Re: Ch. 12: Reflections on the Cosmic Perspective
Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2018 6:11 pm
It is a tough problem in philosophy that the analytic tradition by and large has accepted the subordination of thought to science, rejecting Kant’s approach of seeing time, space and causality as necessary conditions of experience. I would say that even if details of Kant’s Newtonian cosmology have been refuted by Einstein, that refutation does not do the work that the Vienna School of logical positivism claims for it. When the positivist philosopher Carnap said “the only philosophical questions which have any meaning are those of the logic of science”, he meant that the logical method of Kantian idealism, deducing necessary conditions of experience, is invalid. I see it as important to deconstruct the social and political work being done by Carnap’s assertion, to see how even science has its mythological dimension. The way Carnap’s existentialist bete noir Heidegger put this in An Introduction to Metaphysics was that the key metaphysical ideas are nature, truth and reason.Harry Marks wrote:Kant's mode of processing, with "a priori" modes of understanding such matters as time, seems to me not to have held up very well.
Sure, and you could also reference Kahnemann’s multiple examples of how our intuition deceives us. But I think those are problems of psychology, not philosophical logic, strictly speaking. Our nervous system assumes the world exists as it appears, and by and large that is a perfectly legitimate idea. Discoveries like quantum indeterminacy and entanglement do help illustrate that the absolute Newton/Kant view of rationality needs more humility, but what those discoveries say for ordinary perception and meaning is far from simple.Harry Marks wrote: Scientific investigation has uncovered matters that our nervous system treats as given which are not, in fact, true, such as time being absolute and causality being strictly sequential.
Your phrase ‘modern sophistication’ might take a prize for the most ambiguous idea possible. Sophistication ranges from science to philosophy to culture, and each of these have very different attitudes to meaning and mattering. Much as philosophers claim to have a more sophisticated outlook than the positive idea that the meaning of a statement is its factual content, that positive idea remains a pervasive rational assumption.Harry Marks wrote: However, it is not clear to me why modern sophistication should have any strong implications for "meaning" which I take to be tied inextricably to "mattering", i.e. to values.
Fairness is a great example of an idea that seems to be a necessary condition of experience, which is a phrase that I find a more accessible way of saying that it has a priori meaning. But the immediate problem raised by the logic of necessity is we then need to say what justice and equality actually are, and as Plato showed in The Republic, our assumptions on such basic ideas can have wild conflict. Fairness can mean getting what you deserve, but the most vivid problem with that emerges from the claim from Jesus Christ known as the Matthew Principle that fairness means the talented will get more than the untalented.Harry Marks wrote: In fact I don't see any way of escaping from a sort of Kantian "a priori" meaning of fairness. Our nervous systems are wired to detect unfair behavior, when it happens to us. Thus we experience a kind of dislocation from being the center of everything when we recognize unfair behavior happening to others, or even unfair behavior we have ourselves inflicted.
This observation opens a typical set of dilemmas within the philosophy of science. Relativism, the idea that contradictory statements can be equally true, entails the view that truth is a function of perception. Plato’s dialogue Protagoras is the classic analysis of the relativist idea that man is the measure of all things. Its logical invalidity makes relativism formally absurd, and yet relativism has practical utility where we are unsure which of conflicting opinions is correct and where we support political tolerance of right to believe false claims. Where this gets interesting for the philosophy of science is that relativism assumes truth is a construction, whereas people often think of truth as a description. The constructivist ideology that sees culture as autonomous from nature is often lampooned as hopelessly postmodern, as it sometimes indeed is, and yet this nest of problems shows that the automatic common sense type of epistemology implied by Tyson should be more a starting point for discussion than a final statement.Harry Marks wrote: Even though I frequently oppose the "relativist" approach to right and wrong, I don't see how the world of values could be said to be independent of sentient perception and sentient thought about that perception.
The problem here is that a so-called “a priori sense of fairness” can so easily just be a cover for political assumptions and ideologies. When a person says that their views on fairness are necessarily true by definition, which is what a priori means, they are claiming access to a higher logic that invalidates anyone who has a different opinion about what is fair, just and equal. For example there is massive political conflict between the ideologies of equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.Harry Marks wrote: With our a priori sense of fairness we make deductions about what that "means" and this is the basis of knowing right from wrong.
Here again we find one of the biggest assumptions challenged by Locke and Hume at the foundation of modern enlightenment, that any idea can be innate. The capitalist imperial mentality of British empiricism sought on the surface to demand robust polite logical challenge to innate ideas, while concealing its own racist assumptions about innate ability and importance. When I say my opinion is innate, that can just be a way to assert it is better than a conflicting idea, as a gambit in moral politics. What I liked about the philosopher Edmund Husserl was his argument that all presuppositions should be rigorously analysed.Harry Marks wrote: Other values work similarly: we have innate perceptions of importance, modified by logic and linkages with perceived causality (much of this structure coming from others around us).
I find it immensely valuable to support the positivist idea that facts have intrinsic meaning. By setting logic and evidence as the highest moral values, the scientific philosophy of logical positivism establishes a robust transparency that subjects all claims to rigorous analysis in the spirit of Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation. Naturally, that starting point rapidly encounters what you call ‘boundary situations’, but rather than looking for these in fields of scientific uncertainty like quantum mechanics and astrophysics, I prefer to see the boundaries of the scientific worldview arising in problems like the role of intuition in psychology, the role of faith in politics and culture, and the extent to which our concepts of truth are descriptive or constructed.Harry Marks wrote: So I am left unsure what either science or logical positivism gives us in the way of meaning. Maybe it plays a role a bit like relativity or quantum mechanics, helping us to sort out boundary situations foreign to experience (of ourselves and our compatriots), but having little to say about meaning in ordinary life.
This basic experience of the problem of objectivity illustrates a schism in meaning between facts and values, between objective and subjective, and between truth as description or construction. What you call ‘a visceral sense’ involves the unreflective emotional reaction to perceived wrongs. We all know that the due process of legal challenge can produce results through the justice system that are quite different from our visceral beliefs.Harry Marks wrote:
On the other hand, the experience of dislocation of meaning from self is central to a more abstract, less visceral sense of fairness and right.
Apologies that I can’t cope with replying to more than one sentence at a time. Each point here raises fundamental questions. Our sense of beauty usually relies on principles such as symmetry, and yet principles such as the stoic sense of connection to all humanity can generate perception of beauty in ugliness. The beauty within paradox such as that the last will be first are an example of a rational inversion of direct emotion.Harry Marks wrote: Similarly, we generally value a broad sense of values, including in esthetics, based on principles rather than on direct emotional reaction.
It is not just reason that shifts our values away from our gut. We also have cultural precedents that function as myth, whose basis may not be in reason but which do produce moral consensus.Harry Marks wrote: The distance created by reason helps to give a values system based in philosophically sound meaning structures, rather than self-centered gut feelings.
Absolutely yes. We test our gut reaction against reflection and evidence, scientific principles that often do produce a rational correction of immediate assumptions.Harry Marks wrote: Science doesn't automatically give that, but I have a sense that it contributes significantly to such distance.
The relation between mystery and logic is among the deepest problems of philosophy. Our reason tends to restrict truth to matters we can understand, but our sense of mystery creates awe for the vast unknown, and humility before the feeble powers of our rational description. Richard Dawkins expressed this well in The Magic of Reality by saying science creates a sense of wonder and reverence for the awesome beauty and coherence of the rational causal processes of nature. This sense of wonder has a touch of the mystical, and yet scientists are quick to contain that sense by demanding we not speculate about topics where evidence is weak. The old mystical idea that all is one is far from a paradox, but is rather a statement that the whole universe obeys the same orderly laws.Harry Marks wrote:
In the extreme case removal of self as even a reference point for values seems, almost paradoxically, to come not from reason but from direct mystical experience.
Self returns as a reference point for values in the Gospel injunction to love God and neighbour as self, indicating that a person who lacks self-respect cannot achieve a proper sense of respect for others.
I think the mystical critique of ethics has turned on the observation that practical systems of rules are often resistant to discussion. People’s opinions about good and bad are of course often arbitrary and artificial and dogmatic, making any imagined mystical grounding of ethics in a perception of ultimate truth very difficult to make persuasive. Only a sense of self-identity makes action possible, since oceanic mystical feeling of unity gives no basis for will or direction. Yet there is room here to open a dialectic between the soul and the ocean, our immediate assumptions and the deep needs of time.Harry Marks wrote: Mystics often take the distinction between "good" and "bad" to be artificial (though I prefer the taoist formulation that the shadow is intermingled with the bright, eye-catching aspects of life) as well as distinctions like "us" and "them" and even subject and object. But this is based on highly subjective experiences of "the unity of everything", which are similar in emotional impact to the crashing of ego boundaries when someone falls in love.
Capital punishment is a great example of a moral value where our intuition can clash with our reason. I like to argue that such problems should be analysed in terms of consequences, but we face the incommensurable problem that the deep coarsening of a societies’ respect for human rights cannot be weighed in any objective way against the signals sent by a message of tremble and obey, or against the opportunity costs of imprisonment. Evidence informs such decisions, but at the end of the day policy outcomes emerge from principles whose real nature functions as social myth. Any effort to present the policy-evidence link as simple is an exercise in politics, not philosophy.Harry Marks wrote: Both orientations, the experience of total unity and the intervention of reason, can lead to values that are subtly counter-intuitive. We may even overturn basic, socially prevalent understandings, for example with a rejection of capital punishment based on either reason or a dramatic identification with the criminal. I'm willing to grant that science and its impersonal approach has a healthy role to play in creating a richer understanding of the connections between cause and effect that inform our sense of meaning. I just don't accept NDT's inference that the link is automatic.
I am writing a paper at the moment on the physics of zodiac ages. This question supports a cosmology at human scale, whereas modern astrophysics has an almost moral insistence that cosmology can only be discussed at the level of galaxies and the Big Bang which have no possible connection to human scale.Harry Marks wrote: Agreed that scale is a barrier to proper mythical connections.
The greatest thinker in the ‘as above so below’ topic was probably Sir Isaac Newton with his proof that the same law of gravity applies on earth as in the heavens. Unfortunately, Newtonian mechanics became the basis for a mechanistic enlightenment that derided the old moral sense of the unity of all things. Your example from Tyson is confusing, since it seems he is saying the ‘above’ of cosmic scale is completely different from the ‘below’ of human life.Harry Marks wrote: I think Tyson (like Dawkins) does a little "as above so below" himself, suggesting for example that insignificance in the factual account of the astrophysical universe corresponds to appropriate humility by individuals in the social structure. (Dawkins' myth-making is even more complex).
Scholasticism as a cultural movement gives priority to learning from books, where scientism gives priority to learning from nature. Both contribute to our sense of meaning, but with the risk of leading to static opinions. Any partial theories can only be improved through the challenge and contestability of conversation.Harry Marks wrote: In the end, both scientism and scholasticism fail to make connections that hold up to careful examination. They may resonate, especially with people who are concerned with the same questions as the writer, but they don't do a good job of approximating the true structure in our sense of meaning.