Dueling Epigrams

Clashing stances re noögenesis:

   Materialist:   Mind is an emergent property of the  brain.
   Theist:   Mind is an emergent property of the  soul.

A New Proof of the Existence of Coffee-Cups

But the math had not clarified one basic question:  what the hell did it all mean?  How could the world of atoms be nothing but a puff of probabilities, and yet conglomerations of those atoms could create something as strong and unbending as the  chair on which he sat?

-- David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011), p.  54

[Update to an earlier essay.  For the original, with readers’ comments, click here.]

Re the authors of “The Stability of Many-Particle Systems” (1966):

They couldn’t explain why it was  that ordinary everyday objects wouldn’t just go up in smoke.  It was quite anomalous.  Inert matter just lies there in a kind of steady state, ticking over silently in a metaphysical sort of way, but this ordinary and plain fact of experience  was incomprehensible to physics.

-- Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? (1987), p. 185

There comes a time in the life of every young person, when they doubt the existence of coffee-cups.  So here comes jolly old Doctor J, to prove it for you;  and more importantly, to reassure you that, even should you someday forget the details of the proof, you may continue  to place entire faith in the existence of these useful objects, asking no questions for conscience’ sake.

(We earlier sketched the idea of the proof, but there the argumentation was informal.)

So!  It’s a quiet Sunday, the desk and the mind are clear, let us pour out a generous helping of this fresh-ground, new-brewed, steaming darkling French roast, into the convenient receptacle which (to all appearances, at any rate) sits within easy arm’s reach upon the solid oaken desktop, to stimulate the grey cells, and set ourselves to this great task  of confounding the nominalists and solipsists.

[Excursus:  Historique du problème

Dr Johnson famously proved the existence of stones  by kicking one (a martyr to science -- he reckoned without his gout).  The Cambridge philosopher of banality, G. E. Moore, satisfied himself (I choose the verb with care) of the existence of physical reality, by noticing his own hands.  (The choice was not a happy one, being potentially seen as solipsistically self-centered, not to say onanistic;  further, the phenomenon of phantom limbs complicates the picture in irrelevant ways.)
Accordingly, we shall proceed by proving the existence of coffee-cups:  both because they form the prototypical physical object for philosophers (apart from mats, which are ignored unless they have cats on them), and because, for mathematicians, who in general care not a fig for the physical, do care crucially about this one concrete object, since coffee is their essential fuel.]

But before embarking upon the abstract part of this argument (since some folks are uncomfortable with abstractions -- though really, they need not be;  what follows makes a lot more sense than most of what gets uttered around the water-cooler), I shall offer what critics have called the objective correlative:  a description of the actual coffee-cup whose space-time coordinates are My-Here and My-Now [** But now see below!].  (Rather than the ambiguous “here and now”;  for such coordinates must indeed be relativized to some observer, though not necessarily a mortal observer.)  After all, we wouldn’t want you to wonder whether we might not be just making the whole thing up.

[**Horrified update, August 2019:  Testing the link, I clicked, winding up  indeed at the sales-site for the "Catholic Attitude" mug;  but -- It has been censored!  Shorn of its knight, along with his attitude! -- Fortunately I -- Fahrenheit-451-fashion -- saved the original image, and included it in this essay; vid. inf.]

From the standpoint of the chemist, the object in question would appear to consist in some sort of ceramic, whatever that may be, though I really couldn’t say -- anyhow, something sturdily non-porous.  In general outline, it forms a cylinder, sealed off at the bottom and evacuated at the top.  Somewhat spoiling this sleek Platonic profile, a handle protrudes from the side, a concession to the physical infirmities of hominoidal incarnation.

It is thus strictly speaking a ‘mug’ rather than a cup;  but still I say “coffee-cup” because, for philosophers (who don’t get out much), that is the prototypical object in the cosmos.  (At least this is true for hypercaffeinated Americans; more leisurely Oxonians look to "the tree in the Quad").  In similar fashion, the propotypical Contingent Truth for the Oxbridge set is:  “The cat is on the mat.”  (That last one is not true at the moment, b.t.w.;  she seems to have wandered off.)

That is pretty much all you need to be  to call yourself a coffee-cup.  But these days, most cups are not quite so minimalist:  most of them sport some wacky slogan of office lore, or the logo of a sports team.  This particular specimen displays the image of a medieval knight, standing in contrapposto, his tabard emblazened with a cross pommée.  On his face is an expression difficult to read, some blend of troubled arrière-pensées and manly determination.  He is set largely within a blue circle, which his mailed headgear slightly overtops; at the bottom -- a detail I just noticed only now -- the end of his belt (bulging slightly at the tip) laps down and over, in a way that, hm,  might be misinterpreted.  And written boldly above him, the words:

Catholic  Attitude

Well.  So much for the objective correlative.  Now for the proof, deo volente -- while mindful of the strictures of Kant:

It remains a scandal for philosophy  and for human reason in general, that the existence of things outside us  must be taken only on faith,
and that, if it occurs to someone to doubt it,
we can produce no counter-argument  sufficient to prove it.

-- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

~ ~ ~

We must confess at the outset (well, it’s a bit late for that) that we cannot actually prove the existence of coffee-cups, by the lofty standards of proof first intuited by Euclid, and refined  in our own day  to a high sheen.   Outside indeed of mathematics, such a capability appears not to exist:  Whenever I try to read a physics article reporting recent research, it always appears at some point to be hand-waving, “You’ll just have to trust us on this.”   And within mathematics itself (trade secret; don’t whisper this to Muggles) we seldom explicitly set out all the steps, even in the final published results.   As for the actual process of mathematical discovery, it normally bears no relation at all to Hilbert’s formalist program;  at its deepest and most mysterious, it is more like…. (and here we’ll have to whisper very softly) … Revelation…

Anyhow, we obviously can’t actually prove the existence of coffee-cups, because logically, strictly speaking, they might not exist:  We might all be just brains in a vat, hallucinating the whole thing.   So to clear the air, we frankly state our Auxiliary Assumption:

(AUX)  We’re not just brains in a vat.

If you personally reject that assumption -- well, happy marinating.  For the rest of us -- to proceed.

[Excursus:  Among the merits of d’Abro’s history The Rise of the New Physics (1939), is that he repeatedly points out the (sometimes unacknowledged) auxiliary assumptions that were required in the development of even the most successful programs in the physical sciences, by the most celebrated researchers, during physics’ Golden Age.

Almost nothing we do in everyday life  is free of unspoken assumptions, sheer force of habit, and random whims.  So, simply by listing such propositions as (AUX), we are making some modest progress.]

The principal premises of the proof, and the only ones that would occur to most people, are evidential.   This is where the hard work of science is done.  Fortunately, in the case of perceptions of ordinary middle-size objects, Nature does it for us, that we need not continually trouble our little heads:  all sorts of cross-connections and epistemological assumptions are hard-wired into our brains.  (These brains, b.t.w., reside in a cranium, vice a vat.)  We shall nevertheless lay out some of the perceptions and observations that serve to buttress the conclusion to objectual existence -- not so much to convince you yet further that your mug is real, but rather, virtually the contrary:  by such explicit exposure of our evidential grounds, to make plain their essential poverty, absent certain grounding metaphysical principles, along the lines of (AUX) though more substantial -- or rather again, more abstract and as it might be insubstantial, since (AUX), though it has the look of a metaphysical assumption, might in some circumstances be actually demonstrable, and thus empirical, as happens in the movie “The Matrix”.

(PE) Perceptual Evidence

(1) I seem to see before me a colour-patch (Note to the lay reader: These colour-patches compose the whole of the world for the positivist empiricists, who never quite manage to convince themselves that coffee-cups are real, and therefore cannot drink the coffee, and die of thirst), roughly cylindrical in outline -- though the exact projection upon the retina depends on the viewing-angle in complex ways (blah blah blah; insert usual empiricist verbiage here).

(2) When I reach out with my hand (for reassurance as to the existence of your own hands, consult the works of G. E. Moore), groping in the general direction of the above-named coloured patch, I abruptly encounter what seems to be a solid object -- a bit too abruptly, it turns out, as some sort of dark hot liquid is now pouring into my lap.

(3) (Insert more such evidence here -- crucially, cross-modally, involving the sound of the mug as you strike it with your pen; the smell and the taste of the coffee within).

(4)  When I pour a small amount of coffee into this apparent container, it does not quantum-tunnel out:  thus recalling, by uniformity and analogy, such similar objectual posits as the Water-Glass.

(5)  Jones here -- a stout fellow of sound mind -- affirms that, egads, he too perceives a coloured patch in what, calculating the parallax by triangulations, dum-de-dum, doing the math, appears to correspond to the same space-time locus that I myself have identified.

(6)  (etc. etc. etc.)

(C ) Conclusion

Coffee-cups really do exist.

(They do, but this one's just an image of such a cup)

Now:   The thoughtful reader will already have noticed how grotesquely speckled with gaps  such reasoning is -- why, it shouldn’t convince a child.  For, though it pretends to consist of but simple reports of perceptions -- “observation sentences” in the lingo -- rather than any abstract reasoning that might be open to critique, it actually smuggles in a great deal of unbuttressed assumptions.  Thus -- what ties (1) and (2) into any sort of connection with each other?  Why,  the unexamined assumption that the visual coordinates of (1) map smoothly and without controversy to the kinesthetic coordinates of (2):  a fact by no means obvious  -- intellectually, that is;  of course, the identity is more or less hard-wired, though it may take baby a certain amount of groping and spoon-dropping to get the respective ordinates and abscissae to finally match up.  Nor is the correlation in any sense necessary -- indeed, it can be easily overturned in simple experiments involving funny spectacles.

And as for that “Jones” there -- you are assuming the existence of Other Minds, about which great vats of ink have been spilled!  (There is, in fact, one sense in which philosophers at any rate  are brains-in-a-vat.)  And indeed you need vastly more than that -- for the Other Minds projected by mere analogy, might be only Other Monads, and incommunicable among themselves.  All right, wire them one to another -- still not enough:  you are assuming that you each mean ‘the same thing’ when you utter the same (or: “similar”) syllables:  an assumption demonstrably false in every political summit or marital argument.  All right, plow ahead and assume that:  you’re still not there.  With all the intelligence and good-will in the world, your private knowledge might not be transmissable intact: witness the celebrated case of determining whether or not your extragalactic pen-pal resides in a world made of matter or of anti-matter, or whether he is right- or left-handed.  -- And here my grey-cells throw in the towel; but were you (younger, and keener) to pursue this line of speculation further, things would probably only get worse.

No, for the various clauses of (PE) to have any cohesion and probative force at all, we require a vast apparatus of non-evidential, metaphysical assumptions, almost never made plain.  The above syllogism,  (PE) => (C ), is thus in reality an enthymeme .  Suppressed is what we might dub the enthymematic assumption, which we now state here:

(EA -- full version)  Background metaphysical premises

(Insert the entire body of philosophy here, along with the whole of science.  Do not omit to mention the Assumption of Cosmic Uniformity (spatial; temporal; spatio-temporal), the Problem of Induction, the Reliability of Deduction, along with some still-unnamed rules of thumb concerning our right to ignore pesky quantum-mechanical paradoxes when speaking of mid-level objects, etc. etc.)

Now, that is rather a tall order, and even were it somehow to be accomplished for this particular case (which might or might not "go over" towards founding the existence of pickles, say), no individual mind could survey the results and verify their correctness and inter-consistency.   And yet, this is the heavy machinery that we need to conclude to so modest a proposition as the existence of coffee-cups.  So let us superadd, as a concession to our feeble powers of ratiocination and memory, the following Concise Version:

(EA -- concise version)  God is Good.

This one works for me;  but if you’re an epistemological stickler, you can probably get by with this weaker assumption, as stated by Einstein, and applied, not only in his life, but in the practice of his physics:

(EA -- weakened version)  Boshaft ist er Nicht.

Which is to say, anglicê:  at least He is not plain mean.   By which he meant:  The cosmos is not just some vast joke, jerry-rigged to baffle our senses.  Overall, it ultimately makes sense -- even if what we perceive here below, is but the thread-gnarly underside of the grand patterned carpet.

(Note:  The basic point is more logical than theological;  still, the realms do tend to intertwine.)

Historical footnote:

Descartes derived the principle of inertia from two premises:

* the homogeneity of the straight line, and

* the immutability of God, of which the constant quantity of motion in the world is an expression.

-- Charles Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (1960), p. 90

Note incidentally that the first of these Cartesian premises  is at least as fraught as the second (the problems and paradoxes of The Continuum).

~

~ For a theo-philosophical fantasia, try this:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

~ ~ ~

To add some punch to our insistence on the Importance of the Enthymeme, with all its tacit metaphysical assumptions, let us instance another, less familiar syllogism.

(P) Evidential Premises:

1. Something funny’s going on here.

2. What’s that smell?

3.  I can’t find my car keys -- probably somebody swiped them.

4.  What’s that noise?!

5.  So where does Jones get the money for a fancy car like that?

6. No way I’m letting that bastard merge into my lane.

7. Why are all those people staring at me?

8. Ouch!

9. It’s a conspiracy.

(C ) Conclusion:  The world is ruled by giant lizards.

That conclusion is an actual doctrine, firmly held by some people:  non-institutionalized people, actual citizens who have the right to vote (and who seemingly exercise that right with disproportionate frequency).  I’d provide a link to the relevant Web sites, but fear lest these poison your computer.

What, though, must be the missing enthymeme, which licenses this deduction?  Apparently something like this:

(E)  The cosmos is ruled by Satan.

Compared with (E), (C) begins to look relatively inviting.

~  ~  ~

But enough of such stuffy studies!   The sun, renewed, has broken through the clouds, the bird-sounds rise in chorus, and a breeze bestirs itself among the leaves.   Let us then fare forth, into the wide world, whose splendor bears the imprint of its Maker, as plainly as had He signed it, John-Hancock-style, with His celestial pen.

~  ~  ~

[Afterthought]  But what then, of the java, that flows from the mug whose reality we have just proved???  Why, it flows to fuel the brains of mathematicians! 

[Appendix, Jan 2015]  Having at length satisfied ourselves as to the reality, or at least reliability, of coffee-cups, would should not  on that account sink back into an attitude of Moorean complacency (“I’m all right, Jack;  I’ve got hands”).  For our commitment to these  suggests yet further commitments, which we had not realized were there to assess.  Such as :  Realism with regard to quantum state vectors.

The question of ‘reality’ must be addressed in quantum mechanics -- especially if you takes the view that the quantum formalism applies universally to the whole of physics -- for then, if there is no quantum reality, there can be no reality at any level.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 508

And:

The question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematics … is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world.

-- Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?”, in American Mathematical Monthly, 1947.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

~

This notion of ‘enthymeme’ deserves further comment, and here is not really the place;  yet I can find no other home for it, among these essays.  Thus:

This is characteristic of ancient informal logic -- that is, of the logic of proof or of thought-experiment …. ; we regard it as enthymematic  only through hindsight:  it was only later that an increase in content  became a sign, not of the power, but of the weakness, of an inference.

-- Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976), p. 81

For more from this pen, try this:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

Eliminative materialism (expanded update)

…those bright and breezy Americans  who call themselves Behaviourists.  They declare with some warmth that there is really nothing in their minds, and that they only think with their muscles.

-- G.K. Chesterton,  Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)

Biology is only the Fascist substitute for sociology.

-- Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (1940)

… that faulty inference  from the plausible view of the cognitive sovereignty of sense, to the absurd conclusion that explanatory models of human conduct must be in terms of elements similar to ‘sensation’ or ‘stimulus’.  The inference is quite fallacious, though an entire movement in psychology (Behaviourism) is based on the failure to see this.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 16

Abstract:   The psycholytic style of current neuroscience-invoking reductionism  is intellectually and philosophically unilluminating;   and the social and political effects to which it is often put  are morally debilitating.   Taking ever-more-microscopic tallies of the goings-on in neural tissues  is of interest only to a histologist.   The attempt to press such observations into service as solvents of long-standing noëtic questions  is unsuccessful, probably in principle so. 

As Freud put it in the first paragraph of his final summary of his own work, the Abriss der Psychoanalyse (1938), we know about the brain on one side, and consciousness on the other, but

Alles dazwischen ist uns unbekannt;  eine direkte Beziehung zwischen beiden Endpunkten  ist nicht gegeben.  Wenn sie bestünde, würde sie höchstens eine genaue Lokalisation der Bewusstseinsvorgänge liefern  und für deren Verständis  nichts leisten.

That is to say such correlations amount to a higher phrenology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[Prefatory note:  An earlier nineteenth-century forerunner]

Köhlerglaube der Wissenschaftler

In the course of the Materialismusstreit …, the German Darwinist Karl Vogt  published a widely read essay entitled Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (1855), in which he tried  with cynical witticism  to dispense with the problem of the human soul [NB: and mind].  According to Vogt, thought is a secretion of the brain  just as the digestive juices are secretions of the stomach, bile a secretion of the liver, and urine a secretion of the kidneys.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 594

By now, the man in the street has become acclimated to the notion of secretions, and is unlikely to be swayed by that account.  He will notice that, somehow, the liver never secretes anything but bile, the kidneys, urine;  whereas the brain ‘secretes’ such unexpected and unprecedented and mutually contradictory things as:  Catholicism, Communism, situation comedies, and the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.

But the underlying atheist-nihilist idea, that of wave-of-the-wand eliminativism (it does not even deserve the name of reductionism), whereby you eliminate the problem from consideration, rather than doing anything to actually solve it,  ever and again resurrects itself, morphing into a semblance of life, from some discarded afterbith.

~      ~      ~      ~      ~

[Herewith our original essay  from a couple of years ago]

We did not have to wait for the tribe of those laboratory nihilists known as neuroscientists, to behold an academic school dedicated to reducing free will and cogitation to the level of meat.  The behaviorists were there first.    And it is our great good fortune that we are spared the chore of actually reading and refuting their earlier and generally gratingly ill-written output, since their fifteen minutes have expired(*), the quietus marked by a famous and scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky, way back in 1959 (a good year -- aye, a vintage year).

 

Skinner himself, and others of his spawn, continued to “engage in writing behavior”.(**)   And like the dragon’s-teeth of Cadmus, the doctrine springs up ever anew, in this or that contorted form.

Maxfield Parrish:  Cadmus

[(*)  I spoke too soon.  Savor my groveling retraction here.]

[(**)  The phrase was made famous by a journalist who, to test the nature of asylum-based therapy in general  and involuntary commitment in particular, had himself commited, and immediately began acting perfectly normal, and telling the doctors he’d like to go home.  He kept a journal of his experiences.   This latter fact did not go unnoticed by the keenly observant psychiatric nurses, who wrote in his chart, “Patient engages in writing behavior.”  An immortal and dactylic line.]

Skinner, apart from his paid occupation of making life miserable for rats, is best known as the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971 -- not such a good year).  The title echoes that of Jenseits von Gut und Böse,  by that other evil troll, Nietzsche:   beyond, not in the sense of uplift, but of, “Get O-o-o-vah-rit!” -- A similar bit of titular legerdemain (sugar-coated in the title, rat poison on the inside) was perpetrated by Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (1986).  What is really being proposed there is not Unity, but Anschluss, with the mind playing the hapless role of Austria.

Professor Skinner, hard at work in the lab

Again, prior to contemporary neuroscientists, there were philosophers who ground much the same axe.   Wikipedia (s.v. “Self-refuting idea”), re eliminative materialism, speaks of identity theorists like the philosophers Boring and Smart, who “claim that ideas exist materially as patterns of neural structure and activity.”  Now, that is one unilluminating and bone-headed idea.  By which I mean, of course, no more than that it is an unilluminating and bone-headed pattern of neural structure and activity.  Owing possibly to an excess of calcium at one of the synapses.

And why, indeed, stop short at the level of the cells, themselves already doubtless epiphenomenal?  Take it right down to quantum mechanics!   Let some gaggle of labcoats come up with the Schrödinger equation for the Bible, and another for “Paradise Lost”, and show us how certain passages -- excuse us, certain Hermitian forms -- of the former, lead directly to the eigenkets of the latter.  Put literary critics  plumb out of work.
(Something more than just a joke:  Cf. entomologist/ultrareductionist Edward Wilson donning the robe of a Milton scholar here.)

-- A further word about this scenario of ideas as “patterns of neural structures and activity".  It really is little more than ye olde idea of Ideas as Pictures-in-the-head, but dressed up in a modern labcoat (the sort worn by actors playing doctors on TV); and this is one subterranean source of  plausibility of a doctrine that  on logical (and indeed theological) grounds  is a tissue of absurdity.

~

What gives the “thought is a physical pattern” account some specious plausibility, is our modern picture of vision:  which, to be sure, is vastly more complex than the everyman’s pre-theoretical account, whereby the vision of an apple is like a little apple in my eye.  (Compare, indeed, the etymology of the word pupil.)  -- Actually, the completely pre-theoretical account doesn’t even involve vision at all;  it’s just, “Behold! an apple!”  (or, holophrastically:  Gavagai!)

In that account, we begin with the beheld object.  

  (a)  It is, as a ding-an-sich, as hopelessly unknowable in its totality as a black hole;  yet like those reticent celestial bodies -- the veiled houris of the stellar harem -- by their corona ye may know them (that, and a bit of math).

  (b)  From this object -- let us take it to be specifically a coffee-cup, since we have proved the existence of these -- photons and phonons and perhaps even an occasional Higgs boson, bounce and boing and go-or-do-not-go through visual slits, in some inextricable and inexplicable quantum fashion, to wind up

  (c ) landing on, and lighting up, this or that spot on the retina.  From there,

  (d) ganglia shiver and synapses thrill, and eventually

  (e) the visual cortex receives various rude jolts, after which

  (f) the rest of the brain somehow sorts it all out, until finally

  (g) the mind says, “Aha!  There it is!  Time for a spot of java!”

Unfortunately, this comparatively simple scenario won’t do for the generality of ideation.  It would seem that, when these reductionist gentlemen contemplate an “Idea”, they go no farther than an analogue of (f) or at best (g), for an object of thought as simple as a coffee-cup (or, in their own case, their own endlessly contemplated navel) -- the ‘idea’ of one, rather than the image of one.  -- One is reminded of Hadamard’s plaint, in The Psychology of Mathematical Invention, that previous researchers into thought-processes had restricted themselves to the elementary thumb-sucking mental-motions of the Beoetians, which simply do not display the richness of thought-processes of research mathematicians, so that his own researches had to start from scratch.
(Similarly, generative linguistics would not have gotten far, had it never considered sentences more complex than "John is fat.")

For consider:

What the cognitive eliminativists are proposing, is not that a thought consists of some pattern of little electrochemical twitches and irritations plus ideation (the thinker contemplating the canvas of his own neuroprocesses, as it were);  their explicandum cannot involve the explicans.  No, it is really just -- splat -- that.

Now consider the following ideas:

  (a)  A topological space T is regular.

  (b)  T has a countable basis for its topology.

To each of these corresponds -- in Henry’s head -- a cortical panorama (A, B) not unlike a TV test-pattern plus static, or a Jackson Pollock painting on a bad day.

And consider that, as we all know by now, (a) and (b) imply

  (c)  T is metrizable.

which in turn duly corresponds to some porridge of pixels (C) on Henry's cortex.  Fine, we grant that.
But how  by all that is holy  do (A) and (B) imply (C)?  The moreso as Henry’s cortical idiosyncrasies  differ from those of Hector (A’, B’,C’), let alone those of the silicon-based mathematicians of the planet Gnorf:  who, whatever their physiological differences from ourselves, must reach exactly the same conclusion as did Urysohn, since that conclusion is, in fact, a fact (laid up in heaven, where Churchlands do not penetrate, and the worm corrupteth not).

[An attempt from an entirely different direction, to reduce the complexly interrelated richness of mathematics to triviality, by translating it into a non-mathematical world of discourse  entirely unsuited to it (in this case, the mushy one of metaphor), is  Where mathematics comes from:  How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being (2000), by   George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez.  You can tell already by the subtitle, that the authors are no Platonists.   I did coursework with George, briefly at Harvard and later at Berkeley, where at one point I TA’d for him;  so I shall not criticize him here, lest I fall into the crime of magistricide.   Yet I must sadly concur with the verdict of the reviewer, Terence Langendoen, in the March 2002 issue of the refereed journal Language.]

~     ~      ~

Ethicists should likewise soon be out of a job.  The latest in the public press:

The End of Evil?
Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing.
Are they right? 

A word:  I have no quarrel at all with the reductionist program as propounded and practiced by, say, Steven Weinberg (who embraces the term).  The problem comes in with the eliminativists who do not really mean to explain things, but to explain them away.

For remarks on the ontology of attributes, and their vulnerability to the eliminativist attack, click here.

~     ~      ~

What tends to get eliminated, in these proceedings, are things like consciousness and free will -- features of which we had grown rather fond.   Their very familiarity (as “folk theory”), for these gentlemen,  somehow tells against them.  As though a good rule of thumb were, If the ancient Greeks believed it, it must be wrong.  An eternal verity gets rechristened a “stagnant theory”. 

(Extraordinary idea, that, in any case: that to be any good, a theory must, like a fashion-slut, annually change the length of her skirts.  By that measure, the truths of numbers known to Diaphantos must be positively mildewed.)

Here  phlogiston plays ever and again the useful role of whipping-boy.  (Indeed, given the continued prominence of this ethereal etwas in philosophical debate, it must count as one of the most fruitful scientific hypotheses ever.  If it didn’t not-exist, someone would have to uninvent it.)  

The line of reasoning, reduced to its essentials, runs:  Well if that thing turned out not to exist, maybe freedom and God and all that lot   are just illusions too.

One problem with this angle of attack is that there's more to physics than phlogiston.  Also on the roster of theoretic posits  we find:  acceleration, force, electromagnetism, atoms, protons …  Phlogiston went out on a limb, which broke;  atoms & co. went out on a limb, and so far it seems to have held.   The eliminativists are being rather choosy in what to highlight.

Another problem with their reasoning  is that it’s nonsense.   Shooting down this or that hypothesis of theoretical physics, or even the whole lot of them, is not at all the same thing as denying what every mother has been telling her children since the beginning of time.   We are rather more certain of our own consciousness and free will, than we are of protons.

Let us examine another favorite butt of their mirthless hilarity.  Your great-great-grandsires believed in God, and that the sun set in the west.  The more fools they!   We New Atheists proclaim triumphantly that the earth circles the sun, and not the other way about.  Therefore, everything else you believe is false as well.

But in point of fact, you haven’t got much further along by taking the sun as the rest-point of your dynamical system, than when you stood firm on the earth.  For now you may be held to depict a system in which the entire galaxy whirls lumbrously around the axis of a single, peripheral, faint star.

In reality, none of these choices of a reference frame intend the absurdities ascribed to them.   Each has its use for some purpose or other.  Grandpa was well within his rights, both cosmologically and theologically.

~     ~      ~

~   Commercial break  ~            

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

All biochemists and molecular biologists today are ‘mechanical materialists’.

J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 11

Probably no harm in that, so long as the molecularists  stick to their last, and don't go sounding off in the Sunday supplements about matters that concern them not;  indeed, it would be more concerning, were they all Cantorian Realists, or Presbyterians.   But the day when all musicologists, or mathematicians, or literary critics, take mechanical materialism for their lodestar and touchstone, is the day when we shall cease to learn anything of interest about music, math, or literature.

~     ~      ~

 

We earlier glanced at the program of consilience, which (speaking somewhat informally) depicts the sciences stacking up one atop the other, like proverbial pancakes, while the life-giving maple syrup of shared method and ontology, seeping from one to the next, unites them.   (That summary, while not perfect, is both more concise and somewhat clearer than what you may glean from scattered passages in Wilson’s book.)  Eliminative materialism takes all this a step further:  the whole stack is squashed flatter than flat (again, the individual pancake has passed into legend for this very quality) into an inedible paste: the which, however, is declared to be the sole reality, things like syrup and pats of butter being just figments of your imagination (which itself does not exist).  Understandably, this philosophy was quite popular among the guards at Belsen-Belsen.

That may sound harsh, but truly, the often creepy frisson of the behaviorist/neuroscientific mindset does recall certain experiments during that unlamented Reich which were better left undone.  Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 19, on the founder of American Behaviorism:

Watson presented a baby with a white rat, and then clanged a hammer against an iron bar, alledgedly making the baby associate fear with fur.

Thus, to all our weightier indictments against Nominalism in all its forms, we add this slogan:   

“Behaviorists Hate Bunnies.”

(Our own favorite behaviorist, jolly Dr. Quine, does suffer from a certain lagomorphobia,  in his obsession with "undetached rabbit parts", documented here.)

Wilson pens a highly entertaining parable of the termite ethical code, extoling:

…the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil …. the sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal rights (the colony is ALL!); … the aesthetic pleasure of eating feces from nestmates’ anuses  after the shedding of our skins; and the ecstasy of cannibialism … (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat).

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p.  148

This is jolly stuff, skillfully done; probably give Donald Trump a stiffie.  Yet one senses a sour note,  as the (“consilient”) goal of the eliminative materialists   is to provide a similar account of human morality, decency, caring, flights of fancy, love …. Ever again and inevitably, these proctoscopists return to the anus, the central life-ring (Lebenszirkel) of their Weltanschauung.

~     ~      ~

To be fair to the reductionist program, let us briefly consider a proposal narrated by Wilson, who is both a much more graceful writer  and a more congenial companion than Skinner or the Churchlands.

Wilson offers one worked-out example of  basically eliminative reduction (or ‘consilient’ explanation): from oneirology straight down to biochemistry.  Here is a sketch of the bad old days of Freud:

Mysticism and science meet in dreams.  … When we sleep, the ego releases its grip on the id…  Freud … -- to put it as kindly as possible -- guessed wrong.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 74

Wilson is in fact a kind and temperate man; that mild rebuke is as strongly-worded as anything in the book.  (He is even able to discuss the Postmodernists without resorting to scatological invective, a task far beyond my own capacities.)

But now (p. 75) for the good news:

The competing and more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming  is the activation-synthesis model of biology.  … Sleep descends upon the brain when chemical nerve cell transmitters … such as norepinephrine and serotonin, decline in amount… Simultaneously a transmitter of a second kind, acetylcholine, rises in amount.  …

Etc., etc.; we skip to the exciting climax on the next page:

The electrical membrane activity, still mediated by acetylcholine at the nerve junctions, moves from the pons (the P of PGO), a bulbous mass of nerve centers located at the top of the brain stem, upward to the lower center of the brain mass, where it enteres the geniculate nuclei (G) of the thalamus, which are major switching centers in the visual neuronal pathways.  The PGO waves then pass on to the occipital cortex (O), at the rear of the brain, where integration of visual information takes place.

Voilà ! Any questions?  No?  We're done then.

Oh dear -- did I type all that up aright?  Was it not perhaps the serotonin that flows into the thingummy, thereby (de)activating the thalamo-geniculo-pataphysico reaction?  Well, no matter;  for you will notice that we have so far learned absolutely nothing about actual dreams.(*)

(*  Don’t misunderstand:  this is sound, painstaking work, and it is excellent that someone is doing it.  No doubt it will prove crucial to some hyperspecialists in the approriate microcompartment of biochemistry.  For the general man of science and letters, on the other hand, it is precisely as fascinating as the mysteries of the pancreas.)

This lacuna Wilson hastens to remedy by rushing in with his own broad-brush description, eclipsing that of that bungler Freud:

We fly through the air, swim in the deep sea, walk on a distant planet, converse with a long-dead parent … In dreams we are insane.  We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Hm.   Doesn’t ring a bell, either with my own experience or that of friends with whom I have discussed such things.    In my own dreams, I tend to be at work, or in a classroom, or (oddly) at some sprawling party on the grounds of a great country house.   No flying through the air;  more like, irksome difficulties catching the right bus.  But let that pass.   No doubt spending your days as a reductionist  means you must compensate with florid fantasies at night.

But the real killer is that last line.   It is, I believe, wildly and crucially false.   The real mind-set of the typical dreamer was captured perfectly by Louis Carroll:  Alice retains her level-headedness, while all around her are acting fantastically, and she rather taxes them for their behavior.  (A similar depiction occurs in the long-running comic strip, "The Strange World of Mr Mum".  The eponymous everyman wanders bemused through the strangest situations.)  What the dreamer beholds  may resemble the visions of psychotics:  yet the dreamer is not psychotic. In our dreams we remain our real selves:  we retain, in particular, our unbanishable morality, not doing in dreams what we would not do or at least fantasize doing in waking life. (Morality: a word anathema to some of these gentlemen -- though here Wilson himself is sound enough -- yet it survives the oneiric lysis, as it shall survive their nihilism.)  We remain perfectly rational, only…. just not at our best.   For instance, in dreams I often work out etymologies, or expound mathematical ideas.  These are without exception in error -- hey, happens to the best of us -- but that is what I do, I don’t imagine I’m a prophet, or a giant cockroach, or that everyone is out to get me, or what not.

Freud may not have nailed it, but you’ll learn more about actual dreaming from Die Traumdeutung than from this ultrareductionist stuff.

[Update]  I am currently re-reading Die Traumdeutung;  some actual reflections might follow.
Preliminary musings here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/appendix-to-appendix-on-oneiric.html
And now this;
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/die-traumdeutung-still-further-updated.html

~     ~      ~

That only somewhat facetious polemic brings me to another point.   While specialists of this or that stripe  may want to drill down to the last detail, what most of us require -- expressing this somewhat provocatively -- is an explanation that is as shallow as possible, in that it digs down only as far as it needs to, to clear things up a bit.  (Compare Quine's "Maxim of shallow analysis:  Where it doesn't itch, don't scratch.")  And even if you wind up doing a deep-dive yourself, what you intellectually retain is likely to be an explanatory skeleton. 

Thus, take mathematics.  When a proof is truly “irreducibly reductionist” (to coin a phrase), like that of the Four-Color Theorem,  where intermediate guiding Ideas, of general application, do not emerge, but everything is tediously and computationally broken down into a bad-infinity of special cases, mathematicians are disappointed and frustrated.   What we want ultimately is an agencement of Leading Ideas.  We might dutifully check the details of the proof, but these we shall probably not retain.

(Keynes, whose Treatise on Probability  brims with Leading Ideas, charmingly prefaces one particularly symbol-ridden chapter with absolution for any reader who wishes to skip it.  “We do it, to show that the thing can be done;  the exercise is more for the benefit of the writer, than the reader.” [Quoting from memory, so you might not be able to Google that.])

So, suppose we wish to know what launches birds or butterflies on their migrations.  What we hope to hear about is an account in terms of concepts antecedently familiar or at least learnable without too much fuss -- things like average temperature, extremal (trigger) temperature, average length of daylight, or depletion of ambient foliage.  Or, how do they find their way.   We are prepared for an explanation in terms of magnetism, starlight, or even “an instinct, varying in its details from species to species, whose guiding factors are as yet unknown”.   In the first-named case, we are open to talk about iron molecules in the inner ear;  but if the account in inextricably entangled in the details of the cross-effects between the ornithoboson cycle and the L-dextro-retro-feniculation mechanism, it’s TMI, and we tune out.  A ‘molar’ elucidation suffices for the general public and for the general zoologist   (and indeed, even this much is often too much to ask in practice;  apparently major mysteries remain about many migration-patterns, including the celebrated case of the Monarch butterfly).  An avian histologist might want to know more about those iron particles and their interaction with the inner ear.  But at some point even he is satified to call it a day, content to say, of levels yet further down, The Thing Can Be Done.

[Update 26 April 2012]  And now, for pigeons, it has been:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/science/study-sheds-light-on-how-pigeons-navigate-by-magnetic-field.html?hpw

[Update 14 July 2012]  And trout:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magnetic-sensing-cells-20120714,0,828028,print.story
And sharks (a segment this morning on NPR).

Now, sometimes, perhaps usually, no such shallow-draught explanation will be forthcoming.  Thus, the saga of individual animals gets you only so far towards the understanding the appearance and disappearance of species; a lower-level unit, the gene, turns out to be quite handy; and to further understand the behavior of these, we occasionally have to get down among the DNA.

Consider further,  the symmetries of snowflakes.  The usual explanation is straightforwardly intuitive, local and deterministic.  But somehow I don’t buy it.   It just feels as though such endlessly varied detail, with symmetries nonetheless rigidly enforced, brewed in a whirling cauldron of stochastic accident, must have some energy-minimizing post-editing -- something global (or “holistic”, if you like that word) along the lines of surface tension, or of standing waves on tympani.  In which case you’ll be dragging in Bessel functions, or calculus of  variations, or quantum mechanics.   And in that case  snowflakes will be one of those phenomena that can barely be intuitively understood.  In this, it would join ranks with what may be a host of questions that Homo sapiens will never really understand.  -- This is the Mysterian stance.  Believe it or not, this is also the orthodox Judeo-Christian-Muslim position towards the ultimate unknowability of the mind of God -- certain TV preachers and football coaches to the contrary.

So:  Reduce as you can and as you must, but not for its own sake.  Practically, cognitively, there is a price to pay.   The naturalist tracking an ecosystem knows he may need to have recourse to natural selection, perhaps to geology, a bit of statistics -- but it’s not as though he can’t wait to get his hand on the string theory of the thing. 

Or consider the case of generative syntax, which over the years has dug ever deeper, and become increasingly abstract in its ontology of explanation, drifting further and further from categories familiar to Jespersen.  Yet it did this, not out of any fetishism for abstraction, nor reductionism for its own sake, but rather because earlier, more traditional and intuitive attempts just did not work.  Indeed, the principle figure behind this sweep of developments has also consistently been in the forefront of debunking popular but vacuous styles of reductionism.

~     ~      ~

Again, to be fair, let us quote a man whose mind we entirely admire, whose prose sparkles like dew-bedecked blooms at break of dawn.  None other than -- but you have already guessed -- the master himself, Mr. Willard (“Van”) Orman Quine:

Corresponding to every mental state … the dualist is bound to admit the existence of a bodily state  that obtains when and only when the mental one obtains..  The bodily state is trivially specifiable in the dualist’s own terms, simply as the state of accompanying a mind that is in that mental state.  Instead of ascribing the one state to the mind, then, we may equivalently ascribe the other to the body.  The mind goes by the board, and will not be missed.(*)

(*In fairness to Quine, let us hasten to add, that his core concern here is quite abstractly ontological, even quantificational, as befits a symbolic logician.   It may even be compared to the notion, not of dualism, but of duality, in mathematics, being related rather like the positive and the negative of a photograph, where either one will do.  --  Still, his chosen periscopic viewpoint leads to some no very edifying reflections: “Mental states, construed as states of nerves, are like diseases.”  And such reasonings spawned venomous afterbirths  with Dennett and the Churchlands.)

This nifty epiphany casts our Quine into something of a Little-Jack-Horner state (= excitation of synapse #5328b), for (coming to his senses) he straightly confesses that “this effortless physicalism smacks of trickery”.   Yet what he says is true enough. --  True… enough, for sake of argument; that no such isometric reduction has ever actually been made and perhaps never will, is beside the present point.  Let us grandly grant it done;  Nobels all round, lads!  What then?  Well, then, nothing.  We are back where we were.

For: every carpet has an underside.  We may even concede (perhaps over-generously) that both sides are interderivable:  given the one, you can work out the other.  Now, you and I prefer the upper side, where green birds are depicted in an azure sky, and the prince urges his huntsmen  forward in the chase.  Equally -- and it is their right, -- the proctoscopic philosophers prefer to ogle the underside, an unintuitive tangle of knots and loose ends.  You and I can observe why the green beings  appear on a background of blue;  whereas the proctoscopists can only stare miserably at their welter of circumanal shorthairs.

Such, indeed, is the case most favorable to the proctoscopists, where we are concerned only with a single static pattern.  Consider now -- well, our old friend, the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.  All the proctoscopists can do, in trying to wrangle with that, is to examine the brains (not, note:  the thought processes) of actual people trying to wrangle with it, since the theorem itself is incorporeal.  (Compare the Competence:Performance  distinction, in linguistics. Recall as well the unprofitability of obsession with the latter.)  And granting our epistemological vivisectionists  superhuman abilities  far beyond the offing of likelihood, they will be able to peer into everybody's brain-pan  and inspect the various chemical blurps, electric fizz, and meandering fat-globules  of the would-be topologists.  Yet worse, far worse for their case -- even granted their ability to somehow read off, from this mephitic brew, such messages as “SMITH - NOW - CONSIDERING - FIRST-COUNTABILITY.  UH-OH, SMITH SAD.   MEBBE FIRST-COUNTABILITY NOT ENOUGH. OH NOES!!”, -- they will be not a whit closer to understanding the theorem.  For their data-set consists of all the various blunderers of the earth, barging about, running into dead-ends, committing fallacies, thinking they’ve proved it whereas in reality (victims of a misfolded protein) they did not -- really one would like to see Monty Python work this one up into a skit.  (They did the complete works of Marcel Proust;  why not Urysohn?)  For the truth of the theorem resides, not in the cloaca which these gentlemen are pleasured to inspect, but in the realm of Invisibilia, the kingdom of the Lord of Hosts.  And the valid mathematical moves made by this or that fallible incarnated creature, in their groping attempts to approach the truth, gain their validity, not from thermodynamic or statistical considerations, but from our miraculous harmony with such abstract truth itself, which stems, we know not whence;  though some of us have an inkling.

That, technically, one might perform such fundamental (or rather fundament-level) analyses or rather catalyses,  shows only that it is possible, by the wrong sort of reduction, to reduce meaningful phenomena to the meaningless.  We may dub this excretory reduction, as opposed to explanatory reduction.  And the craft practiced by these proctoscopic coprophiles, we may dub stercochemistry.  (Not a typo, that:  sterco-, not stereo-.)  Indeed, in this perspective, we notice that the doctrine of -- eliminative materialism, is singularly well-named.

Envoi:

… grob geredet, wie gesagt:

womit noch keineswegs  der Wunsch  ausgedrückt ist,

auch grob gehört,

grob verstanden zu werden …

-- Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral

[Update 10 III 2012]   For a briefer, parallel argument, in a lighter vein, click here:
Eliminative Immaterialism

[Update 28 III 2012] Roger Scruton weighs in:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7714533/brain-drain.thtml

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[Update 13 April 2012]  This particular post keeps receiving a disproportionate number of pageviews.  Since the Comments are virtually nonexistent, I am at a loss to know why.

If you have been enjoying it for its sober philosophical content, and want more, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Realism

If, on the other hand, you rather relish the invective, trouncing the nihilists, then you might further appreciate this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophy-porn.html

Eliminative Immaterialism

As an appendix to our crowd-pleasing refutation of (or at least polemic against) cognitive eliminative materialism, and in rank contradiction to our own earlier coffee-cup-related demonstration, we offer here, as an olive branch to the nihilists, this Bonus Gedankenexperiment:

Eliminative (Im)materialists

prove the non-existence of coffee-cups

Thm.  Certain credulous people (“Objectual Realists”) posit things they call “physical objects”:  most notoriously, coffee-cups, emblematic of their simple faith.  They fancy that these posits are perfectly solid, and retain their shape over time, and in sooth (but the image is fantastic) can actually confine a hot steaming swirling admittedly hydrodynamically chaotic fluid (the “coffee”)  lastingly within its walls.

They are deluded.

Pf.  [Subjoin all the perfectly valid truths of physics, whereby said “objects” actually resolve to an impossibly porous congeries of quarks, being otherwise mostly empty space.]

How could this ever lead to an objectual phenomenology such as these believers claim?  QED.

Of course, the mere descriptive apparatus of the Proof part  goes on for many pages, and requires several Ph.D.’s to understand;  so by the time we reach the scoffing at the notion that lasting solidity could possibly emerge out of such a mess, we are too brainfagged to object.  And indeed, the Fnorkoids, highly intelligent though disembodied beings from the fifty-ninth dimension, never having experienced anything remotely analogous to a physical “object”, will find the demonstration plausible, if not quite binding.

Nor do we, embodied though we be, stand in better case:  for indeed our physics -- with rare exceptions -- does not in fact derive the macroscopic properties (even physical properties, let alone cognitive or spiritual) of objects (oceans, animals, mugs) save in a very few favorable cases.   Scientists themselves maintain no otherwise:  as Martin Rees modestly concedes, “A star is simpler than an insect.” (Modest, since Rees is an astronomer  not an entomologist.)

Nor is the shortfall likely to be just an artefact of current computational limitations, since, provably, analytic solutions must already give up at the extremely simple level of a classical dynamical system of conservative central forces involving so few as three bodies.  (As the joke goes, quantum theory is already defeated by the zero-body problem -- the spontaneous Heisenberg-born infinities of the quantum foam.)  Why the coffee does not simply quantum-tunnel through the walls of the mug, or climb over its sides like liquid helium, or just fall straight through the bottom as the porosity picture would suggest, is a very hard problem. 

We do have certain knowledge of coffee-cups -- as certain as anything may be, at any rate (short of our Free Will, which is the most certain of all) -- but it is not of analytic or deductive origin.  It depends rather on the sort of… why, let us call it Revelation, that comes with Incarnation.   For it hath so pleased our Maker, not simply to think of us in posse, but actually to shape us concretely out of clay, with His manly hands;  and to place us in His garden,  for the greater glory of all that is, or was, or is to come.   -- Delightedly observing which, and experiencing which, at this very instant, we must note that,  should you desire a witness to His being and His goodness, you need look no further than the bracing mugful of java in your very hands.