On the Inapplicability of Philosophy to the Future
by rsbakker
By way of continuing the excellent conversation started in Lingering: The problem is that we evolved to be targeted, shallow information consumers in unified, deep information environments. As targeted, shallow information consumers we require two things: 1) certain kinds of information hygiene, and 2) certain kinds of background invariance. (1) is already in a state of free-fall, I think, and (2) is on the technological cusp. I don’t see any plausible way of reversing the degradation of either ecological condition, so I see the prospects for traditional philosophical discourses only diminishing. The only way forward that I can see is just being honest to the preposterous enormity of the problem. The thought that rebranding old tools that never delivered back when (1) and (2) were only beginning to erode will suffice now that they are beginning to collapse strikes me as implausible.
I got a good feeling about 2016.
So much so that it fills me with dread.
Happy New Years, all!
Who said philosophy is meant to apply to anything? What’s the use of revealing mystery and darkness? Thinking that philosophy is supposed to be somehow practical is as old a misunderstanding as the discipline itself. Old and boring misconception.
edify us with the refined understanding
Well, I have been up to my eyeballs in the stuff for more than three decades now, and I’ve never encountered the sentiment that philosophy applies to nothing uttered by any philosopher I’ve encountered. The ancient skeptics certainly thought as much, but then I see my project as extending their insights with cognitive science. I fear I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I think the Socratic lesson that goes back to Plato is precisely that philosophy is counterproductive and thus impractical, because the questioning of delusory social conventions, including religious ones, is subversive and dangerous.
Is this what you were getting at?
Sorry, I forgot to add that I was directing that question to Axl Barnes.
I’ll have a crack at a grim dark perspective – if philosophy hovers around the black boxes of the universe, what if the sense that philosophy is done with is simply an artifact of us thinking philosophy is somehow innate to us or is tied to us…a sense it has to be tied to us? What if, instead, philosophy has moved on – humans becoming about as philosophically relevant as chimpanzees are philosophically relevant. It’s not that philosophy is ceasing to be – it’s just discarding us? But our conceit makes us think our lover is dying/dead?
It struck me after thinking about where is the science of science – and what happens if it does start reflecting on itself? Hopefully Bakkerfans cobbles together ‘the thinker’ statue and a skynet terminator and posts it at this point! 🙂
The thought that rebranding old tools that never delivered back when (1) and (2) were only beginning to erode will suffice now that they are beginning to collapse strikes me as implausible.
I think I got scolded on reddit recently for using sentence structure like that! lol 🙂
Intentional philosophy… which happens to include the whole of traditional philosophy. Philosophy qua bull-shit speculation will never die, at least not so long as I have a blog and a shovel!
I think I may have actually knocked you over to the optimist role, Scott! Or the less pessimistic role, anyway. I mean, if science that conducts science on scientific effect is the man outside the cage and we are the chimp inside the cage, which is more relevant to speculative philosophy?
Scott,
I agree that we evolved to understand little of nature. Our social and maybe even biological functioning depends on our submitting to various delusions, including delusions about the nature of the self. If your point is just that science is providing us with far too much information so that we can expect not a cultural transformation, but more likely a collapse, that science thus amounts to a self-destructive mutation, I can agree. So far there’s no value judgment and specifically no thumbing of the nose at philosophy.
The mockery of philosophy for being useless and muddled and futile makes sense, I think, only next to some praise of science; for example, “philosophy is weak compared to how strong science is” or “philosophy is bullshit and it goes nowhere, whereas science clearly progresses.”
But these value judgments are inconsistent with the above observations about how we function well only when we have shallow access to environmental info. If science is pushing us to the brink of disaster on many fronts, isn’t it in bad taste to side with the cancer in our midst, to pile on against the victims of “scientific progress,” namely against philosophy and religion which look foolish next to science, but only when we take the liberal’s short term view?
Science looks like it’s progressing, but this is debatable. Scientists reach consensus, but do you know who else reaches consensus? The bureaucrats and clones and psychopaths who make up The Empire in the Star Wars universe. They’re all on the same page, they’ve got enormous technical know-how and godlike power–but they represent a cancer in the Galaxy. They’re anti-life and their technoscientific “progress” is just a precondition for extinguishing everything that’s been so assiduously mapped out. Divide and conquer indeed.
So it strikes me as unseemly to point out that we thrive when we’re deluded or preoccupied with myths and other fictions, and then to cheer on that which erodes our capacity to trust in any myth. Merely describing our dire situation is one thing, but betraying boredom or disgust with a rich source of criticism of how we’re handling that situation is something else.
I’m also disgusted with philosophy, religion, and art, but my criticisms are measured. I’m offended when these unscientific discourses don’t go far enough, such as when they’re all-too exoteric.
“But these value judgments are inconsistent with the above observations about how we function well only when we have shallow access to environmental info. If science is pushing us to the brink of disaster on many fronts, isn’t it in bad taste to side with the cancer in our midst, to pile on against the victims of “scientific progress,” namely against philosophy and religion which look foolish next to science, but only when we take the liberal’s short term view?”
If we were duping ourselves we were duping ourselves. I just don’t understand the apologia. Given the way evolution splits audiences, I think it’s safe to assume the bulk of the world will allow their conceits to carry the day. Meanwhile, someone needs to take an honest whack at these things, to consider the worst case scenario. Science is telling us what we are at finer and finer grains of resolution (manipulation)–if the solution doesn’t consist in seeing its logic through, if there’s no way to re-regiment our self-understanding in high-dimensional terms, then I fear there is no solution at all. (We are actively re-engineering ourselves and our environments in high-dimensional terms, after all). I dunno, Ben. I think ‘follow the information’ is obviously the more reliable strategy when it comes solving real world problems, which this is in spades. Science, unlike philosophy, is predicated on the accumulation of information.
As for ‘eroding trust in myths’–you had me squinting with this one! The myths are adapted to ecologies that no longer exist. The myths are what’s going to get us killed.
The accumulation of information begets the accumulation of solutions begets the accumulation of power. Some people call this ‘progress’ because they have a cartoon understanding of what ‘power’ means in this context. We are natural through and through means we are ecological through and through means that the ‘good’ pertaining to the accumulation of power is always going to be situational, insofar as being ecological entails dependence on systemic invariances, and more power means more variance.
But you seem to be suggesting the problematic nature of ‘progress’ discredits science as a reliable source of theoretical cognition. It really is simple.
Science is the most reliable source of theoretical cognition in human history.
Scott and Ben are not reliable sources of theoretical cognition.
You keep trying to reframe this platitudinous observation in ways the siphon reliability from science to you. I would distrust this instinct if I were you. We are, as a matter of empirical fact, wired for self-advocacy, not accuracy.
Personally I see value in Ben’s preservation of myths – how is it any different than when we try to preserve the habitat of apes or pandas or any other creature that civilization (driven by science) is destroying.
On the other hand he seems at the far end of the spectrum in advocating utter trust in myths.
But maybe at the other end of the spectrum – the myths that are going to get us killed? The myths…we are, to a large part? The panda is part of it’s environment, it’s not detachable. You can’t just preserve it and discard it’s environment at the same time. Are we really detachable from our myths? Or is that some academic ideal to ‘see through it all’? An ideal bent on the notion that that is possible and it’s just a matter of doing it that is the only part that requires thinking?
Seems you’re both at extreme ends of a spectrum? Anyway *ding, ding!*, back to it, lads! 🙂
“follow the information” not sure information is the issue as much as know-how, but than I’m not sure that there is any such thing as “information” to begin with…
Callan,
Of course I’m not saying we should trust all myths or just any myth. I am saying that we do all trust in some myth, since myth accompanies our deepest values. So I’m agreeing with Hume and Niezsche and even St Paul when they speak of our irrational side. Even liberals and new atheists who think they’re ultra-rational and mythless should think again. The Western monoculture is swimming in myths, such as those that originate in Hollywood, mass media, and government double talk.
That’s the descriptive point. The prescriptive one is also Nietzsche’s and Joseph Campbell’s, which is that it would be sweet if we had myths that fit our zeitgeist and that appealed to both our irrational and rational sides.
Scott,
It’s more likely that the social split will develop into something like that between the Morlocks and the Eloi, between the sociopathic power elites who manipulate information in higher dimensions, and their domesticated herd of cattle and pets who are fattened and led to the slaughter.
‘”Follow the information,” is obviously the reliable strategy when it comes to solving real world problems,’ you say. But here you’re either changing the topic or you’re assuming that all real world problems can be posed as How questions, in which case Should/Ought and Why questions are illusory, superficial or unrealistic. (In fact, the biological discourse of ecologies defines “problems” in terms of evolutionary functions, which are quasi-normative. Whether biology eliminates the notion of the good would be controversial, because biologists haven’t fully reckoned with the deistic metaphors swirling around their discourse.)
Anyway, it just so happens that science is reliable only when it comes to answering How questions, as in “How do rainbows work?” And as you say, science provides more options in the ecological context, by empowering us with know-how. But what of the matter of choosing wisely between the options? What of the creative vision to see new options to which most people have been blind? Is “Follow the info” a reliable strategy for solving the problem of organizing society to make life fulfilling?
I suppose your injunction might be consistent with libertarianism. A pro-science society would be open to acquiring new information, so I’d expect it to enshrine the freedom of speech. But does this mean all information should be made available to everyone? Should secrets be permitted? Should the government or corporations be allowed to hide information pertaining to their wrongdoing or that threatens public welfare, such as indications that all Why and Ought questions are nonsensical, entailing that we’re all absurd machines faced with the horror of having no intelligent designer? Again, science can model the options; for example, historians can tell us what happens to societies that keep many or no secrets. But how will science be able to conclude which option is best?
In fact, that question wouldn’t even arise in a world filled only with information and with science-centred individuals who affirm that ontology. Applied science could lay out the possible “variances” or technologies that could intervene in the wild ecology, and those social sectors driven by different interests would then argue mechanically about which one to apply, but there would be no right answer. Even a math problem can have more than one solution. Multiple solutions to problems can have different side effects.
Indeed, I’m suggesting that science itself may have the side effect of ending all life in the long term. That may be the doom awaiting us as we take the march of progress. I didn’t imply that science is an unreliable source of theoretical cognition. Instead, I said that unlimited theoretical cognition may ultimately be bad for our health.
You say myths are all obsolete. Not so, since Hollywood has largely replaced the major religions as the purveyor of myths in secular society. Indeed, cog sci studies of our innate irrationality, of our penchant for fallacies, show why we often prefer myths to accurate information. Thus, even scientists succumb to magical thinking. For example, they likely buy into romantic myths about love. If they’re info-loving libertarians, they’ll likely believe in the American Dream or they’ll declare that Information Wants to be Free. (Compare the Old Testament notion that the blood fallen from the righteous cries out to be avenged.) In short, you’re talking only about theistic myths, whereas there are also modern, secular humanistic myths with which to contend.
I’m not trying to steal science’s credibility at all. On the contrary, unlike scientismists such as Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne who equate science with reason so that they can steal the fruits of philosophy, I’m clear about the differences between science and the arts. I’m saying science can discover information and empower us with technological applications, but the arts are needed to address the other questions which aren’t rendered empty just because they’re unscientific.
For me everything turns on understanding the ecological nature of cognition, Ben. Once you appreciate that intentional cognition is heuristic in the extreme, then the question for a project such as yours immediately becomes one of why we should trust any given theoretical application of intentional idioms. I just don’t see where you’ve answered that question, and I don’t see how you can bootstrap your positive project (I largely agree with your critical one) short answering that question.
Theoretical meaning is dead.
Other than that, the problem is one of accelerating technological variance, the way ‘deep information’ is flooding our sociocognitive ecologies, and the way cognitive technologies are overthrowing the cognitive biological invariances required to assure that intentional idioms will retain their practical efficacy. All heuristic problem-solving turns on invariances. Once these can no longer be counted on, problem solving ends, and our tools begin generating more problems. The obsolescence of ‘myth’ simply follows, doesn’t it?
Practical meaning is in the process of dying.
You keep framing the killer, science, as a theoretical competitor, insisting that traditional institutions still have their inviolate domains, while I keep trying to show how this drastically underestimates the nature of our dilemma, that there are no ‘inviolate domains,’ save that ignorance makes it seem so. Science is the rising tide, the provender of actionable information wherever it sets its systematic hooks. All of the traditional boats you cite are taking on scientific water as we speak, and the process of reverse-engineering the brain is just getting under way. Traditional questions aren’t empty because they’re not scientific; they’re emptying because the ecologies that once made their answers effective are being ground to mulch by the theoretical and technological consequences of science.
To Benjamin Cain,
You said
“Anyway, it just so happens that science is reliable only when it comes to answering How questions, as in “How do rainbows work?” And as you say, science provides more options in the ecological context, by empowering us with know-how. But what of the matter of choosing wisely between the options? What of the creative vision to see new options to which most people have been blind? Is “Follow the info” a reliable strategy for solving the problem of organizing society to make life fulfilling?”
Have you ever read Hellstrom’s Hive? It’s a novel by Frank Herbert. It describes one method by which science can answer the normative questions you pose, or at least render them moot. As science accumulates power science may well change human nature is such a way that “Should/Ought and Why questions” will have different possible answers than they do for ‘baseline’ humans. I could be wrong, but I think that the very act of asking the questions you are asking presumes human beings will remain more-or-less the same despite the technology. I don’t mean to imply the questions are invalid but I do think that any attempt to answer them must include some disciplined speculation about possible changes in human nature and corresponding changes in what it means to be wise or happy (or Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, Doc, or Bashful).
“Is “Follow the info” a reliable strategy for solving the problem of organizing society to make life fulfilling?”
Is ‘ignore the info’ a reliable strategy? It was once, maybe, but not so anymore. The problem is that there’s no going back, which means our info ignoring systems are simply going to become less and less reliable. If the answer doesn’t lie in following the info no matter where it leads, then where? That’s the better way to frame the dilemma, I think, as one ugly option among numerous unworkable ones.
Ben,
Of course I’m not saying we should trust all myths or just any myth. I am saying that we do all trust in some myth, since myth accompanies our deepest values
It doesn’t matter what we do, currently. Nothing in that is an advocacy for any future action.
Further whatever myth you’re talking about, that’s ‘just any myth’ as well. Unless you are prepared to talk about a myth that stands ahead of the rest? Otherwise every myth is ‘just any myth’.
And there’s a conspicuous absence in your denial – not trusting all myths, not trusting just any myth…okay, that’s 2…out of 3. With the third being ‘trusting A particular myth (absolutely)’, which you don’t discount.
I think I described you pretty well, in that you’re advocating utterly trusting a particular myth. Even though once a ‘truth’ has gone to ‘myth’, utter trust is impossible. That, of course, doesn’t preclude wanting to utterly trust it still.
Ben&co what/where exactly are these “myths” and how do we come to determine how we use them or not? to make this sort of a generalization “since myth accompanies our deepest values (what are values?)” seems like a huge leap to me so if someone could fill in blanks that would be appreciated.
Dmf,
I’ve filled in these blanks in several articles on my blog. Some of them are linked to below. Myths are fictions that rationalize our acts of will in choosing speculative answers to life’s big, normative or otherwise nonscientific questions. We justify our values and ideals and even our character by turning to emotionally-powerful stories that feature models of how to live well. These can be theistic or progressive, secular, and explicitly artistic, as in the case of novels or Hollywood movies. Either way, we should see myths as artworks made of ideas, as fictions that nevertheless serve an indispensable role.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-virtue-of-speculation-scientism-and.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/04/untangling-myths-and-delusions.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/02/fame-and-false-gods.html
thanks i’ll take a look, my sense in general is that we shouldn’t con-fuse after the fact justifications with causes, as for our uses of models (which isn’t something we do often and so isn’t part of our usual day to day affairs) they are as varied as the problems we might employ them to work thru.
I agree that philosophy has been diminished by the professionals, but I think it will find its footing again. When and how that happens is another matter. Age old questions of (1) what there is (ontology), (2) what it is (epistemology/metaphysics), and (3) what to do about it (ethics) will not go away.
‘Science’ has provided us with a vast amount of information about one and two, but rather little about three. This has created a big challenge for the philosophers because they just can not keep up, as Hawking has indicated.
Of course there is no such ‘thing’ as science, just millions of scientists, all of them being experts in their narrow fields. All scientists are acutely aware of these limits and uncertainties. In fact, scientists cannot keep up with science either. There is no one person or organization that speaks for scientific knowledge, itself only one step away from the next great discovery that changes everything..
In summary: there is no such ‘thing’ as science or philosophy. Just scientists and philosophers operating in a brave new world in which it is now obvious that the amount of information and knowledge available far outstrips the ability of anyone to process. This imbalance will continue to get worse with no end in sight yet.
What this suggests for the future is that information processing is going to be our primary interest and responsibility. The vast majority of individuals today are still content with blindly accepting the judgments of others, by not exercising their own critical faculties. Many of the implicit metaphors and myths are quite dangerous and harmful. This new social evolutionary process might turn out to be as messy as the preceding ones.
what is the new evolutionary process?
@dmf
the news about social evolution is that we are beginning to realize that our community knowledge base profoundly affects our perspectives and actions. Conflicts between communities result only too frequently.
Evolution, mentioned quite a few times in the discussion so far, is both a science and philosophy question. It would seem to be a fundamental question that could determine if we ever succeed in guiding our destiny.
not sure what a community knowledge base is but if yer suggesting something like we are influenced by our socialization this seems like a pretty old idea, no?
“The only way forward that I can see is just being honest to the preposterous enormity of the problem.”
Perhaps this is the most useful function Philosophers throughout the ages have served. You could argue its what killed Socrates: being the annoying naysayer in the room. Telling people what they don’t want to hear, chiding them for not wanting to hear it, explaining the reasons why it needs to be heard, acted upon, integrated into their ‘shallow information environment’, this is an essential role and one that, understandably, no one wants to play. More than ever the world seems to need willing martyrs, or at least humble social pariahs.
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/Philosophy-Mind.pdf
It’s a good example of the ‘pile the black boxes this way game’ anyway. The materialistic turn, hmm.
Generally correct, but it does not follow that we must discard a vital feature of the human animal, symbolic reason. Philosophy is nothing more than taking reason as far as one can. Science does the same, except reason is subject to testing and verification/falsification. Many philosophers have made the cardinal mistake of taking the structures of pure reason as real, which they patently are not, usually. Science is more of a manifestation of practical reason, but there are many others.
We have also evolved to be the most diverse and creative animals of all. There is no reason to think that we are going to stop using all of our faculties, of which philosophy is just a small part. Our ethical, political and economic challenges are great, just to mention a few.
Intentional philosophy consists of using intentional cognition to solve intentional cognition, and this is the tradition that has yielded us posits like ‘symbolic reason,’ and the perennial controversies that swirl around them. The fact is, after 25 centuries nobody knows what ‘symbolic reason’ is. We can’t even agree on how to formulate whatever it is we hope to explain, let alone explain anything. That’s precisely the kind of discourses that we should expect to leave behind, once we understand what it means to be ‘shallow information consumers in deep information environments’: namely, the inclination to use shallow information tools to solve deep information problems.
I still think our habitat is shallow information – there’s no point ‘saving’ pandas if you just have them in an iron lung with a pipe feeding them nutrients directly. You can’t just discard the habitat and treat is as if you’ve saved them. You have to preserve the habitat…to some degree.
So, kind of spaceship like arrangement maintaining a habitat against a far different environment. But yeah, if someone takes the semantic spaceship for ‘all there is’, then any breaches of the spaceship from the external environment (whether that be by natural event or corporate event) most likely would be taken as how things are. Some amount of disenchantment is necessary to deal with ‘hull breaches’. Some amount of general populace disenchantment is required to disperse responsibility (a bit like the internet having no central core to blow up!) instead of a few knowing and the majority taking it as ‘all there is’.
Stuff like the spaceship idea means I dig Ben’s preservation of various myths and art attitudes. I’m just not sure what, if any, is his disenchantment policy. I’m pretty sure he harbors disenchantment, but in regards to others and passing on disenchantment…?
Hey, is your Last Magic Show essay still what you’re about? Or have you upgraded? About to read it, but wanted to double-check and see if it’s still where you’re at. Thanks.
I would rewrite it from the ground up, if I were the rewriting sort. I wrote the thing in a manic rush after more than ten years of avoiding philosophy, and it shows, I think. But these are just concerns with expression. I’m pretty much peddling the exact same argument.
Off topic:
Thought I would share that Minnesota Public Radio included your “Prince of Nothing” series in a list of books to read while waiting for the next installment of “A Song of Ice and Fire”.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/01/04/books-if-you-like-game-of-thrones
Way cool. This is exactly the kind of tub-thumpage I need building to the summer. Thanks for this, dharm.
You’re welcome.