Keith A. Gillette (gillette@tahc.state.tx.us)
Sun, 1 Mar 1998 19:56:22 +0100
PART I: Epistemological Aspects of Dynamic Quality
Many thanks to Platt Holden, Doug Renselle, Bodvar Skutvik, and Donald
Palmgren for the flattering comments on my original post. The comments on
Kant, Taoism, and the recommendation to read *Zen in the Art of Archery*
are well taken. Pirsig talks about that book as being influential in this
thought in "Subjects, Objects, Data, and Values", so it should probably be
required background reading. It's been added to my reading list. I have
read *The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts, which I found very illuminating,
though not enlightening. ;-)
I just wanted to follow-up on the good points that Ken Clark brought up on
the subject of intellectual knowledge. Mostly I'll be reinforcing what
Platt Holden and Diana McPartlin have already said. (I don't know how all
of you find time to philosophize during the week! I'm stuck being a weekend
philosopher.)
At 3:28 PM +0000 2/24/98, Clark wrote:
> I am not sure that all of this talk about not being able to understand
>reality because we are a part of it is right. I would be interested to
>hear your explanation of why that is so. Just saying it doesn't make it so.
Quite right that just saying so doesn't make it so. However, I do believe
there are justifiable reasons for believing this is the case.
First, a clarification. As Diana pointed out in her post, "[i]t's only in
an intellectual sense that we can't understand [reality]". What I said in
my post was that "reality can not be fully captured by language (i.e.
understood intellectually)". We can apprehend reality through direct
experience (more later), but we cannot know it *fully* through our
intellectual models.
Don't take this as a rejection of rationality or science. It's simply an
acknowledgement of the limitations of intellectual understanding, which
Pirsig believed amounted to an "expansion of reason" (*ZMM* chapter 14).
What is this limitation in our intellectual knowledge? Does it mean we'll
never move beyond our present stumbling blocks in scientific understanding?
No, *emphatically* no. You are completely right to say that "[a]t our
present level of ignorance we are not in a position to make a firm
statement about many things". While I do think that prospects for moving
beyond the seeming fundamental limitations imposed on knowledge by the
*particular cases* of the Uncertainty Principle and Chaos theory are
limited, many more intelligent than me have thought we were at the limits
of knowledge in one field or another in the past and been proved completely
wrong. I have no disagreement whatsoever with your general assertion that
things that appear mysterious now will be understood in the future. I even
hold out hope, along with you and Stephen Hawking, that we may one day find
a Grand Theory of Everything, which unifies all of physics.
However, that isn't the same as asserting that through a "combination of
language and symbol" we will find that "the riddle of the universe is
finally fully unraveled". Such a unified theory of the universe would be an
explanation of reality only at the physical level. Surely, it would unify
all of physics into a coherent system. Would it do the same for psychology?
For art? Even for biology? No. In MoQspeak, it would be merely a complete
intellectual description of the inorganic level of quality. But what of the
rest? Aren't they equally part of reality? How is it that this so-called
'Theory of Everything' misses them?
The problem such a theory (and more generally, any intellectual
description) is that in its striving to be a universally-applicable
objective description of reality, it will by necessity completely miss the
subjective nature of experience. Platt Holden layed this out neatly in his
response to your post:
At 8:59 AM +0000 2/26/98, Platt Holden wrote:
>Seeing you as a camera sees you is not exactly what Robert Burns had in
>mind. If you kiss the camera on its lens, I doubt it will have much of a
>reaction. But hopefully your kiss will have some effect on a human
>kissee who will see you as something more than an electronically encoded
>apparition.
>
>The point is you can never know what it's liked to be kissed by you, any
>more than a physicist can know both the exact position and velocity of
>an electron.
What Platt describes here is the problem of qualia. Qualia is a term used
in the philosophy of mind. The idea is that some mental states have
"qualitative characters"--something that it's *like* to be in that mental
state. As Sydney Shoemaker explains in "Functionalism and Qualia",
"functionalism (or behaviorism, or materialism, or 'causal' theories of
mind--the objection has been made against all of these) cannot account for
the 'raw feel' component of mental states for their 'internal', or
'phenomenological', character" (*Philosophical Studies XXVII*, May 1975,
292-315). In a nutshell, the problem is that a description of mental states
as physical states of the brain doesn't tell us anything about the
subjective experience of being in that state. How does "an increase in
serotonin levels" explain what it is to "feel euphoric"?
Thomas Nagel believes that the inability of an objective (separated from a
particular viewpoint) conception of the functioning of mind (such as
reductive physicalism) to account for the subjective content of experience
points to a limitation in intellectual understanding. "If we try to
understand experience from an objective viewpoint that is distinct from
that of the subject of the experience, then even if we continue to credit
its perspectival nature, we will not be able to grasp its most specific
qualities unless we can imagine them subjectively. We will not know exactly
how scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach even if we develop a detailed
objective phenomenology of the cockroach sense of taste. When it comes to
values, goals, and forms of life, the gulf may be even more profound. Since
this is so, no objective conception of the mental world can include it all"
(*The View From Nowhere*, Thomas Nagel, 1986, p.25).
No intellectual account of the universe will be able to exlain what
scrambled eggs taste like to a cockroach, what it's like to be kissed by
you, or what it's like to *be* a bat (see Thomas Nagel, "What's Is It Like
to Be a Bat?", *The Philosophical Review LXXXIII*, October 1974.) But all
of those things exist, don't they? They are part of the reality we're
hoping to explain, aren't they? I certainly can't deny that there is
something it's like to be kissed by my girlfriend. But in what sense does
the description of me and my girlfriend as quantum wave functions capture
that experience? In what sense does a description of us as complex
aggregates of various carbon compounds explain it? In what sense does the
idea that we're vertebrate mammals of the species homo sapiens sapiens
explain that feeling? How does the idea that love is an innate
psychological need for humans elucidate the nature of the experience?
In short, by stripping off the Lockean secondary qualities of sense
experience to apprehend the world in terms of primary qualities, we lose
the ability to make sense of our experience of reality, which is, of
course, purely in terms of secondary qualities. When we go purely for
Classical Quality, we trade in Romantic Quality.
Well, that was maybe a long way to go for that point. It's not the only way
to go, either. I think the elucidation of the qualia problem is apropos of
my original post and especially of Platt's response to yours. There are
certainly other ways of arriving at the conclusion that reality is
ultimately not completely knowable through intellectual understanding. From
Descartes' meditations on whether he can trust sense experience or whether
a devil is actively deceiving him, to Kant's noumenon, unknowable in
itself, to the modern scientific-determinist paradox of a world governed by
causal relationships but specifiable only with probabilistic mathematics
(doesn't that imply there's something *missing* from the scientific
description that we're summarizing with probability factors?) to, as Platt
alluded, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (thought I really don't know the
math metatheory to tell whether his work is extensible to language at
large). Following any of these leads may well bring us to the same
conclusion about the limits of knowledge.
Now, as I implied at the beginning, I don't think we have any real argument
on this point. I never meant to say that reality is completely unknowable
by intellect. That wouldn't be true. I do, however, (for some of the
reasons layed out above) believe it is the case that reality is not
completely knowable by intellect, a somewhat different proposition. I also
believe that we can not say that any of our concepts represent reality in
an absolute sense, but are merely models that to a greater or lesser degree
explain the data we gather through observation. But enough on these
epistemological considerations, save this last comment on Diana's
Eastern-tinged response concerning our topic ...
At 5:33 PM +0000 2/25/98, Diana McPartlin wrote:
>Indeed it doesn't. We most certainly can understand reality. We can
>understand it completely and perfectly. Saying we are "part of" reality
>is as much an SOM point of view as saying that we are separate from
>reality. In the context of Dynamic Quality we are not separate from
>reality and we are not part of reality, we *are* reality. There is no
>difference. To be precise we shouldn't even say "we are reality", we
>should say "reality is"
And to be absolutely accurate, we should say nothing at all. Lao-tzu: "The
Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao" (Line 1, *Tao te Ching*).
A monk asked Ma-tsu, "Why do you teach, 'Mind is Buddha'"?
Ma-tsu said, "To stop a baby from crying."
The monk said, "When the crying has stopped, what then?"
Ma-tsu said, "Then I teach, 'Not mind, not Buddha.'"
The monk said, "How about someone who isn't attached to either?"
Ma-tsu said, "I would tell him, 'Not beings.'"
The monk said, "And what if you met a man unnattached to all things: what
would you tell *him*?"
Ma-tsu said, "I would just let him experience the great Tao."
(Notes on *Tao te Ching*, Stephen Mitchell translation.)
Cheers,
Keith
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