Brute Facts

A typical argument for atheism goes like this (in simplified form): Both the atheist and the theist start with a "brute fact", i.e. something that "just is." The theist argues from the existence of the universe ("What caused the universe?") to God (something that "just is.") The atheist responds that if we must accept something that "just is", why not say it is the universe rather than hypothesizing something beyond it like God? That merely, ala Ockham, multiplies hypothetical entities unnecessarily. The universe "just is" and there is no need for God.

It isn't true that the cosmological arguments for God put forward by the great classical philosophers like Aquinas considered God as something that "just is." Indeed, the whole point of the arguments are to establish the existence of something that is much more than something that "just is."

But that is beside the point of the present post, which is to explore the notion of brute facts or things that "just are." My conclusion is that brute facts are intellectually dangerous things, and destroy far more than their deployers suppose. They want to aim the cannon of brute facts at God, but the consequent explosion blows up not just God but our understanding of the universe itself.

Consider what it is to be a "brute" fact. Something that is "brute" is something unintelligible; that is why animals are called "brutes", because they do not possess reason. A "brute" fact is a fact that is unintelligible beyond the bare fact that it is. Clearly, if a fact is brute, there is no point in asking anything more about it, since there is nothing more about it that we can know.

Here is the rub. How do we know a brute fact for what it is when we encounter it? What distinguishes brute facts from intelligible facts? Intelligible facts are facts for which we can find an explanation, you say. But there is nothing to say that brute facts can't appear to have an explanation when they really don't.  That, in fact, is the whole point of the atheist's brute fact argument against the theist: His argument is not that God doesn't really explain the universe should He exist, but that the universe in fact does not stand in need of an explanation in the first place because it is brute.

Newton's theory of gravitation appears to explain why the moon orbits the earth and planets orbit the sun. Perhaps, however, those celestial movements are really only brute facts; then Newton's theory only appears to explain the solar system. You scoff because it is clear that Newton's theory does in fact explain the solar system; it is ridiculous to suppose that it is just by chance that all the planets and their moons happen to orbit in accordance with Newton's theory.

And I would agree, but only because I do not accept the notion of brute facts. For smuggled in your reply is the assumption that you have some idea of the nature of brute facts: Brute facts wouldn't appear to happen in such a way that they conform with some intelligible law. In doing so, however, you have implicitly denied the notion of brute facts, for brute facts are facts about which you can say nothing at all further than the fact that they are (or might be). We can't say what they are like or what they are unlike or how they might appear or how it is impossible for them to appear. Any supposition along any of these lines is to contradict the brute nature of the supposed brute fact: It is to concede that the fact is in some measure intelligible; if we can say how brute facts cannot appear to us, then we have conceded that brute facts are in some measure knowable beyond the fact that they are, and therefore are not brute.

One of the virtues of David Hume was that he took the notion of brute facts seriously. And he saw that if we allow the notion of brute facts through the door, then we have destroyed the intelligibility of causality altogether and not just for the universe or God. For we never see causality itself, says Hume, only one event following another. And if we don't presuppose that the universe is intelligible, that is, if we take it that brute facts might be lurking around every corner, then the fact that one type of event tends to follow another might just be one of those brute facts waiting to temp us into false conclusions about causality. We might mistake our becoming accustomed to breaking glass following the flight of a brick for insight into a casual relationship between flying bricks and broken glass, when in fact their relationship might just be a brute fact.

Kant, of course, noticed that Hume's position not only undermined the traditional arguments for God but also any possibility of an actual understanding of the universe, including that of modern science. Kant furthered the Humean project by offering an explanation as to why we tend to (falsely) infer causality into the universe. Kant reflects on the fact of experience, and claims that the only way we can have connected experience is for our cognitive faculties to organize it out of the blooming, buzzing confusion around us. In other words, our minds are constructed so as to read into nature notions like causality and substance so that we can deal with it. A very clever advance on Hume, which saved science from Hume's skepticism, but at the price of recasting the subject of science from being nature itself to merely how nature appears to us given our cognitive apparatus.

The point here is to be wary when an atheist deploys the brute fact artillery. For those who start firing with brute facts typically do not understand that their shells will land on them as much as anyone else. In particular, they don't realize that the brute facts they deploy to destroy God will destroy the science they love so much as well.

The Self, Immanuel Kant, and Sam Harris. Commentary Part 4

In this fourth part of my commentary on Sam Harris's Waking Up, I will continue with his chapter The Mystery of Consciousness and on into the next chapter The Riddle of the Self.  Both these chapters provide the opportunity to bring in Immanuel Kant, the great Enlightenment philosopher.  Kant was a deep, thorough and disciplined thinker who thought through the implications of modern philosophical premises to a level that is still often underappreciated. Modern materialists like Harris still haven't come to terms with Kant.

In the latter parts of chapter 2 and into chapter 3 Harris attacks the unity of conscious experience and the subjective experience of an "I" (the latter of which he does think is an illusion, in contrast to consciousness itself). Harris distinguishes between consciousness itself and its contents:

Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness itself and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood in neurophysiological terms. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: Its color, contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus, when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball's roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of "binding" can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible - because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a percept.

This work suggests, as many other finding in neuroscience do, that the contents of consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

He then goes on to discuss the division of the brain into hemispheres, and circumstances under which the hemispheres appear to have their own individual consciousness:

What is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious... The consciousness of the right hemisphere is especially difficult to deny whenever a subject possesses linguistic ability on both sides of the brain, because in such cases the divided hemispheres often express different intentions. In a famous example, a young patient was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up: His left brain replied, "A draftsman," while his right brain used letter cards to spell out "racing driver." In fact, the divided hemispheres sometimes seem to address each other directly, in the form of verbalized, interhemispheric argument.

What Harris is after is undermining the notion that there is some unified self, soul, or "I" that is behind human nature. Consciousness is real for Harris, but any unified experiencer of consciousness is not.

Much of what makes us human is generally accomplished by the right side of the brain. Consequently, we have every reason to believe that that disconnected right hemisphere is independently conscious and that the divided brain harbors two distinct points of view. This fact poses an insurmountable problem for the motion that each of us has single, indivisible self - much less an immortal soul. The idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks of the body. But the split-brain phenomenon proves that our subjectivity can quite literally be sliced in two... However, the most important implications are for our view of consciousness: It is divisible - and, therefore, more fundamental than any apparent self.

Harris is anxious to show that science suggests that the self is an illusion because that is the same place he is going with Eastern spirituality.  For Harris, science tells us the truth about the objective world, while Eastern meditation can reveal to us the truth about the subjective world - specifically, that the self or "I" is an illusion. Since consciousness is not merely subjective but is itself part of the objective world, consciousness is the meeting place between science and meditation. Like a good medieval theologian, Harris rejects any temptation of a "double truth" about consciousness - the truth discovered by meditation and the truth discovered by science, which might possibly disagree. For Harris they must agree and, he argues, in fact they do.

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion - and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

And the benefits of realizing this, moment to moment, is, according to Harris, peace of mind.

Harris, however, in attempting to hold on to the truths (allegedly) revealed both by modern science and Eastern meditation, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. We can see this by turning to Kant, who saw the problem in his analysis of the thought of David Hume. Hume, like Harris, did not think there was any unified self undergirding our experience, for the simple reason that we do not directly encounter any such self in experience. Such a self would be one and the same through all our experiences, but we have no experience of anything that persists invariably the same, so the self must be merely an illusion.

We don't need to go into the details of Hume's thought other than to remark on its resemblance to the position Harris takes. Kant was not particularly concerned about saving the idea of a persistent self, but he was concerned with saving the idea of empirical science, and he saw that the Hume/Harris position threatens the very possibility of science. For science requires scientists, and if there is no persistent self, how can there be a scientist to pursue science? Kant, who respected Hume as the man who "awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers", wondered how he could save science in light of the Humean view of the self and Humean epistemology. Specifically he asked: What are the minimum requirements, rationally speaking, to get science up and running?

Let's consider one of the famous experiments at the origin of modern science: Galileo's investigation of acceleration by rolling balls down ramps. What is necessary for this experiment? Beyond the physical equipment of balls, ramps and timing mechanisms, there is the necessity of a scientist to conduct the experiment. Consider what Galileo must be capable of for the experiment to work.

At time t1 Galileo releases a ball at the top of the ramp. At some later time t2, when the ball reaches the bottom of the ramp, Galileo marks that time and, at a yet later time t3, he calculates the difference between t1 and t2 and deduces from that difference some conclusions about acceleration. What is Galileo doing at time t3?

He is recalling what he did at time t1 (release the ball down the ramp) and considering it in its relationship to what happened at time t2 (when he recalls that the ball reached the bottom of the ramp.) So at time t3 Galileo is experiencing the remembered experiences of t1 and t2 and uniting those memories in his consciousness at time t3. Now, as Clint Eastwood might say, we have to ask ourselves a question: Just what is the object of science? Is the object of science the real balls, ramps and events that happened "out there" at times t1 and t2, i.e. is it about objective reality itself? Or is science only about our experiences of reality and not reality itself? Specifically, are the conclusions that I arrive at during time t3 about something more than merely the memories I have of what happened at times t1 and time t2?

Let me table this question for a moment and consider what Kant showed regardless of how that question is answered. For Galileo's scientific project to work, whether we think science is about reality itself or only about our experience of it (both now and remembered), certain things are necessary. For starters, no conclusions about what was going on at t1 and t2 are possible unless they are united in what might be called "a unified field of rational inquiry." (These are not Kant's terms but my interpretation of what Kant is getting at.) This simply means that t1 and t2 must be viewable from some one rational perspective. If you remember what was going on at t1 but not t2, and I remember what was going on at time t2 but not t1, and we don't talk to each other, the science can't get on. Either I have to remember what was going on at both t1 and t2, or you have to tell me what went on at t1 (assuming I remember t2). Either way, the events at t1 and t2 must appear to some one rational viewpoint for any scientific analysis of them to occur. And this rational viewpoint must be capable of supporting the meaning of the relationship between t1 and t2. It must underwrite the meaning that t2 is "after" t1 and that such a difference is measurable as precisely some number of seconds.

Furthermore, the rational viewpoint must also underwrite the spatial relationships that constitute the substance of the events at t1 and t2. Galileo was standing at the top of  the ramp at the start of the experiment, which he experienced as here at that moment and the bottom of the ramp as there. Later, he moved to the bottom of the ramp to catch the ball, which he then experienced as here and the top of the ramp as there. Yet later, when analyzing the experiment, Galileo is able to identify the top of the ramp as the same identical spot in space despite it having been here at one moment and then there at a later moment, and similarly with the bottom of the ramp. Just like the experience of the times t1 and t2, it doesn't really matter if Galileo himself both released the ball and then caught it. Someone else might have released the ball and Galileo caught it, but the science can't happen unless the man who released it tells Galileo exactly where he was when he released it. The point is that the ball's place at the start of the experiment - call it p1 - and its place at the end of the experiment - call it p2 - must be united in some one field of rational inquiry capable of seeing and analyzing the geometrical relationship between the two points. And beyond that, this rational viewpoint must be capable of uniting the geometrical considerations in the relationship between p1 and p2 with the temporal considerations of the relationship between t1 and t2. p1 happened at t1 and p2 happened at t2 and all four of those elements can be united in a single theory of acceleration in a single rational field of inquiry.

We might see the problem Hume would have here. If I am nothing more than merely the passing parade of experience from moment to moment, then there is nothing to unite that experience in a single rational field of experience to make science possible. That passing parade must somehow be integrated across time and space, and integrated in a way that makes it mathematically tractable, for science to happen.

Now I have been careful not to identify the "rational field of experience" that makes science possible with the "soul", the "self", or the "I" or - and this is what materialists miss - the "brain". I haven't done that because Kant didn't do it. Kant restricted himself to elaborating the purely rational requirements for the possibility of science and he found no warrant in that purely rational consideration to go beyond the "formal" requirement of an integrated field of rational experience to an identification of what, in reality, the substance of that field actually is. He can, strictly speaking, only say that such a field of integrated experience, whatever it's ultimate nature might be, is necessary for science.

It is at this point that we return to the question I tabled earlier: What is the object of science? Is it the balls and ramps themselves that are "out there" in objective reality? Or is it merely our experience of those things with all the qualifications alluded to above? Kant refused to go beyond what he could justify with strict rational necessity, and he held that science is about our experience of reality but not reality itself, which is the basis of his famous distinction between the noumenal (how things truly are in themselves) and the phenomenal (how they appear to us).

But suppose we want to go beyond Kant and hold that science is about reality itself and not merely reality as it appears to us as conditioned by our cognitive apparatus? This is only possible if the rational field of inquiry required by science supports such a move. Galileo's cognitive apparatus must have enough integrity so that at time t3, when he remembers what happened with respect to the ball and ramp at times t1 and t2, he can have the rationally justifiable confidence that his memories reflect reality itself at those times and places. Furthermore, he must have the rationally justifiable confidence that his analysis of the relationship between times t1 and t2, and places p1 and p2, reflect reality as well.

On what basis can Galileo justify such confidence? It is hard to see how such justification could be arrived at in terms of the Hume or Harris views of the self or mind (which, of course, is why Kant never went there). Since we are talking about the rational justification of science itself, we can't call on scientific conclusions to do the work without begging the question. The only other available basis of justification is pre-scientific common sense. By "pre-scientific" I don't mean temporally prior, i.e. what was thought to be common sense prior to the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I mean logically or "existentially" prior. The scientist takes for granted that his telescope is in reality what it appears to him in his sight and touch; that it behaves more or less the same as long as its nature isn't changed; and that the things he views through his telescope will not change their behavior without some cause. And, of course, he will assume that his spatial and temporal intuitions (here and there, before and after) reflect reality itself and not merely a reading into reality of the conditions of his own cognition.

But the intuition of an enduring self is just as much a pre-scientific common sense intuition as are our intuitions about space and time. We might, indeed, say that the intuition of self is even more fundamental that the intuitions of time and space since it is only in reference to a self that time and space have meaning (space - here and there - has meaning only in reference to a self which is here and something else is there and time only has meaning in reference to a self to which before and after appear.) So if we are going to take our common sense intuitions about space and time, and what appears in space and time, as reflective of reality - and this seems the only way to underwrite a science that is about reality itself rather than merely the human perception of reality - then we must accept our common sense intuition about an enduring self to be reflective of reality as well.

All this is to the point that when Harris wishes to invoke neuroscience or brain science in general to undermine the notion of an enduring self or "I", and in particular our common sense notion of an enduring self, he has sawed off the limb on which sit the brain sciences themselves sit. Brain science can get going only if there are brain scientists who, like Galileo, can be rationally confident that their scientific intuitions about the "brain" actually reflect reality itself rather than merely their experience of reality conditioned by their cognitive apparatus. And, again, such confidence cannot be a product of brain science itself without begging the question.

Typically, thinkers like Harris fail to see this problem. They think they can blithely invoke science to undermine common sense, including common sense notions of the self, without effecting the rational foundations of science, as though scientists do not share the same human nature as the rest of us. So when he makes statements like

The idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks of the body.

we can respond that any scientific talk about biochemical wheelworks is only possible if there is subject around with the unity, simplicity and integrity to support it.

Scientific Absolutes

Steven Novella has a post on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) here. What interests me are his comments on science and absolutes. Using the classic question concerning the possible existence of a black swan, he has this to say:

Sometimes a hypothesis can be stated in such a way that a single counter-example will disprove it. The now classic example is that all swans are white. A single non-white swan will falsify this hypothesis. How thoroughly do you have to search, however, before we can conclude that all swans are white? Would you have to simultaneously survey every swan in the world? If it takes 10 years to conduct a thorough survey can you be sure that a black swan was not born in the last 10 years? 

The problem here is in thinking in absolutes. Scientific theories, rather, often deal with probabilities and are not necessarily wrong when exceptions are found. In the case of swans, the more thoroughly we look for non-white swans without finding them the greater our confidence is that all swans are white, and we can certainly conclude that most swans are white and that any exceptions are rare.

While it is true that science does not deal with absolute conclusions, it doesn't follow that science doesn't involve absolutes at all. In fact, science can't be done without some thinking in absolutes. Consider those swans that are the subject of a worldwide survey. Assumed in the story is that scientists have no problem distinguishing swans from non-swans, be they black or white. We might say that, as far as the experiment is concerned, scientists are absolutely able to distinguish swans from non-swans.

Why, for instance, on encountering a creature that is furry, has floppy ears, and barks, doesn't a scientist announce a revolutionary discovery: Not only can swans be black, but they can have fur and floppy ears! Because, of course, what the scientist has encountered is a dog and not a swan. Experiments like the one described by Novella presuppose, albeit unconsciously, an Aristotelian natural philosophy - specifically, the distinction between essential and accidental properties of being. An essential property is a property that makes a being the kind of thing it is; an accidental property is a property that, whether a being has it or not, does not change the kind of thing it is.

How is it possible for us to make absolute statements regarding essential properties? How can we know, for instance, that while all swans may not be white, all swans are naturally born with the ability to fly? (I qualify that statement with "naturally" because, through accidents of birth or injury, a particular swan might not be able to fly. This does nothing to change the fact that its nature is directed toward flight and would have achieved it but for accidents of fate). Hume famously denied such a thing was possible with his criticism of induction. But what Hume overlooks is that when we analyze something, we not only understand it as a catalog of properties, but we also understand it's mode of being, the why behind its collection of properties. A swan has a mode of life peculiar to it, and very different from the mode of life of a dog, that accounts for the essential properties of the swan vs. a dog. A dog is an animal that hunts prey through smell, and so is built low to the ground with a wet nose and an extraordinary sense of smell. The swan eats plants at the bottom of ponds, and so has a long neck and a bill, but a poor sense of smell since it doesn't need it. The dog's nose is essential to its mode of being so we can be sure we will never encounter a dog with a bill, and similarly we won't find a swan with a soft wet nose. But being black or white is irrelevant to the mode of life of either, so we should expect that we might find different colored dogs or swans. And in that case, statistics tell us the probability of occurrence of the various colors.

If we don't like Aristotle, Kant saw the same thing with respect to the distinction between essential and accidental properties, but he hoped to avoid any metaphysical assertions concerning being. His solution was to relocate the essential/accidental distinction from being (i.e. in the world out there) to the subjective (i.e. in your mind). Kant argues that in order for experience to be possible for us at all, it must be organized by our cognitive faculties into some sort of coherence - otherwise our experience would be the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of William James. Actually, it would be worse than that, for Kant insists that it wouldn't be experience at all, not even a confused one ("confusion" still implies a relationship between the confused elements, some stable background with respect to which they are confused.) So the mind organizes experience spatially and temporally, with space and time being the terms in which the mind constructs that organization. Essence and accident are categories within which the mind refines experience. For Kant they are imposed on nature rather than read off it as with Aristotle. But it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this post, for they are just as absolute for Kant as they are for Aristotle; they are just subjectively absolute rather than objectively absolute. Either way, empirical investigation is impossible without some thinking in absolutes.

H. Allen Orr, Kant and Nagel

I discussed Kant and the philosophy of mind recently in this post.  H. Allen Orr's review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos at New York Review of Books provides a good illustration of the fact that the contemporary investigation of the mind still hasn't caught up to Kant. Here is a quote from Orr's review:

Despite this, I can’t go so far as to conclude that mind poses some insurmountable barrier to materialism. There are two reasons. The first is, frankly, more a sociological observation than an actual argument. Science has, since the seventeenth century, proved remarkably adept at incorporating initially alien ideas (like electromagnetic fields) into its thinking. Yet most people, apparently including Nagel, find the resulting science sufficiently materialist. The unusual way in which physicists understand the weirdness of quantum mechanics might be especially instructive as a crude template for how the consciousness story could play out. Physicists describe quantum mechanics by writing equations. The fact that no one, including them, can quite intuit the meaning of these equations is often deemed beside the point. The solution is the equation. One can imagine a similar course for consciousness research: the solution is X, whether you can intuit X or not. Indeed the fact that you can’t intuit X might say more about you than it does about consciousness.

And this brings me to the second reason. For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can’t imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.

In that prior post I argued that the scientific explanation for consciousness, which can be cast in terms of a generalized function that explains consciousness (X) in terms of some set of factors, necessarily falsifies the nature of consciousness by turning it from the constitutor of the world into just another thing in the world. Even if this project is in some sense successful, it will not touch the consciousness Y that underwrites the scientific explanation of consciousness X in the first place. Orr's point in his first paragraph is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether we intuit X or satisify ourselves with an equation about X ala quantum mechanics. It is the form of science itself that vitiates the possibility of a thoroughgoing scientific explanation of consciousness.

A scientific equation divides and unifies. It divides reality into a set of factors (force, mass, acceleration, brain chemistry, photons, etc.) and then reunifies them in the equation. The ground of that reunification necessarily transcends the factors that are unified. This is not a mystical point. It merely says that if we are going to split things into force, mass and acceleration, and then say F = ma, it can't be either force, mass or acceleration that synthesizes these factors in the unity (to use Kant-speak) of the equation, since the equation hypothesizes them as factors of division rather than unity. The unifiying synthesis, of course, happens in the mind of the scientist, which is entirely non-problematic in normal scientific investigation. It becomes problematic when this same method is used in an attempt to understand consciousness itself, for then the attempt is made to include consciousness both as a factor of division ( as in the equation consciousness X = some function of brain chemistry, photons, neurons, etc) and as the ground of the unifying synthesis (as consciousness Y of the scientist constructing the theory). This is to attempt to cross the border that Kant identified in his delineation of the modern understanding of the mind. And Kant argued that this border can never be crossed because whenever we try to cross it, we simply push it further in front of us. Any scientific explanation implies a consciousness that transcends the factors of explanation and serves as the synthesizer of them into the unity of explanation. As soon as we try to understand consciousness scientifically, we turn it into a scientific factor that is transcended by the scientific mind analyzing it. This may be useful and rewarding for some purposes, but it will by the nature of the case leave the most signficant aspects of consciousness untouched.

As for Orr's second paragraph, with Kant we can do more than idly speculate concerning cognitive limitations that evolution might have imposed on us. We can analyze the nature of cognition, and scientific investigation, a priori and show that their very natures preclude a scientific understanding of consciousness, whatever evolution may or may not have done for us.

Kant, Consciousness and the World

I''m in the middle of reading a "hot" book (Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos), which has generated considerable critical reaction as well as extended analysis by Edward Feser over at his blog. Feser has developed a wonderful metaphor to describe the philosophical problem materialism (and, indeed, any philosophy founded in the Enlightenment views of Hume, Descartes and Locke) has with the mind: One may get rid of dirt in a house by sweeping it all into a pile and then sweeping the pile under a rug. And this is certainly effective in getting rid of all the dirt in the house, at the price of collecting all the dirt under the rug. But this same method is obviously unavailing as a way to get rid of the dirt under the rug now that it is there. Some other way must be found if we want to get rid of that dirt.

Feser says that this is analogous to the modern problem of the mind. Hume and Locke swept all the "secondary qualities" (e.g. color, taste, sound) out of the world and into the mind, classifying them as subjective responses to the "real" world, which is composed solely of colorless, tasteless, soundless particles in motion. Contemporary materialist philosophers now want to dispose of the mind (i.e. color, taste, sound as we subjectively experience them) in a similar manner, which is just like trying to get rid of the dirt under the rug.

My purpose here is not to go further into Feser's metaphor, but to show that the metaphor can also be interpreted in terms of Immanuel Kant's views on the mind, views that also expose problems with the contermporary understanding of the mind but from a different perspective. My starting point will be a quote from page 51 of Nagel's book:

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world.

This is true as far as it goes, but it carries the danger of shortchanging consciousness in ways that Immanuel Kant would not approve. Writing of the existence of consciousess as a thing "about the world" misses the fact that consciousness is not a feature of the world, but is rather the constitutor of the world. Consciousness is the ground on which there is (for me) a world at all; it is the thing with reference to which anything at all can be said to be "about the world." There is nothing "about the world" for a book, a stone, the number five, or 5:00 pm, for none of these things is conscious and therefore they have no world. And as Nagel made clear in his famous 1974 article "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?", the world of a bat is likely so very different from our own that it is nigh on inconceivable to us. Now physical science is one of those things that is "about the world" for human beings; not being conscious, books and stones have no physical science, and not being men, bats don't have it either. Physical science is a creation of man and is therfore a product of his consciousness. This makes it problematic, then, to suppose that physical science can "say" anything about consciousness at all, let alone say it the same way it says things about everything else. To adapt the rug metaphor to the Kantian point I am making, it's not just secondary qualities like taste and sound that have been swept under the rug of the mind in modern philosophy; everything has been swept under the rug, including the physical sciences. The reason the physical sciences cannot ultimately grasp consciousness is because they are under the rug rather than outside it, and what is under the rug is in no position to grasp the rug itself.

Let me flesh out this point by applying it to physics. Physics deals with things like force, mass and acceleration. But force, mass and acceleration as we understand them in modern science are not things we just stumble across walking down the street. They are theoretical constructs with which the scientific mind analyzes the world. Any physics student understands how this works. In physics 101, the student is presented with problems involving blocks on a ramp or weights and pulleys. The first step in the solution, and often the most difficult step, is to analyze the blocks, ramps and weights into forces and masses. The block on the ramp is the relevant mass, the relevant forces are directed down the ramp and also straight down (the force of gravity on the block), etc. Once this analysis is complete, the student then plugs the quantities into the relevant Newtonian equations and cranks out the answer, which is then mapped back from the forces and masses back onto the blocks and pulleys (e.g. the block will take 10 sec to travel down the ramp).

Everything about this problem has an ineluctable reference to consciousness. The "block" is a block because I perceive it as such; a bat would not perceive it in this manner nor would a stone. The relationship of the block to the ramp ("the block is on the ramp") is only such because my consciousness perceives both the objects and the relationships between them. The mapping of the objects to the theoretical constructs of Newtonian physics is most obviously dependent on consciousness, as is the mapping back once the problem is complete. My point is not the solipsistic one that the world is a creation of consciousness; it is that the ground of our experience of the world is consciousness, and therefore the attempt to draw conclusions about the ultimate nature of consciousness from experience via modern scientific methods is problematic; in fact, it is doomed to failure. It is in the end an attempt to sweep the rug under itself.

Consciousness cannot be just another "thing about the world", or a variable in a physical description of something, as other things are. This is to misunderstand the relationship of consciousness to science. Take the basic elements of Newtonian physics:

They do not exist for us in this undifferentiated, unrelated manner. They have existence, and indeed only have meaning in the relationship specified by Newton:

Here X is the consciousness that is the ground for the scientific relationship between force, mass and acceleration. The arrows indicate that the consciousness X is the ground both of force, mass and acceleration, as well as the mathematical relationship between them. Again, I want to stress that the point is not that scientific constructs are purely subjective, but that they only have meaning in light of a consciousness that can ground their meaning. Someone uneducated in Newtonian physics may use the words "force", "mass" and "acceleration", but they will mean other things than they do for the Newtonian physicist, and will have meanings bound up with his non-Newtonians comprehensive understanding of the world (or, perhaps, lack of understanding). The relationship of consciousness to science is as the ground and constitutor of science, not as one of many "things in the world" analyzed by science.

What happens when we attempt to investigage consciousness as though it were as amenable to scientific investigation as anything else? Consider that Newton's Second Law (F=ma) can be written in terms of a function:

Again, X is the consciousness that serves as the ground of the scientific understanding of the world. Now a scientific account of consciousness, whatever it's specific content, can be cast in terms of a generalized function:

X is consciousness as it appears under scientific investigation, and the arguments of the function are possible elements in a scientific account of consciousness; the ellipsis indicates that the list may go on indefinitely or have whatever elements one might suppose. Notice the difference between X and Y; consciousness X is now a thing in the world in the world constituted by consciousness Y. It has changed from being what consciousness really is (the constitutor of the world) to being what it is essentially not (a thing in the world). When science attempts to understand consciousness, what it inevitably ends up understanding is consciousness reduced to what is amenable to science, that is, a thing in the world - which is finally not consciousness at all.

Can't consciousness Y just be the same as consciousness X? Even if this could be so it doesn't change the fact that consciousness has changed its essential nature in going from the constitutor of the world to a thing in the world, so what ends up being understood about consciousness in science is something much less than is necessary to ground the scientific consciousness in the first place. This is why Kant says that ultimately our rational natures are opaque to us and must remain eternal mysteries. And this accounts for the "shell game" impression given off by much of the scientific writing about consciousness these days; books have grandiose titles like Consciousness Explained or The Synaptic Self, but when these titles are cashed out in terms of what is actually explained in the works, the reader can't help but feel he has been given the bait and switch. The "consciousness" explained seems but a pale shadow of the consciousness we were hoping to be explained.

There is also the problem that an explanation should not include in its explanation that which is to be explained. F=ma can't include force on both sides of the equation if it is to explain force. But this is what happens if we take consciousness Y to be the same as consciousness X. Consciousness Y is implicit in all the terms on the right side of the equation that form the basis of the explanation of consciousness. Worse than this, it is implicit in the relations between the terms themselves. In terms of the rug metaphor, what we have here is the attempt to sweep the rug under itself.

Of course, if the rug (and the dirt under it) is going to be swept somewhere, it can only be swept under a yet larger rug that is big enough to hold the first rug and its dirt under it. Consciousness Y is that larger consciousness under which consciousness X is swept. But consciousness X is not really swept under the rug of consciousness Y, for consciousness X is in itself a constructor of the world, and it is only swept under the rug of consciousness Y as a thing in the world of consciousness Y.

One of the peculiar features of the philosophy of mind is the manner in which the participants seem to talk past each and cannot agree on even the apparently simplest things. John Searle tells us that "all of the most famous and influential theories are false." The exasperation of Daniel Dennett is palpable in much of his writing. Imputations of bad faith abound. The reason for this is that each participant takes for himself the role of consciousness Y, the transcendent consciousness or constitutor of the world, and from that vantage point tells all other consciousnesses (which he treats as things in the world) how things are. This is done in hilariously explicit manner in Dennett's Consciousness Explained:

If you want us to believe everything you say about your phenomenology, you are asking not just to be taken seriously but to be granted papal infallibility, and that is asking too much. You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. (p. 96, emphasis in original)

Now while you may be entirely mistaken about the meaning of your consciousness (nothing in your consciousness has any metaphysical gravity until it has been subjected to heterophenomenological analysis), the author of Consciousness Explained is in no such predicament. His consciousness is reliably in contact with reality without it first needing to go through the heterophenomenological boot camp. This is how a transcendent consciousness (consciousness Y) talks to a consciousness immanent with respect to Y's scientific constructs (consciousness X). And a good thing, too, at least if you want books like Consciousness Explained to be written, for it could not be written otherwise. But then we must remember that Consciousness Explained at most explains consciousnesses of type X and never of type Y.

All this was thoroughly understood by Kant back in the 18th century and explicated in his Critique of Pure Reason.  It is captured in his fancy terminology as the synthetic unity of apperception.

... it is only because I am able to comprehend the manifold of representations in one consciousness, that I call them altogether my representations, for otherwise, I should have as manifold and various a self as I have representations of which I am conscious... It is true, no doubt, that this principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself identical, and therefore an analytical proposition; but it shows, nevertheless, the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold which is given in intuition, and without which it would be impossible to think the unbroken identity of self-consciousness... I am conscious, therefore, of the identical self with respect to the manifold of representations, which are given to me in an intuition, because I call them, altogether, my representations, as constituting one. This means that I am conscious of a necessary synthesis of them a priori, which is called the original synthetical unity of apperception...
(from Basic Writings of Kant, Modern Library, p. 73). 

Kant is responding here to Hume's argument that, since we find no self in empirical experience, we are unjustified in thinking that there is some substantial core to ourselves that goes beyond the chain of impressions that constitutes our experience. Kant's answer is not a metaphysical argument for the self, but a consideration of "pure reason" (i.e. logic independent of empirical experience), to the effect that some unifying principle must be assumed in experience merely to allow me to claim my experiences as mine. More significantly for my purposes, Kant argues that our experience is not purely passive, but that we actively construct our experience in some measure (this is the "synthesis of the manifold") and therefore there must be some principle unifying that construction. This is all the more significant when it comes to science, for things like Newton's Second Law (F = ma) or theories of consciousness are not things we stumble over in nature; they are very definitely constructions of the human mind. Kant takes the truth that Hume saw - that there is no self encountered in empirical experience - and drew the correct conclusion that Hume missed, which is that the self is not in empirical experience because it is the ground of empirical experience.

Kant's aim was to save science and modern philosophy from the extreme skeptical empiricism of Hume (while retaining the authentic insights of Hume), while also ruling out the metaphysical speculations of the classical philosophers. In other words, he wished to show that the nature of human thought is just what modern thinkers want it to be: Metaphysics is a waste of time, and the only true way to know the world is through empirical science supported by logical thought. Kant saw that the price to be paid for this resolution is that the conscious self must ultimately be a mystery to itself. The only legitimate way to know the world is through empirical science, but the relationship of the scientific consciousness to science is not as one of the things in the world of science, but as that which grounds and underwrites the constitution of the scientific world itself. Thus the scientific consciousness will always slip behind any attempt to understand consciousness through science.

Creating the Abstract

Ed Feser has a post on his blog concerning the Cartesian/scientistic error of "concretizing the abstract." He describes abstraction, and what it means to "reify" an abstraction, this way:

[Modern Scholastic writers often distinguish three “degrees” of abstraction.  The first degree is the sort characteristic of the philosophy of nature, which considers what is common to material phenomena as such, abstracting from individual material things but retaining in its conception the sensible aspects of matter.  The second degree is the sort characteristic of mathematics, which abstracts not only the individuality of material things but also their sensible nature, focusing on what is intelligible (as opposed to sensible) in matter under the category of quantity.  The third degree is the sort characteristic of metaphysics, which abstracts from even the quantitative aspects of matter and considers notions like substance, existence, etc. entirely apart from matter.]

Abstractions can be very useful, and are of themselves perfectly innocent when we keep in mind that we are abstracting.  The trouble comes when we start to think of abstractions as if they were concrete realities themselves -- thereby “reifying” them -- and especially when we think of the abstractions as somehow more real than the concrete realities from which they have been abstracted.

Feser later discusses scientism as the error of mistaking scientific abstractions for reality itself:

The irony is that while New Atheists and others beholden to scientism pride themselves on being “reality based,” that is precisely what they are not.  Actual, concrete reality is extremely complicated.  There is far more to material systems than what can be captured in the equations of physics, far more to human beings than can be captured in the categories of neuroscience or economics, and far more to religion than can be captured in the ludicrous straw men peddled by New Atheists.  All of these simplifying abstractions (except the last) have their value, but when we treat them as anything more than simplifying abstractions we have left the realm of science and entered that of ideology. 

My purpose here is not to argue with Feser's conclusions, but to point out something about scientific abstractions that makes his case even stronger. The great revolution that occurred in the development of modern science was that abstractions were not simply read out of nature in the manner of classical philosophy, but read into nature by the actively creative mind. This is what Kant was getting at in this famous passage from the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason:

When Galileo rolled balls of a weight chosen by himself down an inclined plane, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight that he had previously thought to be equal to that of a known column of water, or when in a later time Stahl changed metals into calx and then changed the latter back into metal by first removing something and then putting it back in again, a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgements according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. (From the Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant.)

We don't necessarily need to agree with Kant's view that "reason has insight only into what it itself produces" to see that he was saying something deeply significant about modern science and its differences from classical modes of inquiry. The classical philosopher pondered nature and subjected it to rational analysis; this starts by abstracting form (principle) from being as the intellectual basis of analysis. Therefore the forms the philosopher considered were those derived from his experiential encounter with being. The modern scientist, by contrast, does not abstract his scientific principles from nature, but creates them a priori and imposes them on nature.

Consider the principle of inertia - "an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest." Inertia runs counter to our common experience because the objects of our common experience are generally subject to frictional forces, and so don't "tend to stay in motion" when they are in motion. Slide a beer across the bar and it comes to a stop after a few feet. So the principle of inertia is not something abstracted from experience, because we never really experience it. Instead, it is that marvelous invention of modern scientific inquiry, the theoretical construct. Galileo created the principle of inertia and used it to interrogate nature in his scientific experiments.  Kant's point is that science works so well, and gives such transparent results, because there is nothing obscure about its principles; and there is nothing obscure about them because we ourselves create them.

Similar to inertia, the force, mass and acceleration of Newtonian physics were not abstracted by Newton from nature, like Aristotle abstracted rational animal from the nature of man. If they were, we might expect Aristotle to have discovered them. Nor is it an accident that force, mass and acceleration are mathematically related as force equals mass times acceleration. They are related in that equation because Newton created and defined them through the equation. Newton created his second law as a mathematical tool with which to interrogate nature, as Galileo had created inertia. This intellectual procedure - the creation of mathematically susceptible principles that form the basis of a subsequent investigation of nature - is the great breakthrough of modern science.

It's also why modern science is riven with priority claims in a way that classical philosophy was not. The idea that Plato might dedicate himself to a public campaign to prove that he was real inventor of the theory of the forms, and not Socrates or Aristotle, is laughable. Or that Thomas Aquinas might engage in a publicity battle to prove that he was the real originator of the cosmological argument rather than, say, Averroes. But the modern scientific world was subject to such acrimonious disputes from its inception, as exemplified in the long battle between Newton and Leibniz for the title of inventor of calculus. The reason, of course, is that Plato and Aquinas weren't inventing anything but explicating what was already given - nature - while Newton and other modern scientists were doing more than mere explication; they were inventing the tools that made the interrogation of nature possible. And over inventions there may be priority disputes.

Returning to Feser's point about the reification of abstractions, the situation under the understanding of scientific abstractions I've just presented is even worse for scientism than it is if scientific abstractions are considered as plain, old classical abstractions. Classical abstractions are at least derived from nature. In Aristotle's understanding, substance is a composite of form and matter, and the form analyzed in the philosopher's intellect is the same form as in the substance under analysis, since it is abstracted from substance. The mistake of "concretizing the abstract" is to mistake this abstracted form for fundamental reality rather than the substantial being from which it was abstracted. But the Aristotelian abstracted form at least has the advantage of being an aspect of fundamental reality, if not the whole of it. The situation is different with the theoretical constructs of modern science. They are creative products of the human mind and nature is interrogated in their terms; to reify them is to mistake pure products of the human imagination for reality itself.

This is not a novel point: Kant makes it in his Critique in the form of his distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. If we take science as the only true means of the investigation of reality (other than pure reason, which - according to Kant - can't issue in any genuine metaphysical insights), then what we learn through science is not reality itself, but only reality as it is interpreted through the theoretical constructs of science, which are themselves creative products of the human mind. To reify those theoretical constructs is literally to live in a fantasy world of your own creation.

It was obvious to Kant, and should be to us, that the mind that creates the theoretical constructs of science is both more real than those constructs and yet ultimately unknowable through them, since it necessarily transcends them. Henry Ford's Model T factory in Detroit could be constructed of many things, but one thing it couldn't be constructed of is Model T's, since the Model T's don't exist until the factory produces them. Similarly, the mind of Newton can't ultimately be composed of force, mass and acceleration (as strictly understood under Newton's Second Law) since those things are not naturally occurring elements, but the creative products of the genius of Newton. (It is important to keep in mind the distinction between the common sense meaning of terms like force, mass and acceleration, and their strictly scientific meaning as force, mass and acceleration. Commonsensically, mass means "how much stuff there is", but that isn't what it means under Newtonian science. What mass means under Newtonian science is the strict mathematical relationship of force divided by acceleration. And that meaning of mass is a creative product of the genius of Newton, not existent in the world until Newton created it.) 

The early modern scientists and scientific philosophers like Galileo, Francis Bacon and Kant were quite self-conscious about what they were doing and the genuine revolution in thought modern science represented. Rather than being led around by the nose by nature like the classical philosophers, the modern scientist turns the tables and submits nature to an interrogation of his own invention, literally: Scientific constructs are constructs and nature is forced into their categories. The vindication of a scientific theory through repeatable experiments indicates the extent to which nature submits to the categories created by the scientific mind; but no level of vindication changes the fact that the substance of the scientific theory is a creative product of the mind rather than the substance of nature itself.  These early modern philosophers saw science as a manifestation of the transcendent power and reality of the human mind: The classical philosopher thought the mind, though part of nature, transcended nature by knowing it. The modern scientific mind also transcends nature but in a way far more significant than that supposed by Aristotle. The modern scientific mind is not a part of nature at all because it is behind and prior to nature: Nature comes into existence only when spoken through the creative products of the scientific mind. 

More Trouble With Kant

This is a continuation of this post on Kant.

One way not to argue in support of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic is the way Dinesh D'Souza does in What's So Great About Christianity. D'Souza draws an analogy with a tape recorder, which I discuss in this post and will not repeat here. The problem with the analogy, and similar analogies, is that it is undermined by the very transcendental aesthetic it is meant to support. If Kant is right, and we have access to appearances only and not the reality behind appearances, then we have no way of knowing what is really going on with whatever reality is behind the appearance we call "tape recorder." Whatever thing or things out there in reality give rise to the appearance of a tape recorder, we can't know what they are or are not capable of. They may be capable of all sorts of things we can't imagine; including access to reality in ways we cannot imagine.

The examples generally used to support this sort of argument typically involve animals with different sensory capabilities than our own, like Thomas Nagel's bat (Nagel did not use his bat argument for the point I am making here.) The bat has poorer vision than us, but instead has a highly refined sonar system it uses to echolocate its prey. What must it be like, Nagel asks, to be a bat? What is a "bat's world" like? We can hardly imagine it, but by what right do we claim that our world is the "real world" in contrast to the bat's? If these sorts of examples impress us as support for Kant's views, we should remember that Kant himself did not argue from them. For if Kant is right, then what we call a "bat" is only a construction our consciousness puts on sense impressions. Imagining what it is like to be a bat is just another way of exploring our own consciousness, not a magic way to explore the possibilities of some other consciousness.

There is an illusion involved in arguments like these, as though we can assume for the sake of argument that we do have access to the true nature of things, then argue from there that we don't have access to the true nature of things. If the conclusion is true, then it was true at the beginning of the argument as well as the end. The argument apparently starts with some premises concerning the variety of the nature of things, e.g. the variety between our sensory apparatus and a bat's. What it really started with was the variety in our conscious constructions on sense impressions which, according to Kant, say nothing about any actual variety in reality. So what if the conscious construction we put on sense impressions and call a "bat" has a different character than the conscious construction we put on sense impressions of ourselves and call "men"? Whatever conclusions we might draw from this fact says nothing about the actual sensory capabilities of either men or bats, or the relationship between the two. It is at best about the quirky nature of our own consciousness.

Kant's argument for the transcendental aesthetic is simple and is the only possible one. It starts and ends with the fact that space and time are not conclusions from empirical experience, but the form of it. Kant isn't wrong but, as I argued in the earlier post, we need not accept his conclusions.

But let us grant, for the sake of argument, the natural facts in support of Kant's position to which some of his more naive supporters resort but his philosophy actually doesn't allow. That is, let us suppose that we know bats really do have an excellent echo location system and poor eyesight relative to our own. The argument still does not work. For the bat's echo location system is obviously not intended to discover the true nature of things but merely to help the bat locate its prey; and it serves that purpose magnificently. We see the same thing with the features of other animals. Hawks have excellent vision, but the vision isn't for understanding the world per se, but for tracking prey far below on the ground. The dog's nose is far superior to our own, and the dog lives in a "smelly world", which is perfect for a dog since it hunts through scent.

Our senses, however, and our natures themselves, have no immediate and single purpose the way a bat's sonar is immediately directed toward prey location. We don't hunt by instinct in the manner of a hawk or dog, but must consider the nature of possible prey and how best to capture it. We must understand the world in order to survive in it. Neither are we born with fur like a bear or build nests by instinct like a bird. We must figure out what will work for clothing and how to get it, and what will work for shelter and how to make it. This is why Aristotle says that the relevant distinction with respect to man is that he is rational, which means more than merely the degenerate "thinker" of modern thought, but an animal whose nature is to understand the world.  And since we see that nature doesn't fail in its purposes (the bat's sonar does locate it's prey, the hawks eyes do see the mouse on the ground, etc.), why should we entertain the idea that our nature, uniquely among the creatures, fails to do what it is clearly meant to do - and that is to understand the world as it really is?

My Trouble with Kant

Kant is the greatest modern philosopher because he perceived the far consequences of the premises of modern thought earlier than others, and to an extent that many today still do not appreciate. He is the indispensable philosopher to understand the meaning of philosophy since it began to take its cue from Descartes and Hume.

But that doesn't mean that we must believe that Kant was right. The conclusions follow only if both the logic and the premises are true; Kant is correct in his logic but his premises are not true. In other words,  if Kant is wrong, he was wrong right at the beginning. And his beginning was the assumptions constitutive of modern thought.

It is difficult for us raised in the modern world to get the distance necessary to be genuinely critical of modern thought. The assumptions of modern thought have become the very air we breathe; for us they are simply taken for granted. This is why Kierkegaard is so indispensable. Kierkegaard understood that modern thought must be attacked at its root; and since it is modern first principles that are the problem, those principles must be addressed front and center. Kierkegaard has a wonderful way of getting behind the defenses of his reader and bringing him to a reconsideration of first principles, before the reader knows what is happening and can set up psychological self-defenses:

If it were true - as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks - that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived? Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true; one can be deceived by appearances, but one can also be deceived by the superficiality of shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain that it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake? (From the start of Ch.1 of Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1962).

This passage always comes to mind when I think what is wrong with Kant. For a fundamental modern principle is that doubt is self-justifying: If something can be doubted, then it should be doubted. Kant's transcendental aesthetic gets rolling when he points out that time and space are not something we encounter in experience, but are the conditions of experience itself. So we can only safely conclude that space and time are parameters of our consciousness, not necessarily of reality itself. From this start Kant brilliantly, thoroughly and ruthlessly draws out the logical consequences in his "transcendental philosophy."

But looking at the transcendental aesthetic with Kierkegaard in mind, and granting Kant's point about the conditions of experience, we can still ask Kierkegaard's question about deception: Time and space may be conditions of our experience, but they may nonetheless also be conditions of reality itself. We can go wrong thinking time and space are qualifications of reality if they are only qualifications of our consciousness, but we can also go wrong thinking time and space are not qualifications of reality if in fact they really are. Deception is possible either way. The modern philosopher is simply wrong in thinking his self-justifying doubt is a bulletproof way to avoid deception. And if we do not accept the modern premise that doubt is self-justifying, then we may ask: Why should we grant Kant's conclusions from the transcendental aesthetic? What reason do we have for doubting the reality of time and space beyond the bare possibility of deception?

There doesn't seem to be any such reason, and I suspect there can't possibly be one. Any reason would have to be an argument from experience, which would necessarily take experience for granted, and the argument concerns the conditions of experience itself.

To be continued in a forthcoming post.

Kant and Christianity

Dinesh D'Souza's presentation of Kant in What's So Great About Christianity, which I've discussed here and here, winds up with a statement of why Kant is so important to his discussion of religion:

No one who understands the central doctrines of any of the world's leading religions should have any difficulty understanding Kant, because his philosophical vision is congruent with the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It is a shared doctrine of these religions that the empirical world we humans inhabit is not the only world there is. Ours is a world of appearances only, a transient world that is dependent on a higher, timeless reality. That reality is of a completely different order from anything that we know, it constitutes the only permanent reality there is, and it sustains our world and presents it to our senses. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, this is where reason stops: it cannot on its own investigate or comprehend that domain. But one day, it is promised, when our earthly journey is over, we will know the higher realm and see things as they really are.

This passage is a good illustration of why Kant is an unfortunate choice for a Christian philosopher. While other religions may offer hope of escape into a higher realm, the specifically Christian hope is resurrection and everlasting life in this world. Why would Christ suffer and die on a Cross only to be resurrected into a world of mere appearance? No, the Christian cannot hold that this world is a transient world of mere appearance on pain of making nonsense of the Gospel.

The Christian world is not a divided world of appearance vs reality, or transient worlds vs permanent worlds. God created man, body and soul, in form a rational animal. A rational animal is not a soul trapped in a body ala Plato, or a rational principle discovering it lives in a world of illusion ala Kant, but a unity of body and soul created specially for the purpose of knowing. When man dies, he really dies: It isn't birth into a higher realm, but a genuine loss of being. The separated soul survives, and God can and does infuse it directly with knowledge; but the soul by nature desires to exist in unity with the body of which it is the form. When man in his fullness is resurrected, once again does the soul know in its natural mode - through the senses. And what it knows is reality, not a shadowplay constructed by God to fool all but the cleverest philosophers.

More on D'Souza on Kant

I wrote about Dinesh D'Souza's take on Kant the other day here. D'Souza goes on to claim that Kant is in the mainstream of Western thought:

Though this conclusion that our reason is confined within the borders of our experience, and that reality in itself is permanently screened off from us by our own sensory limitations, may seem to some to be a very outlandish idea; in fact it is at the very center of Western philosophy. In perhaps the most famous metaphor in Western thought, Plato likened human beings to people living in a cave, shut out from the light of the sun, seeing only shadows and mistaking them for reality. Plato regarded our perceptions as mere images of a deeper and higher reality, the so-called Platonic forms, that he located somewhere outside the realm of human experience. And Plato's teacher, Socrates, regarded himself as the wisest man in Athens because he alone knew how little he knew. For all his breathtaking originality, Kant is squarely in the mainstream of Western thought.

D'Souza describes the beginning of Plato's allegory of the cave, but leaves out the second half. In Plato's story, one of the men chained in the cave is released and is able to make his way outside the cave, experience the sun, and see reality as it is. This process is, of course, the allegory of philosophy. The ordinary man is trapped within the conventional understanding of things (that is, common opinion); the philosopher is the man who, through philosophy, is able to transcend convention and understand reality as it is. If we are to interpret Plato's cave in terms of Kant, then we need to remove any hope that the man in chains is able to escape. Instead of philosophy arising when the man escapes his chains, it occurs when the possibility of his predicament occurs to him. He begins to distrust his naive deductions from his phenomenal experience and invents the critical philosophy. While he can never escape his chains, he has gained the only liberation possible to him: An understanding of his position and release from his prior false beliefs. He can never know reality as it is, but no longer does he labor under illusion.

The liberation Kant provides is superficially similar to that of Socrates, but they are radically different. Socrates's ignorance is subjective; he knows that he knows nothing, but he does not pretend to know that no one else knows anything, and even less, that no else can know anything. The Socratic conclusion is a beginning to philosophy; realizing that all his prior opinions were poorly founded, the Socratic philosopher is spurred to search for true wisdom. The Kantian conclusion is an end to philosophy, classically understood. The philosopher realizes that his prison is his own nature and is inescapable; he universalizes this conclusion to the point that no one else can or ever will know anything (about reality as it is, of course). The philosopher's task from thenceforward is not to search for true knowledge of reality (since he has concluded it is impossible), but to help his fellow men by bringing them to what truth is available to us: The truth provided by the critical philosophy that exposes the Socratic quest for the fool's errand it is.

D'Souza on Kant

Dinesh D'Souza in his defense of Christianity, What's So Great About Christianity, uses Kant as his foundational philosopher. Whether this is ultimately a wise choice is something I may discuss in a later post. Here I would like to explore a common and fundamental misunderstanding of Kant that D'Souza reveals. D'Souza begins his brief summary of Kant with this paragraph:

Kant begins with a simple premise: all human knowledge is based on experience. We gain access to reality through our five senses. This sensory input is then processed through our brains and central nervous systems. Think about it: every thought, even the wildest products of our imagination, are exclusively based on things that we have seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. If we imagine and draw creatures from outer space, we can give them four eyes and ten legs, but ultimately we have no way to conceive or portray them except in terms of our human experience. It is an empirical fact that our fives senses are our only lenses for perceiving reality.

D'Souza is writing a popular book and some license must be given for loose expression. But the first sentence is not loosely phrased, it is simply false. Kant does not just hold that we have knowledge that is not based on experience; the point is essentially what differentiates him from prior philosophers like Hume. Kant's problem with Hume was that Hume's pure empiricism undermined human knowledge, specifically knowledge that could be acquired through the then newly developed empirical sciences. Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason was to explore what reason could know independent of experience and therefore prior to it. This a priori use of reason results in genuine knowledge; among the things it can come to know are the conditions of empirical experience, and from that what distinguishes legitimate empirical knowledge (for Kant, basically modern science) from pseudo-knowledge (for Kant, most of what constitutes classical metaphysics.) This was Kant's plan to rescue science from destruction by Humean empiricism.

But this misunderstanding, although present, isn't the principal one I have in mind in this post. That misunderstanding is found in the fact that, although D'Souza emphasizes (in other passages) just how revolutionary and deep are the implications of Kant, D'Souza himself fails to take Kant fully seriously. D'Souza is right when he points out that the implication of Kant is the distinction between the noumenal (reality in itself) and the phenomenal (reality as it comes to us through the senses). We have no way of "stepping outside" our senses and finding a place from which to compare our perception of reality with reality itself; all we know (empirically) is reality as it is conditioned and filtered by our senses. D'Souza's example of a tape recorder is apt:

Consider a tape recorder. A tape recorder, being the kind of instrument it is, can capture only one mode or aspect of reality: sound. Tape recorders, in this sense, can "hear" but they cannot see or touch or smell. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond the reach of a tape recorder. The same, Kant says, is true of human beings. We can apprehend reality only through our five senses.

Now consider what a tape recorder could empirically discover in trying to understand its own nature. It's only empirical sense is sound. So the the only thing the tape recorder can do is listen to itself. If it could, it might put itself in a soundproof room and turn itself on (how I don't know, but that's immaterial). It might record a few button clicks, and then the soft whirring of the electric motor that rotates the reels. That's it, and it's not much. It might attempt an empirical theory of its own nature based purely on sound, but we can see that any such theory would be hopelessly inadequate to the nature of the tape recorder that can be known through all five of our senses. So it's not just knowledge of the outside world that is subject to the empirical conditioning of the recorder's single sense; it is empirical knowledge of its own nature as well. The tape recorder, if it managed to find an audio version of the Critique of Pure Reason, might understand all this through an application of pure reason.

The same line of thinking, of course, applies to us. Empirical knowledge of our own human nature is just as subject to Kantian limitations as knowledge of anything else. So when D'Souza writes sentences like "We gain access to reality through our five senses. This sensory input is then processed through our brains and central nervous systems" he is not taking Kant seriously enough. "Brains" and "central nervous systems" are empirical constructs; they are phenomenal, not noumenal. Taking Kant seriously means acknowledging that our phenomenally known human nature may be inconceivably different from human nature as it is in itself; just as the tape recorder's understanding of its own nature purely on the basis of sound can't compare with the nature of the tape recorder as it actually is. Kant is careful not to talk about brains, nervous systems or other organs in the Critque of Pure Reason. Human nature in that work, and for Kant in general, is an unknowable X. We can know that human nature, whatever it is, must involve a rational principle (since the fact that we are intelligent beings is known simply from the act of thought itself), but anything beyond that is a matter of phenomenal empiricism.

On the superficiality of the New Atheists

Edward Feser often complains that the New Atheists have a superficial and inaccurate understanding of the traditional arguments for God (for example, see the posts here, here and here).  There is considerable merit to Feser's complaint, as an inspection of Ch. 3 of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion will readily confirm. What interests me here, however, is not showing the inadequacy of Dawkins's treatment of Aquinas's Five Ways (Feser does a better job of that than I ever could), but the relationship of New Atheist thought to its original inspiration in the Enlightenment. Specifically, Dawkins et. al. seem unaware of the movement of thought that gave birth to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment never "refuted" the reasoning of the classical philosophers; instead, in a bold move, it simply put the classical tradition aside and started philosophy afresh.

Perhaps the most succinct statement of the Enlightenment attitude toward the philosophical tradition is expressed by Immanuel Kant in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (from Cambridge Edition of the CPR):

Whether or not the treatment of the cognitions belonging to the concern of reason travels the secure course of a science is something which can soon be judged by its success. If after many preliminaries and preparations are made, a science gets stuck as soon as it approaches its end, or if in order to reach this end it must often go back and set out on a new path; or likewise if if proves impossible for the different co-workers to achieve unanimity as to the way in which they should pursue their common aim; then we may be sure that such a study is merely groping about, that it is still far from having entered upon the secure course of a science; and it is already a service to reason if we can possibly find that path for it, even if we have to give up as futile much of what was included in the end previously formed without deliberation.

Kant's paragraph simultaneously reveals what the Enlightenment sees as the problem with classical philosophy, and provides the Enlightenment solution to it. The problem (as the Enlightenment sees it), is this: Philosophy, as traditionally practiced, is futile. Rather than continue along the traditional lines, Enlightenment philosophers prefer to jettison the philosophical tradition altogether and make a fresh start, a start that promises to support the new science then emerging and perhaps make progress in its own right. But how does one reasonably dismiss the philosophical tradition as futile? Something is futile if it fails to do what it proposes to do. It seems like the Enlightenment philosopher must therefore be a master of the philosophical tradition, at least enough to understand what it proposes to do and to show that it fails to achieve it, and will continue to fail.

Understanding the philosophical tradition, however, is a task for a lifetime, and it is just this task that the Enlightenment philosopher is desperate to avoid; at all costs he must avoid engaging the classical philosopher in a never-ending roundabout concerning the meaning and "end" of classical philosophy. What the Enlightenment philosopher requires is a means to summarily dismiss the philosophical tradition, a means that relieves him of the task of engaging the classical philosopher on the latter's preferred ground and allows him to get on with the modern project of reconstructing philosophy.

In the Preface, Kant both proposes such a means and applies it. He writes that a "treatment" can "soon be judged by its success." We immediately hit a snag. Mustn't we understand the philosophical tradition so that we can know what "success" means with respect to it? We are right back to engaging the classical philosopher in his favorite game of never-ending debate. Kant first deals with this problem rhetorically, by hurrying the reader past it with that "soon." He then sidesteps it by proposing, or rather asserting, several measures by which a project of thought may judged. First, does it "get stuck" when it approaches its end (i.e. goal)? Second, does it repeatedly start over again in frustration? Third, does it result in unanimity of opinion as to its conduct?  Kant applies his criteria to logic, mathematics and the new science of physics in turn, not surprisingly concluding that they all pass the test. He then turns to metaphysics (i.e. classical philosophy):

Metaphysics - a wholly isolated speculative cognition of reason that elevates itself entirely above all instructions from experience, and that through mere concepts (not, like mathematics, through the application of concepts to intuition), where reason thus is supposed to be its own pupil - has up to now not been so favored by fate as to have been able to enter upon the secure course of a science, even thought it is older than all other sciences, and would remain even if all the others were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism. For in it reason continuously gets stuck, even when it claims a priori insight (as it pretends) into those laws confirmed by the commonest experience. In metaphysics we have to retrace our path countless times, because we find that it does not lead where we want it to go, and it is so far from reaching unanimity in the assertions of its adherents that it is rather a battlefield, and indeed one that appears to be especially determined for testing one's powers in mock combat; on this battlefield no combatant has ever gained the least bit of ground, nor has any been able to base any lasting possession on his victory. Hence there is no doubt that up to now the procedure of metaphysics has been a mere groping, and what is the worst, a groping among mere concepts. (again from the Cambridge Edition of the CPR).

Metaphysics, according to Kant, fails all his tests for a successful "treatment of cognitions." It repeatedly "gets stuck", it must repeatedly start over, and their is no unanimity of opinion in its adherents. The question of the "success" of classical philosophy still lurks in the background, since a philosophy "gets stuck" to the extent that it no longer makes progress toward its end (goal); but it would seem one must know the end of something to know if progress is being made towards it, so Kant's conviction of metaphysics on the charge of "getting stuck" implies that Kant knows the end of classical philosophy. As noted, however, Kant wants to avoid the question of the end of philosophy at all costs, as it will (he thinks) lead him into the interminable debates of the philosophical tradition. He cleverly brackets the question of the end of philosophy by saying that metaphysics "does not lead where we want it to go", changing the objective question of the end of philosophy to the subjective question of whether it gives us what we want; and in Kant's case, it manifestly doesn't. And this is the bold stroke of the Enlightenment that allows it to summarily dismiss the classical philosophical tradition: It is the philosopher himself, and his subjective desires, that is the measure of philosophy.

We can sympathize with the motivation of the Enlightenment philosophers. The world seemed to be undergoing revolutionary change; from the discovery of new continents, to the staggering innovation that was the birth of modern science, to new, republican political ideas, everything was becoming new; and the philosophical tradition appeared (I emphasize appeared) to be inadequate to deal with it. What was needed was a revolutionary new philosophy to accompany the revolutionary new world in the making. Slogging through the finer points of the Five Ways or Plotinus to eventually disprove them would miss the point entirely. Columbus didn't spend a lifetime justifying his voyages to skeptics; he never would have gotten out of port if he had wasted time on the timid. Nor did Galileo or Newton puzzle themselves over whether their new physics could fit within Aristotelian metaphysics. Like Columbus, they simply and boldly went ahead with their investigations and discovered what would never have been discovered any other way. Aristotle must reconcile himself to the new physics, not the other way around. Similarly, the Enlightenment philosopher cannot bear to be bound within the philosophical tradition as in a cage. Like Columbus and Newton, he must leave the past behind and strike out for fresh lands.

But there is a key difference between Columbus and Newton on the one hand, and a philosopher on the other. In a certain sense it doesn't really matter if Columbus or Newton knew what they were doing; Columbus always thought he actually made it to the East Indies, and Newton spent much of his time in bizarre religious speculation. But you can still discover the Caribbean even if you're navigation is so poor that you think you've arrived in Indonesia. The philosopher, however, is the wise man, and the wise man, as opposed to the fool, knows what he is doing. Philosophy, perhaps, may even be defined as striving to know what you are doing. So the philosopher must be self-aware in what he is doing, and this holds true for the Enlightenment philosopher as much as the classical. Kant can't simply assert that he doesn't like classical philosophy and he's going to try something new; he's got to give a reason for dismissing classical philosophy.

As I've hope I've showed above, the reasons Kant gives for dismissing the philosophical tradition are a bit of a bluff. He says that philosophy has proven itself futile, but he never actually proves the point; he asserts that it has and hopes the reader goes along. He must bluff because the attempt to prove the point would lead him into the interminable arguments so beloved of the classical philosopher, and this is just what he wishes to avoid.

And this is what Richard Dawkins doesn't seem to understand. Similar to the typical Enlightenment philosopher, he doesn't really have time for classical philosophy, which he sees as a waste of time. He should, then, summarily dismiss it in the fashion of Kant. Not having the self-understanding of a true philosopher like Kant, however, he instead takes a halfway position that is unreasonable on any account. He gives a little time to classical philosophy, enough to rapidly refute classical arguments for God, he thinks. But all his simple refutations reveal is his simplistic and superficial understanding of the arguments involved. This doesn't bother him, however, because he has already decided on Enlightenment grounds (i.e. the manifest futility of classical philosophy) that the arguments are worthless. Rather than an insult, I suspect he sees his condescending to treat the classical arguments even in a superficial manner as generous, since from his perspective they rate no treatment at all.

Efforts like those of Richard Dawkins discredit the Enlightenment tradition (if we can call a "tradition" something that was born in the rejection of tradition). Kant dismissed classical metaphysics as a mere "groping" among concepts, but at least the classical philosophers knew what it meant to grope. Even more embarrassing is a contemporary thinker, supposedly freed two hundred years ago by Kant from even needing to address classical philosophy, blundering about in classical philosophical concepts in a manner that it would be too kind to call "groping."