| Our
present-day conception of nature contains a surprising degree of order, as if a
consciousness were at work in the world we experience. In all our efforts to be objective, passive
observers of our universe, we easily forget that we are responsible for all the
order contained therein. That man causes
order seems absurd because it appears to bestow upon him the power of God. However, man is not king in the palace he has
built. He is not in complete control of
what happens to him from one moment to the next. Instead of elevating himself to the status of
God, man reduces the universe to his own level.
He is limited in his ability to predict and control what will happen to
him in the next moment, but the world in which he lives is still his own
construction.
This level
of skepticism departs from the common conception of science. The typical person unknowingly espouses an
ideal of knowledge that originally appears in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.
Before Descartes, Plato and Aristotle dominated western epistemology
because the mind-body duality had not yet become an issue. In antiquated systems ideas were
mind-independent entities. For Plato,
ideas were more real than physical objects.
Ideas were eternal, perfect, and transcendent. Physical objects were transitory instances of
these ideas. For Aristotle, ideas are
embedded in the physical objects themselves. The mind “abstracts” these ideas from the
objects it observes.
Descartes
was the first to place ideas in the mind of man while leaving objects to the
external universe because of his distinction between mind and body. Descartes foolishly assumes that ideas and
objects directly correspond.
Physical bodies “contain formally all that is objectively in
ideas.” The physical object’s reflection
in the mind is connected to the ambiguous interaction between the object and
the mind. The object causes the idea by
interacting with the body’s sensory organs.
Part of Descartes’ failure is that he does not explain the exact nature
of the causality between ideas and objects; he leaves a huge gap in his
reasoning.
Nevertheless,
Descartes’ most significant failure is his unwarranted assumption that a sense
perception implies an external cause.
David Hume criticizes Descartes on this issue by critiquing the
impossibility of supporting the causal principle with deduction;
belief in causality is irrational. The
human mind infers causality after experiencing uniformity in sense
perception. Our reason for relying on
such uniformities to remain consistent in the future is that they have remained
consistent in the past. This is circular
reasoning and therefore also irrational.
Hume is not suggesting we should doubt past experience. Instead he recommends mitigated skepticism.
He means that relying on nature’s uniformities is still practical.
Hume’s
practical reasoning has become the basis of scientific method. Scientists assume a theoretical model as the
cause of certain phenomena. If the
phenomena are consistent with the predictions from the model, the scientists
have sufficient reason to infer a causal relationship. They believe practically and not rationally
in these theoretical entities. The
scientists make a temporary leap of faith; they do not acquire permanent
knowledge. He should treat the causal
relationship hypothetically, not literally, so he is does not confine himself
to a narrow worldview. Literalism could
hinder creativity and hence progress as well.
People
object to this skepticism because science is ubiquitously useful. They reason that because of definite progress
in medicine and technology, science must be getting closer to transcendent
reality, the reality behind sense impressions.
T. S. Kuhn has produced the best response to this argument. He shows that science can improve
its ability to predict phenomena without becoming a more accurate model of
transcendent reality. A scientific
paradigm is replaced when a new one can solve puzzles more effectively, meaning
greater simplicity or more predicative power.
Science replaces weaker theories with stronger ones in a Darwinian fashion. Darwinian evolution progresses without a
definite goal just as science progresses without approaching a specific model
of reality. That science is approaching
a definite truth does not follow from science being successful.
To say that
our ideas “reflect” the transcendent universe does not make sense. Nietzsche argues in his essay “On Truth and
Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” that ideas do not correspond to the objects they
represent. For simplicity, assume a
materialistic worldview. The brain
abstracts an idea from a series of sensations.
These sensations result from the brain’s processing of the stimuli
delivered by the various senses. The
senses are triggered by material objects from the outside world. Nietzsche uses the concept of leaf as an example. The electrons on a leaf’s surface, excited by
light from the sun, release photons that travel until being absorbed by the
electrons on the surface of someone’s retina.
The retina sends an impulse along the optic nerve to the brain’s visual
processing centers where the impulse is integrated into a sensation. Further processing in the brain leads to the
abstraction of the idea “leaf.” Even in
the materialistic worldview, the idea of “leaf” is in no way a reflection an
actual leaf. The idea is a neural net
bearing no physical resemblance to the structure of plant cells that make up
the leaf itself. The only relationship
between the leaf and the idea is one of indirect causality. Our ideas are useful because they result from
neural processes evolved to cause us to react optimally to our environment, not
because they reflect transcendent reality. Ironically,
this argument from the perspective of materialism undermines a literal
interpretation of the materialist worldview.
Material objects and the interactions between them are described in
terms of theoretical concepts, but materialism shows that concepts cannot
literally be reflections of reality. The
materialistic universe is a useful model for our experiences, but it should not
be taken literally. One inaccuracy of
materialism is the assumption that the translation from sensation to concept is
a deterministic process. Carl Hempel, a
philosopher of science, shows that historically this does not appear to be the
case. There is no mechanical process for
deriving new theories from raw data. For example, Kekulé discovered the formula
for benzene, not by examining data and applying a formula, but while dreaming
in front of his fireplace.
The formula came to him in what can be described as a revelatory
experience. Such a leap from data to
model can be described as anything but deterministic. While Hempel applied his argument to
scientific theories, it can be expanded to apply to ideas in general because
theories are systems of ideas. There is
no mechanical process to abstract ideas from sensations. Philosophers have attempted to show that
every idea has a specific definition applicable to every one of its
instances. If this were possible, then a
mechanical process to translate sensations to ideas could be derived. However, Wittgenstein has shown that exactly
the opposite is true; for any word, there is no set of characteristics that
fits every instance of that idea.
Wittgenstein uses as an example the word “game.” “Game” can refer chess, baseball or
Mario. These games are different enough
that we can extract no common set of characteristics and build a definition,
yet we still use the word “game” effectively.
Wittgenstein discusses the meanings of words, but his argument can be
applied also to ideas because both words and ideas are abstracted from
sensations.
One’s
experience of the world may not completely determine his system of ideas, but
the structure of his mind can determine his experience of the world. In Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant shows that because our concepts are constrained by
certain laws of intuition, our experience of the world must also. We are confined by the laws of our internal
logic, our mathematical and geometric intuitions, and our perceptions of space
and time. If the mind is constrained by
such laws, then any interaction of the mind with the external world must be so
constrained as well. Hence, it does not
follow that because we experience a mathematically ordered universe,
transcendent reality is actually mathematical by nature. Mathematics tells us more about ourselves
than anything transcendent. This
argument also addresses the claim that scientific knowledge touches fundamental
reality because of the order we experience in nature. While accepting scientific theories to be
hypothetical, some claim that the degree of uniformity seen among phenomena is
so overwhelmingly great that it must represent an underlying order in the
transcendent world. Regardless, if the
human mind is constructed compute information that is mathematically ordered,
then given a random body of data, it will perceive every coincidental instance
of order therein. In fact, order can
only be defined relative to the intuitive laws of the mind. That is to say, a space alien with a
differently constructed mind looking at the same data would find order where
humans find chaos and chaos where humans find order. This point
is difficult to accept when considering the seemingly overwhelming body of
phenomena that behave in an “ordered” fashion.
But this body of phenomena only
seems overwhelming because it is the body of data upon which our attention is
focused. We do not talk about the
movements of individual atoms in a hot substance precisely because we cannot
predict their behavior. Indeed, when
considering the quantity of phenomena we can accurately predict in comparison
to the amount of entropy, quantum uncertainty, and phenomena simply yet to be
explained, the argument that nature is fundamentally ordered does not seem
quite as persuasive.
The
healthiest attitude is mitigated skepticism.
Science and mathematics are wonderful for their predictive power, but
elevating them to the level of absolute truth could handicap ingenuity. Thinking of theories as hypothetical and
avoiding speculation of mind-independent reality is much more practical. One final philosopher worth mentioning is
George Berkeley, who argued that even thinking about the mind-independent
reality is absurd. To analyze
mind-independent reality is to break it down into concepts. Thinking about it makes it
mind-dependent. Therefore, we should
accept our limitations as human beings and be content to live pragmatically in
the universe of our own ideas. The
transcendent universe is by nature unreachable. |
