Philosophy

To be a Philosopher

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What is philosophy?  The answer lies in the question itself, because philosophy is all about asking questions.  Philosophy is not in the business of dictating answers, so an appropriate philosophical non-answer to the question is that philosophy examines the foundations on which we can claim to know anything.  Not surprisingly, this philosophical position challenges the credibility of all those who profess to know, and philosophy gains a well-deserved reputation for effrontery when it pitches the wisdom of not knowing against the authority of those who claim to know better.  The rest is history, but as philosophers we remain interested in what comes next, knowing that one of the obstacles to ‘getting to know’ is the belief that we know already.   This issue raises the philosophical paradox of knowing that we don’t know, which sits at the heart of knowledge like a ‘black hole’ sitting at the heart of the universe, apparently gobbling up its substance.  But perhaps the ‘dark matter’ of paradox is the gateway to another universe of understanding – beyond the confines of certainty.

A ‘certain fact’ is more a reflection of our psychology than the nature of an external world, for there is no fact in mind that has not been elevated to prominence by our selective thinking.  So our certainties may amount to no more than psychological inflexibilities concerning ideas we want to uphold, or myths we don’t want to relinquish.  Such is the case with our ideas of causality and nature as the cause of existence.  Meanwhile, our ideas about the special nature of life remain unshaken by all the explanations reducing it to unliving processes.  And though we might deem to explain consciousness as an outgrowth of unconscious functions, we know that much only because we already know consciousness to be something much more than that. Nonetheless, the facts continue to inform and it is tempting to think that they are selecting and refining our explanations and conclusions – that the ‘weight of evidence’ will eventually iron out any anomalies and contradictions.  But what if the facts are not straightforward in themselves?  What if the cumulative factual data remains inherently contradictory?

Despite knowing that life is made of some cheap chemicals that become organised, we still don’t know what makes the difference that makes them ‘come to life’ – knowing, as we do, that life marks a difference we cannot ignore by claiming there is no real difference.  Likewise, there are some important questions we can ask only ourselves, such as: by what property of thought are we able to think that a thought is just a brain process and in what state of knowledge do we conclude that it can’t be anything else?  Then what if facts are no more than markers of changes that can’t be explained adequately in terms of things as they were?  What if nature is a plurality of natures to be understood not as one thing or another, but as one thing and another?   In other words, there may be more to reality than the objective facts can reveal about a natural reality that has no cause to think about itself.

What is the law of nature that says everything is really something else or that knowledge owes to this form of explanation?  Perhaps we need to acknowledge the limits of explanation and look to the knowledge that comes with a re-awakening to ourselves as subjective entities, with subjectivity serving as a prerequisite to knowing anything.  Even in science we like to show that we know we know, but to truly know is to realise its limits – back to the paradox!  Then what can we know?  We know that knowledge is impossible without a reference to the facts, but it would be a big mistake to conclude that the facts are the drivers of knowing and wholesale repositories of certainty.  And whereas it seems quite logical to think that more and more facts are the answer to our factual conundrums and theoretical shortcomings, it is wholly unreasonable to think that the facts draw their own conclusions and can explain for us the nature of thought, reason, consciousness and understanding, as if there is nothing more to knowledge than a body of fact, and more to the better when it belongs to an objective state of reality that remains inherently unknowing – as if there is nothing more to reality, or for that matter, being realistic.

Mike Laidler

Dialectical diversions

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Our understandings lay claim to the facts on the understanding that those facts can be characterised by their consistency – inferring that even as things can be seen to change over time, the nature of that change forms a pattern of consistencies underpinned by a natural lawfulness and immutable truth. However, it is our conceptualisations of fact, rather than the facts themselves, that require ‘their truth’ to be free of contradiction. Meanwhile, the everyday is replete with factual contradictions that we purposely overlook in favour of a perceived logical integrity – a logic we claim to inherit from a nature that apparently has no purpose in it. Likewise, life is seen to be a derivative of an unliving nature that is both changed and unchanged – a contradiction that remains embedded in the very stuff of our DNA, understood as the unliving stuff of life. Furthermore, quantum mechanics reveals that our world is built upon, indeed depends upon, a raft of stark factual anomalies.

Normally, we habilitate the factual contradictions by making them inter-personal – by supplementing our observations with theories and opinions by which we variously agree or disagree with one another. And the more we expect the truth to be either one thing or the other, the more those perspectives tend to polarise. So the paradoxes holding truths in contradiction get assimilated as factors of ideas in opposition. Then, by rationalising different points of view, we move to mould the facts and ideas into an intellectual consistency, albeit hypothetical – as if, from a synthesis of our contentions and disputations, truth might emerge to resolve contradiction and uphold our reasoning. Thereby we affirm, in applying that synthesis to our observations of reality, that the facts show us truths that cannot be inconsistent – one thing and another – lest we abandon sound reason in countenancing a nature that can be both mindless and aware, or an earth beneath our feet that is both round and flat.

Mike Laidler

Supernature

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Instinctively:

walking

talking

seeing

feeling

thinking

– being natural,

‘nature’ redefined.

 

Knowingly:

changing

becoming

incorporating

ascending,

transcending

– being otherwise,

‘being’ redefined.

©Mike Laidler

Grey matters

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We may feel that we can get to know a thing better by explaining it in terms of something else, indeed science depends upon this philosophy, but there is also a sense in which it doesn’t make sense – and the best example is ourselves.

Consider the perceived difference between our thoughts and the brain.  First we must recognise a difference in order to talk about a cause, otherwise there is nothing to talk about.  Then we suppose that the cause must explain things – especially if there is nothing else to see.  Yet something else remains evident in the change, now perceived as an effect.  However, saying that the cause has changed to create that difference leaves the fact of the change unexplained and renders the effect redundant.  Typically, we diminish the reality of the difference in order to explain it by attributing the emergent properties of the effect to the cause – as if ‘causality shows us’ that change doesn’t really occasion a shift in reality.  Thereby we conclude that new events, such as thought or consciousness, are really superficialities that cannot amount to changes in the nature of nature.  In other words, we concede, for the sake of explanation, that change is not all it seems – as if a talking nature is really not so different in kind from one that never did, now seen as the cause.

Moreover, the mind and the body amount to differences in reality which we can’t explain by supposing that reality must be a singular ‘thing’.  Indeed we are no more able to explain reality in terms of ‘things real’ than we can explain the existence of existence.  In fact, we can’t pin the ‘it’ down.  And perhaps reality is a fact we cannot define because it can also be seen to define us – in more ways than one.  So when people say that mind and body are one and the same thing, they are calling them the same in the name of an incomplete explanation – as if causality is a thing in existence that explains the origin of things in existence and automatically clears-up the problem of change.  Also, we are looking at ‘the reality’ retrospectively by leaving out of the analysis the significance of the looking – as if the change to observation can be seen as a subsidiary effect.  But we have yet to explain the change to perception, together with the evidence, of itself, of the effect that occupies an additional reality to the cause – a difference that cannot be accounted for by saying that there is no real change, as if the fact of change is subsidiary to the cause instead of the other way round.

Mike Laidler

 

The Mind In Science

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Foreword: This article was first published as a letter in the January 2016 edition of The Psychologist: the monthly publication of the British Psychological Society; volume 29, no 1. (www.thepsychologist.org.uk)

I would like to add some philosophical observations to the recent contributions on the performance of psychological research.

There is a fundamental ‘uncertainty principle’ in psychology because the study of behaviour can change it, intentionally or not, whilst psychological research cannot control for the incalculable influences of its findings. In addition, psychology is open to the accusation of being subjectively invested in its subject matter to the detriment of ‘pure objectivity’ – after all, don’t we start with subjective premises like thoughts, feelings, memories, attitudes etc? And, despite the physical sciences being just as susceptible to ‘confirmation bias’ they seem better placed to get away with the trick of being ‘essentially objective’ – as if ‘objectivity’ is independent of the meaning we give to it. In fact, it may be fair to say that scientists are more like tinkerers than independent observers, and to make this point I take my cue from the works of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.

Science faces a continuous challenge to determine the facts, which, aside from the most general of interpretations, are rarely conclusive. Indeed, the ideal of science – that the facts will speak for themselves – is a complete myth. Furthermore, every fact is a fact in multiple contexts and its isolation does not necessarily reflect its true nature. Evidence, such as it is, is a construct of the questions we ask, and is limited by all those we fail to ask. In general terms, there is no evidence without a mind to be convinced, and it doesn’t matter how objective we strive to be, we cannot escape the fact that there would be no objectivity without a subjective backdrop; indeed objectivity exists as a selective version of subjectivity. It is no wonder then that as the evidence accumulates, we find ourselves overturning or re-interpreting facts of prior investigations that were hitherto taken to be conclusive.

In reality, science remains a community of tinkerers. We like to think that our discoveries bolster our claims to have mastered the facts and that we know what we are doing because, like Little Jack Horner, we have managed to pull the plum out of the pie. And though we might have good reasons for selecting our pie, our generalisations don’t mean that the facts have told us what to think, or that that the ‘hard evidence’ runs our research – indeed it remains very much the opposite. Meanwhile, we strive to remain in control of our selections, so ensuring that the results remain subject to our foibles – which is why, as Karl Popper pointed out, we can always find confirmations of our pet theories and still be wrong.

A cynic might conclude that reliability and replication thereby serve to promote a line of research at the expense of the wider truth. But what kind of truth is to be found outside research? It would seem that the answer lies in our assessments of validity, so long as we remember that those assessments remain no more than that – since no fact speaks for itself whilst it requires a theory to speak for it. Nevertheless, there is one conclusion we are entitled to draw on the basis of our privileged position as subjective entities in an objective universe – that no matter how research proceeds and performs in the future, it remains relative to the unique ‘contamination’ of the mind in science, and necessarily so, albeit, paradoxically, not necessarily sufficient to convince us.

Mike Laidler MBPsS
philosophyalive.co.uk

References
Kuhn, Thomas S (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Popper, Karl R (1957). The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge & Kegan Paul

Factualities

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Explanation is not all it seems.  Explanations owe more to matters of language than fact.  They echo the voice of authority, partly borrowed from the facts, but crucially sponsored by the credibility of who says what.  For most purposes they serve as rarefied beliefs – vouching for the way things ‘must be’.  At the cutting edge they take the form of specialised communications between like-minded thinkers claiming to speak for the truth – assuring us that facts dispel uncertainties, and truth is furthered by the elimination of contradiction.  Contradiction showcases opposing statements of fact.  Either way, the facts are neither disposed to tell us anything, nor explain themselves.  In most cases the facts have been selected to suit the explanation, though their proponents gain rhetorical advantage in pretending it is the other way round.   Politicians are particularly adept at this – the fuzziness of language being the politician’s weapon of choice and first line of defence.

Scientific explanation tackles the problem by putting its explanations on trial – as if the facts will decide.  Scientists acknowledge known unknowns, but it is the unknown unknowns that weaken their conclusions, which harbour a persisting hiatus that outstrips all progress in working towards an ultimate truth.  The strange thing about scientific explanation is that it can seem right, because it works, yet still be wrong – being ‘right’ for the wrong reasons.  Nevertheless, for scientists, it is the explanation that counts, and they soldier on without knowing whether their findings will ever have a practical application.   In the meantime the whole of explanation comes down to tentative theories which remain fallible because of the ever vacant space for the unknown.  But the greater fallacy is due to our precepts of what we need and don’t need to know, given the fact of what we take to know already – prescribing that whereof we cannot know, thereof we must ignore.

Mike Laidler

Horizons

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Whatever else we can know about the beginnings and becomings of the universe, we know it hosts, in us, a reality quite unlike the nature we can find by looking to a universe without – that reality being the fact of our awareness. It is as if the universe has evolved to incorporate something extra, through us, which we know to be real enough simply because we are aware of the fact of awareness in existence – a fact that now seems to exist in addition to everything else. And if that fact only seems to be the case, then the fact of that seeming is still enough to make the case.

Mike Laidler

The Silent Truth

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There is a simple truth that defies all explanation because it forms the basis of all explanation. It towers over our philosophies, religions and sciences, dwarfing the edifices of knowledge by which we claim to know. It can’t be magnified by theory, refined by belief, or preserved in tablets of stone. Neither is the ratification of discovery or reification in fact sufficient to define its boundaries. Nor can it be captured by the finesse of the artist, or the subtleties of scholarship, or the trappings of authority. Indeed, it empowers knowledge by stripping away all authority in what we can claim to know – for the knowledge that needs to be bolstered by authority is not true knowledge. And history shows that it is not with the mouth of truth that the facts are said to speak for themselves.

In the name of reason, we reject the possibility of a knowledge beyond the reach of our understanding, except as we allow it to be held in trust for us by others believed to know better. Thus we entertain proxy truths in relying upon the edicts of appointed authorities to tell us what we can and cannot know – as if personal knowledge is a recipe for ignorance, contradiction and delusion – as if reason can resolve the paradox of existence – as if paradox is the antithesis of truth. So we try to overrule the simple truth, believing that it must give way to the necessity of explanation. Yet the more we come to know, the more we come to realise the sheer scale of what we don’t know. Meanwhile, the fact of existence remains a mystery and the simple truth remains silent within the paradoxical pre-existence of possibility.

Mike Laidler

The way things are

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Realists say that they respond to the facts as they are and reality as it is; however, truth, reality, fact and possibility can outdo all our expectations and logical understandings.  For instance, scientific explanations of life raise as many questions as answers; nevertheless, we tend to presume the kind of answer we are looking for by regarding life as a minor rather than a major part of an expanding universe.  On the other hand, a universe without life is conceptually less than one that is imbued, and the same applies to a living universe without the power of conceptualisation.  That being so, it is up to us to ask ourselves whether, in the fullness of possibility, reality is potentially bigger again than us and our powers of conceptualisation – just as we happen to be by comparison to the insentient fabric of the universe that subsists ‘apart from’ us.  Even so, the questions keep on stacking up, such as: is the universe expanding within different dimensions of possibility; does the power to be encompass more than one reality, and if so, are we qualified to define that power and pronounce upon the way things must be or should be according to our parochial ideas and ideals?  In short, to what extent can we get to know the nature of existence, its limits and possibilities, on the basis of the way it is for us?

We like to think that logic entreats us be realistic, whereas, in fact, logic takes its starting point from our initial presumptions about the facts.  So what can we presume about this thing called reality?  We take for granted the fact that we live in a world of things that come to be, which also suggests that things are subject to change.  Yet does it mean that things can change radically?  Is reality itself subject to change?  Is everything necessarily the same at one level yet different at another?  Can things be one thing and another?  Is reality a plurality of realities?  Must all possibilities conform to logic?  Not surprisingly, there remain fundamental questions about the nature of change that the facts as they were and are cannot answer for us, and which science struggles to explain by filling-in the gaps with a logic that states what must be the case in order for the explanation to remain logical – that is, in order to preserve the logic.  But what if it is possible for ‘the real’ to be transformed by facts to come?  What if things that are impossible in one context become possible in another – because of change – as when the chemicals that make up our bodies become a part of a knowing reality that thinks, perceives and wonders about itself?  What if change builds on chemistry, extending it into the reality of thought wherein the chemicals in our brains are and are not the cause of our capacity to consider the nature of reality, truth and logic?

The rational mind draws on logic as an absolute truth in a world it struggles to understand.  So is truth the servant of logic or logic the servant of truth?  If the latter, it would be wrong to conclude that the truth must conform to logic in order to be true – as if to restrict the nature of truth to our logical conceptualisations of what must be the case.  However, if the truth is indeed something grander and stranger than we can make it out to be, might this not alert us to the limits of logic for resolving the factual contradictions of a universe that is grander and stranger than the imagination?  For instance, it may be perfectly true to say that the space-dust of which we are constituted is and is not the cause of the living mindful panoply that is known to us and occupied by us – since the evidence shows the physical world achieving sentience rather than supplying it.  But logic continues to nag at us and aver that the facts as they were must be the ‘real’ cause.  And whilst it is true to say that an effect, such as a thought, is a particular consequence of causes identifiable in non-thinking physical states, it is not possible to say thereby that the difference between cause and effect can be explained by that fact or any number of causal convolutions, or that the cause is capable of saying anything to us unless we put the ‘words into its mouth’, with a meaning that never belonged to the facts as they were, or nature as it was.

Mike Laidler

Leadership and Democracy

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We use the vote to tell our governments what we think, but how do we know what to think?  Does making a decision on the basis of the available evidence mean that our reasoning is balanced for us by that evidence?  And can we mean what we say or do if the brain makes us do it under the influence of its inputs?  In fact, are we just being carried along on a tide of influences that appear to us as our opinions?  Is this why our choices get skewed by the facts that happen to grab our attention or the past experiences that bias our views?  Then what does this say about voting in democracies that are meant to operate on the balance of public opinion?  Are we any better when it comes to collective decision-making?

Can a consensus of opinions draw us nearer to the truth?  When confronted with an irresolvable dilemma it might seem reasonable for an individual to commit the choice to the toss of a coin.  However, we don’t want to commit to chance important choices on matters of national policy, so we might listen to the debates and take note of the opinion polls giving us a statistical insight into the balance of public opinion?  But can we really claim to know the collective mind?  Can we rely upon the statistics to give us the facts?  Can democratic opinion resolve a dilemma in any event?  Is the opinion of the masses any less fickle than the singular decision of a dominating leader?

Does democracy enshrine the sovereignty of the majority over ‘the right thing to do’?  Ironically, our dilemmas appear to be most acute when we give ourselves an either/ or predicament.  So what can the statistics reveal about issues that split a population down the middle?  Suppose there are millions of coins in a bag of national treasures and they happen to tumble out at random.  They would tend towards a balance of 50/50, heads and tails, with the trend towards this balance increasing as the number of coins increases – the reason being that the coins don’t know what they are doing.  So when our mass choices at elections and referenda tend towards such a balance of opinions, might this not mean that the statistics are indeed telling us something about ourselves – that the balance of collective opinion is no better than chance?

Mike Laidler