Ambiguity and the "big" problems in philosophy

General Philosophy
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While I think there are legitimate problems that philosophy aims to deal with, I contend that a not small subset of what we might think of as the “big” problems in philosophy aren’t real problems, but rather examples of ambiguity masquerading as mystery. A few prime examples are “what is it like to be a bat?”, “why is there something rather than nothing?”, and the “hard” problem of consciousness. I’d also suggest that to those that ask these questions earnestly, there is no answer that would satisfy, making them not really honest questions, but rather rhetorical ones. If you examine what each of these questions (and others) are rhetorically pointing toward… it’s ambiguity.

I think there are those that would suggest that this ambiguity is an arrow pointing toward some mystery in the world. While not impossible, we know a lot about language, and we know that ambiguity is common and often confuses and confounds us. If an apparent mystery can be equally well described as insoluble for decades or centuries, or just a trick of language, we know how common tricks of language are. I get how viscerally we feel like these are real problems, but I have yet to see that we can demonstrate that they actually are.

Let me tackle “what is it like to be a bat?”. Literally, the question is asking about simile. It is asking “what is similar or comparable to being a bat?”, however, in philosophy, we are trying to ask something more like a combination of “what does it feel like to be a bat?” and “what is it to be a bat?”. When posed as the original question, these feel like the same thing, but they are clearly different. “What does it feel like to be a bat?” is an exercise in imagination, and another request for simile. We might answer it like this:

To be a bat would be like swimming in the ocean. Where you cannot really hear much underwater and have to rely on your other senses, just so with the bat and sight. it would also be like being surrounded by elephants. As a bat, you would be much smaller than many creatures around you…

You can take issue with how well I described what it might feel like to be a bat, but certainly you can see that I am actually answering the question as asked. The distinct question, what is it to be a bat is also perfectly answerable. To be a bat is to be a winged mammal of the order Chiroptera.

I think that the reason this problem feels so much like a real problem and not an example of ambiguity is because cognitively, we lean so heavily on language to model the world, that sometimes we can temporarily forget that the word isn’t the thing it describes.

I’ve never deeply studied Wittgenstein, but it seems to me that this is what he was saying. I think these problems are examples of our intelligence being bewitched by our language.

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What you claim to know, and what your brain knows are likely much different.

Your brain, knows a lot more than you claim you know here, typing, with use of the hands.

The brain, if possible to communicate using it directly, would probably amaze with it’s expressions.

We cannot communicate so easily using our native language, there are a lot of limitations. Of course it’s possible to explain in typed words, what you claim to know(as said, you’re probably far off, your brain knows more), but it’s likely that your typed-up intelligence is far off your brains.

We are thrown off by words, especially if we don’t believe we are equipped with a pro-agile brain.

Some questions have ineffable answers, yet the brain understands the answer.

I would say it’s less ambiguous and more analogous. Our brains have different, more clear answers than our hands are able to type from the get go.

I think the hard problem of consciousness, can be, and is probably solved by our brains.

Language is automatically puzzling. Fitting together a neat reply, isn’t the way brain figures things out and answers.

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The “what is it like” is the quality, as opposed to the quantity. Chalmers coined qualia to be like quanta, or the qualitative as opposed to the quantitative. They are related also to the analog, and the digital. In that the analog is continuous, indistinct, indiscrete flowing from one thing to the next without clear boundaries. The digital is discrete, countable and separated by clearly defined boundaries. Russell said “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” Wittgenstein did think that ambiguity was the problem in the Tractatus, but had abandoned that by the Investigations, accepting that ambiguity is necessary, and cannot be done away with.

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Okay, lets tease this out a bit. I was talking about the question “what’s it like to be a bat”, and you responded with an explanation of the philosophical term “qualia”. While I totally get why you did that, and why you think it sheds light on the question, I’d suggest that it actually adds further ambiguity. Saying the “what it’s like” is the quality isn’t helpful. “What’s the quality of being a bat?” What is the question even asking? What is it trying to determine? I think that depending on the context, it’s either trying to determine what it would feel like to be a bat, or to rhetorically point to the fact that our descriptions of what it would feel like to be a bat are (unsurprisingly) not identical to actually being a bat.

As far as “doing away with ambiguity”, I think that giving up on that project is sensible. It’s a flat linguistic fact that natural language can’t occur without ambiguity. My suggestion isn’t that we try to rid the world, or even philosophy, of ambiguity. It’s that we don’t confuse ambiguity with real mysteries.

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It is often taken to be the difference between third person sharable information, and first person experience of being there, and doing that. This is illustrated by the Mary the super scientist thought experiment. Where Mary is given all possible, exhaustive, measurable descriptions and information about the color red. Then you are asked if upon seeing the color red herself, first person, for the first time, if she learns something new? Is there something about first person experience, of what red is like, that is not sharable by any possible third person description whatsoever? Data on Star Trek also uses this in measure of a man, to refuse to let star fleet copy his memories, and make another Data from them. He says that only the information would be copied, but the actual quality of having literally been there for the experiences that formed those memories they would be copying could not be delivered to the copy. They are his alone, and as such, the copy would be lacking something important.

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Yes, good.

But none of these would be on my list.

Generally, when ambiguity threatens to create a false problem, it’s because two people are taking a term in two different senses without realizing it. Is that really what’s going on here?

It seems that your objection to the “what is it like . . .” formulation is not that it’s ambiguous, but that when it’s used in the potentially interesting sense of “what is it to experience . . .” the question is incoherent, or at least insufficiently specified. That may be true (though I don’t think it is) but that’s not due to ambiguity – two people talking past each other.

“Something rather than nothing” is merely unanswerable, no? Do you have any trouble understanding it, or the terms? I don’t.

I’m not sure how the hard problem, as Chalmers states it, would bring up questions of ambiguity, but maybe I’m not seeing what you are. Do you think that the question gets different answers depending on what we mean by “consciousness”? I would have said that there aren’t any good candidate answers (sorry, Dan Dennett!) but again this isn’t due to ambiguity, but to our current lack of knowledge.

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Again, this is more ambiguity, not less. So let me take two things separately:

First person/subjectivity vs third person/objectivity. We can all agree that we can speak about things from the first person, subjective point of view, or the third person objective point of view. These are linguistic choices, not differing representations of the world. “There is a cloud”, and “I am aware there is a cloud” aren’t representing a different thing, they are speaking about the same thing in a different way. Often, we choose the different framings to either highlight our confidence in the statement, using “objective” framings to communicate strong confidence and “subjective” framings to communicate the possibility of fallibility. Other times, we use “subjective” statements to denote that the important part of the sentence isn’t the object (the cloud), but rather the way we relate to it. These are not metaphysical differences, they are narrative differences.

Mary’s Room

This is another easily dealt with exercise in ambiguity that leans into the ambiguous meaning of the words like “know” and “learn”. On the one hand, we say Mary “knows” everything about color there is to know (she has accumulated all of the possibly relevant descriptions and explanations of color). Yet when she first experiences it, does she learn anything? Does she have more data? Yes. Does she have a more complete description or explanation of color? No. The answer to “does she learn anything?” hinges entirely on what we mean by “learn”. There’s no real mystery here, just ambiguity.

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I think that the bigger issue is rationalism vs empiricism. Or the crisp distinct invariable can be present in the logical abstract form, that never is or can be in the literal thing. What a “cat” is, is only crisp or distinct insofar as it is standardized, or defined so. So that we come up with a clear definition of what we mean by it. But this clear definition will be general, and not actually apply well, let alone account for all or most cats. Cats are a species that evolved from non-cats, and will go extinct or continue to evolve into a non-cat, and all differ from one and other. Platonic, or rationalist views are that logic or definitions underscores, or structures the world, and that variability or ambiguity is illusory, or a kind of error. Like there are good cats, and bad cats. Fitting the perfect form more closely is the better cat, and less closely is the worse cat. The idea that all we have to do is be clear about what a cat is, and there can be no ambiguity is to say that we get to stop looking at cats, because it will just be another one of the thing we have crisply defined, or it won’t be. That there is always ambiguity, and that cats are never the same with one and other, or reducible to a clear and distinct definition says that they will only ever be, and only ever can be analogous to one and other. So every single cat has differences, has details, variability. It is never sufficient to just say “another one” as if, if you have seen one you’ve seen them all. This problem, or the ambiguity in the abstract notion of cat, or our different ideas about it cannot account for this at all. The ambiguity is basic to the fact that they don’t share a literal essential nature, but are only ever analogous to one and other, and through a standardization, or quintessential, or exemplar cat. The perfect cat form, what a cat ought be like, and not even any, like statistical average or anything. The crispness of the definition is more of a conventional cultural artifact than a real literal thing.

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I think the problem is that we confuse “what would it feel like to be a bat” and “what is it to be a bat”, and feel uneasy by the fact that no description of what it feels like to be a bat is identical with being a bat. We desire, and even I think imagine, that there is such a thing as a perfect description, and then lament that we can’t perform that description, so we name that indescribable description a “quale” as if that’s really something.

What does “nothing” denote in this question? At the risk of sounding glib, it literally denotes nothing. In common contexts, “nothing” denotes the lack of something that we could imagine or expect… so it denotes something about our imagination or expectation. The ambiguity is that the word functions like an object in the world, so we can formulate the form of a question, and feel like we’re actually asking a question, but the contents of the question are semantically empty. The question isn’t a real question, and no possible answer would be satisfactory (the sign that a question isn’t real).

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The representation isn’t the thing. We need the representation, but when we forget that the representation isn’t the thing, or expect that we can create a representation or description that perfectly, inerrantly captures everything about the thing represented, then we land in a philosophical “problem”. But it’s not a real problem. I can tell my cat from my neighbor’s dog without a perfect platonic conception of “catness” and “dogness”.

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As I put, the brain probably can represent truly what it’s like to be a bat.

It can probably run simulations.

Thus, the problem is more analogous.

It comes back and tells you, ‘well it takes a lot of pleasure here’, ‘it feels small’, ‘it’s consciousness is different’.

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If the ambiguity existed in our definitions, or understandings of what we each meant, then we could clear that up and there would no longer be any mystery, is what I thought you were saying. I was saying that that does not take away the need to know each and every individual thing subsumed under the category, which retains plenty of mystery that no amount of clarity can overcome.

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No offense, but I am uninterested in the way you speak about philosophy, so I won’t respond further.

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We need to know that? Why?

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Because the empirical, unlike the rational is inherently analog, continuous, indistinct, indiscrete. Multiple, rather than uniformly captured by a definition or description. Simon De Beauvoir has a book, the ethics of ambiguity, that is derived from the examination of existentialism, or the idea that subjective lived experience is primary, and not logical abstractions, or rationalism. First person living and being, rather than clear and distinct rules.

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Okay, but that doesn’t really answer my question. Do we need to know “each and every individual thing subsumed under the category”? Can’t we just have functional definitions and taxonomies that are useful in exploring the world?

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I don’t understand what you mean? Language and abstraction are definitely useful, and I think that communication is quite good, and generally quite possible. The issue is that clarity and consensus or agreement cannot overcome ambiguity, or mystery.

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I think that phrasing is suspect. It implies that clarity and consensus or agreement can’t ever overcome ambiguity nor can it ever overcome mystery. I think the case is rather that clarity can’t always overcome all possible ambiguity but most often it can overcome ambiguity to a functional degree. I think conflating ambiguity and mystery is problematic. There are real mysteries in the world. “Is a hotdog a sandwich” isn’t one of them, it’s just an example of ambiguity.

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Whether a hot dog is a sandwich is just a convention though, and can be based in rules, but the reason that there is ssuch question is because of the similarity between hot dogs and sandwiches, and the inherent vagueness at the boundaries of categories where things become sort of kinda maybe not really, or I can see it. The issue is that “a hot dog” is an abstract notion. Literal hotdogs are not. I think that there is a real issue with essentialism. It tends one to think that they know a thing before hand, or that things are reducible to the category, and nothing new is seen or learned upon every single literal encounter with a real one. There is an interesting thing with the categorical. The vagueness also serves in the category to expand its scope. The more vague, the less detailed, the more general or applicable it is. A basic stick man can be understood to be every human, but the more details you add the more it narrows it down, and less people get subsumed under the category, until you reach so much detail that it becomes individual, or uniquely singled out. The vagueness necessary to make “sandwich” apply to more than one literal food item opens the category enough that whether a hotdog counts becomes a question.

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Yes, I agree with all of this. There is a big difference between determining if a hot dog is a sandwich or not, and determining if a hot dog is carcinogenic. I would never describe the first question as being an exploration of a mystery, but I would describe exploring the second question to be so (to the degree that it is still unknown… so probably not the best example). I see a whole bunch of philosophy being engaged in the first kind of question.

When philosophy is at it’s best, it reveals ambiguity. When it’s at it’s worst it revels in it.