus Far
A couple years back, I published a piece in Scientia Salon, “Back to Square One: Toward a Post-intentional Future,” that challenged the intentional realist to warrant their theoretical interpretations of the human. What is the nature of the data that drives their intentional accounts? What kind of metacognitive capacity can they bring to bear?
I asked these questions precisely because they cannot be answered. The intentionalist has next to no clue as to the nature, let alone the provenance, of their data, and even less inkling as to the metacognitive resources at their disposal. They have theories, of course, but it is the proliferation of theories that is precisely the problem. Make no mistake: the failure of their project, their consistent inability to formulate their explananda, let alone provide any decisive explanations, is the primary reason why cognitive science devolves so quickly into philosophy.
But if chronic theoretical underdetermination is the embarrassment of intentionalism, then theoretical silence has to be the embarrassment of eliminativism. If meaning realism offers too much in the way of theory—endless, interminable speculation—then meaning skepticism offers too little. Absent plausible alternatives, intentionalists naturally assume intrinsic intentionality is the only game in town. As a result, eliminativists who use intentional idioms are regularly accused of incoherence, of relying upon the very intentionality they’re claiming to eliminate. Of course eliminativists will be quick to point out the question-begging nature of this criticism: They need not posit an alternate theory of their own to dispute intentional theories of the human. But they find themselves in a dialectical quandary, nonetheless. In the absence of any real theory of meaning, they have no substantive way of actually contributing to the domain of the meaningful. And this is the real charge against the eliminativist, the complaint that any account of the human that cannot explain the experience of being human is barely worth the name. [1] Something has to explain intentional idioms and phenomena, their apparent power and peculiarity; If not intrinsic or original intentionality, then what?
My own project, however, pursues a very different brand of eliminativism. I started my philosophical career as an avowed intentionalist, a one-time Heideggerean and Wittgensteinian. For decades I genuinely thought philosophy had somehow stumbled into ‘Square Two.’ No matter what doubts I entertained regarding this or that intentional account, I was nevertheless certain that some intentional account had to be right. I was invested, and even though the ruthless elegance of eliminativism made me anxious, I took comfort in the standard shibboleths and rationalizations. Scientism! Positivism! All theoretical cognition presupposes lived life! Quality before quantity! Intentional domains require intentional yardsticks!
Then, in the course of writing a dissertation on fundamental ontology, I stumbled across a new, privative way of understanding the purported plenum of the first-person, a way of interpreting intentional idioms and phenomena that required no original meaning, no spooky functions or enigmatic emergences—nor any intentional stances for that matter. Blind Brain Theory begins with the assumption that theoretically motivated reflection upon experience co-opts neurobiological resources adapted to far different kinds of problems. As a co-option, we have no reason to assume that ‘experience’ (whatever it amounts to) yields what philosophical reflection requires to determine the nature of experience. Since the systems are adapted to discharge far different tasks, reflection has no means of determining scarcity and so generally presumes sufficiency. It cannot source the efficacy of rules so rules become the source. It cannot source temporal awareness so the now becomes the standing now. It cannot source decisions so decisions (the result of astronomically complicated winner-take-all processes) become ‘choices.’ The list goes on. From a small set of empirically modest claims, Blind Brain Theory provides what I think is the first comprehensive, systematic way to both eliminate and explain intentionality.
In other words, my reasons for becoming an eliminativist were abductive to begin with. I abandoned intentionalism, not because of its perpetual theoretical disarray (though this had always concerned me), but because I became convinced that eliminativism could actually do a better job explaining the domain of meaning. Where old school, ‘dogmatic eliminativists’ argue that meaning must be natural somehow, my own ‘critical eliminativism’ shows how. I remain horrified by this how, but then I also feel like a fool for ever thinking the issue would end any other way. If one takes mediocrity seriously, then we should expect that science will explode, rather than canonize our prescientific conceits, no matter how near or dear.
But how to show others? What could be more familiar, more entrenched than the intentional philosophical tradition? And what could be more disparate than eliminativism? To quote Dewey from Experience and Nature, “The greater the gap, the disparity, between what has become a familiar possession and the traits presented in new subject-matter, the greater is the burden imposed upon reflection” (Experience and Nature, ix). Since the use of exotic subject matters to shed light on familiar problems is as powerful a tool for philosophy as for my chosen profession, speculative fiction, I propose to consider the question of alien philosophy, or ‘xenophilosophy,’ as a way to ease the burden. What I want to show is how, reasoning from robust biological assumptions, one can plausibly claim that aliens—call them ‘Thespians’—would also suffer their own versions of our own (hitherto intractable) ‘problem of meaning.’ The degree to which this story is plausible, I will contend, is the degree to which critical eliminativism deserves serious consideration. It’s the parsimony of eliminativism that makes it so attractive. If one could combine this parsimony with a comprehensive explanation of intentionality, then eliminativism would very quickly cease to be a fringe opinion.
II: Aliens and Philosophy
Of course, the plausibility of humanoid aliens possessing any kind of philosophy requires the plausibility of humanoid aliens. In popular media, aliens are almost always exotic versions of ourselves, possessing their own exotic versions of the capacities and institutions we happen to have. This is no accident. Science fiction is always about the here and now—about recontextualizations of what we know. As a result, the aliens you tend to meet tend to seem suspiciously humanoid, psychologically if not physically. Spock always has some ‘mind’ with which to ‘meld’. To ask the question of alien philosophy, one might complain, is to buy into this conceit, which although flattering, is almost certainly not true.
And yet the environmental filtration of mutations on earth has produced innumerable examples of convergent evolution, different species evolving similar morphologies and functions, the same solutions to the same problems, using entirely different DNA. As you might imagine, however, the notion of interstellar convergence is a controversial one. [2] Supposing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is one thing—cognition is almost certainly integral to complex life elsewhere in the universe—but we know nothing about the kinds of possible biological intelligences nature permits. Short of actual contact with intelligent aliens, we have no way of gauging how far we can extrapolate from our case. [3] All too often, ignorance of alternatives dupes us into making ‘only game in town assumptions,’ so confusing mere possibility with necessity. But this debate need not worry us here. Perhaps the cluster of characteristics we identify with ‘humanoid’ expresses a high-probability recipe for evolving intelligence—perhaps not. Either way, our existence proves that our particular recipe is on file, that aliens we might describe as ‘humanoid’ are entirely possible.
So we have our humanoid aliens, at least as far as we need them here. But the question of what alien philosophy looks like also presupposes we know what human philosophy looks like. In “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” Wilfred Sellars defines the aim of philosophy as comprehending “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1). Philosophy famously attempts to comprehend the ‘big picture.’ The problem with this definition is that it overlooks the relationship between philosophy and ignorance, and so fails to distinguish philosophical inquiry from scientific or religious inquiry. Philosophy is invested in a specific kind of ‘big picture,’ one that acknowledges the theoretical/speculative nature of its claims, while remaining beyond the pale of scientific arbitration. Philosophy is better defined, then, as the attempt to comprehend how things in general hang together in general absent conclusive information.
All too often philosophy is understood in positive terms, either as an archive of theoretical claims, or as a capacity to ‘see beyond’ or ‘peer into.’ On this definition, however, philosophy characterizes a certain relationship to the unknown, one where inquiry eschews supernatural authority, and yet lacks the methodological, technical, and institutional resources of science. Philosophy is the attempt to theoretically explain in the absence of decisive warrant, to argue general claims that cannot, for whatever reason, be presently arbitrated. This is why questions serve as the basic organizing principles of the institution, the shared boughs from which various approaches branch and twig in endless disputation. Philosophy is where we ponder the general questions we cannot decisively answer, grapple with ignorances we cannot readily overcome.
III: Evolution and Ecology
A: Thespian Nature
It might seem innocuous enough defining philosophy in privative terms as the attempt to cognize in conditions of information scarcity, but it turns out to be crucial to our ability to make guesses regarding potential alien analogues. This is because it transforms the question of alien philosophy into a question of alien ignorance. If we can guess at the kinds of ignorance a biological intelligence would suffer, then we can guess at the kinds of questions they would ask, as well as the kinds of answers that might occur to them. And this, as it turns out, is perhaps not so difficult as one might suppose.
The reason is evolution. Thanks to evolution, we know that alien cognition would be bounded cognition, that it would consist of ‘good enough’ capacities adapted to multifarious environmental, reproductive impediments. Taking this ecological view of cognition, it turns out, allows us to make a good number of educated guesses. (And recall, plausibility is all that we’re aiming for here).
So for instance, we can assume tight symmetries between the sensory information accessed, the behavioural resources developed, and the impediments overcome. If gamma rays made no difference to their survival, they would not perceive them. Gamma rays, for Thespians, would be unknown unknowns, at least pending the development of alien science. The same can be said for evolution, planetary physics—pretty much any instance of theoretical cognition you can adduce. Evolution assures that cognitive expenditures, the ability to intuit this or that, will always be bound in some manner to some set of ancestral environments. Evolution means that information that makes no reproductive difference makes no biological difference.
An ecological view, in other words, allows us to naturalistically motivate something we might have been tempted to assume outright: original naivete. The possession of sensory and cognitive apparatuses comparable to our own means Thespians will possess a humanoid neglect structure, a pattern of ignorances they cannot even begin to question, that is, pending the development of philosophy. The Thespians would not simply be ignorant of the microscopic and macroscopic constituents and machinations explaining their environments, they would be oblivious to them. Like our own ancestors, they wouldn’t even know they didn’t know.
Theoretical knowledge is a cultural achievement. Our Thespians would have to learn the big picture details underwriting their immediate environments, undergo their own revolutions and paradigm shifts as they accumulate data and refine interpretations. We can expect them to possess an implicit grasp of local physics, for instance, but no explicit, theoretical understanding of physics in general. So Thespians, it seems safe to say, would have their own version of natural philosophy, a history of attempts to answer big picture questions about the nature of Nature in the absence of decisive data.
Not only can we say their nascent, natural theories will be underdetermined, we can also say something about the kinds of problems Thespians will face, and so something of the shape of their natural philosophy. For instance, needing only the capacity to cognize movement within inertial frames, we can suppose that planetary physics would escape them. Quite simply, without direct information regarding the movement of the ground, the Thespians would have no sense of the ground changing position. They would assume that their sky was moving, not their world. Their cosmological musings, in other words, would begin supposing ‘default geocentrism,’ an assumption that would only require rationalization once others, pondering the movement of the skies, began posing alternatives.
One need only read On the Heavens to appreciate how the availability of information can constrain a theoretical debate. Given the imprecision of the observational information at his disposal, for instance, Aristotle’s stellar parallax argument becomes well-nigh devastating. If the earth revolves around the sun, then surely such a drastic change in position would impact our observations of the stars, the same way driving into a city via two different routes changes our view of downtown. But Aristotle, of course, had no decisive way of fathoming the preposterous distances involved—nor did anyone, until Galileo turned his Dutch Spyglass to the sky. [4]
Aristotle, in other words, was victimized not so much by poor reasoning as by various perspectival illusions following from a neglect structure we can presume our Thespians share. And this warrants further guesses. Consider Aristotle’s claim that the heavens and the earth comprise two distinct ontological orders. Of course purity and circles rule the celestial, and of course grit and lines rule the terrestrial—that is, given the evidence of the naked eye from the surface of the earth. The farther away something is, the less information observation yields, the fewer distinctions we’re capable of making, the more uniform and unitary it is bound to seem—which is to say, the less earthly. An inability to map intuitive physical assumptions onto the movements of the firmament, meanwhile, simply makes those movements appear all the more exceptional. In terms of the information available, it seems safe to suppose our Thespians would at least face the temptation of Aristotle’s long-lived ontological distinction.
I say ‘temptation,’ because certainly any number of caveats can be raised here. Heliocentrism, for instance, is far more obvious in our polar latitudes (where the earth’s rotation is as plain as the summer sun in the sky), so there are observational variables that could have drastically impacted the debate even in our own case. Who knows? If it weren’t for the consistent failure of ancient heliocentric models to make correct predictions (the models assumed circular orbits), things could have gone differently in our own history. The problem of where the earth resides in the whole might have been short-lived.
But it would have been a problem all the same, simply because the motionlessness of the earth and the relative proximity of the heavens would have been our (erroneous) default assumptions. Bound cognition suggests our Thespians would find themselves in much the same situation. Their world would feel motionless. Their heavens would seem to consist of simpler stuff following different laws. Any Thespian arguing heliocentrism would have to explain these observations away, argue how they could be moving while standing still, how the physics of the ground belongs to the physics of the sky.
We can say this because, thanks to an ecological view, we can make plausible empirical guesses as to the kinds of information and capacities Thespians would have available. Not only can we predict what would have remained unknown unknowns for them, we can also predict what might be called ‘unknown half-knowns.’ Where unknown unknowns refer to things we can’t even question, unknown half-knowns refer to theoretical errors we cannot perceive simply because the information required to do so remains—you guessed it—unknown unknown.
Think of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The chained prisoners confuse the shadows for everything because, unable to move their heads from side to side, they just don’t ‘know any different.’ This is something we understand so intuitively we scarce ever pause to ponder it: the absence of information or cognitive capacity has positive cognitive consequences. Absent certain difference making differences, the ground will be cognized as motionless rather than moving, and celestial objects will be cognized as simples rather than complex entities in their own right. The ground might as well be motionless and the sky might as well be simple as far as evolution is concerned. Once again, distinctions that make no reproductive difference make no biological difference. Our lack of radio telescope eyes is no genetic or environmental fluke: such information simply wasn’t relevant to our survival.
This means that a propensity to theorize ‘ground/sky dualism’ is built into our biology. This is quite an incredible claim, if you think about it, but each step in our path has been fairly conservative, given that mere plausibility is our aim. We should expect Thespian cognition to be bounded cognition. We should expect them to assume the ground motionless, and the constituents of the sky simple. We can suppose this because we can suppose them to be ignorant of their ignorances, just as we were (and remain). Cognizing the ontological continuity of heaven and earth requires the proper data for the proper interpretation. Given a roughly convergent sensory predicament, it seems safe to say that aliens would be prone as we were to mistake differences in signal with differences in being and so have to discover the universality of nature the same as we did.
But if we can assume our Thespians—or at least some of them—would be prone to misinterpret their environments the way we did, what about themselves? For centuries now humanity has been revising and sharpening its understanding of the cosmos, to the point of drafting plausible theories regarding the first second of creation, and yet we remain every bit as stumped regarding ourselves as Aristotle. Is it fair to say that our Thespians would suffer the same millennial myopia?
Would they have their own version of our interminable philosophy of the soul?
Notes
[1] The eliminativism at issue here is meaning eliminativism, and not, as Stich, Churchland, and many others have advocated, psychological eliminativism. But where meaning eliminativism clearly entails psychological eliminativism, it is not at all obvious the psychological eliminativism entails meaning eliminativism. This was why Stich, found himself so perplexed by the implications of reference (see his, Deconstructing the Mind, especially Chapter 1). To assume that folk psychology is a mistaken theory is to assume that folk psychology is representational, something that is true or false of the world. The critical eliminativism espoused here suffers no such difficulty, but at the added cost of needing to explain meaning in general, and not simply commonsense human psychology.
[2] See Kathryn Denning’s excellent, “Social Evolution in Cosmic Context,” http://www.nss.org/resources/library/spacepolicy/Cosmos_and_Culture_NASA_SP4802.pdf
[3] Nicolas Rescher, for instance, makes hash of the time-honoured assumption that aliens would possess a science comparable to our own by cataloguing the myriad contingencies of the human institution. See Finitude, 28, or Unknowability, “Problems of Alien Cognition,” 21-39.
[4] Stellar parallax, on this planet at least, was not measured until 1838.
Three Pound Brain 
I think alterations of our sensory and cognitive systems may create vastly different theoretical pursuits. Perhaps a bad example but we knew there were multiple twinkling things in the sky even though such information made no biological difference. It seems like much of our information capacity and information inquiry may have that kind of tinge of arbitrariness to it. Much of our early scientific inquiry and information gathering came from rather arbitrary uses of our senses and the accident of the kinds of senses we had. In many ways our early information gathering was always only accidentally connected to our senses, our cognitive abilities and our desires. Intelligent creatures that arbitrarily could see really tiny objects, because their disease carrying lice were really small, may take a greater interest in theorizing cellular walls instead of stars from early on.
On the other hand, most of your (and others) speculations about knowledge development and limitation seem appropriate, such as the assumption that aliens will not know they are throttling through space, which seems difficult to know from early on. One idea to change the sky moving thesis is a species evolving on a body like our moon, say on the side that always face earth. I bet somebody in science fiction has written that up. (I don’t know if that is a common occurrence in moons, or if planetary development is screwed up by such.) That aliens would worry about the heavens from early on already assumes that they live outside and have strong visual and spatial modelling. I think there is reason to believe that such is likely the case, but it still relies on certain assumptions about how intelligent creatures develop.
On your last point, I think there is a case to be made that some arbitrary skill or some developmental quirk may make it so that creatures would have a significantly different relationship towards theorizing their own cognition. These things are difficult to think of but we can imagine creatures being selected for with much greater memories or very flat emotions, and that things like that should change self-cognizing to different degrees. Whether it makes sense to think hive creatures could create individual or collective intelligence, we could imagine intelligent creatures that are at least closer to that mold than our mammalian pack model. Or hell, maybe some aliens would still have earlier troubles of false beliefs about cognition, but if such creatures had simpler nervous systems their brain science would eventually click along faster. If you are right that many systems would bottleneck like humans trying to understand their own cognition, there is still reason to believe that those bottlenecks would look very different in different intelligent systems than what we are experiencing.
Again, difficult to imagine, but perhaps some aliens would simply not have these kinds of thoughts about their own cognition until very late in their information gathering. But maybe that would render those creatures non-conscious or only semi-intelligent up until that point.
Also, there is a history of philosophers criticizing different turns and fixations of western philosophy. If we can imagine a world without Kant, surely we can imagine creatures who have a much different relationship in what they consider problems in the first place or who have different initial theoretical postulations.
Some great observations, and an excellent demonstration of how the account I’m giving only covers a very narrow region of ‘alien philosophical possibility space.’ As Dennett always warns, philosophers have a bad habit of confusing the absence of alternatives with necessity, and there’s nothing necessary about anything in my account. My argument only requires empirical plausibility, but understanding the blizzard of alternatives is very important to understanding the larger stakes (which David alludes to below).
This is beautiful but also very clear, Scott. It seems to me that you are developing a highly general, ontologically minimalist argument for the falsity of intentionalism here. It’s also works as a powerful argument for unbounded posthumanism.
Well, this is only part one, so I might let you down yet! But you’re right about how it does double duty vis a vis the problem of the posthuman, and why I keep saying it represents the ‘death of meaning.’ Absent the ancestral straightjacket of biology, sapience becomes as hard to fathom as sentience.
There’s a line in today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that I thought you’d like. “My brain is too complex for my brain to understand?”. The consensus is starting to turn.
Aww, he ripped off my ‘We are not complex enough to grasp how complex we are’ line, totes!
This is the age of the internet, Callan. No one owns ideas anymore, save by dint of luck or capital.
Such finger wag – I thought my post was playful? I said totes! Besides, one could say if we were in the desert that slowly dying of thirst is how it is. And?
I’m seeing ‘BBT-isms’ everywhere lately, myself (most recently, watching Humans last night). I like to think I’m partly responsible, but I like the idea of popular culture doing an end run around the academic establishment even more!
Apropos of the TPB in general, SMBC strikes again!
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3824
Priceless.
Oh, going to add that speculative posthumanism seems a special case of xenophilosophy. Something that you’ve been pointing out for a while….
Either that, or both are moored to a thoroughly biological understanding of human cognition, which is really all that I’m offering here. It’s hard to reckon what comes next short of knowing where you are.
yep i don’t see what “a thoroughly biological understanding of human cognition” leaves out that is worth saving
But then, the ‘worth saving’ is for posterity to decide, or at least it was, once upon a time.
fair enough, but can we leave it to them or must we worry that virtual-bone?
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
Cool. The piece is starting to get some serious traffic.
RSB, my email was updated on me and erased yer @ so if you get a chance drop me a line, thanks
on my to do list;
viruses alive?
http://www.radiolab.org/story/shrink/
Great grist for a short story about a peevish software engineer actually turning into a virus!
I liked how they fucked with the expected (and so for years weren’t seen/grasped) definitions/practices/etc, I tried to bring these aspects of reality/scientific-exploration up in the philpercs discussion of roden’s book but couldn’t hack thru the philo
defense-mechanisms/biases. maybe showing is better than saying in these cases?
Well, I decided to give it a whack with Jon, see what comes up.
All in all, I think they’ve been disabused (via the strength of PL) of the notion that we fit in the tidy little coffins they’ve arranged for us, like ‘bald naturalist’ or ‘greedy reductionist’ or what have you.
it’s yer forehead my friend, pound away.
[…] latest, beginning with one of the greatest uses of a Kant citation I have ever seen, is as relentlessly […]
“Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.” – Aristophanes
Oh, by the Scott, take a gander at my new ongoing work-in-progress. The begging of my Consilience Trilogy: http://darkecologies.com/2015/08/10/the-consilience-work-in-progress/
Been toying with the BBT and Roden’s posthuman perspectives and its ramifications for SF. Going to take time off from blogging soon and finish the second revision on this beast. 🙂
…scanning for Inchoroi references…
Well, technically speaking, everything is a an Inchoroi reference…
😉
Speaking of which, any word on TUC? We’re afraid that Overlook might have just been placating us so we’d stop bothering them.
I’m starting to loose what little of my mind I have left, dissecting minutiae in the books we have…
An attempt to regiment the profusion of post-human verbiage via profuse verbiage.
heh. What do you think you show up as? 🙂
“But I make sense!”
Also an endless appeal to ingroup affiliations. Does she make any arguments at any point? Where should I be looking?
oh man sorry my old computer is not cooperating, was trying to share this reza, the best part of the conference tape is the still of the panel video with pete w. rubbing his eyes w/ a pained expression while rosi’s on the mike:
should note that reza and peter wolfendale and co. are also wrong about these matters but wrong in ways that spell out the possibilities (and so the limits) of waxing philosophical (they all should read St.Turner for starts).
lets take her favored word: affect. affective computing is a real field. they dont take the body seriously? isnt that the whole point of alex pentlands work: you can look at the structured patterns of embodied interactions alone and draw rich inferences from that data? the divide she is thinking of is there, but its lopsided. we can at least find roboticists and computer interaction design people reading material in phenomenology. i dont think we can find many critical antihumanists taking a look at whats up in robotics.
That is all. Sorry for being long winded.
[…] novelist and philosopher R. Scott Bakker recently put out a mind blowing essay on the philosophy of extraterrestrials, which isn’t as Area 51 as such a topic might seem at […]
So I’ve been trying on and off to get the gist of BBT for some time now, learning about it first some time ago on Conscious Entities.
In particular, it seems to address my stock criticism of most eliminativist theories: just because you say something doesn’t exist doesn’t free you from given an account of its appearance. In fact, it often seems to me that most eliminativist stories I can come up with end up not being quite as eliminativist, once this point is addressed—picture an hand-eliminativist, who holds that there are no such things as hands in this world, and that thus, everybody who talks about grasping, handling, throwing things and so on—who uses the manual idiom—is ultimately misguided.
To that person, it seems to me one could well reply, well, but whethere there are hands or not, there is at least the appearance of grasping, handling, throwing; and of these appearances, the hand-eliminativist, in order to make any sense at all, must give an account. Of course, in this case, we can readily imagine what such an account would be like—it could be, for instance, in terms of muscle contractions, sinew flexings, and bone movements; it could also be in terms of intercellular communications, nerve cells firing, muscle cells contracting, and so on; and finally, it could be in terms of elementary particles, quantum fields, strings or whatever else one takes the fundamental constituents of the world to be.
And upon providing such a story, the hand eliminativist might take his mission to be accomplished—he’s shown how to give an account of grasping, handling, throwing without the mention of anything that could recognizably said to be a hand.
But ultimately, such a story can be told about anything that is not part of some as yet hypothetical fundamental ontology—barring some forms of strong metaphysical emergentism, it seems almost trivial that most everyday objects (and their properties) can be analyzed into their components (and their properties). But is pointing this out really eliminativist? Could not, say, the hand realist merely point out that this assembly of bones, muscles and sinews, that particular lump of cells, this configuration of quantum fields simply is what they call a hand?
Abhidharma buddhism made that move with regards to some thing’s ‘ultimate reality’ versus its ‘conceptual reality’ a long time ago—there is no cart over and above the wheels, axle, and so on, but it is conceptually useful to call a particular configuration of such parts a cart, knowing full well that the concept of cart can in the last consequence be analyzed into an (unwieldily long) description entirely in terms of whatever one considers to be ultimately real, be it dharmas or quantum fields.
So that’s my general problem with most eliminativist accounts: they ultimately only eliminate a conception of intentionality (or hands) that sees it as among the fundamental features of reality; but it’s not clear to me that this is really the point of view taken by most self-described intentional realists.
Anyway, so much for my preconceptions. What I’m interested in is an explanation of intentionality—whether it’s one given by an intentional realist, or one in terms of explaining merely the appearance of intentionality as you seem to aim to do with your ‘critical eliminativism’ doesn’t seem to matter too much (in fact, I’m not even sure these are different problems). I’m not sure I see yet how you propose this explanation might look like, but then again, this is only part one. But I’ve got a few questions/quibbles:
You say that “evolution means that information that makes no reproductive difference makes no biological difference”. But I’m not sure this is really right, if taken literally: not everything about an organism is dictated by some sort of reproductive determinism; in fact, some traits may ultimately be accidents that do not confer a reproductive advantage either way, and instead became prevalent merely due to genetic drift. Natural selection is not the only factor in determining an organism’s genetic makeup; there are also reproduction-neutral factors.
So it seems entirely possible to me that there could be information available to an organism variant A that is not available to variant B, without impacting differential fitness—say, via something like tetrachromatism, where variant A has four distinct rod types in their retina instead of variant B’s three, allowing a greater ability for distinguishing colours. If this does not impact the reproductive fitness of either variant, A might nevertheless become dominant via simple genetic drift, while an A-organism’s capacity to discern more colours does not have an explanation in simple terms of natural selection. So I think you’re overstating your case a bit here.
I’m also not quite on board with your second bolded claim, that “a propensity to theorize ‘ground/sky dualism’ is built into our biology”. You’re certainly right to argue that an alien humanoid species could plausibly come to the same conclusions regarding these issues as Aristotle did—this is borne out by the simple fact that Aristotle indeed did reach these conclusions. But I think that in arguing that the propensity to reach these conclusions is due to our biology you’re overreaching—our biology certainly allows those conclusions, but it’s entirely plausible—likely, I would say—that Aristotle’s views becoming ‘mainstream’ (at least in large parts of the western world) is more due to historical accident than biology.
I think two lines of evidence support this: first of all, that the ground/sky dichotomy does not seem universal across cultures; and second, that even within his own culture, alternatives to Aristotle’s views existed.
With the latter, I mainly mean the model of Aristarchus of Samos, who was a near-contemporary of Aristotle, but who placed the Sun at the center of his cosmology, with the Earth orbiting it; he was inspired by Philolaus, who predates Aristotle, and who likewise held the Earth to be in constant motion around some ‘central fire’. Since these two, and others like them, evidently shared Aristotle’s biology (and even much of his cultural and social background), and nevertheless came to radically different conclusions, I’m not sure how far one can really assert that Aristotle’s conclusions were in some sense simply due to human biology.
In fact, and this brings me to the first point, it seems to me that most early models of the world are mythopoetic, rather than (in the broadest sense) empirical in origin, and thus, biology factors into them only in far less obvious ways: rather than a ground/sky dualism, for instance, Buddhist cosmology features an infinite ‘stack’ of worlds (although it’s not clear to me whether this isn’t really more of a metaphoric vertical dimension, in the same sence that one could distinguish ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions in two-dimensional semantics); Islamic thought features a dichotomy rather between an unseen world and a world accessible to the senses; etc. I can’t offhand recall any other example of such a strict dichotomy as the Aristotelian one, in fact (but I’m also largely ignorant on these issues).
It’s really only with the advent of at least some form of methodology that we get a view of the world that is not dominantly mthopoetic (although even today, those origins can still be discerned very clearly); and the role of biology there continues to be more and more diminished. Certainly, we can build theories only from what we observe, and to some extent, what we observe will always be dictated by the sort of creatures we are; but, and this brings me to my final quibble, we can ensure that the observations made in this vein are always ever-closer approximations to that which is the case.
This final point is that you claim that “the absence of information or cognitive capacity has positive cognitive consequences”. I’m not sure (if I understand you correctly) that that’s right. Absence of information regarding the roundness of the Earth may lead to thinking it is flat, but this is not, as I would use the term, a positive fact—it is merely the closest approximation to the truth, given the data. And within the accuracy of that data, it is entirely right: given length scales of a few kilometers, the Earth is indeed flat; it is only once one extends this scale that deviations from flatness become observable.
A new positive consequence, as I would understand it, would be inferring something that is in fact not the case—such as concluding from the data (which can’t adjudicate between flatness, roundness, or other shapes on large enough scales) that in fact the Earth is a cube. But this would simply be wrong, and moreover, not something that (given the data) we are licenced to conclude.
So to me, ignorance cannot produce positive cognitive consequences—it means the existence of a large number of hypotheses which can’t be excluded, and new information means excluding more of these hypotheses; but it can’t mean singling out one of these hypotheses at the expense of the others.
On to part 2!
I’m not sure what to make of your dismissal of eliminativism, Jochen, since it clearly is the case that the posits used in theory formation impact the interpretation of data.
As for the qualifications regarding the role played by the physical and biological facts, I’m just not sure how they obviate the claim that ‘a propensity to theorize ground/sky dualism is built into our biology,’ which is actually quite weak. The point of the piece is simply show the abductive power of BBT, the fact that adopting it as a perspective allows you to make sense of a great number of otherwise perplexing things. Death by a thousand qualifications just doesn’t haul water here. Short of providing a more parsimonious, more comprehensive natural account of meaning, you need to explain why heuristic neglect is not something of philosophical concern or not at all how I describe.
When you say that ‘the posits used in theory formation impact the interpretation of the data’, do you mean that only using the correct assumption—by which I take you to mean eliminativism—we could hope to find an appropriate theory?
If so, then this is exactly what’s not clear to me: what theory could an eliminativist propose that a realist could not simply adopt as their own, as being a theory of the inner workings of the phenomenon of intentionality, which does not in any way lead to a loss of the phenomenon’s reality? And if that is so, then how could it matter whether one is an eliminativist or a realist at the outset, if both accept the same theories?
The thing is, I think, that certain mental phenomena like intentionality are wholly composed by their way of seeming. Like e.g. pain, there’s nothing more to intentionality than its appearance within experience (at least as far as the explananda are concerned). What could an eliminativist about pain really offer the realist but something that ends with “…and that’s how those phenoma that you naively considered to be ‘painful’ come to seem the way they do”? And what then is the realist to say but “congratulations, you’ve just explained how pain works”?
It’s different with powers we merely infer our brains to have, like for instance free will: while it’s true that our actions seem free to us, there is more to them than their seeming. There, I can easily see what an eliminativist account unacceptable to a realist looks like—it is one in which, despite appearances, it is not actually the case that we ‘could have done otherwise’ in the same situation.
But how is such an account to work like in the case of intentionality? To be explained is the appearance within our experience of states of mind being about things other than themselves; the eliminativist can’t go and deny this appearance, he must account for it, as you seem well to realize. But whether you give an account of this appearance and call yourself an eliminativist, or give an account of it and call yourself a realist, seems to be a distinction in verbiage only to me—I’d certainly be happy with both accounts.
Regarding the claim that a propensity towards a ground/sky dichotomy is built into our biology, well, the way I understand it, you could either be making the trivial observation that since we in fact did come up with this dichotomy, our biology must allow us to come up with it; or, you could be arguing for the stronger claim that given our biology, our coming up with this dichotomy was either inevitable or considerably more likely than if we had had a different set of biological characteristics—that is, that our biology is in some way at least a contributing cause of coming up with such a model. The first option, I think, is wholly uninteresting, and I don’t believe you’d waste so many words on it; but the second option, I don’t think you’ve yet made a sufficient argument for.
The reason for this is quite simply that many cultures and many individuals, despite sharing the biology of Aristotle and the general situation within the solar system of the ancient Greeks, did in fact not come up with such a dichotomy, and that thus, it’s not clear to me whether we really have such a biological propensity of coming up with it, any more than for coming up with any of the other world models that have been proposed. But if that’s the case, then it’s ultimately really only our physical situatedness that’s responsible for our model building (intelligent interstellar space amoeba would conceivably come up with quite different models).
But then my larger point obtains: we simply approximate to the truth within the limits dictated by our physical constraints; but this, then, is not a process capable of generating additional positive but erroneous beliefs about the world. That the world is flat is not an erroneous belief; it is, in fact, true within the accuracy of the data as can be gathered by the unaided senses, since the deviation from flatness only becomes observable at larger scales (using, for instance, the method of shadows, as Eratosthenes did).
This then makes me skeptical about the claim that we could somehow generate intentionality out of ignorance—by analogy, it should rather be the case that intentionality is an approximation to the truth as accessible to us given the data we are privvy to. But of course, I’m getting ahead of myself—I should really try and digest the second part of your explanations first.
I’m saying cognitive science needs to abandon intentional posits if it wants to understand intentional idioms and cognition. ‘Beliefs,’ ‘desires,’ and so on need to be understood as heuristic ways to communicate what’s going on, not as what’s going on. Blind brain theory explains apparently intrinsic intentional phenomena as artifacts of metacognitive neglect, as chimerical, and the vast philosophical swamp that grown around it as a paradigmatic example of ‘crash space,’ a domain characterized by the systematic misapplication of cognitive tools to problems they have no hope of solving. There is no ‘intentionality to generate out of nothing’ on my account because there is no intrinsic intentionality.
As for Thespians, as I explicitly say in the post, they are simply a way to exhibit the abductive power of blind brain theory. I don’t see how that counts as trivial.
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Great blog. I’ve been looking for what philosophy has to say about the possibility of intelligent life. However, I think you are operating on somewhat of a reductive paradigm. I like your integration of an ecological paradigm into the development of consciousness, but I don’t believe its “built into our DNA” to be geocentric. In fact, anthropologically speaking, we find evidence much more elaborate cosmologies that don’t put the earth at the center of the universe. I don’t think you should take the history of Western philosophy and generalize to the human species. In fact, I think the conclusions that you draw about human nature in general, about explaining the nature of human experience through that metaphor, is just that- a metaphor. I think it is only possible to speculate about the development of an entirely alien rational consciousness. You assume they follow the same laws of development as our own. Even if they are biological beings like ourselves, the capacity for abstract thought you give a timeline I find problematic. However, I think the idea of neglect structures is an apt metaphor. It has not been a cultural value to care about life on other worlds. But I don’t think you should generalize to the whole of humanity and mistake lack of interest for lack of knowledge