A simple sketch of how realism became unpopular
[Epistemic status: Sharing current impressions in a quick, simplified way in case others have details to add or have a more illuminating account. Medium-confidence that this is one of the most important parts of the story.]
Here’s my current sense of how we ended up in this weird world where:
I still intermittently run into people who claim that there’s no such thing as reality or truth;
a lot of 20th-century psychologists made a habit of saying things like ‘minds don’t exist, only behaviors’;
a lot of 20th-century physicists made a habit of saying things like ‘quarks don’t exist, only minds’;
there’s a big academic split between continental thinkers saying (or being rounded off to saying) some variant of “everything is culture / perception / discourse / power” and Anglophone thinkers saying (or being rounded off to saying) “no”.
Background context:
1. The ancient Greeks wrote down a whole lot of arguments. In many cases, we’re missing enough textual fragments or context that we don’t really know why they were arguing — what exact propositions were in dispute, or what the stakes were.
2. In any case, most of this is screened off by the fact that Europe’s memetic winners were Christianity plus normal unphilosophical beliefs like “the sky is, in fact, blue”.
3. Then, in 1521, the Protestant Reformation began.
4. In 1562, the Catholics found a giant list of arguments against everything by the minor Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus, got very excited, and immediately weaponized them to show that the Protestant arguments fail (because all arguments fail).
5. These soon spread and became a sensation, and not just for being a useful superweapon. Plenty of intellectuals were earnest humanists used to taking arguments at face value, and found Sextus’ arguments genuinely upsetting and fascinating.
I trace continental thinkers’ “everything is subjective/relative” arguments back to a single 1710 error in George Berkeley:
[...] I am content to put the whole upon this Issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable Substance, or in general, for any one Idea or any thing like an Idea, to exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the Cause[....]
But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine Trees, for instance, in a Park, or Books existing in a Closet, and no Body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: But what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your Mind certain Ideas which you call Books and Trees, and the same time omitting to frame the Idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: It only shews you have the Power of imagining or forming Ideas in your Mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the Objects of your Thought may exist without the Mind: To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest Repugnancy.
If I can imagine a tree that exists outside of any mind, then I can imagine a tree that is not being imagined. But “an imagined X that is not being imagined” is a contradiction. Therefore everything I can imagine or conceive of must be a mental object.
Berkeley ran with this argument to claim that there could be no unexperienced objects, therefore everything must exist in some mind — if nothing else, the mind of God.
The error here is mixing up what falls inside vs. outside of quotation marks. “I’m conceiving of a not-conceivable object” is a formal contradiction, but “I’m conceiving of the concept ‘a not-conceivable object’” isn’t, and human brains and natural language make it easy to mix up levels like those.
(I can immediately think of another major milestone in the history of European thought, Anselm’s ontological argument for God, that shows the same brain bug.)
Berkeley’s view was able to find fertile soil in an environment rife with non-naturalism, skeptical arguments, and competition between epistemic criteria and authorities. Via Kant and Kant’s successors (Hegel chief among them), he successfully convinced the main current of 19th-century European philosophy to treat the idea of a “mind-independent world” as something ineffable or mysterious, and to treat experiences or perspectives as fundamental.
(Edit: G.E. Moore seems to think that everyone in the 19th century was making an error along these lines, but I now suspect Kant himself wasn’t making this mistake; I think his main error was trying too hard to defeat skepticism.
I also don’t think Berkeley’s writing would have been sufficient to confuse Europe on its own; it’s too lucid and well-articulated. The transition to Kantian and Hegelian versions of these arguments is important because they were much more elaborate and poorly expressed, requiring a lot of intellectual effort in order to spot the inconsistencies.)
My unscholarly surface impression of the turn of the 20th century is that these memes (“the territory is fundamentally mysterious” and “maps are sort of magical and cosmically important”) allowed a lot of mysticism and weird metaphysics to creep into intellectual life, but that ideas like those are actually hard to justify in dry academic prose, such that the more memetically fit descendants of idealism in the 20th century ended up being quietist (“let’s just run experiments and not talk about all this weird ‘world’ stuff”) or instrumentalist / phenomenalist / skeptic / relativist (“you can’t know ‘world’ stuff, so let’s retreat to just discussing impressions; and maybe you can’t even know those, so really what’s left is power struggles”).
Today, the pendulum has long since swung back again in most areas of intellectual life, perhaps because we’ve more solidly settled around our new central authority (science) and the threats to centralized epistemic authority (religious and philosophical controversy) are more distant memories. Metaphysics and weird arguments are fashionable again in analytic philosophy; behaviorism is long-dead in psychology; and quietism, non-realism, and non-naturalism at least no longer dominate the discussion in QM, though a lot of Copenhagen slogans remain popular.
The above is a very simple picture featuring uneven scholarship, and history tends to be messier than all that. (Ideas get independently rediscovered, movements go one step forward only to retreat two steps back, etc.) Also, I’m not claiming that everyone endorsed the master argument as stated, just that the master argument happened to shift intellectual fashions in this direction in a durable way.
This post was educational, however, I want to push back against the implicit criticism of instrumentalism and the Copenhagen interpretation. The metaphilosophical position I will use here is: to solve a philosophical question, we need to rephrase it as a question about AI design (AFAIK the full credit for this approach goes to Yudkowsky). So, suppose I am building an AI. Should the AI’s model of the world be (i) “about things that exist independently of the AI” or (ii) “about the subjective perceptions of the AI”? This depends on what kind of reward function I want my AI to have.
The standard (I call it “perceptible”) type of reward function in reinforcement learning only depends on the history of actions and observations. For such an AI the answer is (ii): it is important the AI will correctly predict the consequences of its actions, but there is no significance whatsoever that the AI’s models can be interpreted as (i). Yes, these models will still have intrinsic variables corresponding to “unobserved objects” in some sense, but there is no reason for these variables to always have an unambiguous “realist” interpretation.
Now suppose that the AI is actually designed to care about particular objects outside itself. Specifically, assume the AI uses an instrumental (or semi-instrumental) reward function. Such a function might be specified (or partially specified) using some particular ontology. Then, the AI is modeling the world as containing certain unobserved objects, at least approximately. The answer is now in between (i) and (ii). The AI’s models are about subjective perceptions of the AIs and also about some particular type of things that exist independently of the AI, namely, those things that are normatively important to it. Coming back from AIs to humans, we may conclude that, what really makes sense is our subjective perceptions + those external objects that we actually care about (e.g. other humans). But, quarks only “exist” in the sense that they are components in a useful model we created.
What does it tell us about the interpretation of quantum mechanics? Once again, consider an AI trying to discover quantum mechanics. From the AI’s perspective, what it’s looking for is a function from observation histories to distributions over the next observation. How can we construct such a function from the formalism of QM? Obviously, using Copenhagen: each observation is a measurement that causes the wavefunction of the environment to collapse. “But,” the fans of MWI will object “what about all those other Everett branches? They are still out there, right? They don’t actually vanish?!” The point is, from the AI’s perspective the question is meaningless. The AI’s design assumes the AI can record everything it observes in its memories, therefore, once an observation is made, those Everett branches will never meet again in the AI’s lifetime. “But,” another objection may go “what if someone tempers with the memories of the AI in a way that allows quantum interference between the branches? Sure it is completely impractical for humans, but it is theoretically possible, and might even be practically possible for an AI running on a quantum computer.” Alright, but tempering with the memory of the agent is effectively destroying the agent: it invalidates the fundamental assumptions of its reasoning algorithm, and any reasoning algorithm must make some fundamental assumptions of that sort. (The agent might still accurately account for the possibility of its own destruction (see “The Death of the Agent and Kamikaze Strategies”), but probably only with the help of external knowledge.)
Maybe the problem is that I’m not sufficiently convinced that there’s a philosophical question here. Sometimes philosophers (and even physicists) argue about things that aren’t open questions. “Do refrigerators exist, or only mental models of refrigerators?” sounds like a straightforward, testable empirical question to me, with all the evidence favoring “refrigerators exist”.
I predict I’m missing an implicit premise explaining why “I don’t currently understand where the Born rule comes from” is a bigger problem for realism than “I don’t currently understand how my refrigerator works”, or some other case where realism makes things unnecessarily hard/confusing, like infinite ethics or anthropics or somesuch.
Let’s unpack what it means to say that “refrigerators exist”. From my (instrumentalist) perspective, it means that (i) I have a predictive model of my perception, to which I assign high credence, and in which for each state of the environment I can say which refrigerators exist (where “refrigerator” is just some symbol that makes sense inside the model) and (ii) according to my belief, the current state of the environment contains at least one refrigerator with high probability.
My claim is not that quantum mechanics proves realism is wrong. My claim is that instrumentalism is the correct metaphysics regardless, and once you accept that, the Copenhagen interpretation seems quite satisfactory. Although it is also true that if you try interpreting quantum mechanics according to sufficiently strong realist desiderata you run into impossibility results like the Kochen-Specker theorem and the violation of Bell’s inequality.
What does it mean for instrumentalism to be the correct metaphysics? Normally, I’d interpret “the correct metaphysics” as saying something basic about reality or the universe. (Or, if you’re an instrumentalist and you say “X is the correct metaphysics”, I’d assume you were saying “it’s useful to have a model that treats X as a basic fact about reality or the universe”, which also doesn’t make sense to me if X is “instrumentalism”.)
Well, sufficiently specific realist desiderata. Adding hidden variables to QM doesn’t make the theory any more realist, the way we’re using “realist” here.
Like I said before, it means that instrumentalism is the point of view that is the most useful for designing AI or answering questions about AI. According to the “Yudkowskian computationalist” metaphilosophical view, this also makes it the most useful for rationality in general.
I imagined “realist” to mean something like “the universe can be described in a way independent of the choice of observer, and the perceptions of any given observer can be decoded from the history of the universe in this description, s.t. different observers have compatible observations”. Adding hidden variables does make QM more realist in this sense, for example the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is realist (but it only makes sense if you assume all observer perceptions can be reduced to configuration variables, which seems false and disqualifies it). MWI fails to be entirely realist because you have to either make the decoding of observer perceptions stochastic (and thereby admit that your description of the universe is incomplete) or to postulate, for each “normal” observer Alice, a huge ensemble of different observers that correspond to versions of Alice in different Everett branches (and thereby lose the physical meaning of quantum probabilities and with it essentially all the predictive power of the theory).
Except that if you are the kind of rationalist who cares about what is really real, you should reject instrumentalism immediately.
I immediately saw this mistake *while reading the text of the mistake.*
So, now I’m confused. Am I master ninja of a philosopher? Are you misrepresenting the level of people’s confusion about this? Have I been arguing on the internet for 3 decades and thus I’m just hypersensitive to language/text based mistakes? Are we both wrong that this is a mistake?
It’s relatively easy to be a master ninja of philosophy relative to anyone in 1710, because you’ve had a chance to crib from the work of all the smartest people who’ve lived since then.
I can see this being true, but I’m not entirely convinced.
I have no background in philosophy. I don’t read philosophy other than occasionally dipping into LW.
Of course, there exists the possibility that occasional dipping into LW has been enough, or that the necessary mental rigor has just seeped into the general populace over the intervening few hundred years.
Also, I’m not sure “anyone in 1710” is the right comparison. More like “people thinking about philosophy in 1710″.
Of course, that is likely what you meant, but I think the less precise wording you used makes your argument a lot more convincing so I think it’s important to point out the distinction.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that actually I am a ninja of philsophy. I’m just saying that your point doesn’t necessarily make me less confused.
It’s also that a lot of philosophy, including famous works, is just really bad.
See also: “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts”.
It’s rather obvious if you’ve done programming or studied provability or read the sequences. The lesswrong crowd isn’t a good sample for testing the strength of this trap.
Re “was Berkeley making such an obvious mistake?”, I think this is historians’ majority view, but multiple people have tried to come up with more reasonable versions of the argument; see Gallois (1974) and Downing (2011). Note that Berkeley makes the same argument in dialogue form here (starts at “How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?”), so you can check if you find that version more tenable.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley says:
That said, I put a lot of weight on Allen Wood’s view as a leading Kant scholar, and revisiting his book Kant, he doesn’t think Kant accepted the master argument (p. 69). David (2015) asserts a link, but it looks tenuous to me.
Kant’s earliest interpreters took him to be saying “trees, oceans, etc. all just exist in your head and have nothing in common with the mysterious ineffable things-in-themselves”, and Kant definitely talks like that a great deal, but he also says a lot that contradicts that view. Wood thinks Kant was just really confused and fuzzy about his own view, and didn’t have a consistent model here (pp. 63-71).
My new pet theory is that Kant was being pulled in one direction by “wanting to make things as subjective as possible so he can claim more epistemic immediacy and therefore more immunity to skeptical arguments”, and in the opposite direction by “not wanting to sound like a crazy person like Berkeley”, so we get inconsistencies.
I don’t know who, if anyone, noted the obvious fallacy in Berkeley’s master argument prior to Russell in 1912, and Russell seems to think the argument was central to idealism’s appeal. Regardless, my new view is: philosophy mainly ended up going down an idealist cul-de-sac because Kant shared Berkeley’s “try to find ways to treat more things as subjective” approach to defeating skepticism. (Possibly without realizing it; Stang (2016) suggests Kant was pretty confused about what Berkeley believed.) Then Kant and Hegel built sufficiently dense, mysterious, and complicated intellectual edifices that it was easy for them to confuse themselves and others, while still being brilliant, innovative, and internally consistent enough to attract a lot of followers.
Not even Moore in 1903?
Isn’t that the same argument Russell was making?
They’re… similar? I find Russell a lot clearer on this point:
I find Moore’s way of discussing the issue weirder. Moore is definitely making an argument from ‘a thought’s object is different from the thought itself’ to ‘idealism is false’, but his argument seems to involve weird steps like ‘our experiences don’t have contents’ (rather than the expected ‘the content of our experience is different from its referent’):
Baldwin (2004) confirms that this line of reasoning, plus Moore’s attempt to resist skeptical hypotheses, led Moore in a very confused direction:
I should note that Russell was also led in some pretty weird directions by the desire to resist skeptical arguments:
Also, insofar as Moore and Russell are gesturing at similar issues, Moore’s paper provides some support for the claim that master-argument-ish reasoning was central to the idealism and rested on a simple error that was concealed by motivated reasoning and obfuscatory language, and that no one noticed (or successfully popularized) the error prior to Moore/Russell:
This updates me partway back toward the original claim I made (that Berkeley’s master argument was causally important for the rise of idealism and its 20th-century successors).
Also interesting: “insistence that we be immune to skeptical arguments” and “fascination with the idea of representation/intentionality/‘aboutness’” seems to have led the continental philosophers in similar directions, as in Sartre’s “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” But that intellectual tradition had less realism, instrumentalism, and love-of-science in its DNA, so there was less resistance to sliding toward an “everything is sort of subjective” position.
Maybe confused, maybe nuanced, but certainly not backing some clear but extreme view.
I’d say: definitely nuanced. Definitely very inconsistent on this point. Not consistently asserting an extreme metaphysical view like “the true, mind-independent world is incomprehensibly different from the world we experience”, though seeming to flirt with this view (or framing?) constantly, to the extent that all his contemporaries did think he had a view at least this weird. Mainly guilty of (a) muddled and poorly-articulated thoughts and (b) approaching epistemology with the wrong goals and methods.
Berkely’s argument caused a fair amount of incredulity at the time. Samuel Johnon’s Argumentum ad Lapidum was intended as a reponse.
BTW, I notice that a lot of people here are persuaded by Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, which is every bit as flawed in my view.
This seems like incredulity at his conclusion, rather than at his argument. Do you know of good criticisms of the master argument from the time? (Note it wasn’t given a standard name until the 1970s.)
To be clear, I think Berkeley was near-universally rejected at the time, because his conclusion (‘there’s no material world’) was so wild. Most people also didn’t understand what Berkeley was saying, even though he was pretty clear about it (see: Kant’s misunderstanding; and the above fallacious counterargument, assuming it wasn’t just a logically rude joke on Johnson’s part).
But I don’t update positively about people for rejecting silly-sounding conclusions just based on how silly they sound. The same “that sounds silly” heuristic that helps you reject Berkeley’s argument (when it’s fringe and ‘wears its absurdity on its sleeve’) helps you accept 19th-century idealists’ versions of the argument (when it’s respectable and framed as the modern/scientific/practical/educated/consensus view on the issue).
Flawed how?
I should also emphasize that Berkeley’s idealism is very different from (e.g.) Hegel’s idealism. “Idealism” comes in enough different forms that it’s probably more useful for referring to a historical phenomenon than a particular ideology. (Fortunately, the former is the topic I’m interested in here.)
Aumanns theorem assumes there is no ambiguity or disagreement about what counts as evidence or information in the first place. In the real world, that is the major barrier to achieving agreement.
Well, maybe that is right. You haven’t really argued against sophisticated idealism, or noticed that scientific realism has dumb forms.
It seems like you might be referring to Eliminativism. If you are, this isn’t a fair account of it.
Eliminativism isn’t opposed to realism. It’s just a rejection of the assumption that the labels we apply to people’s mental states (wants, believes, loves, etc) are a reflection of the underlying reality. People have been thinking about minds in terms of those concepts for a really long time, but nobody had bothered to sit down and demonstrate that these are an accurate model.
From wiki:
Upvoted! My discussion of a bunch of these things above is very breezy, and I approve of replacing the vague claims with more specific historical ones. To clarify, here are four things I’m not criticizing:
1. Eliminativism about particular mental states, of the form ‘we used to think that this psychological term (e.g., “belief”) mapped reasonably well onto reality, but now we understand the brain well enough to see it’s really doing [description] instead, and our previous term is a misleading way of gesturing at this (or any other) mental process.’
I’m an eliminativist (or better, an illusionist) about subjectivity and phenomenal consciousness myself. (Though I think the arguments favoring that view are complicated and non-obvious, and there’s no remotely intellectually satisfying illusionist account of what the things we call “conscious” really consist in.)
2. In cases where the evidence for an eliminativist hypothesis isn’t strong, the practice of having some research communities evaluate eliminativism or try eliminativism out and see if it leads in any productive directions. Importantly, a community doing this should treat the eliminativist view as an interesting hypothesis or an exploratory research program, not in any way as settled science (or pre-scientific axiom!).
3. Demanding evidence for claims, and being relatively skeptical of varieties of evidence that have a poor track record, even if they “feel compelling”.
4. Demanding that high-level terms be in principle reducible to lower-level physical terms (given our justified confidence in physicalism and reductionism).
In the case of psychology, I am criticizing (and claiming really happened, though I agree that these views weren’t as universal, unquestioned, and extreme as is sometimes suggested):
Skinner’s and other behaviorists’ greedy reductionism; i.e., their tendency to act like they’d reduced or explained more than they actually had. Scientists should go out of their way to emphasize the limitations and holes in their current models, and be very careful (and fully explicit about why they believe this) when it comes to claims of the form ‘we can explain literally everything in [domain] using only [method].’
Rushing to achieve closure, dismiss open questions, forbid any expressions of confusion or uncertainty, and treat blank parts of your map as though they must correspond to a blank (or unimportant) territory. Quoting Watson (1928):
More generally: overconfidence in cool new ideas, and exaggeration of what they can do.
Over-centralizing around an eliminativist hypothesis or research program in a way that pushes out brainstorming, hypothesis-generation, etc. that isn’t easy to fit into that frame. I quote Hempel (1935) here:
Simply put: getting the wrong answer. Some errors are more excusable than others, but even if my narrative about why they got it wrong is itself wrong, it would still be important to emphasize that they got it wrong, and could have done much better.
The general idea that introspection is never admissible as evidence. It’s fine if you want to verbally categorize introspective evidence as ‘unscientific’ in order to distinguish it from other kinds of evidence, and there are some reasonable grounds for skepticism about how strong many kinds of introspective evidence are. But evidence is still evidence; a Bayesian shouldn’t discard evidence just because it’s hard to share with other agents.
The rejection of folk-psychology language, introspective evidence, or anything else for science-as-attire reasons.
Idealism emphasized some useful truths (like ‘our perceptions and thoughts are all shaped by our mind’s contingent architecture’) but ended up in a ‘wow it feels great to make minds more and more important’ death spiral.
Behaviorism too emphasized some useful truths (like ‘folk psychology presupposes a bunch of falsifiable things about minds that haven’t all been demonstrated very well’, ‘it’s possible for introspection to radically mislead us in lots of ways’, and ‘it might benefit psychology to import and emphasize methods from other scientific fields that have a better track record’) but seems to me to have fallen into a ‘wow it feels great to more and more fully feel like I’m playing the role of a True Scientist and being properly skeptical and cynical and unromantic about humans’ trap.
I find that Dennett’s heterophenomenology squares this circle, fully as much as it can be squared in the absence of actual telepathy (or comparable tech).
“Heterophenomenology” might be fine as a meme for encouraging certain kinds of interesting research projects, but there are several things I dislike about how Dennett uses the idea.
Mainly, it’s leaning on the social standards of scientific practice, and on a definition of what “real science” or “good science” is, to argue against propositions like “any given scientist studying consciousness should take into account their own introspective data—e.g., the apparent character of their own visual field—in addition to verbal descriptions, as an additional fact to explain.” This is meant to serve as a cudgel and bulwark against philosophers like David Chalmers, who claim that introspection reveals further facts (/data/explananda) not strictly translatable into verbal reports.
This is framing the issue as one of social-acceptability-to-the-norms-of-scientists or conformity-with-a-definition-of-”science”, whereas correct versions of the argument are Bayesian. (And it’s logically rude to not make the Bayesianness super explicit and clear, given the opportunity; it obscures your premises while making your argument feel more authoritative via its association with “science”.)
We can imagine a weird alien race (or alien AI) that has extremely flawed sensory faculties, and very good introspection. A race like that might be able to bootstrap to good science, via leveraging their introspection to spot systematic ways in which their sensory faculties fail, and sift out the few bits of reliable information about their environments.
Humans are plausibly the opposite: as an accident of evolution, we have much more reliable sensory faculties than introspective faculties. This is a generalization from the history of science and philosophy, and from the psychology literature. Moreover, humans have a track record of being bad at distinguishing cases where their introspection is reliable from cases where it’s unreliable; so it’s hard to be confident of any lines we could draw between the “good introspection” and the “bad introspection”. All of this is good reason to require extra standards of evidence before humanity “takes introspection at face value” and admits it into its canon of Established Knowledge.
Personally, I think consciousness is (in a certain not-clarified-here sense) an illusion, and I’m happy to express confidence that Chalmers’ view is wrong. But I think Dennett has been uniquely bad at articulating the reasons Chalmers is probably wrong, often defaulting to dismissing them or trying to emphasize their social illegitimacy (as “unscientific”).
The “heterophenomenology” meme strikes me as part of that project, whereas a more honest approach would say “yeah, in principle introspective arguments are totally admissible, they just have to do a bit more work than usual because we’re giving them a lower prior (for reasons X, Y, Z)” and “here are specific reasons A, B, C that Chalmers’ arguments don’t meet the evidential bar that’s required for us to take the ‘autophenomenological’ data at face value in this particular case”.
I don’t think I can imagine this, actually. It seems to me to be somewhat incoherent. How exactly would this race “spot systematic ways in which their sensory faculties fail”? After all, introspection does no good when it comes to correcting errors of perception of the external world…
Or am I misunderstanding your point…?
A simple toy example would be: “You have perfect introspective access to everything about how your brain works, including how your sensory organs work. This allows you to deduce that your external sensory organs provide noise data most of the time, but provide accurate data about the environment anytime you wear blue sunglasses at night.”
I confess I have trouble imagining this, but it doesn’t seem contradictory, so, fair enough, I take your point.
I don’t read Dennett as referring to social acceptability or “norms of science” (except insofar as those norms are taken to constitute epistemic best practices from a personal standpoint, which I think Dennett does assume to some degree—but no more than is, in my view, warranted).
Sure. Heterophenomenology is that “more work”. Introspective arguments are admissible; they’re admissible as heterophenomenological evidence.
It is indisputably the case that Chalmers, for instance, makes arguments along the lines of “there are further facts revealed by introspection that can’t be translated into words”. But it is not only not indisputably the case, but indeed can’t ever (without telepathy etc., or maybe not even then) be shown to another person, or perceived by another person, to be the case, that there are further facts revealed by introspection that can’t be translated into words.
Indeed it’s not even clear how you’d demonstrate to yourself that what your introspection reveals is real. Certainly you’re welcome to “take introspection’s word for it”—but then you don’t need science of any kind. That I experience what I experience, seems to me to need no demonstration or proof; how can it be false, after all? Even in principle? But then what use is arguing whether a Bayesian approach to demonstrating this not-in-need-of-demonstration fact is best, or some other approach? Clearly, whatever heterophenomenology (or any other method of investigation) might be concerned with, it’s not that.
But now I’m just reiterating Dennett’s arguments. I guess what I’m saying is, I think your responses to Dennett are mostly mis-aimed. I think the rebuttals are already contained in what he’s written on the subject.
What does “indisputably” mean here in Bayesian terms? A Bayesian’s epistemology is grounded in what evidence that individual has access to, not in what disputes they can win. When Chalmers claims to have “direct” epistemic access to certain facts, the proper response is to provide the arguments for doubting that claim, not to play a verbal sleight-of-hand like Dennett’s (1991, emphasis added):
It’s intellectually dishonest of Dennett to use the word “ineffable” here to slide between the propositions “I’m unable to describe my experience” and “my experience isn’t translatable in principle”, as it is to slide between Nagel’s term of art “what it’s like to be you” and “how it seems to you”.
Again, I agree with Dennett that Chalmers is factually wrong about his experience (and therefore lacks a certain degree of epistemic “authority” with me, though that’s such a terrible way of phrasing it!). There are good Bayesian arguments against trusting autophenomenology enough for Chalmers’ view to win the day (though Dennett isn’t describing any of them here), and it obviously is possible to take philosophers’ verbal propositions as data to study (cf. also the meta-problem of consciousness), but it’s logically rude to conceal your cruxes, pretend that your method is perfectly neutral and ecumenical, and let the “scientificness” of your proposed methodology do the rhetorical pushing and pulling.
There’s a version of this claim I agree with (since I’m a physicalist), but the version here is too strong. First, I want to note again that this is equating group epistemology with individual epistemology. But even from a group’s perspective, it’s perfectly possible for “facts revealed by introspection that can’t be translated into words” to be transmitted between people; just provide someone with the verbal prompts (or other environmental stimuli) that will cause them to experience and notice the same introspective data in their own brains.
If that’s too vague, consider this scenario as an analogy: Our universe is a (computable) simulation, running in a larger universe that’s uncomputable. Humans are “dualistic” in the sense that they’re Cartesian agents outside the simulation whose brains contain uncomputable subprocesses, but their sensory experiences and communication with other agents is all via the computable simulation. We could then imagine scenarios where the agents have introspective access to evidence that they’re performing computations too powerful to run in the laws of physics (as they know them), but don’t have output channels expressive enough to demonstrate this fact to others in-simulation; instead, they prompt the other agents to perform the relevant introspective feat themselves.
The other agents can then infer that their minds are plausibly all running on physics that’s stronger than the simulated world’s physics, even though they haven’t found a directly demonstrate this (e.g., via neurosurgery on the in-simulation pseudo-brain).
You can update upward or downward about the reliability of your introspection (either in general, or in particular respects), in the same way you can update upward or downward about the reliability of your sensory perception. E.g., different introspective experiences or faculties can contradict each other, suggest their own unreliability (“I’m introspecting that this all feels like bullshit...”), or contradict other evidence sources.
Ok… before I respond with anything else, I want to note that this is hardly a reasonable response. “Indisputably” is a word that has several related usages, and while indeed one of them is something sort of like “you won’t actually win any actual debates if you try to take the opposite position”, do you really think the most plausible way to interpret what I said is to assume that that is the usage I had in mind? Especially after I wrote:
So it should be clear that I’m not talking about winning debates, or social acceptability, or any such peripheral nonsense. I am, and have been throughout this discussion, talking about epistemology. Do I really need to scrupulously eschew such (in theory ambiguous but in practice straightforward) turns of phrase like “indisputably”, lest I be treated to a lecture on Bayesian epistemology?
If you really don’t like “indisputably”, substitute any of the following, according to preference:
plainly
manifestly
obviously
clearly
certainly
indubitably
incontrovertibly
with nigh-perfect certainty
… etc., etc.
And now, a substantive response:
First of all, how in the world could you possibly know that your experience isn’t translatable in principle? That you can’t describe it—that you of course can know. But what additional meaning can it even have, to say that you can’t describe it, and on top of that, it “isn’t translatable in principle”? What does that even mean?
As far as I can tell, Dennett isn’t sliding between anything. There’s just the one meaning: you can’t describe some experience you’re having.
Secondly, it’s not clear that this paragraph is a response to claims about having “‘direct’ epistemic access to certain facts”. (I’d have to reread Consciousness Explained to see the context, but as quoted it seems a bit of a non sequitur.)
I confess I don’t really have much idea what you’re saying here. What’s Dennett concealing, exactly…?
I wasn’t talking about group epistemology here at all, much less equating it with anything.
This clearly won’t do; how will you ever know that the verbal prompts (or etc.) are causing the other person to experience, much less to notice, the same “introspective data” in their brain as you experienced and noticed in yours? (How exactly do you even guarantee comparability? What does “same” even mean, across individuals? People vary, you know; and it seems fairly likely even from what we know now, that capacity to experience certain things is present to widely varying degrees in people…)
Why, there are entire reams of philosophy dedicated to precisely this very thorny challenge! (Google “spectrum inversion” sometime…) And in fact I once saw this principle play out in my own life. A musically inclined friend of mine was attempting to teach me the basics of music theory. When his initial explanations got nowhere, we opened someone’s laptop and loaded up a website where you could click buttons and play certain chords or combinations of tones. My friend clicked some buttons, played some chords, and asked me to describe what I heard, which I did… only to see my friend react with astonishment, because what I heard and what he heard turned out to be quite different. (As we later discovered, I have some interesting deficiencies/abnormalities in auditory processing, having to do, inter alia, with ability to perceive pitch.)
Now, how do you propose to cause me to experience “the same introspective data” that my friend experiences when he hears the tones and chords in question—or vice versa? What stimuli, exactly, shall you use—and how would you discover what they might be? What function, precisely, reliably maps arbitrary
(stimulus X, individual A)pairs to(stimulus Y, individual B)pairs, such that the “introspective data” that is experienced (and noticed) as a result is the “same” in both cases of a set? And having on hand a candidate such function, how exactly would you ever verify that it is really the desired thing?I find such fanciful analogies almost uniformly uninformative, and this one, I’m afraid, is no exception. Even if I were to stretch my brain to imagine this sort of scenario (which is not easy), and carefully consider its implications (which is quite challenging), and take the further step of drawing a conclusion about whether the given hypothetical would indeed work as you say (in which I would have quite low confidence), nevertheless it would still be entirely unclear whether, and how, the analogy mapped back to our actual world, and whether any of the reasoning and the conclusion still held. Best to avoid such things.
What if there is no “contradiction”, as such? Surely it’s possible for introspection to be deficient or entirely misleading even so? In any case, if introspection is corrigible by comparison with “other evidence sources” (by which you presumably mean, sense data, and experimental and various other observational information acquired via sense data, etc.), then you can hardly be said to have “‘direct’ epistemic access” to anything via said introspection…
Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind was written in 1996, so this is wrong. The wrongness doesn’t seem important to me. (Jackson and Nagel were 1979/1982, and Dennett re-endorsed this passage in 2003.)
I appreciated this post for explaining Berkeley’s beliefs really clearly to me. I never knew what he was going on about before.
I’d like to put forward a lukewarm defence of Kant as a friend of science.
Kant is on board with the idea that common sense observations like “refrigerators exist”, or a car has four wheels” are true… enough.. In context. He calls it “emprical realism”. He summarises his system as “empirical realism and transcendental idealism”. Not as “you can’t know anything”.
Empirical realism means perceptions are based on information entering the mind via the sense organs. Kant is in agreement with basic scientific realism on this point. He also emphasised the realist side of his philosophy by adding a “Refutation of Idealism” to the second version of the Critique of pure Reason.
Transendental idealism means all specific human perceptions are moulded by the general form of human perception and there is no way to backtrack to a raw form. We can concede that humans and bats perceive the world differently.. although Kant goes further than most.
The kind of knowledge he says you can’t have is knowledge of the thing in itself, which in modern terms would mean something like knowledge that is not relative to some conceptual framework or way of perceiving. Physicalism doesn’t refute that in the least, because it is explicitly based on using physical science as its framework.
Why does Kant include Transcendental Idealism and not go for 100% realism? Because he is trying to rescue science from some philosophical criticisms! Berkely and other idealists attacked the occult, invisible nature of Newtonian gravity and absolute space. It seemed an embarassment for empirical science to be based on invisible things. Additionally, Hume attacked the cause-effect relation as indiscernable from mere temporal succession
Transcendental Idealism is a stepping stone to the central point of Kants system, the argument that space and time and causality and substance are categories that the human mind uses to organise its sense data, not external realities. He described this radical view with a term borrowed from science: a Copernican Revolution.
Kant was impressed by Newton’s physics (and lectured on astronomy himself). He believed that nothing less than a necessary connection between cause and effect would do justice to Newton’s clockwork determinism. His contemporaries were happy to accept that logical implications were necessary, but Hume had argued that fire did not imply smoke.
To meet this difficulty, Kant restructures the traditional logical/empirical distinction into a fourfold grid of analytical/synthetic times apriori/a posteriori, and places causality in the “synthetic apriori” quadrant. By any account, something is necessary if it true in all possible cases. Kant tries to restore the necessity of causality by arguing that cause and affect (and the other categories of transcendental idealism) must hold on all possible cases of human perception.
So the idealistic aspects of Kants are there to support the science of his day against sceptical attacks, and are accompanied by realistic elements.
Whether his strange and ingenious scheme is still necessary is very open to debate. Neither physical determinism nor logical necessity are as important as they were; our notion of empiricism includes a strong element of abduction, or influence to the best explanation; we end to have multiple theories rather than different paradigms; and we have become comfortable with invisible entities.
Nonetheless, some of Kant’s ideas remain open question, for instance the ontological status of time.
Not only is Kant basing his philosophical views on the science of his day, but Kantian philosophical conclusions are being promoted as science, by scientists.
“The idea that our senses (or, indeed, those of any conscious agent) don’t disclose reality is the main idea of The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine, who argues that in addition to its ancient pedigree, this counterintuitive view of reality and perception is also supported by the latest science.”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AtGIIv371v0Yu35eNsIxJr67dw4SHOiGdKrqmoKt2hg/edit
I agree that Kant thought of himself as trying to save science from skepticism (e.g., Hume) and weird metaphysics (e.g., Berkeley), and I’m happy you’re trying to make it easier to pass Kant’s Ideological Turing Test.
I have two objections:
(1) Physicalism does contradict the claim “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form”, if this is taken to mean we should be agnostic about whether things are (really, truly, mind-independently) physical.
I assert that the “raw form” of an electron, insofar as physics is accurate, is just straightforwardly and correctly described by physics; and unless there’s a more fundamental physical account of electrons we have yet to discover, physics is plausibly (though I doubt we can ever prove this) a complete description of electrons. There may not be extra features that we’re missing.
(2) Modern anti-realist strains, similar to 19th-century idealism, tend to slide between these three claims:
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality.”
“(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
The first claim is true, but the second and third claims are false.
This sliding is probably the real thing we have Kant to thank for, and the thing that’s made anti-realist strains so slippery and hard to root out; Berkeley was lucid enough to unequivocally avoid the above leaps.
Quoting Allen Wood (pp. 63-64, 66-67):
In particular, here’s Wood on why Kant is sometimes saying ‘we can’t know about the world outside our heads’, not just ‘we can’t have knowledge without relying on some conceptual framework or way of perceiving’ (p. 64):
Whereas (p. 65):
I dont think the quoted passage supports your claim at all. If the object “in itself” is the object outside of any conceptual or perceptual framework, then K. Is just that all knowledge occurs within a framework, and knowledge outside a framework is impossible.
I could, however, see how Kant could be read as denying any knowledge of external objects, under circumstances where no particular meaning is assigned to “in itself”.
I mean “But we should consider that bodies are [...] a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our senses; that consequently neither of these is something outside us, but both are merely representations in us” seems pretty unambiguous to me. Kant isn’t saying here that ‘we can only know stuff about mind-independent objects by using language and concepts and frameworks’ in this passage; he’s saying ‘we can only know stuff about mere representations inside of us’.
Kant passages oscillate between making sense under one of these interpretations or the other (or neither):
the “causality interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are objects that cause appearances, like a mind-independent object causes an experience in someone’s head. If noumena are the “true correlates” of phenomena, while phenomena are nothing but subjective experiences, then this implies that we really don’t know anything about the world outside our heads. You can try to squirm out of this interpretation by asserting that words like “empirical” and “world” should be redefined to refer to subjective experiences in our heads, but this is just playing with definitions.
the “identity interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are the same objects as phenomena, just construed differently.
Quoting Wood (66-67, 69-70):
I think that is actually two related problems.
1a. A general problem of founding knowledge.. the Epistemic Circle or Munchausen Trilemma...which applies to everything, even maths.
1b. The specifically Kantian problem, which is limited to knowledge of the external world.
I think it is pretty unfair to blame the whole problem on Kant. He is a much less clear writer than Berkely, but then he is expressing much more complex ideas. Also, a lot of the sliding is surely cause by non-philosophers summarising complex ideas into one line slogans.
“Mind independent” and “physical” don’t mean quite the same thing, and there are multiple ways of cashing out “physical”.
What “raw” means is “absent any conceptual framework”. Making that substitution, your statement is a clear contradiction,along the lines of “We have a way of knowing what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework, and that way is to use the conceptual framework known as physics”.
But even given the correctness of the tautologous version of Kant, a version of physicalism can still be asserted as, for instance, “ideal physical science is the correct framework”.
Well, indeed. The question is: what follows from this truth being merely tautologous? One thing that follows is the falsehood of strong physicalism. (I believe that a solution to the hard problem of consciousness follows that in turn, but that is a topic for another day).
I claim that the most natural interpretation of “[Transcendental] idealism means all specific human perceptions are moulded by the general form of human perception and there is no way to backtrack to a raw form.” is that there’s no way to backtrack from our beliefs, impressions, and perceptions to ultimate reality. That is, I’m interpreting “backtrack” causally: the world causes our perceptions, and backtracking would mean reconstructing what the ultimate, outside-our-heads, existed-before-humanity reality is like before we perceive or categorize it. (Or perhaps backtracking causally to the initial, relatively unprocessed sense-data our brains receive.)
In those terms, we know a ton about ultimate, outside-our-heads reality (and a decent amount about how the brain processes new sensory inputs), and there’s no special obstacle to backtracking from our processed sense data to the raw, unprocessed real world. (Our reasoning faculties do need to be working OK, but that’s true for our ability to learn truths about math, about our own experiences, etc. as well. Good conclusions require a good concluder.)
If instead the intended interpretation of “backtrack to a raw form” is “describe something without describing it”, “think about something without thinking about it”, or “reason about something without reasoning about it”, then your original phrasing stops making sense to me.
Take the example of someone standing by a barn. They can see the front side of the barn, but they’ve never observed the back side. At noon, you ask them to describe their subjective experience of the barn, and they do so. Then you ask them to “backtrack to the raw form” beyond their experience. They proceed to start describing the full quantum state of the front of the barn as it was at noon (taking into account many-worlds: the currently-speaking observer has branched off from the original observer).
Then you go, “No, no, I meant describe something about the barn as it exists outside of your conceptual schemes.” And the person repeats their quantum description, which is a true description regardless of the conceptual scheme used; the quantum state is in the world, not in my brain or in my concepts.
Then you go, “No, I meant describe an aspect of the barn that transcends your experiences entirely; not a property of the barn that caused your experience, but a property unconnected to your experience.” And the person proceeds to conjecture that the barn has a back side, even though they haven’t seen it; and they start speculating about likely properties the back side may have.
Then you go, “No! I meant describe something about the barn without using your concepts in the description.” Or: “Describe something that bears no causal relation to your cognition whatsoever, like a causally inert quiddity that in no way interacts with any of the kinds of things you’ve ever experienced or computed.”
And the person might reply: Well, I can say that such a thing would be a causally inert quiddity, as you say; and then perhaps I can’t say much more than that, other than to drill down on what the relevant terms mean. Or, if the requirement is to describe a thing without describing it, then obviously I can’t do that; but that seems like an even more trivial observation.
Why would the request to “describe something without describing it” ever be phrased as “backtracking to a raw form”? There’s no “backtracking” involved, and we aren’t returning to an earlier “raw” or unprocessed thing, since we’re evidently not talking about an earlier (preconceptual) cognition that was subsequently processed into a proper experience; and since we’re evidently not talking about the physical objects outside our heads that are the cause and referent for our thoughts about them.
I claim that there’s an important equivocation at work in the idealist tradition between “backtracking” or finding a more “raw” or ultimate version of a thing, and “describe a thing without describing it”. I claim that these only sound similar because of the mistake in Berkeley’s master argument: confusing the ideas “an electron (i.e., an object) that exists outside of any conceptual framework” and “an ‘electron’ (i.e., a term or concept) that exists outside of any conceptual framework”. I claim that the very temptation to use ‘Ineffable-Thingie’-reifying phrasings like “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form” and “what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework”, is related to this mistake.
Phrasing it as “We can’t conceive of an electron without conceiving of it” makes it sound trivial, whereas the way of speaking that phrases things almost as though there were some object in the world (Kant’s ‘noumena’) that transcends our conceptual frameworks and outstrips our every attempt to describe it, makes it sound novel and important and substantive. (And makes it an appealing Inherently Mysterious Thing to worship.)
The reason I’m focusing on this is that I think some of the phrasings you chose in trying to summarize Kant (and translate or steelman his views) are sliding between the three different claims I described above:
E.g., you say
In treating all these claims as equivalent, you’re taking a claim that sounds at first glance like 2 (“you can’t have knowledge of the thing in itself”), and identifying it with claims that sound like either 1 or 3 (“you can’t have knowledge that is not relative to some conceptual framework or way of perceiving,” “you can’t have knowledge of the real world that exists outside our concepts”, “space/time/etc. are things our brains make up, not ultimately real things”).
I think dissecting these examples helps make it easier to see how a whole continent could get confused about Berkeleian master-argument-syle reasoning for 100-200 years, and get confused about distinctions like ‘a thought you aren’t thinking’ vs. ‘an object-of-thought you aren’t thinking about’.
With regard to Kant’s claims, there is no “sliding” because he asserts all 3 of those, and provides separate arguments for them. In particular, [3] is supported by the Antinomies, which purport to show that spatiality is not a property of objective reality. He is not deriving everything from a single argument, any other than Berkeley is.
I can’t see why equivocation is helpful. If you want to ascertain the existence of some kind of noumena, you need to distinguish the thing you can do—come up with a theory of the causes of your perceptions as external physical things—from the thing you can’t do—get outside the map entirely.
The significant-sounding claim does indeed follow from the trivial sounding one. That makes it a good argument. Good arguments should draw non-obvious conclusions from well-founded premises.
This sounds… strawmanny. “Reality and truth are not always the most useful concepts and it pays to think in other ways at times” would be a somewhat more charitable representation of non-realist ideas.
I think my characterization is accurate, but maybe guilty of weak-manning: I’m recounting a salient recent (long) conversation with laypeople, rather than attempting a representative survey of non-realists or trying to find the best proponents.
I had in mind a small social gathering I attended (without any conscious effort to seek out and find non-realists) where most of the people in the room voiced disagreement with my claim that truth is a coherent idea, that some entities aren’t social or psychological constructs, that some methods for learning things are more objective/reasonable/justified than others, and so on.
I tried to find common ground on the most basic claims I could think of, like “OK, but we can at least agree that something is real, right? There’s, like, stuff actually going on?” I wasn’t successful. And I think I’m pretty good at not straw-manning people on these issues; I’m used to drawing pretty fine distinctions between pretty out-there ontological and epistemological views. (E.g., I’m perfectly happy to try to tease apart the nuances of thinkers like Parmenides, Nagarjuna, Zhuangzi, Sextus, William James, Dharmakirti, Schopenhauer, Jonathan Schaffer, Graham Priest, Sartre, Berkeley. This stuff is interesting, even if I put no stock in it.)
To my ear, “it pays to think in terms other than reality/truth sometimes” sound too weak on its own to count as ‘anti-realism’. If I think it’s ever (cognitively?) useful to read fiction, or explore fake frameworks, or just take a nap and clear my head, that already seems to qualify. I’m happy to hear more about what you have in mind, though, regardless of what labels fit best.
To have a conversation where you can draw fine distinctions both parties of the discussion need to be willing to have that conversation. You might have approached the issue as a mistake theorist while they were more in the conflict theorist mindset and didn’t want to yield any possible ground.
I remember in a book about applied ontology by a author who saw himself as a realist while the statement that “homo sapiens is a species” was seen as a statement about reality while “Alice sake” in the sense of “He did X for Alice’s sake” is not something that really exists. ( I think it was in Applied Ontology: An Introduction by Katherine Munn and Barry Smith)
In contrast to that non-realist ontologists consider the idea of a species to be constructed and not one about reality. What’s real about the statement “homo sapiens is a species” is not something that’s directly made up of atoms and physics but the realist position by applied ontologists like Barry Smith is still that it’s real.
It’s something people say, but don’t necessarily fully believe
Yes, anti realists still need to do the things that words like “good” and “true” do - - praise and condemn, and do on. But they are unwilling to use them, which leads to a euphemism treadmill, where “false” is substituted with “problematic”, “evil” with “toxic”.
1. 19th century German version:
2. 21st century evolutionary theory version:
Today, I think “evolutionary debunking arguments” against realism is fashionable for anti-realists. If Daniel Dennet is right about Darwin, (“If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.”) then Darwin is really important figure in the history of anti-realism.
Hoffman’s book has been reviewed as part of Scott’s review competition. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AtGIIv371v0Yu35eNsIxJr67dw4SHOiGdKrqmoKt2hg/edit