The conceptual pop
We are so close. We have an almost complete picture of reality. There is just one more step to go.
We know that the world we experience, that we share with everyone else, is a world made inside our head. We know that the world exists, we know that our senses perceive it, and we know our brain’s recreate that same world – adding in loads of really complicated stuff as it goes.
Our problem is that this argument still looks like one for some form of solipsism. Our entire argument is deformed by the fact that we do not have the values right in the picture.
For our enquiry started out trying to explain this world in which we all live. It ended up saying this world was not the real one.
The discovery that consciousness took place in the brain and the subsequent feeling that this changed the inquiry, is not the same as doing an operation for a broken bone and finding cancer. It is like the doctor becoming disinterested in surgery because of something he found while operating and turning his hand to carpentry.
The leap we must make is to flip our value system, our judgement system, our entire conceptual structure, to reflect the fact that the stuff that happens in all of our heads is the only thing of value to us, and that it is also a shared phenomena.
The conceptual pop happens when you see that consciousness might be a sometimes inaccurate virtual reality of our shared world. But it is all we have. We have to call it reality, we just have to, its all we’ve got. But it helps to think of it like virtual reality, so I’ll call it (v)R.
The difficulty is that the rules of the investigation change massively when you pop. No longer is it a clear-cut matter as to what is real. Ambiguity and shifting cultural sands lie all around. No longer is there a reductive system of investigation by which reality is pinned down. The conceptual system that explains our (in brain) reality is utterly expansive and interconnected.
Reality now conforms, not to the rules of causation, but to the rules of narrative, the rules of grammar.
The fall out from the pop is to accept that the human sciences – human evolution, psychology and sociology, are in a different bracket of investigations to those whose subject matter is outside the reality. Of course they do talk about material facts – the glands of emotion, the genes of gangs.
But they also have to try and generalize the narratives of living humans. How to you generalize stories? Clearly in a different way to averaging data.
I find it hard not to get waylaid in these thoughts. So many confusions come from our inability to clear our ears at this altitude. If you make the pop and start calling THIS reality, you’ll start to see the oddness of putting all the truth into natural science.
When you pop out into the organized, conceptual, interconnected and narrative brain-created human-reality that we all call home, you’ll see that everything that has meaning and value is completely different in kind to the facts of matter. The truths are based on certainty and action, the concepts are based on stories, and everywhere we tread disconnects and reconnects the connections in new and different ways.
We must stop wishing that science could understand this massively complex shared (v)R world from the outside, and get on with figuring it out from where we are.
It is such a simple picture. The world – my head – our world. Such a simple picture – shared virtual reality. Why isn’t it obvious?
Hemispheres
Psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist speaking here about the two halves of the brian:
“The difference is essentially one of attention. It might not sound important, but it is.
“If you look at birds, we know that chicks use the eye that is connected to their left hemisphere to get seed, to be able to pick out that detail against the grit. The other one is watching out for predators. Taking the wider view.
“The left hemisphere has its own agenda, which is to help manipulate and control the world (hence it controls the right hand for grasping). The other hemisphere has no preconceptions, and simply looks out to the world for whatever there might be. In other words it has no allegiance to any particular set of values.
“It matters because, over the course of time, there has been a shift towards the view of the left hemisphere. There has been a series of shifts backwards and forwards, but with each shift there has been a gain of ground by the left hemispheres view of the world – the view, essentially, of the world as a mechanism.
“That is because it is a very coherent, self-refering system. It is a beautiful model which allows things to be simple, graspable and usable. It is a bit like the difference between a map, and the land the map represents.
“It results in a visualizing and self-refering world, in which doctors, teachers and policemen find, they spend an awful lot of time planning, reporting and analysing what they are doing, and not doing it.
“We have substituted a rather lifeless, mechanical, fragmented picture of the world. Which has robbed it of its complex, changing, interconnected quality. That actually has a huge impact on our view of ourselves as human beings and what we are doing on the planet.
“We are in the process of destroying the planet through a need to be constantly grasping and using. We miss out on the non-mechanical aspects of our existence, and see ourselves as simply rather clever machines and a lot of other things get neglected.
Articles of faith
The New Atheists or scientists, as I like to call them, don’t just have a problem with organised religion. They have a problem with the very concept of faith.
In science’s language, the definition of faith is this – living your life as though human-created stories are real things in the world.
Making concepts real is what faith does, and all concepts, by definition, are human-created. Faith is simply a belief that a belief is real.
I, for example, have faith in the existence of love. I know it cannot be explained as the causal link between two brains or organisms. I know love only exists because I believe it’s existence is real. But I also know that my faith in love, along with everyone elses, is all that keeps love in existence. I could inspect as many brains as I like, and I will not find love, only the brain parts which make the concept possible.
So how can I have faith in something’s being real, at the same time as knowing that it only exists as a concept? Doesn’t this make it an illusion?
This all depends how you want to define reality. There is no absolute rule stating that you have to restrict the concept of reality to exclude concepts. You may choose to believe that there is such a rule, and you can make your arguments around assuming that rule is true, just as many atheists do. That just isn’t a good way to argue (to assume your answer).
Personally, I wouldn’t want my concept of reality itself not be real – for me that would be confusing. If you think it works, let me know how.
So if you allow conceptual as well as material reality in, what then?
Well you have to accept that things like love, happiness, joy, freedom, responsibility and community are real, but only in so much as we believe in them.
Actually, the relationship is much more complex than that, we’re not talking about twinkerbell here. Faith, defined as a belief that a belief is real, is a necessary condition for the existence of our conceptual reality. But the articles of faith still have to acted upon to make them real. It’s no good believing love is real when no-one is actually in love.
Now here’s the crunch. Communal conceptual realities (or you could call them faith communities I guess, or folks that share the same story) that do not include the discoveries of science don’t personally suit me. I’m an atheist, and always have been.
And there is no doubt that literalist religious conceptual systems can cause harm in some cases – the intelligent design lab biologist for example, or the Al Qu’aida bomber. However, most people who believe in concepts that massively contradict material reality – that the world is young, the people go to a special place after death and so on – lead pretty normal lives, considering.
The point is that there is so much more besides, which fits in just perfectly with the material reality, but which still make use of our ability to live our lives within complex and beautiful narratives. Here are just a few examples:
Awe and wonder. Richard Dawkins prefered conceptual reality, built on our emotional (concept) reaction to beautiful(concept) natural (concept) scenes.
Golden Rule. Love thy neighbour. Perfect consequentialist rule of thumb.
Humanism. Ain’t life great. Couldn’t it be great for everyone.
Humanitarianism. Ain’t life shit. Couldn’t it be great for everyone?
Progress. I believe there will be a situation in the future, which could be better or worse depending what I do now.
History. What I am now is because of great-great-great-great-great grandpa’s awesomeness.
Evolution. How brilliant is it that complex life, or life itself, even exists. How great that the ancestors survived and changed.
Freedom. I can do anything.
Community. We can do anything.
Creativity. I can improve the world by making interesting and beautiful things.
and last of all Depth. There are such things as shallow and deep experiences, and the deeper ones are often better.
There are tons more, let me know your favourite.
Rationalist judo
There are some things people cannot say. It’s not that they’re stupid, or that they’re particularly closed-minded, it’s just that saying certain things makes their world fall apart.[1]
“Myth” isn’t a word that can be used by the person who believes in the myth. There are enough magazine articles about the myth of sexuality or love or democracy or progress, to see it is a word that is used to undermine. You can’t have a debate about a myth without first accepting that someone accepted it as true – but always in the past tense. It is impossible to have a discussion about your own myths.
What is more, these stories-taken-as-real aren’t limited to Zeus turning into a bull or Jesus coming back from the dead. Think of the myths of genius or heroism. In the scientific sense there are no geniuses or heroes, but even the hardened rationalist might see the utility in keeping the stories.
The problem is that for these stories to find a place in the world, they have to sit in the place of scientific facts. Myths aren’t just stories, like films and novels, they are stories that people believe are true and which serve a purpose in people’s lives. They are stories that are lived by, are lived into existence, are accepted as (by necessity unseen) parts of the world.
So people who believe human-created stories are real and want to keep them – and lets face it, in some form that includes all of us - are faced with a dilemma when asked to defend their beliefs.
They can’t, after all, discuss them as myths. That punctures the balloon which gives their life its certain kind of meaning.
And they can’t say they’re not factual claims, because that would mean they should treat them as stories, which they don’t.
So their only options are to defend them as factual claims, set up defences so as to persuade themselves that the facts are not where the scientist says they are, and pay as little attention as possible to the whole debate.
Which is where the modern kind of atheist comes in, constantly asking them to defend their myths as facts.
But, as we know, the statements of religion are not factual statements, except obviously the myth believer has to say they are in order to keep the myth alive.
And the atheists know they are not facts, and they also know that the upholder of the myth cannot say that. They know the myth believer can’t even entertain the thought that they are myths, because that kills them as myths and makes them into stories.
The new atheist strategy seems to be to try and bully the myth believer into facing the scientific reality of the thing the scientific reality destroys. This is by no means an obviously good thing. It is rather an act with moral consequences, the justification for which has to come down to an argument about the worth of the myths in people’s lives. This is an argument that in some cases is obviously well made, in others clearly not, and in most utterly ambiguous. Even where the moral case is made, the fact that the myth only exists because it is somehow insulated from science means telling someone their belief is a myth is a very stupid way of trying to get them to change their mind.
There is a bludgeoning unsubtelty about some atheists’ approaches to religion.[2] Myths have to be approached crabwise, from the side – from the facts about their effect, their impact on people’s lives and their value. Straight on, all you end up doing is making enemies and forcing the mythics in more and more defensive directions. Science either needs to make its own myths, or just back off.
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1. This post is in some ways a reaction to Lisa Miller’s editorial in Newsweek, much criticised by Bloc Raisonneur, Why Evolution is True, Mind Droppings, Reason.Science.Metal , Think Atheist and Poohsthink – although it gets a friendlier and altogether more subtle reading from In Living Colour.
2. I mainly mean sciencey atheists like Richard Dawkins, the Reason Project and Pharyngula, who I’m sure are quaking in their boots.
Once upon a time…
This talk from physicist Lawrence Krauss is fascinating. It’s a masterclass in how scientists and narrative are bound together – it tells stories about the universe, as science believes at the moment it really is – 13.72 billion years old, flat in a 3D sense and expanding at an accelerating rate. Scientists and atheists like Depth Deception, Brother Richard, Prometheus Unbound and The Good Atheist love it, although all for different reasons.
The problem is that the questions of interest to science drive the narrative, in a way that is far from scientific or rational. For example, he argues that less than 1% of the universe is planets and stars and all that we see and are. The rest is dark matter (30%) and dark energy (70%). So on the scale of the universe, we’re completely insignificant.
Now this whole set of facts is clearly generated by the scientific interest in solving the conundrum of dark matter. What on earth do the facts thus gained have to do with the significance of our life, planet or solar system? In what respect is living matter equal in value to dark matter? In equations about the universe it is equal, for sure, but not in our actual lives. There’s a mother and baby on one railroad track, a pile of dark matter on the other…
As tongue in cheek as this talk is, there is something serious going on. Atheists, like everyone else that ever lived, need their stories. The success of this talk clearly derives from this need. What is more there’s clearly a quasi-theological argument going on. The fact the universe is “flat”, for example, means the total energy is zero so you don’t need to posit the existence of a deity to have kicked it off (as if that is what physicists would posit if the universe were not “flat”).
One of the reasons the talk is so engaging is that Krauss’s universe seems to have a character, but that character is of a massive, cold and uncaring thing – like a god who doesn’t care. But the universe has no character whatsoever. It’s size is not, for instance, large – there’s no comparison for that word to make any sense.
In one way, I’m being pointlessly sour. This is just funny stuff about the universe, meant to make you think, to communicate the facts in a fun way. But sadly, this stuff is the closest atheists come to having something to believe in. And in this talk, the overriding narrative is fundamentally confused.
At one point, Krauss says cosmology has uncovered the most poetic fact about the universe – that the explosion of stars generates the atoms that end up in our body:
“Forget Jesus,” he says. “The stars died so you could be here today.”
But the talk ends on a total downer on the big picture of the universe:
“It’s big, rare events happen all the time, including life, and that doesn’t mean its special.”
The trouble is, Krauss’s cosmic narrative is generated as a way of interesting us in the facts and does not seem thought through as a narrative. There is a feeling that the narrative naturally follows when you know the facts. It is obvious that our lives are insignificant when you know the scale of the universe. It is obvious that our lifespans mean nothing when you know the timescale of the universe.
But these things simply are not true. The cosmological calculus has no necessary bearing whatsoever on whether or not we think life is special, purposeful or good. The value of life is not found naturally occurring in the universe – thats a religious thought. We make up the values, not the stars.
If we want to think life is special we can construct a narrative to do that – using whatever tools we chose. The facts by themselves are only physically or causally connected. The conceptual connection is made up by us and simply does not exist in the universe before we find it there.
So whether we chose to fit a story about the universe and the people curious enough to find out about it into a good story or bad is up to us. We decide.
Humans have to believe in something and it is irrational not to make the most of this ability. It is a cowardly lie to pretend the narrative forces itself upon us. (Although I don’t think Makouli will agree).
Why not believe in something good, that our lives are meaningful, that there is a point to existence? This talk gives much to inspire, but does much to purposfully destroy all faith in life at the same time.
The missing link
The split of subjective and objective seems a bad one for everyone. It goes like this. There are things that can be verified by everyone. Science finds them out. There are things that are only known to me. This is consciousness – a mystery and probably best left alone.
The reality is that we share our lives with lots of people in a variety of ways. Our reality is communal. There is truth in both the subjective and the objective perspective, but only as extreme positions on an otherwise ambiguous spectrum.
Is the full explanation of a painting in an art gallery to be found in the chemical structures of the materials? Nope. Is it found in the interpreted colour patterns we sense? Nope – and I don’t know how you managed to experience just the colours anyway.
No, it is found in the experience of an object about which you have already learned a massive amount from other people – the story of the artist, the ways we look at art, the history of art, the objects from other places we see in it, what we know about the specific work from what other people have told us.
The missing link in all of this is aspect perception. This is an everyday phenomena which somehow no-one talks about. Here’s the duck rabbit – the first of many. You see a duck. Then you see a rabbit. The two experiences are different and yet nothing has changed.
The important bit is not the aspect shift, which is quite an interesting feeling. The interesting bit is thinking about a drawing with a non-ambigous aspect. Then you realize that every other experience you have is jam packed full of concepts. So our idea of there being no concepts in the world is wrong. Concepts are everywhere. And how do they get there? Well our world is organised conceptually, and we get our concepts from… everyone. The connections between you, me and everyone and everything we know run so deep into our lives that it is impossible to escape them.
So it is not rational to be objective, because that completely misses a massive section of our reality. And it is certainly not rational to be subjective, because we don’t live in a world by ourselves. The truth is much harder. Whether we want to or not, we directly experience a shared world, and we’re going to have to make the most of it.
Destroying our (virtual) reality
Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it’s also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.
All in the Mind with Thomas Metzinger via Mindhacks
Metzinger’s theory of consciousness, now that science has discovered it at last, is one of the friendlier from the scientific perspective. He sees it as a kind of virtual reality model of the world, which sort of excludes the self, but accepts that the non-existant self will never be able to perceive its non-existence:
The conscious self is a fantastic tool that emerged in natural evolution that allows a body to own itself.
But, as he says himself, his philosophy is “unintelligible” to a conscious human.
My theory—big, unintelligible philosophical theory—says that we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image.
He says unintelligible as a kind of a joke, but it really is not. From our perspective, unless you define “consciousness” in a silly technical way that allows you to pretend it is not THIS, it is impossible to truly conceive of your own life as a simulation of a life. It is just life full stop. My life.
Metzinger is incredibly self-aware of both the paradox and the danger caused by the invading culture of neuroscience. He suggests a new field of morality be born to make decisions about states of human and animal consciousness, which would be a step in the right direction.
But he fails to see the possibility that there is a debate to be had about what scientists say, about the way the facts come out. The subjective is out of reach for scientists by definition, so of course every theory they come up with will exclude it somehow. It’s the rules of the game.
It seems to me that telling someone that, from the perspective of a form of inquiry that excludes the subjective, there is no such thing as subjectivity, is kind of pointless. But at the same time it does damage the subjective narratives that bind people and their world together.
It is harmful and pointless to undermine people’s sense of reality, when there is no reality behind to get at. That is a simple misuse of the concept of reality.
Metzinger is right to say that neuroscience is destructive. But it is not simply beliefs that are destroyed. It is beliefs that humans created over hundreds of years, and which will not be easy to replace once gone.
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Thomas Metzinger:”We don’t find a will in the brain, that’s for sure. What we have is the conscious experience of having free will, of actually deliberating, wanting something, of weighing different goals against each other and so on, and that conscious experience of free will, that will be explained by science.
And the question is…many people in the general public feel an uneasiness with this debate about freedom of the will. Imagine there was no freedom of the will, that if we had a theory that said that, we couldn’t really believe that theory, it would make us sick. I mean, how could you imagine that every thought, every intention you are consciously experiencing right now has been predetermined by something unconscious outside of your reality. The people that have that experience are usually in psychiatric institutions. Our brains were never made for this.
….
My unitelligible philosophical theory says that we identify with this identity of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image…
… the conscious self is a fantastic tool that emerged in natural evolution that allows a body to own itself. That’s what is actually happening, for instance, when you wake up in the morning and a conscious self emerges, that is when the body that was sleeping boots up this virtual reality tool to own itself, to control itself in a new way. That is where selfhood came from.
….
Thomas Metzinger: Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it’s also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.
Natasha Mitchell: You see it as that we’re witnessing a disenchantment of the self, which is interesting because you’ve just banished the self in this conversation.
Thomas Metzinger: Well, who is ready to do that, who could even understand, honestly, what that would mean. I think we’re seeing a lot of good things, interesting things. For instance, we’ll be able to heal psychiatric diseases much better in a few decades, but we’ll also pay a price. We’ll pay an emotional price, there are these unsettling things about freedom of the will, then there is the social cultural price we’re going to pay for it which is much harder to assess.
I mean, how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there’s no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events…I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists? And I think something that could help us to take this step in integrating all this brand new knowledge and the new potentials for changing our brains and our minds technologically…
Natasha Mitchell: And pharmaceutically.
Thomas Metzinger: And pharmaceutically, that’s what we’re researching in my cognitive enhancers group…how are we going to make this historical transition in an optimal way? And I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?
It’s also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It’s not only about defending ourselves, it’s also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won’t make it go away.
Stories of the scientist
But maybe you’ll say, “Storytelling is just for fiction.” Sorry, but that’s not true. This is a shortcoming of today’s science education—the failure to make scientists realize they are storytellers, every bit as much as novelists. They just don’t like to admit it, or really even think about it. They tend to think stories mean Star Wars and Harry Potter. The truth is, stories are as equally important in nonfiction as fiction. They are the way we understand our world.
There is a conundrum of the scientist. For, as Olson makes clear, scientists want to think they are just doing science, that they are simply investigating things in a rational and scientific way, and that there is nothing intermingled with it whatsoever, because anything creative, or un-scientific, would pollute what they do.
But the whole scientific investigation (which should of course be conducted in a scientific, rational way) is embedded in stories. What scientists are interested in, what fires up their investigation, the value of what they find out, the scope of their investigation, its purpose and success, are all related to the place of the scientists’ discoveries and clarifications in the story of our lives. As Olson says, the scientists’ questions and their results are framed in language, and language is fundamentally not comprehensible to scientific investigation (although I admit I’ve got a way to go before I convince anyone of that).
The point is, that the only time a scientist is a scientist in the sense of someone completely cut off from narrative, is when they are actually engaged in scientific investigation. Once their eye is off the microscope, they are no longer a scientist. Everything they say about what they have found out creates and modifies stories. It is utterly inescapable. [ Comment saying this].
What Olson also brings out is that stories are not only a matter of fiction, but of non-fiction as well. Once you start looking for stories you find them everywhere – from our immediate experience of values and meanings to the grand narratives that describe human history.
The mistake of believing you can operate outside of stories has huge consequences. It is one of the scientists primary sins.
Five tribes
“As people see the world so they behave”
From this TED video by David Logan. A glib, self-satisfied, and over-simplified analysis of 5 stages of our modern tribes. This man may be a moron, who sells a better world like used cars. But I still like the idea of a super-simple ladder narrative for thinking about human progress. A bit like a computer strategy game. Collect enough logs and food, and you get onto the next level. Here’s how it works:
Stage 1) nihilist tribe – there is no tribe. Life sucks. Despairing hostility. 2%
Stage 2) idiot tribe – your life is good, my life is not. I hate my tribe. My life sucks. 25%
Stage 3) cocky tribe – my life is great and you’re not 48%
Stage 4) self-aware tribe – our lives will be better if we work together. We’re great. 22%
Stage 5) total tribe – life is great. 2%
So we just move the numbers up the stages and everything gets better. Easy as that.
Not everything that counts
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life. Einstein
Einstein’s definition of religion is very abstract, and could put people off. It pre-supposes that there is something that is outside of the scientific description, something that takes an attitude towards it (just like Wittgenstein – see below). But this basic fact is the stumbling block in the debate.
It sounds funny to say it, but many rationalists actually belief that humans don’t exist. And in one way, that makes perfect sense. You look at the world as a graph of atoms doing what they do and there is simply no need to outline a more abstract description. Everything that exists is accounted for, and what more do you need?
But on the other hand, what point is there in investigating anything if there is nothing with any meaning in your belief system, in fact nothing so grand as a belief?
It’s quite a big unintended consequence for science – the destruction of all meaning in life. And it’s not one that science has the tools to deal with. Science has no secrets, nothing is hidden. But the meaning in our lives is based on nothing more than things we take as certain. Meaning is created by humans, it doesn’t have a non-human foundation. As soon as you investigate the foundation you find we’re just making it up as we go along.
I think that’s what Einstein is talking about. Calling it religion is an offputting way of describing something that even the most irreligious person does all the time. Humans live in stories, human narratives are the basis of everything that matters to us. And science can’t say anything at all about them without smashing them up.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton) Link
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