This is good. If you are willing I’d like to resume the conversation from where our misunderstanding began, so permit me to recap:
So I want to go back to the idea that there is no absolute ‘real’ world upon which our investigations are ‘converging.’ It seems we are in agreement that there is not, so what do you think our investigations are “converging on”?
@John and @Andy,
That was a very cool exchange, read through it a couple times now and fine it an exchange worth savoring.
This type of philosophizing resonates with my conceptions because it feels grounded in a way that defending the hard problem never achieves.
I agree there is no absolute real world, but I think there is a relational or interactive real world of which we are part. I think we are affected by the environment pre-cognitively, and that the structures which we interact with are real and would exist even if humans didn’t exist. Of course there can be no appearances or experience absent sentient organic structures. I don’t see life as a definite cutoff, so I think the inorganic compounds and processes which form rocks, minerals, mountains and planets also exist without sentient life, although it would seem that that existence is ‘dark’ or ‘blind’ without percipients.
Let me see if I can put my point more clearly. The idea that our scientific investigations are ‘converging’ presupposes a destination we’re approaching. If the relational structure is all there is, and it’s evolving, then there’s no fixed point to measure distance from. What I think we actually have is something like an objectivised constructivism: our descriptions are built through interactions within the relational structure, and they get increasingly robust – i.e. they hold up under more conditions, agree across more perspectives, predict more reliably. But (and this is the point I’m driving at) ‘robust’ is an internal criterion, not a correspondence to a target. It’s the relational analogue of von Glasersfeld’s ‘viability’ – a description is ‘good’ if it works – i.e. if it stands up to the interactions it’s embedded within. The ‘objectivity’ comes from the structure of the interactions, not from a view from outside them. Would you disagree with any of this?
I wouldn’t say there is any fixed destination. However I do think we may gain an ever more accurate and comprehensive picture of the world we find ourselves in. That said, that world is obviously the world of human experience, not some imagined unknowable world that lies beyond human experience.
So, yes of course there is no view from outside our interactions with the world. We infer, and I believe correctly, that there is much of the world which is not within our interactions with the world, but as to the nature of that, we can only make inferences to what seem the most plausible pictures and explanations.
What I’m trying to say is that at the frontier, our investigations aren’t just revealing the network – they’re part of its evolution. New interactions instantiate new facts, so the structure we’re ‘discovering’ is partly constituted by the investigation itself. I need to emphasize that I don’t mean we’re the only thing driving the evolution – the whole web of interactions does that, including pre-cognitive ones. We’re just a reflective node in the network, and one that models the other nodes.
The network is more like an organism in that it is constantly evolving, and this evolution is not guided by anything external to it (like the absolute metaphysically ‘real’ world it seems we both reject). It is totally internally driven, so the “ever more accurate and comprehensive picture” that is being revealed by our scientific investigations is, at the cutting edge so to speak, constituted by those investigations. Furthermore, the network has no global organizing principle (no ‘purpose’ that it is converging on) but it contains local ones – organisms, ecosystems, institutions – all self-maintaining from within. Even the most teleology-looking things in it are internally generated, not externally imposed.
Have I said anything you’d take issue with?
Dang dogs and distractions. I appear to have over written my comment 81, when I thought I was in the Response text box. Another oops.
I cannot but agree, since everything is part of that evolution. We think in concepts, which are more or less fixed, static so our investigations cannot but be anything more than approximations to the dynamic living reality.
Again I cannot but agree, since we are embedded both within what we are investigating and the investigations themselves. i don’t hold with constructivism though, since I don’t see that we construct the reality we are investigating―we are always already thrown into a pre-cognitively constituted reality. So I would say we construct our investigations, and our conceptions of the structures we are investigating, but the structures themselves are not constructed by us, rather they emerge from the pre-cognitive interactions between our sentient bodies and the world.
Right, so I don’t imagine you will disagree with what I wrote above. And I agree with all the rest of what you have written in that post.
Von Glasersfeld doesn’t claim that we build the physical structures either, but he doesn’t want to say anything more than what can be epistemically justified. Von Glaserfeld would say that we can’t even know that these constructs are mind-independent – all we can say is that our constructs are “viable.” He wants to remain agnostic on the ontology, and I think he correctly identifies the epistemic constraint, but like you I want to push the investigation into the ontology.
I don’t want to lose sight of the point I was making at the outset of our conversation. The first-person and the third-person are two “entry points” for our investigation, and we have an instinctive drive to attempt unification (i.e. to find a better map that would accommodate the phenomenological entry point). I was trying to expose the often unquestioned priority entailed in taking our third-person descriptions as the starting point for the investigation (which prompted your challenge to me in message 57 in this thread).
It seems to me that there is still a widespread insistence on giving priority to the third-person description (“the map”) – either by declaring that there is no problem (“it’s a pseudo-problem”), or by making it a matter of faith that there will come a time when science accommodates the phenomenological. What Rovelli gives us is another third-person description that is silent on the phenomenological first-person entry point. Where do you stand on this?
Isn’t a key point here, that what we construct our impression of reality, given the facts at hand – for our sensory systems to observe, and brain to process.
This is naturally true and = “there is no one centre of the universe” unless of course there is a consciousness which could be identified as “The Universal Entity”
Is it even likely such a critter has ever existed?
Yes - why call it anything but natural?
It may even be natural that we use phrasing which suggests intelligent design.
Ah yes - declaring “the designer”…
THis may (or may not) be overreaching. Earth has survived many extinction events. The concept may be the product of overblown human egoism.
Mostly we don’t think in the following way (but I do - and it helps)…
…that the earth is a conscious entity.
Putting that into my pipe and smoking it, changes the way I understand history - regardless of where the reports derive…from strata, or the inflated imagery of conquering empire historians or even modern interpretations of ancient culture.
What about the application of a balanced outlook - rather than one over the other?
How much do you actually think this is true, as in do you think (or suspect/know) that the earth is a conscious entity?
I think our experience and all our understanding of it shows us that we don’t construct the world or even our experience of it. That said, of course we do construct our conscious, discursive understandings.
For me Glasersfeld’s reticence regarding ontology as you have framed it is based on only counting as knowledge what we can be absolutely certain of. I, on the other think we have no reason to doubt, beyond the mere logical possibility, that the world is mind-independent, in fact all our knowledge points to its being so. But we each have our own assessments of what seems most plausible I guess.
I don’t see a dichotomy there. All our investigations are from some perspective, which we might term “first person”. Yet all our knowledge consists in objects of knowledge, which we might term “third person”. I think the distinction is artificial―not substantive.
Perhaps, I’m not sure about this. I do think it is unnecessary to emphasize the first person perspective since it is trivially true that we experience and understand everything from some perspective or other. Science proceeds by a convergence of, agreement between, perspectives. People used to mostly think the Earth is flat, now we mostly think it is is roughly spherical, and I think that is an example of a real correction and thus an advance of knowledge about the nature of things.
I think we construct our conscious ideas and models of the world we perceive, but I do not think we construct our perceptions of the world, including our own bodies. Perceptual…lived… experience is given to us pre-cognitively in my view, although it can be modified and elaborated to some extent by cognition. We cannot in the general flow of our lives consciously choose what to perceive in the world. I mean we can sometimes choose to look at this instead of that, but we cannot choose what is seen.
The flat-earth to spherical-earth case is interesting, but notice it wasn’t that we got “closer to the nature of things.” It was that the spherical model proved more robust – it held across more perspectives, predicted more reliably, and more people’s observations agreed with it. That is increasing mutual agreement. The progress is in the robustness of the account, and not necessarily in its correspondence with a pre-existing world that we are simply ‘discovering.’
All we can say is that our constructs are “viable,” but I don’t want to be misunderstood here so I’ll labor this point: I’m not suggesting that the world is “our construction” – I’m suggesting that genuine novelty may be entering the world, and so it’s possible that the world is being constructed on the fly so to speak. Our investigations must be consistent with what has already been constructed. But at the frontier, they might also be constitutive – instantiating relational facts that didn’t obtain before the interaction occurred.
But I’d like to sideline this issue in order to stay on point. I agree that “it is trivially true that we experience and understand everything from some perspective or other” – it would be absurd to deny that the point of departure for the investigation is phenomenological. But RQM is silent on the phenomenology and how it relates to the relational structure, leaving an explanatory gap. The same gap that people paper over by calling it a pseudo-problem or making it a matter of faith that science will eventually accommodate it.
Sure that’s all we can say with absolute certainty. But what about plausibility? It’s logically possible that the “world is being constructed on the fly so to speak”―but do you think that is a more plausible conclusion than that the world is as it is regardless of our experiences and judgements? Was the world once really flat and now (roughly) spherical? Or has the truth about the shape of the planet been discovered? Even granting that it is logically possible, do you think it plausible, that one day we will discover that (or bring into being the fact that) the world is not spherical but…what…some other shape or perhaps flat after all?
Sure, we don’t know with absolute certainty that our perceptual experience tells us anything about the mind-independent nature of the world, but does not the predictive success of our theories and the vast and coherent web of scientific undertsnding give us reason to believe that our perceptual experience does give us true information?
I agree that the truth about the shape of the planet has been discovered. I don’t think the Earth was ever ‘really’ flat, and I’m not denying that predictive success and coherence give us reason to believe our perceptual experience yields true information. What I’m suggesting is narrower – it is that this true information is about a structure that is evolving, not a fixed target. At the world’s settled core, “true information about the world” and “true information about the relational structure that has already been instantiated” are the same information. The difference is at the frontier, where new interactions may instantiate facts that didn’t obtain before the interaction occurred.
I regard this as the “no absolute world” position we’ve both agreed, investigated to the point where the transition from the established physics to the speculative metaphsyics becomes evident. It’s on the metaphysics that I think we diverge, and it’s a divergence I’d like to park for now so we can stay on the phenomenological point. RQM is silent on how the phenomenological entry point relates to the relational structure. That silence is the explanatory gap I was pointing to – the same gap that gets papered over by calling it a pseudo-problem or making it a matter of faith that science will eventually close it.
I agree the world is ever-evolving―not a static, fixed target. Some parts of it evolve very quickly and other parts very slowly, but it seems beyond any doubt that nothing is absolutely changeless. New interactions by very definition would instantiate facts that didn’t obtain before the occurrence of the interactions, so I can find no disagreement with that.
I see the relational structure as it is experienced and understood as being inextricably bound up with human phenomenology, so I’m not clear on what you are pointing at here. You seem to be referring to the “hard problem” which I consider to be a pseudo-problem only because I don’t think it can be solved.
Personal experience is just not the sort of thing that can be adequately explained in terms of mechanism for the simple reason that feelings are not describable in terms of, cannot be broken down into, parts. So I see the demand for such a solution as a kind of category error. Another example of this kind of category error would be to seek a mechanistic explanation of the nature of beauty.
Firstly, yes, Joseph Levine’s “explanatory gap” is precisely the foundation on which David Chalmers based his paper on “the hard problem of consciousness.” Your assertion that to demand an explanatory bridge is a category error is where I’d like to drill down. You compare it to a demand for a mechanistic explanation of the nature of beauty – I’m happy to grant that a mechanistic explanation of feeling is the wrong kind of explanation, but that’s a constraint on the answer, not a dismissal of the problem. The relational structure, as defined in RQM, is a structure of physical interactions. Phenomenology doesn’t appear in it as a constituent, so “inextricably bound up” is asserting the very connection that needs to be explained – it’s the gap restated as a premise. The question “how can the relational structure accommodate conscious experience?” is still open. You’re asserting that the answer won’t be mechanistic, and that’s useful – it tells us what the answer won’t be – but it doesn’t close the gap.
My thinking on this is guided by the fact than an explanatory bridge between the space of feelings/ thoughts and the space of objects, processes and relations, that is of sensory phenomena, is unimaginable to me. We explain sensory phenomena in terms of causes, and feelings and thoughts and the attitudes and actions they lead to in terms of reasons and intuitions.
I think phenomenology cannot appear in the relational structure because phenomenology is an entirely different kind of conceptual paradigm from physics. The obvious realization that physics investigates the world as it appears to us is not itself part of physics. So, for me the gap appears as a result of demanding that there should be one kind of comprehensive understanding that incorporates everything into its system, and explains everything.
In other words our phenomenological understandings of the relationship between ourselves and the world is not, and cannot be, a part of physics. By the same token, the world of physics cannot be incorporated into phenomenology. So, there are inevitable conceptual gaps, but it doesn’t follow that there is any ontological gap.
That’s my take anyway.
I agree that the explanatory gap is conceptual and not necessarily ontological. The gap is a feature of our descriptions of the world. From the time Galileo proclaimed that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” the scientific enterprise has progressively bracketed the first-person perspective in favour of third-person description – and, it needs to be said, with breathtaking results.
But should we really expect science to account for what it has bracketed by design? Perhaps our instinctive drive towards progressively unified accounts of the world, reinforced by the extraordinary success of science, seduces us into thinking that science will eventually account for everything. Perhaps that is simply our instinct for explanatory completeness overstepping its remit. In that case, closing the explanatory gap is not a task that science, considered on its own methodological terms, can adequately formulate. But that wouldn’t constitute a “failure of science” – it would simply mean that science is not, by itself, the tool for this particular job.
So, phenomenology doesn’t appear in the relational structure described by RQM, but does that mean that it cannot appear in any kind of descriptive account? I don’t think so. “Unimaginable” doesn’t mean impossible. The fact that we can’t currently conceive of a conceptual bridge between phenomenology and physics establishes a difficulty of description, but it doesn’t by itself establish an ontological impossibility. A claim for impossibility seems like quite a leap, but it’s worth examining if we are to avoid turning science into a new kind of religion.
Forgive me for restating my position, but I want to make clear that I regard the relational structure described by RQM as real, pre-cognitive and evolving. I’m therefore not subscribing to a von Glasersfeld-style agnosticism about reality, nor am I advocating substance realism, let alone substance dualism. Indeed, the more I look for a satisfactory ontology that somehow “closes” the gap, the more I’m driven towards the possibility that there isn’t one.
I would describe my own position as being closer to the Jamesian mould. This seems to sit surprisingly comfortably alongside both RQM and Ladyman’s OSR, although I don’t mean to suggest that they are saying the same thing. Whitehead, of course, doesn’t need to “close the gap” in quite the same way, because experience is implicated from the beginning in his notion of “actual occasions of experience.”
But here’s the position I’m increasingly leaning towards…
If RQM is “all there is” in the relevant sense – if there is no reality standing outside the relational structure from which that structure can be viewed – then the appearance of an explanatory gap cannot itself occur outside that structure. The very distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives must itself be something that occurs within it.
RQM makes facts relative to interactions. There is therefore no absolute centre from which the entire network can be surveyed. It is, in that sense, a map without a centre – there are only internal perspectives on the network, and no God’s-eye view of the network from outside it.
Perhaps, then, the explanatory gap is not a “problem looking for an explanation” at all. Nor is it necessarily a category error. It may instead be a structural feature of a relational reality in which every perspective is internal to the network it describes. From one kind of description, we might say that the centre has only a conventional existence and is empty of inherent existence. From another, we might simply say that there is no privileged standpoint from which the relationship between all perspectives can be made absolute. I know this doesn’t close the gap, but maybe we’re wrong to expect it to close in the first place.
For me the progressive move of science away from understandings which were derived from human imagination and intuition, in the quest to see things as as far as possible free of prejudice and just as they present themselves, and understand things systematically so as to (ideally) achieve a view of nature which is overall unbiased, coherent, consistent and cohesive has been a great success yielding, as you say, “breathtaking results”.
I don’t see what you refer to as “the progressive bracketing of the first person perspective” as some kind of rejection of that perspective, but as evolving out of a growing recognition that science is not equipped to deal with matters that afford no empirical evidence. Along came phenomenology as the discipline best suited to exploring what is common to the human condition and experience.
I said earlier that I cannot imagine how a marriage of scientific and phenomenological methodologies could possible, given their very different kinds of subjects and methodologies. You may have read that as a claim that it could not be possible, but my claim is more modest―namely that I personally cannot see how it could be done. I have no idea what such a marriage could look like beyond something like Dennett’s “neurophenomenology”.
And again, I want to emphasize that I think “explanatory gap” is an inapt term for the inability to wed very different conceptual and methodological paradigms―I think the term is more coherently used to refer to gaps in knowledge within a paradigm.
You ask whether I think phenomenology can appear in any descriptive account. I’d say it does appear, as one of the fields of investigation, in a descriptive account of overall human intellectual life. And again I am not making a claim to the impossibility of unifying different areas of study. I also don’t think science should be turned into any kind of religion.
Provisional faith in science is based on its predictive success in certain areas of study―it doesn’t follow that it can explain everything, solve every human individual or social problem, or achieve a total conceptual unity encompassing all the disparate fields of human study and creativity.
I agree that the distinction between third and first person occurs within the relational structures both human and (presumably) extra-human. I think it is a purely conceptual distinction, useful for some purposes and misleading in some contexts. I only refer to the use of the term ‘explanatory gap’ as a category error when applied to the conceptual and methodological separation between areas of investigation, not in relation to what I see as it’s more coherent application to gaps in knowledge within some area of investigation or other. For example imagine if I said that there is an explanatory gap between mathematics and phenomenology or literary criticism―could any sense be made of such a claim?