Exactly. And we should be reasonable, including being able to recognize when a formalism is not appropriate.
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First off, sorry for the late reply. I can’t reply from home, since my machine runs Win7 which is incompatible with the forum software.
I’m juxtaposing these three excerpts from your post, because I feel - taken together - they might give an opportunity to outline where I think we differ. It’s complex. We don’t seem to disagree on facts; but I think we order them radically differently.
First, I’m not suggesting reasonging is arbitrary; I’m suggesting that reasoning is tied up in the reasoner’s world view. And it’s often hard to tell if reasoning serves to solve a problem or rationalise a pre-conceived idea.
So are we sharing our world-views, then? We are trying to, but the reasoning that works well in your world-view may work less well within my world-view (and vice-versa). Methodologically, I need to find out stuff I don’t know I’m taking for granted and question them. Then I need to keep a spot of indeterminacy open for a “foreign concept”. But if I take too many concepts back in this way, I have nothing left to understand you with. It’s this dynamic that makes understanding foreign world-views completely impossible.
And this leads me to my final line about “knowing what it’s like to be ourselves” – which I dearly wish I hadn’t written, but here it is. Our world-views are the basis of all our reasoning and language, but our accounts of our world-view include many blindspots: things we don’t know we take for granted. My phrasing here was definitely off (and I should have known better since you’ve questioned the role of knowledge before in this thread).
As I said earlier, I’ve been wondering things like “what is it like to be a bat” since early childhood. And I’ve been aware of the impossibility of “knowing” this for almost as long. It’s been a source of discontent for a long time (I made peace with it maybe late teen-age? I must admit I no longer remember.) This is very central to my world view, and I can’t easily extract this, as suspending this would necessitate too much re-construction. I might chronically be unable to understand your world-view.
Here’s the thing: if we divide the world in woo-peddlers and what’s-the-big-dealers then I’m a woo-pedler on this topic. Usually, I’m a pretty radical what’s-the-big-dealer, though. I don’t get God, life after death, free will, justice, love… these sort of things are kind of beyond me (justice and love slightly less so than free will or life after death). A lot of the big questions aren’t that big for me, and often don’t even make much sense. But here? I’m intuitively totally on board: it’s one of these things that rooted deeply in who I am and if you ask me to question this I don’t even know what it is I can’t do.
This leads me to language. For me, trying to explain myself in words is a process of alienation: I put thoughts into words and they’re no longer clearly mine: they stare right back at me from the screen. I’ve come to realise this is not how many people experience language. The connection between language and thought is something that I find fascinating for this reason. I delete more posts than I post, for example. I often wish I hadn’t posted something. People often ask me (in real life, in practical contexts) to say clearly what I want, but I don’t know.
So then what is it what I’m trying to do when I post here? Any reasoning needs to connect, somehow, to the world or it’s just and idle mind spinning its wheels. When we’re busy stabilising our world-views with rationalisations, we’re not questioning them, and we remain functional. But that’s the thing: if we function well without wondering what it’s like to be a bat, we can squeeze that out of our worldview, and if we then are confronted with people who do wonder, sometimes very vigorously, we’re tasked with making sense of that. So we can either explain them away (rationalisation) or trying to understand what it is they’re thinking.
It may sound to you here, like I’m talking about, and how you’re trying to explain my interest away as falling for some ambiguities (and it might be true, who knows). But I’m actually on the other side of the fence more often than not, and as I age, I notice myself getting more tired, more cranky, less inclined to question myself. The temptation to abstract the what’s-the-big-deal about my what’s-the-big-deal topics outside of my worldview is getting stronger and stronger. Decades of failing to understand “free will” et al. has left me exhausted and pessimistic. But calling those topics nonsense doesn’t come with a great deal of confidence and with a feeling that I’m indulging myself. Still, these “big questions” are nonsense within the confines of my worldview.
In a thread about any of those topics I might explain myself as well as I can (go through my posting-history, and you’ll find many posts end with some line questioning if I made sense), but it’ll usually amount to the same song and dance. It’s actually weird to be on the other side on this particular topic. Because I kind of see myself on the other side here, and because I’ve never really gotten to understand those topics, I’m kind of hindered trying to explain myself by a sense of futility. The alienation effect of language I experience doesn’t help. The result is posts I don’t like very much, and if this had been a thread about what it’s like to be a bat, I’d have bowed out by now.
If I don’t get a “big question” I don’t get it. Telling others why they think nonsense makes sense feels premature, precisely because I don’t get it. So I follow your posts, agree with a lot, and somehow still end up somewhere entirely different. And I don’t know why, so I can’t explain myself.
The first leaves open the possibility that I encounter people who don’t feel like that, and that living with them might lead to interesting insights. The latter would make this an encounter with idiots who can’t see the obvious.
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I don’t want to address everything you’ve said here. Believe it or not, I actually agree with a bunch of it. Here’s, I think, where we differ in practice:
I am okay with speaking in terms of things being functionally the case, even if they aren’t necessarily, indubitably or absolutely the case. I think depriving oneself of this option means you can’t engage with some really important and impactful subjects in any way that really matters.
It seems that functionally we can share enough experiences to not just engage in simple acts of cooperation, but to create cultures and bodies of knowledge. That’s not trivial. Of course it is the places where are diverge that get all of the attention, but if we just look at the astonishing degree to which almost everyone is able to share a view of the world, it’s really staggering.
Interestingly, I’ve created another thread (yet to be approved) about doubt and humility that I think directly addresses some of the things you’re talking about. You say
I posit that we have a social habit of false humility that is distinct from actual intellectual humility, that causes us to soften our views in order to socially “get along”. The example I give is that even though I believe there is excellent evidence to show that Gods are mythological, if it comes up IRL, I often say something like “I’m not really religious”, when what I actually believe in my heart of hearts is “It is almost certainly the case that Gods are made up”. If I’m right, then your fault is that you’re a perfectly empathetic and kind person. Which globally is fantastic, but in the specific endeavor of truth finding, might be detrimental.
Again, the proposition isn’t that people are identical in every possible way, and therefore I couldn’t possibly learn something from them. The proposition is that people are sufficiently similar to be able to fairly conclude that when I feel pain and you feel pain, what we are feeling is most likely similar. Isn’t that an eminently reasonable hypothesis? So reasonable that it isn’t really amenable to honestly felt reasonable doubt, so you have no choice but to assume it?
One more clarification. Nothing I said suggests we shouldn’t question how a bat experiences the world, and how it differs from us. The opposite, in fact. If “what it’s like” to be a bat is, as Nagel suggests, entirely unknowable in principle, then imagining it would just be some idle but ultimately futile game. If, as I suggest, there is no separate, indemonstrable, ineffable and unknowable thing called “what it’s like”, but instead just bats having experiences, and people wondering about it, then our thinking about it might actually lead to some insights about how bats or we apprehend the world.
I’m certainly going to read this thread; if I’m not replying I’m likely lurking in the shadows. This is something I’ve considered to some extent (I haven’t thought of it in terms of humility), though I’d have thought of myself more as “conflict averse”.
The thing is, even if that’s part of my motivational structure, it’s still at the core of how I think. Everyone’s personality traits go into how they organise facts into a world-view, no?
I don’t see the difference you are making here. I can imagine what it’s like to be a bat. And the most difficult thing to imagine is not echolocation and flight; it’s the banality of it. We hone in on echolocation and flight, because that stands out to us, no. So what stands out to a bat, when those things are the banal background? We can certainly think about all that.
It’s still a fact that we can’t have the bat’s experience. It’s a fact that’s mostly useless to bear in mind in daily life, sure, but if we shine a light on that and ask why the world is structured like that, we’re not suddenly blinded by an ambiguity. We’re interested in this topic (and probably disagree with each other about this or that), and you’re not.
Your clarifications here didn’t actually trigger an oh-you-didn’t-mean-to-say-that experience for me. I didn’t think you meant to say any of that. I don’t get, though, why you would think imagining something you can’t know is futile. It’s how we approach interaction. If what it’s like to be X was knowable, we could just strive to know it instead of imagining what it’s like. Imaginagtion would be second-rate metodology here. Instead, it’s all we’ve got.
We can still refine our imaginations based on observable facts (and to some degree introspection). But imagination doesn’t give us access to foreign (as in not ours) experience; it just guides how we interact with those other creatures: bats, human or otherswise. And to the extent that they can impinge on us, too, we learn to be situationally compatible.
I have bolded the statements that I think we already agree on, yet we seem to keep relitigating them. Is it because you don’t believe we agree, or you don’t understand how we could agree on these in light of other claims I’ve made? I feel like we’re going in circles.
So you imagine it’s banal?
The point of this cheeky question is that to say you imagine it doesn’t mean you create a perfect reproduction in your mind, it means that you imagine any aspect to any degree. I am certain you can imagine at least a tiny little bit what it would be like, the same way you might be able to imagine what it would be like to win a lottery or an Oscar, or whatever it is that your brain imagines when it’s idle, even though you’ve never had those experiences.
Always was the case. I’ve said so from the beginning. There’s a difference between being and imagining though. There’s even a difference between being and knowing.
It depends what you mean by “access”. Imagination doesn’t make us have the experience of someone else. It doesn’t have to. Our imaginations are informed by our own experience, that’s true. Are you certain that it’s impossible that there is no overlap in the Venn diagram of a bat’s experience and yours? I’d say you could learn enough in a high school biology class to give you reason to suspect that there’s at least some commonality.
I’m actually more radical than that. What you have in your mind isn’t a reproduction at all. It’s a black-box model, and you project yourself into the black-box. You can then modify what’s inside the blackbox based on unexpected output or missed input. But what’s inside the black-box is always content you put there.
Unexpected output also leads to judgement of the person, say, as lazy etc. To the extent that you become aware of your own role in contructing the other, this sort of judgemental activity can reduce, but at the cost of action potential on your part.
Yes and yes.
I said earlier, though I phrased it as a question, that we might understand what it’s like to be bat to the extent that we understand what it’s like to be mammal – if there is such a thing reflected in experience in the first place.
But more importantly: By the time you’ve withdrawn enough to place yourself in a venn-diagram, you’ve withdrawn from the subjective experience I think Nagel is interested in. Above paragraph is talking about an abstraction that might be invalid to make given the topic.
So, to answer this particular question, I’d first have to figure out what’s inside the venn diagrams. I don’t find this an easy task. In fact, it’s related to “hard problem” (which you might reject, too).
I think there’s lots of room to speculate on the mechanisms of imagination. I’m not sure I see evidence for what your proposing, but it also doesn’t matter for my larger point. So long as we agree that what is imagined isn’t something we expect to offer any perfect reproduction of the world, then my point is sufficiently addressed.
But neither you, I or Nagel is directly exploring subjective experience when speaking about what it’s like to be a bat, because we aren’t bats. We’re hypothesizing, imagining, speculating.
I think you aren’t answering the question I asked. You seem to be answering the question “Is it possible that the venn diagram of bat experience and my experience have no overlap?”, while I’m asking the inverse question. I carefully worded it that way in order to avoid the “we can’t possibly know for certain” type response you offered. So would you care to readdress the question as asked? Because the implications of the question I asked are very different from in implication of the question you answered. I am asking if you think it is impossible that there is no overlap. If you think it is impossible, then you’d better make a substantive case for such a categorical position.
I’ll have to apologise here; I put commas where there shouldn’t be any. “So, to answer your question,…” makes it sound like I’m answering your question, but what I meant to say is this: “So to answer your question I’d first need to…”
In other words, I don’t think I know what you think is in the respective Venn diagrams. What the Venn diagrams mean. How I should compare them. Etc.
I have no answer to your question at this point. I could say “it’s not impossible,” but I would be talking more about my current lack of understanding than about the topic. This is at the very heart of our disconnect:
A Venn diagram supposes a theory of comparison in the first place. What is it, I’m replying to? If I become aware of being aware I can objectivise my awareness in a way that I could put things into a Venn diagram, sure. But then I’m also moving from what I think Nagel is saying. This isn’t necessarily an insurmountable problem, but it’s topic of its own (and I don’t think helpful in this thread).
I’m saying, if you’re drawing a Venn diagram of yourself, you’re treating yourself like the bat: so, of course, there can be overlap. But that doesn’t necessarily address the topic at hand. You-as-topic =/= you as experience.
I’m sorry, but this literally makes no sense to me.
It means exactly what the words mean in English. I think I’m speaking plainly, and in pretty comprehensible language, but if you need to ask specific questions to clarify anything, go ahead. The bat’s experiences and yours are in the Venn diagram. Presumably bat’s have experiences, right?
At the end of the day, to say you don’t know seems like feigned ignorance to me. It seems fundamentally dishonest in a way that is harmful to the dialogue. You know things about the world, right? You’re not a functional cognitive invalid, unable to act on the world from a total ignorance, right? That’s the only bar I’m asking you to meet here.
I’m not surprised.
And then this:
We probably need to open that can of worms, and I’m not, currently, up to it. I don’t have the mental stamina (real life is draining, too). So I guess, this is my last post in this thread.
I wish I knew what questions to ask:
It’s not feigned ignroance. Everyday life doesn’t make these distinctions, thus everyday language is insufficient. And it’s ignorance not based on the lack of facts, but based on me trying to figure out what you mean, while retaining enough of my own way of thinking about this to remain able to think. If you don’t get this, you’re probably lucky. If you meet people like me, you can just question their honesty, or consider them confused.
It is, sadly, harmful to the dialogue, but I don’t know what to do about it (maybe a detour into language as stated above would help, but frankly I doubt it – and given that it’s probably off-topic, not worth the effort).
Dishonest? I don’t think so. It’s probably best if we end this here.
I’m asking you about everyday things here. Any “extra” level of abstraction or complexity, you are adding on. It isn’t implicit in my question. Given that, can you offer me an “everyday” answer to my question?
Plain language. Plain meaning. Deviation? Opportunity to judge: fooled by ambiguity; dishonest. The problem is elsewhere.
If we’re using everyday language, we’re not talking about the topic. I’m out.