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I remember seeing The Matrix when I was eleven or so and being blown away by the idea that this
could all be an illusion. That possibility
seems laughable and easily discarded in the light of our own personal experiences,
science, common sense and all sorts of other seemingly concrete facets of life.
While I still think the possibility that
we are all trapped in some computer program is laughable, the nature of reality
itself to me is on much more shaky grounds.
When I was
sixteen I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. This first person narrative written in present tense has a nonlinear timetable,
jumping from flashback to future back to the scene at hand within the space of a
few pages. This style leads the reader, first by the hand, and then by the
scruff of the neck down the rabbit hole of personal insanity. For those who don’t
know the story, the psychological twist is hiding in plain sight but invisible
for so long. I remember thinking that possessed insanity would be very hard to
recognize.
A few years later I read Philip K
Dick’s VALIS and then again my view
on the nature of thought was flipped around. The story essentially follows
Horselover Fat who is a schizophrenic version of Philip K Dick himself, as he
tries to rationalize his own situation in the universe.
“Let it
be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels
perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot
think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, [one]
... slipped by degrees into madness.” - Philip K Dick’s VALIS
What
have these types of stories taught us? Well nothing really. There isn't any reliable
way to verify how the nature of reality is
to specific people. That’s the point though. There are several preexisting premises
in which much of humanities collective knowledge rest, that really are quite
unstable.
Now indulge
me as I delve into a little philosophy. Going back all the way to Aristotle,
western philosophy has moved in such a way to try and understand the world in
an objective sense. That is to say “Yes” to the question “If a tree fell in the
woods would it make a sound?” Today most
people would say: “Of course it does!” the physics behind the crash are the
same, so there would likely be a large crash.
Now when
a whistle blows at 40,000 Hz. and the dog starts squealing does the whistle
make a sound? The dog certainly thinks so. But us lame humans wouldn't hear
jack shit. I know, I know. You’re just rolling your eyes and saying “But that’s
just semantics!” Well fuck sometimes semantics are important. If you quantify
sound as the perceptual experience than all those mechanical wavelengths traveling
through matter that we can’t hear aren't sound. Now what about people that can
hear more sounds than others? Wait this is getting stupid. Right?
But
just stay with me for a bit longer. Thomas Nagel (every materialist in the room
groans) is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University who wrote an essay
called “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” The essay itself talks a lot about Qualia:
the “what its like-ness.” On the level of biology and physics we can very accurately
understand how a bats echolocation works, even down to very minute details. However,
there is still a type of knowledge that is completely out of our grasp in the
equation, that of Qualia. We have absolutely no idea, not even an inkling of
how it would Feel, or what it would
be Like.
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Alright,
so maybe we can’t KNOW what a bat feels Like.
So the fuck what?
What if
I told you that when I look at a box of dildos and you look at a box of dildos
we are likely not experiencing the exact same perception (besides maybe the
smell…). Well it’s true; so far we have been very unsuccessful with matching Surface
Spectral Reflectance’s (SSRs) with accurate color matching. This phenomenon,
called metamerism, has baffled many reductionist color scientists.
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I am not trying to make the argument that when
I see red, you see blue (that argument has met with little success). The point
is that our perceptions are NOT in fact very accurate and NOT homogeneous And
that it seems very unlikely that, just like the Bat, I will ever know what it
is Like, to see through your eyes.
Now
where has all this rambling been going? Well, right back to the good grey mushy
sack of ideas sloshing around in your skull. If the sound wave isn't the same
thing as feeling of sound and the SSR isn't the same thing as the perception of
color, what about the neurochemical synapse and the thought? An old French guy
named Descartes said they most certainly weren't the same stuff, that Mind and
Matter were completely different shit and that our thoughts were in some immaterial,
untouchable, float-y spot above your heads or some crap (I’m paraphrasing a
little). But there’s no real evidence, and the apparent connection with the
brain and mind seem a little too convincing. This is referred to as the
mind-body problem, and there are a lot of angry philosophers yelling at each
other about it somewhere right now.
Two
schools of thought dominate the approach to this problem: materialism and
dualism. Dualism maintains that mind is distinct from the physical world
essentially that “no mental state is a material state, no mental state is
entirely constituted by material states, no mental state has only material
states as parts.” (Carroll and Markosian) Materialism, in contrast, affirms
that there are only material states and that when one refers to a mental state
they are just referring to a material state.
Materialism
has been very unsuccessful in dealing with our subjective experience; it can’t
deal with what its likeness. It seems
very difficult to say that all my hopes, dreams, free will, experiences and
memories are just neurochemical activities which exist only in the casually
closed physical domain. To do so strengthens the claims to determinism (free
will is an illusion) and nihilism (everything is meaningless).
On the other hand dualism has the
trouble of butting against our empiricism by relying on completely untestable
claims. Just so you know those who try to make reasonable logical arguments against
empiricism have a very poor track record.
Without boring you more than I already have the problem, as
I see it, boils down to this.
Our scientific society tries to boil everything down to an
objective level. However everything we do is filtered through a flawed
subjective lens (i.e. our experience).
There is an inherent contradiction in this. I am not saying “WHOA IS ME!
SCIENCE HAS FAILED!!!!” No in fact this type of problem should make the hard sciences
strive all the harder.
The general trend has been to ignore these types of problems
and when someone like Steven Hawking declares that “Philosophy is dead,” I have
to scratch my head.
Just some word vomit.
Readings:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/teaching/niseminar4/Nagel_WhatIsItLikeToBeABat.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Metaphysics-Cambridge-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/0521533686
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Meditations-Philosophy-Selections-Objections/dp/0521558182/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104709&sr=1-3&keywords=Descartes
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Ontology-Science-Life-Mind/dp/0262513757/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104816&sr=1-1&keywords=color+ontology+and+color+science
http://www.amazon.com/VALIS-Philip-K-Dick/dp/0547572417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104851&sr=1-1&keywords=VALIS
http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Club-Novel-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0393327345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104872&sr=1-1&keywords=Fight+club
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