Common Sense Realism and Modern Philosophy

Common Sense Realism 

I call "common sense realism" any philosophy that takes ordinary experience as generally reliable. I consider myself a common sense realist, and I will use CSR as a shorthand for "common sense realism."

The designation "common sense realism" has some use in the history of philosophy, particularly with respect to Scottish philosophers including Thomas Reid, but I'm using the term for my own purposes independent of that history.

We all follow CSR in everyday life. Everyone goes through life taking for granted, most of the time, that what is presented to his senses is the way things are. They see the sun and don't doubt it is the sun they are seeing, they hit a baseball and don't doubt that the bat caused the baseball to fly, and they greet their wife not doubting that she is the same woman they greeted yesterday. This holds true for modern philosophers of the skeptical, analytical or Kantian variety as much as it did for Aristotle. 

The greatest advantage of CSR, an advantage I find nearly decisive, is that when reflecting philosophically on experience, CSR doesn't demand that the philosopher toss everyday certainties out the window. The philosophy he develops is the same philosophy by which he lives everyday.  He avoids the fracturing between life and thought that inspired the title of this blog. 

That fracturing was puzzling when I noticed it in college philosophy classes. We discussed what might be believed or doubted with respect to our experience and our morality, but those philosophical beliefs and doubts seemed to have little to do with how any of us, students or professors, actually conducted ourselves outside of class. This impression of philosophy proved enduring, and I developed the "private book" vs "public book" distinction to describe it. 

Organized crime keeps two sets of accounting books, the public book it presents to the courts and investigators, and the private book it keeps hidden that is the true account of the organization's finances.  Similarly, philosophers seemed to have a "public book" that reflected their "official" philosophy they presented in class and in journals, and a "private book" of beliefs by which they actually ran their lives. It was only many years later and after reading certain philosophers - especially Kierkegaard - that I began to understand that this fracturing was not accidental.

Prior to the modern era - which I will define with usual starting point of Descartes - the mainstream of the philosophical tradition followed CSR.  But there were exceptions. The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, noticing the constantly changing nature of the material world, concluded that flux was metaphysically basic and that CSR was mistaken. CSR says the river behind my house today is the same river it was yesterday, but Heraclitus would insist this is an illusion: You can't step into the same river twice. On the other hand, the philosopher Parmenides, seeing that nothing comes from nothing, and that being is and non-being is not, concluded that change is an illusion and that reality is static, since any change from non-being to being would be an instance of something coming from nothing. These philosophers did something that would become recurrent throughout history: They saw part of the truth but became so captured by it that they ignored the rest of the truth. 

What distinguishes Heraclitus and Parmenides from CSR philosophers is that the former ended up insisting that ordinary experience is at bottom an illusion. We might think things endure through time, that the tree in my yard yesterday is the same tree that is there today, but Heraclitus would tell us that I'm naive to think so. I might think that tree grew from a sapling over the years, but Parmenides would deny that it had ever really changed at all. 

The most famous and enduring CSR philosopher is Aristotle. Against Heraclitus, Aristotle noted that if everything was in flux, then there would be no possibility of knowing the truth. And since we manifestly do know some truth, that position cannot be correct. Against Parmenides, Aristotle pointed out that change is a manifest aspect of reality, which his position denies. His developed response to these philosophers resulted in the hylomorphic theory of being, the distinction between matter and form.

But what makes Aristotle a CSR philosopher is not his hylomorphism, however.  Hylomorphism is just one way to develop a CSR philosophy.  Aristotle was a CSR philosopher because he defended ordinary experience against radical skepticism. He gives an expression of CSR in his Metaphysics:

There are, both among those who have these convictions and among those who merely profess these views, some who raise a difficulty by asking, who is to be the judge of the healthy man, and in general who is likely to judge rightly on each class of questions. But such inquiries are like puzzling over the question whether we are now asleep or awake. And all such questions have the same meaning. These people demand that a reason shall be given for everything; for they seek a starting-point, and they seek to get this by demonstration, while it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction. But their mistake is what we have stated it to be; they seek a reason for things for which no reason can be given; for the starting-point of demonstration is not demonstration. (Metaphysics, Book IV, Ch. 6)

Aristotle criticizes his opponents by saying that "it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction."  How do we interpret this? Notice that he compares his opponents to those who wonder whether they are asleep or awake. Such people typically behave as though they know very well that they are awake. If they thought they truly might be in a dream then they would struggle to wake up. But they don't struggle. In fact, they behave as though they had no doubt they are awake. Their doubt has no conviction and need not be taken seriously.

For the CSR philosopher, the lack of conviction in such objections is enough to dismiss them. Philosophy for him is not a game, a hobby, or merely something to teach in the classroom, a way to make money. It is the penetration of life with reason, this life, the one I am actually living. He is always on guard to prevent the fracturing of his life with his thought.  No one can get through life with the conviction that everything is in flux, or that change is impossible. The only way to hold such positions is to fracture life and thought, to live by one philosophy and think by another. 

The Modern Philosophical Era

I noted earlier that prior to the modern era the mainstream of philosophers were CSR.  What distinguishes the modern era is that philosophers are typically not CSR. In fact, very often a modern philosopher develops his philosophy specifically as a rejection of CSR. If for the CSR philosopher the greatest sin is to lack conviction (i.e. to allow a fracture between life and thought), for the modern philosopher the greatest sin is to be "naive", and CSR philosophers are at the top of the list of naive philosophers as far as modern philosophers are concerned. 

Over the years the modern philosophical view has percolated through the culture, down to the level of the ordinary man. At that level it manifests itself in an impression that the business of the philosopher is to doubt everything, or to hold eccentric views that challenge the common sense of the ordinary man. The philosopher is the man who has "seen through" the naive dogmas and prejudices of the ordinary man to the truth beyond it.

Descartes established the pattern for modern philosophers and can be taken as the starting point for philosophy in its distinctively modern sense.  Although subsequent philosophers rejected many of his specific conclusions, the general form Descartes gave to modern philosophy has persisted. 

As a young man surveying the education he had received, the impression Descartes had was that the centuries of classical philosophy had produced nothing of any certainty. The philosophers were still arguing the same points they always had:

Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful... I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false. (Discourse on Method, Part One)

 He conceived a way out of this (alleged) futility: He would embark on a campaign of radical doubt, not accepting anything unless it could be demonstrated with absolute certainty:

,,, I thought it necessary that I do exactly the opposite, and that I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see whether, after this process, something in my beliefs remained that was entirely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine... (Discourse on Method, Part 4)

We may note that the campaign of doubt on which Descartes began may not be as straightforward as he imagined.  Remember that Descartes was led to his radical doubt because he concluded from the history of classical philosophy that it was futile. Well, if he's going to doubt everything that might be doubted, should not his conclusions with respect to classical philosophy be doubted? Maybe classical philosophy wasn't as futile as he supposed. Perhaps his own understanding of it was worthy of doubt.  We may recall the following passage from Plato's Phaedo, where Socrates addresses the frustration his friends felt at their inability to arrive at a conclusive argument with respect to the nature of the soul:

Well, then, Phaedo, he [Socrates] said, supposing that there is an argument which is true and valid and capable of being discovered, if anyone nevertheless, through his experience of these arguments which seen to the same people to be sometimes true and sometimes false, attached no responsibility to himself and his lack of technical ability, but was finally content, in exasperation, to shift the blame from himself to the arguments, and spent the rest of his life loathing and decrying them, and so missed the chance of knowing the truth about reality - would it not be a deplorable thing? 

But Descartes chose to doubt the whole of the philosophical tradition rather than himself. We might also note that Descartes's assertion that "our senses sometimes deceive us" is not an expression of doubt but rather of knowledge, for an instance of deception that is known as such really isn't an instance of deception, and anyways witnesses to the more general case of the reliability of the senses. For instance, a straw seen in a glass of water appears bent to us due to the refraction of light at the boundary between air and the water. We take the straw out of of the water and we see that it is straight. We might classify the former case as an instance of our eyes "deceiving" us, but that conclusion only stands on a conviction that in the latter case our eyes are not deceiving us. 

That all notwithstanding, Descartes's method of doubt eventually led him to the one proposition that he thought could withstand doubt: An assertion of his own existence. He must exist in order to be deceived, and so I think therefore I am,  the famous Cogito Ergo Sum.

The Cogito is sometimes interpreted as the first proposition that Descartes "could not doubt." That is not quite correct. It is the first proposition that Descartes found could withstand doubt. For Descartes definitely doubted it. He just overcame that doubt with an argument: If he is deceived, he must exist to be deceived, therefore he exists. 

Descartes congratulated himself on making a novel discovery with the Cogito, but in fact all he had done was rediscover a metaphysical principle well known to CSR philosophers: Being is prior to act. The assertion of an act implies the existence of the being for whom it is an act. Flute playing implies a flute player, thinking implies a thinker, dancing implies a dancer, and deception implies one who is deceived.  

Where the CSR philosopher differs from Descartes is in recognizing that this metaphysical principle is something immediately known through experience, not something that is known only after surviving trial by doubt. As soon as someone sees and hears a flute player, he knows that the flute playing depends on the flute player and would not exist without him. He knows it so immediately that his mind ordinarily does not stop to reflect on the fact but moves on to other things. All the CSR philosopher does is slow the mind down to conscious reflection on the elements known through experience, elements that the mind normally glosses over in favor of more pressing things requiring attention.  The fact that the mind normally glosses over basic metaphysical principles immediately known to it in no way makes them doubtful; Thinking it does is a mistake at the heart of modern philosophy.

Philosophy and Method

While subsequent philosophers rejected many of Descartes's specific conclusions, they embraced his basic approach. Specifically, that philosophy must begin with method. Thinkers at the time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were understandably impressed with the successes of the new scientific approach that was unlocking the secrets of nature.  The new science exploded many things thought to be true based on an Aristotelian approach and brought the Aristotelian tradition as a whole into question. Aristotle, for instance, taught that objects like stones fall toward the center of the Earth because that is their natural place to be as heavy objects, as opposed to light objects like fire that travel away from the center towards the periphery. The developing science of Newton, however, not only explained the motion of objects much more fruitfully and accurately than an Aristotelian approach, but did so in a way that seemed to dispense with Aristotelian notions, like final and formal causes, entirely.

Philosophers noticed the emphasis on method in the new science and, hoping to mimic science's success, made again the mistake that recurs in the history of philosophy: The mistake of absolutizing an aspect of the truth into the whole of the truth. In this case, they took the newly discovered truth concerning the methods of modern science, which does in fact provide a new and reliable way of interpreting empirical nature,  to imply that all thought must start with method to be reliable.

This is where they agreed with Descartes. Where they disagreed is just what the appropriate method for philosophy should be. Descartes thought it was his method of "universal doubt."  Locke proposed instead his "plain, historical method", which was highly influential and colored much of the discussion of method in philosophy after him, including the philosophy of David Hume. Ultimately there came the method of "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, a monumental attempt to get at what might be described as a "method of methods" in thought.

It's understandable why there was such disagreement over what constituted the proper method of philosophy.  For if we can only trust our thought when it is disciplined by method, then the thought that determines method is unreliable, since it is necessarily prior to method and therefore undisciplined. In one of the many ironies generated by modern philosophy, the method by which modern philosophy would transcend the alleged uncertainty of CSR could itself only be determined by thought in a gray zone that was, if anything, even more uncertain than CSR. Descartes, naturally, was the first to operate in the gray zone when he justified his adoption of the method of universal doubt by a biographical account of his subjective impression of classical philosophy. 

The lesson subsequent philosophers took from Descartes was not to mimic his universal doubt, but  that they were as free as Descartes to operate in the gray zone and establish philosophy on a method of their own invention. The most notable of these was  John Locke and his empiricist "plain, historical method."  Locke's selection of method became very influential, perhaps because it was explicitly developed to support the new science that had so impressed the 17th and 18th centuries.

Science and Philosophy

In their haste to learn lessons from the newly developing science, philosophers overlooked a few important features of science. The most important of these is that scientists themselves, in conducting science, operated in the common sense world of CSR.  When Galileo looked through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he took for granted that his telescope was what his common sense thought it was, that the dots of light he observed in the sky represented celestial objects that were the same objects he had observed the night before, and that various other common sense notions of cause and effect were reliable. He did not think that his vision of Jupiter was actually a blob of color organized by his mind into something resembling a planet, and having only a dubious relationship to external reality,

To doubt CSR is to doubt the basis on which science is actually conducted. The skeptical arguments of David Hume were most devastating in this regard. Hume argued that from a strictly empirical perspective, we see through our eyes colors and shapes, but we do not see causes that link one thing to another, nor do we see the substance that is claimed to be the basis of enduring identity.  I see a tree in my yard today and remember seeing a tree there yesterday, but what I do not see is the principle that this is the same tree as yesterday. I see the brick thrown at the window and the window shatter, but I do not see the brick caused the window to shatter.  The enduring identity of the tree on the one hand, and the causal link between the thrown brick and the shattered glass on the other were, Hume claimed, but "habits of the mind" developed through repetition rather than empirical principles read off sense data.

The response of CSR to Hume is that while empirical data comes through the senses, it doesn't follow that everything in that data is grasped by the senses, any more than your mailman knows the contents of all (or any) of your packages. The senses themselves grasp being in its material particularity; the intellect grasps the universal nature of being encountered through the senses. It is the intellect that knows that the same tree I see today is the same as yesterday, not the senses. 

Hume's skeptical empiricism pulls the rug out from empirical science, as was recognized by perhaps the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant. Kant wanted to preserve the certainty of science, as well as establish philosophy on a permanently firm foundation. Rather than propose yet another philosophical method developed more or less arbitrarily, the variety of which proved that philosophers had yet to penetrate to the depths of the problem, Kant took the analysis to another level with what he called the a priori in his "critical philosophy." The a priori seeks to get behind experience to explore the conditions that make experience itself possible in the first place. The endurance of identity over time, for instance, which we might give the name substance,  isn't a concept our minds draw from experience already given to us, whether legitimately (as CSR holds) or illegitimately (as Hume held.)  Kant argues that it is a condition we must presuppose for there to be any experience at all. In that sense it is far more certain than Hume imagined. 

Thought and Being

What is fascinating about Kant is that in developing his critical philosophy, he reconstructs much of the Aristotelian infrastructure, only instead of basing it in being, he bases it in presuppositions of thought. In other words, instead of being out there in the world, it is only inside our heads as something we must assume. This is the result of denying the reality of the human intellect's relationship to being.

We might ask why we should go through the arduous journey of critical philosophy (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is no easy read) only to arrive back at Aristotle, and an Aristotle that is imprisoned in our own minds. Kant's answer was that the limits of reason had now been firmly established and philosophers were no longer in danger of making the metaphysical mistakes of the classical philosophers. Philosophers were no longer "naive."

Looking at philosophical history post-Kant however, that basis wasn't established nearly as solidly as Kant thought. From an even loftier "meta" level, Kant's efforts look like just another attempt to find an absolute starting point to philosophy, not essentially different from Descartes's. 

This brings full circle the philosophical project begun by Descartes. The basic mistake Descartes made, putting thought prior to being, became the fundamental move of modern philosophy. It remains to ask why such a mistake is so tempting. Since being is in truth prior to thought, the answer should be an answer in terms of being, and being's implications for thought.

Man's being is that of a rational animal. He is animal insofar as he is a material being existing in time and space. He is rational insofar as he has an intellect capable of knowing universal being. Your dog encounters this tree and that tree in its life, but does not know each tree as expressing the universal nature of tree that your intellect grasps.

The incarnate aspect of man's rationality has significant consequences. Through his senses his intellect grasps being, but it is only this or that being of the contingent objects encountered in experience. The mind grasps the being of this tree as one tree among many, true, and as the same tree as yesterday.  But it also sees that the being of the tree does not account for itself. There are mysteries at the heart of contingent being: Why do this tree and that tree share the mutual nature of tree? Just what is the universal nature of tree?  The tree yesterday and today persists in its being, but there is nothing in the nature of tree as such that seems to make it so.

The classical philosopher does not see these questions as reasons to doubt the intuition of being itself, i.e. common sense is not overthrown simply because it is not perfectly transparent. Instead he uses these intuitions of being to demonstrate the reality of Absolute Being (i.e. God) that underwrites the contingent beings of our experience.  The proofs in this regard are relatively straightforward and pretty much unassailable given CSR.  That is why atheist philosophies since the early modern era find that in attacking the existence of God, they must first attack the existence of common sense.

Be that as it may, the temptation to which modern philosophies succumb when faced with the opacity in contingent being is to fall back on the clarity the mind has in its own ideas. It may be mysterious why the tree yesterday continues to be the same tree today, but it is no longer mysterious if I assume that my mind generated the persistent identity; there is nothing more in the idea than what my mind put there. Problem solved.

Only it isn't solved, only denied, and at the cost of destroying common sense and fracturing life and thought. 

Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depths of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modern skeptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. - G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

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.

Williamson the Humean

I'm reading the "hot" conservative book right now, "The End is Near and It is Going to be Awesome" by Kevin Williamson. Williamson is an excellent writer and always worth reading. But in Chapter 3, he reveals himself to be a 100 proof Humean:

If you believe that liberty is the paramount political good, then you probably will be some sort of libertarian; if you believe that socioeconomic equality is the highest political good, then you will not. But there is no way of proving that liberty or equality or some other abstraction should be paramount. These disputes are metaphysical, meaning that they are, by definition, beyond resolution through logic or through any process rooted in empirical evidence. Unless you are a professor paid to do so, engaging in metaphysical speculation is almost always fruitless. No valid process of reasoning can take us from the evidence of our senses to transcendent truth. Your conception of justice may be valid or it may be invalid, but there is no way to prove it in either case. We have spent ten thousand years devoted to such discussions, and we have made no progress.

That's an important hedge - engaging in metaphysical speculation is almost always fruitless. Because in the next sentence Williamson gives us an example not only of metaphysical speculation, but a full-fledged metaphysical dogma: "No valid process of reasoning can take us from the evidence of our senses to transcendent truth." I would be interested in the valid process of reasoning through which Williamson established this truth for himself. For it will of necessity involve many metaphysical ideas - for example, just what transcendent truth is, what the evidence of our senses is, and what the relationship between the two is, disputes about which, according to Williamson, are by definition beyond resolution through logic. So how did Williamson resolve it?

And as far as our conception of justice may go, Williamson may hold that there is no way to prove a conception of justice valid or invalid, but he certainly holds that there are ways to prove that reasoning about justice is valid or invalid. In fact, Williamson's implicit claim is that all reasoning about justice is invalid, if we mean by valid a chain of argument that should persuade the reasonable and open-minded person. But if we can make metaphysical claims about the nature of reasoning about justice, why can't we make metaphysical claims about justice directly?

Perhaps Williamson means to prove his case historically, as hinted at in his last sentence. But such a proof is circular, for those ten thousand years of discussion have made no progress only if all the reasoning in them has been invalid - and there are plenty of people who think there was some pretty sound reasoning about justice going on at least sometimes in those ten thousand years (see Aquinas, Thomas).

Speculative metaphysics is, unfortunately, unavoidable. The question is whether it will be done well or poorly, or openly or in hiding. Humean arguments like Williamson's are a big bluff (perhaps an unconscious bluff), claiming to eschew metaphysics while taking for granted profound metaphysical assumptions. These assumptions are often about the nature of human reason rather than nature directly, but they are no less metaphysical for that, for human reason is a part of nature. But we may be less likely to recognize them as metaphysical - which is why they often work as a bluff.

An Enduring Myth of Modern Thought

Chet Raymo, in Skeptics and True Believers, reveals in passing what may be the central myth of modern thought:

Poetic metaphor ("fire folk") and scientific construct (nuclear-powered spheres of gas) serve useful functions in our lives, but we are confident the latter bears a closer affinity to reality - to whatever is "out there" - than the former. The poetic metaphor conveys a human truth; the scientific construct attempts to remove the human subject from the equation of idea and reality. [p. 12]

The myth is that modern thought has somehow found a way to remove the subject from thought, making it more "objective" and therefore more reliable. The myth is based on a simple misunderstanding but it has had profound consequences. What science really does is discipline the subject of thought within a specified method. The method itself is objective since it does not depend on any particular subject. In other words, how the equation of idea and reality is to be understood by the subject is specified objectively through the scientific method. Rather than dispensing with the subject of thought, as the myth supposes, the actual effect of the advent of the scientific method is to splinter the subject into several distinct types.

The first type includes the genius, a peculiarly modern category of the subject. Classical philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition had a theory concerning the origin of ideas in the mind. Being itself is hylomorphic and the human subject literally absorbs ideas from being; ideas are being as it exists in the mode appropriate to the intellect. Tree is not an idea that wells up in the mind, or is a construct we put on sense impressions that we hope reflects reality; it is the being tree existing in an immaterial mode in our mind. The mind is what it knows, and what it knows is being.

But in the modern understanding of thought, our mind does not know being in its immaterial form of the idea, but ideas that exist independently of being and have no determinate relationship to being (or at least any relationship we can know a priori.) If ideas do not have an origin in being, what is their origin? This is a question modern thought does not and cannot answer, as Kant showed in response to Hume, and gives rise to the man called the genius. The genius is a genie of ideas; he is the creative origin of ideas that are put in human circulation and with which we interrogate reality. Isaac Newton was such a genius. He not only creatively conceived his Three Laws of Motion, but also the ideas of mass, force, and acceleration in which they are cast. The laws of motion and the ideas of mass, force and acceleration mutually define each other and specify a cosmos in the world of ideas, a cosmos we then evaluate through the scientific method. But that evaluation, whatever its outcome, in no way changes the fact that what we know is the Newtonian cosmos in the world of ideas; it doesn't magically transform the foundation of that world into reality itself. All it tells us is that the Newtonian cosmos of ideas "works better for us" than alternatives.

The genius is, of course, a man whom science can never explain, since he is the creative ground of science itself, and the conceptions of science are always posterior to his mind. The unfathomable mystery of Being the classical philosophers located in God, is replaced by the unfathomable mystery of the scientific genius. Being prior to science, the genius is invisible to it, which is why modern thinkers don't account for geniuses like Newton even as they celebrate them. In fact, geniuses are celebrated and then disappear from view altogether in the myth of a science that has magically eliminated the subject. The scientific genius is the true "Prince of the Age", in the words of Walker Percy, because he is the only truly free subject, his freedom found in the creative act of science itself. Everybody else (with the exception of an intermediate type to be described below) exists as a subject of the iron laws of scientific determination. The ancient world had no counterpart to the modern scientific genius, since it considered ideas to be an aspect of being itself, not creations ex nihilo of the human mind.

The subjective complement to the genius, the one who exists prior to science, is the scientific consumer, the one who exists posterior to it. The mass of humanity are scientific consumers, individuals who do not create or perform science, but are expected to respect its results. Unfortunately for them, the scientific worldview has no place for their subjectivity. It has a place for the scientific genius who creates science, and the scientific practitioner who conducts everyday science (a type intermediate between the genius and the consumer; the "retailer" of science), but it has no place for a subjectivity on the far side of science. The only thing that exists on the far side of science are the creative elements of the scientific genius, the forces, masses, accelerations, atoms, neutrons,and black holes in terms of which science is constructed. The only subjectivity they contain are the traces of the subjectivity of the scientific genius who created them.

Since the subjectivity of both the scientific genius and the scientific retailer are hidden behind science as being prior to it, and the subjectivity of the scientific consumer is denied altogether, the myth of the scientific elimination of subjectivity is something that easily takes hold without ever being explicitly advocated, and despite its obvious absurdity. As the dominant myth, thought unselfconsciously starts with it as a premise. Thus, a philosopher of the mind like John Searle can start his work by insisting that philosophy must start with the atomic theory of matter as a non-negotiable premise (see his Mind, A Brief Introduction or The Rediscovery of the Mind), as though such a theory bears no necessary implications concerning the subjectivity, and the mind, that created it.

The classical subject was a unity, not splintered in the manner of the modern subject. This is why Socrates was not embarrassed to converse with anyone in the Agora, be it "those reputed to be wise" (the sophists), the politicians, the craftsmen, or anyone else who might cross his path. In ancient Athens, there was only one type of human subjectivity, and that subjectivity was privileged to be a knower.

The End of Faith Again

Continuing my reading of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (which I have posted on here and here.)

In the last post I discussed the empiricist epistemology proposed by Harris. This plays itself out in a subtle way in his arguments in Ch. 2. Harris proposes that the relationship between truth and evidence is this:

“Because” suggests a causal connection between a propositions’ being true and a person’s believing that it is. This explains the value we generally place on evidence: because evidence is simply an account of the causal linkage between state of the world and our beliefs about them…

The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid… As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence. Indeed, if there were no conceivable change in the world that could get a person to question his religious beliefs, this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon his taking any state of the world into account. He could not claim, therefore, to be representing the world at all.

Harris’s understanding of the relationship between evidence and belief is inspired by David Hume. It also rules out any possibility of making an empirical argument for the existence of God. This is because God is not in the world like all other beings; God transcends the world as its Creator and ground. God underwrites all possible states of the world; the very existence of “states of the world” implies God as their source. So there can’t be a state of the world that refutes the existence of God. Nonetheless, contra Harris, God can still be empirically deduced from the world.

To see this, consider a more trivial question to which we might apply the Humean epistemology: Does the game of Monopoly have a creator? Applying Harris’s criteria, we require that any belief about Monopoly must represent an actual state of the game. Our belief about Monopoly must be a consequence of the way Monopoly is. If there were no conceivable change in Monopoly that could get a person to question that it has a creator, this would prove that his belief is not predicated on taking any state of Monopoly into account and is therefore unreasonable.

What sort of changes in Monopoly would lead us to believe that it didn’t have a creator? We may imagine all sorts of rules changes like having the pieces move backwards instead of forwards, having the owner of the property pay rent to the tenant rather than vice-versa, playing with three dice instead of two, etc., etc. If we think about it, we see that rule changes of this sort imply a creator as much as the normal rules do; in fact, it isn’t so much the particular content of the rules but the fact that there are rules at all that leads us to believe that Monopoly has a creator. Similarly, suppose we modified the board. We might change the number of squares, or change the squares to circles, have the squares run through the center of the board, double the number of properties, etc. Again, we see that it isn’t so much any particular configuration of the board that indicates a creator, but the fact that we have a board at all.

The only state of affairs of Monopoly that would lead us to conclude that it didn’t have a creator is if the rules were utter chaos and the board made no sense at all. In other words, we would think it didn’t have a creator only if “Monopoly” didn’t name an actual game but merely a region of chaos. It is the fact that Monopoly makes sense as a game that grounds our belief that it has a creator, not the particular way in which it makes sense. And the fact that Monopoly makes sense is an empirical fact. It is something we learn through the actual experience of Monopoly.

Similarly, it isn’t any particular state of the world or the particular way in which the world makes sense that indicates that it has a Creator, but the fact that the world makes sense at all. Why does the world make sense? It is not self-evident that it must. In fact, there are some philosophical traditions that think the world doesn't make sense, that our sense that it does is really an illusion; the Eastern thought of which Harris is enamored tends in this direction. The standard rational atheist response, however, is to say that the world “just does” make sense and leave it at that. Why the world makes sense is not a question "worth worrying about." But this avoids the question rather than answers it. As I said in the last post, it is to decline to philosophize rather than provide a philosophical answer. Just as Monopoly points to an intelligence as its ground, so does the world point to an intelligence as its ground – the God of Aristotle that is self-thinking, subsistent thought. In Christian terms, the word points to the Word.

One of the strains of modern atheism realizes this and in order to deny God, it denies the ultimate rationality of the world. This is the atheism of folks like Sartre and the deconstructionists. Sam Harris wants to retain rationality but deny God, a very difficult tightrope to walk. He’s got to deny the transcendent reach of reason (in simple terms, reasoning about the world as a whole) while retaining the mundane use of reason (reasoning about the relationship of parts of the world to each other). The difficulty is that the mundane use of reason naturally leads into its transcendent use. Harris wants us to search out and investigate “regularities” in the world that we experience (see the last post), but not to ask about the foundation of those regularities. We are supposed to take those foundations for granted. The regularities “just are.” But it is natural to the human mind not to settle for something that “just is.” It is in our nature to ask why. Any philosophy, like Harris’s atheism, that demands that we stop asking the question rather than answering it will never be philosophically satisfying because it constitutes a denial of our very nature.

Even in his footnote, Harris can barely avoid using the transcendent form of reason in discussing its mundane use. Some regularities betray causal connections between phenomena, others do not and are dismissed as “mere correlation.” What is the difference between regularities that manifest lawful connections and regularities that are mere juxtapositions in space and time? Harris demurs from answering this question, perhaps because its implications might lead him to where he doesn’t want to go. The distinction he seeks between regularities obviously cannot itself be a regularity. It must be something that transcends regularities so that regularities can be classified in its terms. Already we see that our reason must do more than merely notice regularities in experience and draw conclusions about them. It must know transcendent principles in which it can make sense of regularities, including distinguishing authentic lawful connections from mere correlations. These transcendent principles must characterize experience as a whole; in other words, they don’t represent any particular state of the world but ground the very experience of the world itself. We invoke transcendent principles when we use words like substance, unity, change, material, and ideal, among many others (many being yet another one).

The use of transcendent principles in our thinking is so necessary that there is no point in trying to deny them, as Hume attempted to do. A better tactic for the atheist is not to deny the transcendent use of reason but to claim that it is prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, our transcendent reason does not draw its basic principles from experience but rather reads them into experience. This is the approach of Immanuel Kant. Aristotle taught that man learns the meaning of substance, unity, change, etc. from his encounter with being in experience; Kant says rather that man imposes his forms of substance, unity, etc. on experience. Such principles transcend experience for both Aristotle and Kant; the difference is that for Aristotle they transcend experience objectively and for Kant they transcend experience subjectively. Obviously, a metaphysical argument for the existence of God is not possible on the Kantian view, since any conclusion we drew would only refer to our own mind and its forms rather than objective reality.

I side with Aristotle rather than Kant on the origin and reach of transcendent reason, but I will not engage that argument here. The point is that, on any reading, simple-minded empiricism of the Humean type is unsustainable. Harris has sent his forces to defend Omaha Beach when Normandy has already been overrun; the battle has long since moved to the Siegfried Line.