The Duel of the Dual

They say that theoretical physics is "the result of two to three beers"; I would dispute only the number of beers (it's higher). But then again, after watching a 40 minute video about whether or not chairs exist (yes, really), I think it's safe to say that philosophy is the result of two or three beers, five whiskeys, an unfortunate amount of wine and an indeterminate quantity of something normally used for degreasing engines.

Most blog posts here are cheerfully ignored, but some have the (un)fortunate habit of generating a spiralling discussion. Back in July I wrote up a summary of responses to a post on Locke, which in turn generated its own really quite staggeringly long discussion post that I just don't think I have the time or the will (free or otherwise... sorry, I'll see myself out) to summarise. This brought in the Chairs video, which has protracted discussions here (sadly degenerates into an argument), here (this one is for experts and makes me actually aware of my own ignorance) and here (the one I find by far the most valuable).

(I didn't participate in those discussions. While I've since managed to read Berkeley's Principle's Of Human Knowledge and Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, I haven't had chance to blog them properly as I would have liked, nor engage in discussions until now. I started several other short posts in response, but haven't completed them yet either. Partly this is because I've been increasing immersed in Virtual Reality (surely a valuable philosophical exercise ?) and partly because there has been far too much real world unpleasantness that had to be dealt with, which didn't leave me feeling like I was up to anything as rigorous as a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality. Hitting things with a virtual sword was far more productive.)

But anyway, I leave those links for future reference. My point today is once again about consciousness. As I've stated many times, I'm a dualist : I think the mental realm is of a fundamentally different nature to the material realm. The two to me seem irreconcilable. While I could entertain the notion of idealism (consciousness is all that exists), it's distinctly unsatisfying and far too magical, while the opposite prospect of materialism (the material world is all there is) feels like full-on, self-evident lunacy.

And yet... in a private discussion with Andreas Geisler, one of the main participants in the discussions, I've realised that this doesn't necessarily mean monism in general is incorrect. I may even yet be persuaded to abandon dualism altogether. Shock, horror !

In one discussion I suggested some categorisations of the different theories of mind might be helpful; this surely exists somewhere, but not in a public-friendly format that I could find. For reasons that entirely escape me, this got someone very angry, so this didn't happen. I would still like to return to this, but for now I shall confine myself only to monism and dualism.

Whereas dualism says the mind and matter are fundamentally different, monism says they are one and the same. Idealism and materialism seem to be the most common forms, but there is a third, rather more mysterious yet possibly more satisfying interpretation that avoids the problems of both.

The basis for this appears to rely on what we mean by two key terms : "knowledge" and "reality" (also similarly "exist"). I am not going to venture into a full discussion of any of these, but I think and hope that there will be no need here.

The most useful quote from the discussions above is to my mind without doubt, "'Real' is a bastard of a word." It - ahem - really is ! Andreas has a habit, which takes some getting used to but I think is useful, of distinguishing between lower and uppercase real and Real, I shall do the same here with exist and Exist. For example, Santa Claus clearly exists in some very lose, general sense - the concept exists, but there's no actual living man going around jumping down chimneys (I still do not hold with the idea of fictional characters having some genuine consciousness). Santa Claus does not Exist in the True, Absolute sense of the word : Santa is not the Ultimate Reality.

Another way to express this is with apples. As I've said previously, I don't think much of the claim that since our perceptions are limited, an apple is probably nothing like what we think it is. All we have is perception, so I would say an apple is by definition that which induces our perceptions of an apple. That is all we can never say. Any other qualities an apple might have we cannot know, so aren't worth considering. The Platonic form, as it were, of an Apple is forever beyond us. We have only lowercase, surface-level knowledge of anything, not True Knowledge of its Real, Absolute form (see also my lengthy post on the basic assumptions of science).

There ought to be nothing inevitably mystical or weird about this at all. Astronomers have been expanding their perceptions through different wavelengths for centuries; there is nothing less "real" about observations taken through a radio telescope as with an optical one. We can never observe anything in its sum total of existence; we are always limited in time, frequency etc. 

Qualia only add to this. I completely disagree with the claim in one of the discussions that colours are not qualia, something knowable only mentally. True, you can measure the properties of an object and thus calculate how it will appear to someone - but redness itself you would never have any conception of at all unless you experience it. That the "colour" could be fully defined by the properties of an object (and, importantly, its surroundings) does not negate that the experiential property of colour is wholly different. What appears red to one person may not appear so to someone with colour blindness, or a mantis shrimp, and there is, ultimately, no way to know if two healthy people genuinely experience the same redness anyway.

So our knowledge is fundamentally limited. Again, this doesn't pose any difficulty for science (even for ostensibly very hard-nosed scientific parameters). Science analyses only what we can objectively perceive. It can't say much - if anything - about an Apple, but it can say what an apple is with certainty. Or to put it another way, scientific certainty is indeed possible but only within its own carefully defined domain. Step outside the domain of scientific knowledge and scientific inquiry becomes not even wrong. This is the basic mistake of Scientism, and indeed New Atheism.

This relates to what is for me the key part of the Chairs video. Defining identity is hard, as for example in the Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. Triggers' Broom) problem : add or subtract one atom, and is it still the same ship ? Take it apart and reassemble it and is it still the same ? What if you simultaneously replace all the parts of the original ?

The answer, according to the Vsauce video, depends on the application conditions. That is, it depends on the domain of what you're interested in. Chairs and shoes are made of atoms, but it seems a bit mad to say that atoms are ultimately all there are (we could go down to the subatomic, for example) and that therefore chairs and shoes do not "really" exist. One could describe them as emergent phenomena, but this still wouldn't address the question of whether or not they exist, and seems daft.

The answer is the domain of examination. An atom cannot itself be a shoe any more than a shoe can be an atom, but both clearly have some level of existence. It would be as mad to say that an atom doesn't exist because it in turn is made of protons and electrons, as it would to say that a shoe doesn't exist because it's made of atoms. And so on ad infinitum, at least in the upwards directions... the Solar System exists but is unstable, stars continually evaporate, galaxies are disrupted and merge, large-scale galactic filaments are inherently unstable. We can't say that these things don't exist just because they change and vary, because they clearly do have some meaningful existence (see the Chairs video for an in-depth look at this).

As does everything else. That is, to repeat : everything has some form of existence. Everything we describe is, ultimately, just a label for something. We do not, as Locke pointed out, know the most basic level of reality, we do not know if there really is something more akin to the original indivisible meaning of "atom". So yes, chairs exist, and yes, you can count them as individual objects if that's the domain you're interested in (see the third discussion's first post for a nice definition of what we mean by a thing). You wouldn't include them at all when doing studies of atomic physics because that wouldn't make any sense, just as it wouldn't really make sense to account for the details of atomic physics when teaching a course on carpentry. It's about relevance, not reality.

Now at last we can introduce consciousness. Shoes and atoms demonstrate a kind of duality : they are both very distinct from the other, but there's also an easy route to a Grand Unified Theory of Shoes. That is, we could say that shoes themselves are dualistic (or pluralistic) : trainers and clogs are fundamentally different, but they are elegantly unified in being made of atoms. 

To apply this to consciousness we go a step further. We've already admitted that our knowledge has a lowercase k, that it only applies within the domain of our perception. This means that full, True Knowledge is beyond our grasp. So, Andreas says, matter and mind could be unified by a third, monist form of reality.

That is, we can chuck out materialism as being daft. It is abundantly obvious that particles bashing about are not the whole of reality and cannot account for its mental, subjective aspect. What the true nature of "stuff" would be in this idea is unknown and unknowable. All we can say is that it is that which induces both matter and mind. It is not that matter has some hitherto unrealised properties, but that there is some altogether different substance which manifests either as mind or matter depending on the circumstances and our perception of it.

I this is an excellent compromise and like this very much. It has a lot in common with Spinoza (who I never blogged because his writing is incredibly tedious) and the Upanishads (which, after the binge drinking session that no doubt gave rise to philosophy, probably went on to smoke and otherwise ingest a whole array of now-illegal substances). All things are one, it's just that we don't know what that thing is.

... As an aside, there is a curious tendency to unify, isn't there ? Like that moment in Futurama where Fry realises there are only two parallel universes... somehow the essential twoness of all things just don't satisfy anyone, or as in the Discworld :

The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.

This scenario has the strength and weakness of allowing great freedom of woo. You can say, "there's no need for any mysticism whatever", because as Andreas points out, you still need evidence for stuff. It doesn't alter, let alone undermine, our lowercase k knowledge of the world around us at all. If you want, you can speculate to your heart's content as to the nature of true Knowledge and Reality; you can call it God as Spinoza did, or the Infinite One as the Upanishads and New Ages loonies refer to it. But if you evaluate lowercase r reality using scientific methodology, there is absolutely no reason to do so. Nothing here suggests or implies any kind of deity of supernatural forces, or equally, explicitly or implicitly rules them out. It is utterly agnostic. It only requires something fundamentally unknowable - nothing more, nothing less.

To me, science is an attempt to answer to the question, "what is knowledge ?". It says that this is something obtained by repeat observation using independent observers and established using different methods. You can have facts in science, which are not subject to change, and theories, which are, and the two are not always distinct (such as the shape of the Earth, which is both an explanatory model and an observable fact). I personally find it strange that anyone would use anything other than a scientific method to inquire about the nature of observable reality.

But this domain of science is limited. For example science can inform but never dictate morality or aesthetic preference : those are inherently internal, subjective beliefs. The problem with Scientism (and materialism) is that they assume that this excellent knowledge offered by science is actually Knowledge, presuming that our observations actually show us what is Real. They treat observations less as provisional evidence and more of a sort of creation myth, somehow bizarrely unquestionable without justification.

Yet science itself says nothing of the sort. As Andreas puts is, "That which gives rise to what we observe is not the same as the observation." We have no reason to think our observations are ever whole or complete. While doing science, we confine ourselves to the measurable, perceptible world, but there is absolutely no reason to then assume that this is all there is, or equally, that if there is this other aspect to reality, that we could ever know anything about it. We can "know" that the thing responsible for our observations must have properties in accordance with our observation, but we cannot know what those much deeper properties actually are.

This means that my dualistic stance is not without foundation. Indeed, within the domain of perception, I think it's extremely useful : my mental perception is clearly not the same at all as the atoms I perceive and anyone who thinks they are is barking mad. Dualism is an entirely valid view within the realm of observation (Andreas initially asking if my duality was just the difference between physics - i.e. mental models, and physicality, the things the models describe). In that sense I would say I have no need to change my stance at all. Rather, this interpretation only enlarges rather than undermining my world view : dualism is a valid description, but does not represent true Knowledge.

Of course, this all needs to sink in quite a lot more. Tentatively, I think it's a matter of taste whether this "unknowable stuff" (I presume there's a better, more technical term, but that's a detail) is Occam-compatible or not. In one sense it is, reducing things down to a single substance, but in another way one could argue that it invokes a whole new level of unknown. Maybe I'll return to this when I eventually get around to properly writing up what I thought of Berkeley and Hume. For now, I find this idea extremely appealing. Hooray !