The Scientific Image of Man

General philosophy message board for Discussion and debate on other philosophical issues not directly related to veganism. Metaphysics, religion, theist vs. atheist debates, politics, general science discussion, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
NonZeroSum
Master of the Forum
Posts: 1159
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:30 am
Diet: Vegan
Location: North Wales, UK

The Scientific Image of Man

Post by NonZeroSum »

---------

The Scientific Image of Man
https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/38394

Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State University, The Electric Agora) and Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY Graduate Center, Plato's Footnote, How To Be a Stoic)

---------

*Sections*

01:12 - The underappreciated philosopher Wilfrid Sellars
06:42 - The “manifest image” vs. the “scientific image”
22:15 - Why scientism bothers Massimo
32:30 - Don’t blame me, my brain made me do it!
45:32 - What Daniel Dennett gets wrong in his new book
51:16 - The limits of science

---------

*Time Codes*

01:12 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=1m12s
06:42 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=6m42s
22:15 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=22m15s
32:30 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=32m30s
45:32 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=45m32s
51:16 - https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=51m16s

---------



____________________ The underappreciated philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ____________________
- https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=1m12s


Today we're going to talk about something really interesting, it's a very important paper by the philosopher Wilfred Sellars, it's called “philosophy and the scientific image of man,” and it was based on two lectures that were given at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960. And the paper is very interesting, in that I would argue it's both very influential and almost completely ignored. So I know people, on whom it’s had a tremendous influence, one of your colleagues David Rosenthal is a big Sellars fan. And Rosenthal is a major player in consciousness and of that related series of areas in the philosophy of mind.

He also is a professor of mine when I was at the graduate centre, so there's a number of people I think who would sight Sellars as a major influence and this paper as being one of the reasons, but he also is not one of the people that’s typically brought up in the history of analytic philosophy, he's not brought up in the way that Equine or a Hilary Putnam, or even a Kirkby is brought up. And I wonder maybe some of the reasons will come out in the discussion of the paper, the paper is quite difficult, but I think Massimo, let’s see if you'll agree with me, it provides a really remarkable framework within which to express a whole number of problems, that I think is really useful.


Yes, oh I completely agree, so I didn't study Sellars in graduate school, and I actually came across the distinction between scientific and the manifest image of which we will talk about in a few minutes, I think reading Dan Dennett of all things because I think we should go back to that as well, and then I used to eventually traced back to the source, and then when I read the paper, thought holy crap, this is really good stuff and I think you’re right that everybody, in the living tradition, in philosophy and beyond sort of recognizes Sellars importance, but his name doesn't come up, hasn't become an household name, although rereading recently the entry about Sellars in the Stanford encyclopida of philosophy I agree with the claim of the author there that actually, that there’s been a revival of interest in Sellars ideas and therefore hopefully in its broader philosophy.

I would go as far as saying that when I read some of his stuff, a lot of things for me clicked because as you know, I'm probably sure some of our viewers will know, my background is a dual one in science and philosophy, and so ever since I moved profession, to do philosophy I looked for sort of a framework from which making sense of my two careers, as well as my two different ways of looking at the world, right? As a philosopher and as a scientist, and I think that Sellars actually provides a pretty much perfect ready-made sort of framework.

And I would actually go as far as saying that actually Sellars to me, may help make sense of what the whole point of modern philosophy actually is and that may be going further than even maybe you want to go, but I think there is something to be said there on that behalf, and you know of course no individual thinker has ever had the last word ever. So I’m sure there are things that that will need to revise and improve upon, but I think that Sellars contributions are really ideas that ought to be taken seriously and read more widely now, which is why we have this conversation to begin with.


Yeah I would say, I mean tell me if you think this is maybe part of the reason, it's part of the reason for the revival of fortunes of Sellars and particularly this piece, is because people have become increasingly frustrated with the seeming intractability of the reduction program, and they’re looking for other ways, and the sort of the appeals to superveiniance have seemed less than satisfying, in so far as they really don't say very much. Other than that, you know, one thing supervenes or another, if you were to replace one particle by particle, you would wind up with the same thing, which doesn't say very much about the relationship between the two.

No in fact it says very little, and so I think you're right that one of the problems here, is that on the one hand again as a scientist, you know if you were to tell me, well this conversation that we're having is made possible by the laws of physics, and it's really a bunch atoms you know swinging around, and I’ll say yeah sure of course, but that tells me nothing about the conversation, it tells me nothing about you as a person, or about me as a person or as professional philosophers or what we're talking about.

So yeah, in a sense that's true, I would say at this point it’s trivially true, but it's not helpful at all, and so the question is how do you reconcile as you know the scientific view or image as Sellars puts it with the evolving understanding of the world, we have as some particularly thinking human beings, so perhaps we should start with…




____________________ The “manifest image” vs. the “scientific image” _____________________
- https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=6m42s


Yeah why don't you go ahead and tell me how you see the difference, so that the major distinction that this paper makes, and then we'll link to the paper obviously, that Sellars makes between what he calls the manifest image and the scientific image, and then you want to give your account of what you think it is and if I agree entirely I'll just nod and if I think that something needs to be added I'll say so afterwards.

Well actually we have a quote from Sellars himself it’s very short and then we have a short commentary immediatly following that quote that you can find in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Then I’ll tell you what I think about it

Okay sounds good.

So the quote from Sellars is:
The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
[1]
Thus, philosophy is a reflectively conducted higher-order inquiry that is continuous with but distinguishable from any of the special disciplines, and the understanding it aims at must have practical force, guiding our activities, both theoretical and practical.
[2]

So I take this to mean that what Sellars was aiming at and he thought the point of philosophy was, you know modern philosophy, is to develop a sort of a stereoscopic vision, where we can see simultaneously and integrate in a good way, you know satisfactory way, the scientific image and the manifest image.

Which means that even though Sellars was a naturalist, he said explicitly that when it comes to understanding the natural world, well that science is the only game in town, that’s it, there’s nothing else that can replace it.

But that does not mean that one can do a useful reduction or elimination of concepts, such as normativity, you know meaning and things like that. Most concepts have to stay, not in the sense that there are some kind of mystical, you know hanging around above or beyond science or you know whatever people sometimes seem to think. But just in the sense that they are irreducible to the scientific discourse, we simply cannot do without them and we should not try to do without them, and the way to proceed in our understanding of the world is to keep these two views in mind. And therefore I would say the aim or a major aim of philosophy is you know to see how these two things hang together.

You know how is it that every new discovery of science, what kind of import does it have on our manifest image because manifest image does changed over time, you know we don't have the same image today in the 21st century that people had you know a thousand years ago.


Yes that's right, that's right.

But at the same time, you know we are human beings, we're limited in understanding, we want to understand things and so to get the idea that we can eliminate somehow, talk of meaning and purpose and normativity, and all that kind of stuff in favors of talk of atoms and neural-fibers and things like that is just nonsense. And I think that is what Sellars is saying and then I'm completely on board. What’s your take?

Yeah so on, we probably in order to do this well, we need to sort of give the definition of each for him because it's important to note that he emphasizes that the manifest image is not unscientific, meaning that in the sense that it's not it's not necessarily un-rigorous or even it does not necessarily preclude things like enumerative induction, right? I mean he specifically talks about, he says that “the manifest image is subject to empirical refinement,”

Right

And so he calls it under the heading of “correlational induction.” He says what really distinguishes the scientific image from the manifest image, is that there is nothing in the manifest image that corresponds to the scientific images use of theoretical entities. In other words you're right that the manifest image changes, but one way in which it does not change, is that it does not change by way of the introduction of theoretical entities and theoretical concepts in the way that it does in the scientific image, right?

Yes that’s right.


And so I don't want people to think that the manifest image is just an ordinary folk view of the world.

No.

It includes a lot of philosophy for one thing,

Yes

It includes a lot of what we would call, let's say casual social science, in the sense and I would even argue maybe that if you took social science, about half of it is working in the manifest image and then the other half is at least trying to work in a scientific image.

Yeah I think that's right, and in fact one of the reasons, so I found this other thing, right at the end of the article, which I thout was interesting, it says that Stellar studies are dominated by a clash between the right-wing Selarsians and left-wing Selarsians and it’s interesting what the distinction is.

So the right wing is exemplified by people like the Churchland’s, Ruth Milligan, J Rosenberg, these are people who emphasize Sellers scientific realism and nominalism, while the left-wing is people like Rorty and McDowell and random who emphasize instead that Sellars insistence on the irreducibility and sociality of rules and norms.

And I can't believe I'm going to say this, but i find myself closer to the Rortian angel.


Yeah we're on the left wing aha!

And I can say this honestly, as somebody who doesn't actually have a lot a lot of sympathy for Rorty, I think that you know Rorty went over the deep end towards the end of his career, with too much weird stuff about rejecting philosophy itself and pragmatism that wasn’t really pragmatism.

But nonetheless, I think he's definitely closer to what I think is a sensible interpretation of Sellars, than the Churchland’s, I mean the classic example of the Churchland’s approach to things, is that eventually neuroscience would allow us to do away with talk of mental states and pain and things like that, because pain really is “you know the firing of C-fibers and things like that.”

Well no, pain isn't really the firing of C-fibers, C-fibers are the material biological basis, by which we feel pain, but pain is a subjective experience that is typical of humans and other animals and not of anything else. And that needs to be described on its own terms and the two terms, in fact going back into, this is the perfect example I think of the stereoscopic vision, as a scientist, particularly as a biologist, I can easily switch between these two versions and say; “oh! I'm in pain,” I have the subjective state and that description is meaningful, it need not to be eliminated, in fact it cannot be eliminated. I cannot talk sensibly…


And there's certainly all sorts of modes of discourse, in which that's the way you have to talk about it, in order for the discourse to make sense, right?

Exactly.

Where talking about it in the scientific language so to speak, would makes no sense in the kind of conversation you're engaged in and that's why I think it's important to note that one of the things he notes about the manifest image, and I actually think this is at its heart, I mean people focus on the point about theoretical entities, and I think that's important because I think that is a very distinctive way in which science does its business, that is sometimes defining. But I think that really the more important element of the manifest image, that distinguishes it from the scientific one, is that the manifest image includes people and their point of view in it.

Yes.

In other words, it's not just about the world from a neutral description, from a neutral vantage point, it's about the world as represented by people, all right? And that's why a world that has normativity in it, that has agency in it. In the neutrally described world of science, there is no agency, that dryer, there is no normativity to me and are no values.

That's right and I think that’s why, the tension there I think comes out, still out of the fact that even though other scientists, even today in the 21st century suffer from physics envy. And so the physics has been, since Galileo and Newton, you know the paragon of science, and yes it is a great science, is a great approach to reality, but it is in fact the furthest away from the subjective point of view, from the normative point of view and so on and so forth. What biology gets closer and then definitely the social sciences get right there, and that's why we have a plurality of Sciences, that's why we're not going to do away with the social sciences and reduce it to biology and then when we’ve got just biology reduce it to physics, that project to me is a non-starter, it makes no sense.

“Norms are not reduced away in Stellars naturalism…” and it’s important to remember that he is in fact a naturalist, he does accept the scientific image, doesn’t question it, doesn’t reject it, he’s not a mysticist, you know nothing like that. “He accommodates normativity, not as a basic ontological feature of the world, but whether as a conceptually irreducible indispensable aspect of the distinctively human activity, that ground’s those human activities,” so that I think is a very reasonable way of looking at them. [2]


I agree

Right, and the more I think about it, the more it bothers me that it isn’t painfully obvious to others, there are others like the Churchland’s and even Dan Dennet…

---------------------------------

References

1. Sellars thesis – PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE OF MAN
- http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsPhilSciImage.pdf
Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Wilfrid Sellars
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
Norms are not reduced away in Sellars’s naturalism; he accommodates normativity, not as a basic, ontologically independent feature of the world, but rather as a conceptually irreducible, indispensable aspect of distinctively human activity grounded in the collective institution of principles and standards. We will return to the question of norms later in this article.
----------------------------


Automatic transcript from 17:53
https://youtu.be/1g1AGMYcT8k?t=17m52s

or even on your blog that I fight with all the time yeah or a hundred people but I really get you have to tell me off for being mean to because i don't have you stoic got patience um yeah but you know on the other hand is kind of subtle right i mean it's kind of especially if you were brought up in a very sciency way of looking at things right um you don't and you know i think also once you want to make a mistake the part that you write about it not being fundamental it's not fundamental optically right but it is fundamental in another sort of way right and in other words and maybe that way is a little hard to articulate in that um look I mean you you can't go below it and if you'll be talking about what you were talking about right that's that's why the quote that I just mentioned uses the way a reusable irreducible as opposed to show me that yes these is the bottom level of beasts course not the bottom of the logical level we always read the bottom of electrical energy to this corn is right and neutrinos in general whatever the hell please agree you know today as opposed to tomorrow what basic auth illogical level that is very illogical but at the level of these scores and the level of understanding there are some things there simply are irreducibly conceptually that you're not going to be able to replace talk of pain with neurobiology and you're not gonna be able to displace talk of valuing and normativity with fundamental physics not even in principle this isn't a question of oh well we're not able to do it Yeah right sure we'll get there no there it makes no sense to even think about the fact that you could possibly do something yeah yeah and that's because I mean I would argue that that's because all of these notions are only intelligible when one looks at the world from the point of view of agents right and and so and so because you can't talk about social reality let's call it that okay we conclude agents and agency and thus norms and values you can't talk about the but from points of view um it's simply you are no longer than talking about those things anymore and so you know if you want to talk on geologically you know you know an accent you know you wonder whether there are elements of sort of social reality they're not ontological irreducible beyond a certain point as pipes right i mean once you get once you get below the certain point all you can do is is give a lesbian animistic account of so for example i could give an atomistic account of the motor movements that are involved in my arms coming together like this and my adopting a certain posture all right but I couldn't give that account of praying right yeah right yeah right and so and so there is something irreducible there and I don't know that it's just explanatory irreducible right Oh once you get below a certain level the thing you were talking about isn't there anymore right the app isn't there anymore maybe that's the difference between an action and an event right all right right yeah I idea what you're saying I the reason I don't want to go is very same disagree sorta logical possibility to reduction ontological to meet over action because then then you need to actually situate very circle is what what do you mean by ontological right so I talking about entities that you talked about you know what is it is that that's going on there and I don't think we need you that is in order to block the what I would water with consider the scientific moves which is no no everything can be right we're actually at least in theory to science and scientific and emphasizing image right way this way back so let me go back for a second one of the reasons i find sellers analysis interesting is because it finally makes sense for me what is it really bothered me about sciences right i mean other than there are sort of attitudinal aspects of sciences that bother me right this reduces of cocky you know attitude of which i am dissolved in the end of all and should not a diet is that you're having doing anything interesting and sean's with that but that's a psychological thing that just annoyed me and as edgy boy does is estoy guy try not to get annoyed by thing but that's not the problem i'm trying to figure out i'd be to go for a while what if waste actor is it conceptually the father meets about about a scientist and I think sellers provides the answer there that is what science scientism is trying to do or one way to on the same scientists is as the program that eliminates the manifest image in favor of the scientific image right so that's that's one way to I think that very constructive way actually to understand what science admit and I can point out what people actually really do want to do that an effort to replace the replace in other words to eliminate the manifest image and just time to sign the vehement dress correct and there are people work on board clearly with that program at least in philosophy people like the churchland that we already mentioned chair Oliver not rose I'll children are ya yeah i think the identity point especially off the latest things that we might want to talk about that consciousness is an illusion right in the country whose that illusion kind of thing so all the people are funded us seem to be on board at this point with that kind of program and what's not difficult to find you know physicist like Lawrence Krauss and and I'm sure sure yet get out the same the same bored chillin and I think about it sell it finally made it clear to me what is it other than the psychological aspect that bothered me about it saying that I think there are very good reasons and some of several which are still out by selling himself for white that program is nonsensical you're not going to happen is not what you want you don't want to have that sir things not possible to that you go out the year joining and prayer and your system is that you that if you go get some sort of in the vending to those your objective perspectives you cannot make sense of what's going on I say they go for most humanities yes all action I would actually say that that's what distinguishes an action from a mere event that an action is something that can be understood from a person's point of view right that makes sense from a point of view so I can get a description of every action that I do you have a better day doing a procedure day right and from an entirely physical perspective or biological perspectives you will or both right and those are the third person independent you know you young with all kind of thing not subjective basically description the problem and those descriptions once month said I we interpret my actions doing a day through the physics then those actions are no difference at all from anything else is going on in universe from the planet earth rotating around the Sun from a rock falling down the tritak from an animal doing something or a plane doing something at Daisy's no difference now is the scientific a machine capable of recovering the difference between me in Iraq then I say it's a problem yeah and more substantially it's a problem because all the elements are significant to me and value that attracted the action attached to it insofar as it is an action not insofar as it is right you know what makes something an active aggression yeah is the fact that it involves me representing you a certain way right if not that it involves atoms colliding in various in various fashions and you could have to to it to things that are identical in terms of the underlying events but one of which is an act of aggression and one which is not right and and unless people want to say none of that matters all right right and I don't think that they do I mean I mean that's that's the thing that bothers me the most is that these are people these are anarchists who want to get rid of law and morality and and and all these chosen they think that they're just going to be able to have it all I mean this is harris right yeah this sort of glib I can just get rid of all these things but i still can cheat civilization yeah right now so they don't they want they seem to be one wanting to get rid of the manifest image it no service did it change the lecture exercise cheaply yeah yeah intellectually but then keep all the all the stuff that actually matters in that they do they like so even at an example oh you know being interested as a biologist for a long time into the research on the neurobiology and physiology of falling in love right so they don't do things these talk about oh well this is the same of influential psychologist who is Rusted in Stony Brook University L&T sure i think is her name who wrote love been interesting articles about oh you know what happens people keep you guys they fall into certain sort of famous first nobody lost which you have to almost indiscriminately toward it but you know a bunch of different people run ten days those are romantic involvement which becomes you know that i say one particular person and then if things keep going you have sort of attachments into the long-term relationships and all that stuff in those places are marked by different hormonal profile certain sister woman alleged rain when you are you experiencing you know sort of sexual attractions or somebody a different settlement is letting your brain or threats eyes in your brain pattern when you're in a romantic space or when you're an abduction graph now these are interesting to me as a biologist and actually it does help me make sense of the manifest image of what it is that people find why is it people find attractive certain people white people you know phone are no less but if I wait so five sang-ho then falling in lab or having a romance or attachment is just and that or all or mono profiles there i will be making a huge mistake because it isn't it is under in part physiologically by those or more pop-ups but if i take out if i strip out the social context the fact that there are social expectations about how to behave with other people and the fact that there are values are involved in formation lab or knock on your logical person the fact that adds or subtracts meaning from your life and all that's all of that is entirely missing from a neurophysiological under you know study or and what happens will be performed well that does not mean that the science is somehow irrelevant of course this relevant I like to know you know that's part of the story but def are the story is not the full story and if I think that a beautiful story then I'm missing at you the more important part you know because you know all you're saying after all the use of the day all that isn't Fisher and others are saying is that look when people have certain emotions those emotions are underpinned by some kind of brain function you know their brain machine one locate your body and your brain I don't have a motion superhero right so that's the consequences are being embodied or any mean I need subject I mean I mean that's that's a constant to the fact that actions involving ents right and that love involves physical interaction between people but how else would it go what makes it love is the way those people represent those physical actions exactly as physical event and what the significance of those representations are from which is why although I do I mean you're right of course that the biological thing do tell you something about the manifest thing yes I would say that that the reasons the person tells you tell you a lot more right about the love about the love not about the underlying correct physics physiology but about the love itself uh you know the person what the person tells you the reasons why he loves this person I think tell you a lot more than the hormonal account um I would agree that doesn't the way which we talk and explain what happened to up to our own subjective self and the doors condition is much more informative yeah and then the underlying conduct as much as i said as i find interesting that started about i think it's fascinating and actually it just makes me amazing just how bizarrely complete complicated the biological world is right i mean value namba um i don't want to say it almost always seems to me a little rude goldberg like but but but yeah i don't i don't know me you you're the scientist is biology actually efficient oh that's a good question maybe with this because whenever people give me arguments from designed for god i said the thing looks like a fucking Rube Goldberg to me that's and actually I think a lot of biologists I've come to see natural selection existence or recite topic here but but a lot of islands come to have come to see natural selection nanas optimizing process but as what he called it what they call a savvy sizing problems process Bernama so I'm shooting happened this is famous paper that came out of decades ago now that was presenting natural selection as a tinkerer as something that the process that takes whatever materials are about around in the in the garage and put them together in some kind of creative when I give you a Rube Goldberg and a lot of work a lot of times yeah yeah well looking for another one other we can do another one on that that's again let's do it good necessarily here's another quote that I want to protect our work to our living it and dick and get your take on this is against from the Stanford treatment of the topic which is very good as as usual at all significant so he says sellers treatment of mental a sixth concept and also inspired eliminated philosophies of mine such as those expired five churches the idea of those of that approach is that if folk psychology is like a theory then like any theory it could be superseded and replaced by a better theory as scientific psychology and neuroscience progresses but several himself Simmons not a scientific be spread out later that I yourself crucially was unmoved by this idea because the concepts of folk psychology is therefore the manifest image but not focused solely or even maybe principally on the description and explanation of phenomena the language of agency to which we will shortly returning the article is indispensable and cannot be replaced by the language of an offensive experience so first I thought is something that when I studied the church one in graduate school I saw that ought to consider folk psychology a similar or equivalent to attend it's clearly not yes it does have an explanatory aspect to it sure in that sense it has a component that is kind of really like but unlike scientific theories that's not the major work that it does now when you're working in terms of meaning and good night and it isn't yeah not your bday d internal support you know to be fair to the Churchill's though this is something that folks cycle effects folk psychology enthusiasts that partly brought on themselves because I think people like folder yeah how to try to take intentional psychology and claim that it is causal explanatory in the manner of a sea of matter of theory and so then of course it's not a surprise that you know people who are even more science fetishistic than voter is are going to come along as they well but you know and point out to all these flaws um but look I mean this cooks to an even deeper argument that's been going on that sort of been swaying back and forth you know prior to the reasons so when I mean my reasons I mean when we give when somebody gives a reason for an action right yeah or a reason for a belief were not typically understood as causes right because the influence done was victims died yes it was Davidson who in his very influential papers on action argue that reasons our causes yeah and that then led us into this into this theory that were in now in which reasons are taking as cause enough reasons or causes and the explanations that we give of actions when we cite reasons have to be taken as quasi scientific explanations now in my opinion as I wrote in this essay that you very kindly linked you and your in your blog it might have been that just lends you right in the freewill problem billion and you're not going to get out of it and I think that it's a mistake to go there to begin with I don't think that actions are events or at least they're not just events and I don't think reasons it causes in the census or at least they're not just causes maybe their causes maybe that causes at all but once you once you do I don't see I don't see how you get out of it and you accelerate something that sellers warned against in the paper and you set you use the word stereo stereoscopic now several times and that's crucial to him he says what you must never do is try to piecemeal introduce concepts on the scientific image into the manifest image you can put you could hold them up as to hold here are two ways of looking at the world and ask yourself what is the relationship between the two right what you can't do is start Rick and I think that maybe seventy percent of contemporary analytic philosophy is piecemeal importing the little pieces of the scientific image so bringing the notion from classical mechanics of a cause into psychological explanations what in the sense of giving a reason for something you did well is exactly that sort of move and it gets you nothing but trouble I agree I be that was the crucial mistake that say it's still reverberating analytical philosophy and they're cleaning to a lot of things that are to you here yeah she's actually then it own classification these kind of thing is in flames math instead of chess yes yes yeah it's a lot of very very clever arguments because you know the church lens and a bunch of the other people that we mentioned it these are really seriously few philosophers you're very clever and all that stuff except at all most of what they're saying you do relevant because they start out with the wrong move they write made a wrong turn and all of that stuff is playing schmess which is this game according to dennis that injures like shed except for one little different and i was like it except for those people right right right and that's why you know nope look nobody really doesn't believe that people have agency yeah we got it that's evident from the way we speak and behave towards each other um but but i think that it's not a few philosophers that are doing it down sizes there is a danger because we are increasingly I don't know if you agree with this but we are increasingly more and more trying to medical eyes behavior yeah in a way that seems to me at least could run the risk of inducing a culture wide loss of belief in genuine agency now I don't know if you think that that's true no I actually am worried about that as well that's one of the consequences of the scientistic confusion of defense of the sanctity versus those estimates I mean just just a specific example he's all these articles which fortunately sdx against asylums a bit but there was a period of several years during which she couldn't open a magazine or a newspaper or a website without looking at a neural scan of a brand and what I like your brain on whatever right mobile thinking in a letter self and it was a lot of pushing that being a lot of pushing until until then later on a little bit of boy sex but yeah there's a couple of books out there now on whatever Google miss there is an insect to be there in number neurosciences themselves as being too I'm trying to push sciences and rightly so scientists will have to or else it will never get pushed back on I mean no one's going to listen to the philosophers who are pushing back right yeah so but Dad that's boring because then it does present things that people also this is your brain on Malati let's say a mole thingy oh so that means that i'm not doing them all thinking migraine like what right what do you talking on your plane is part of the sea geological machinery by way of which you thinking we should I owe you my friend you can't blame the damned brain boy right that's right I thought you should put a brain riding a bicycle and a brain to the beautiful or rain on writing in that way in job let's say oh you know the brains of things right happy to be something like the tweak the Twinkie defense I was told at some point if I had oh I I had sugar a high sugars that maybe behave in a certain way and now it's becoming of the brain defect lady said in Virginia discipline of noodle noodle wall or yes we serve it's terrifying and part of me that's terrifying is that actually I think the law is one of the areas that has resisted making this mistake let me give you an example i'm thinking of the legal notion of insanity is not a medical notion right so what gets you out of legal responsibility is not simply being mentally ill it is showing that one has an inability to recognize the difference between right and wrong or how that is an intentional characterization right that is not a biological or a medical characterization and I think it's telling that the law least as it currently stands says you are not removed from responsibility simply for having an illness for your body having an illness if you have to be able to show that you the person don't recognize a certain crucial distinction right right now that strike when your glides in three such a thing is you diversify perfectly now I want to go back for a second young to the thing of constant talk of code alley may be waiting please that should be another a separate you know my take notes on all these there are reasons and causes yeah yeah but we think causes in cotati more general because as you know economy the big field in philosophy skeleton metaphysics and epistemology it's lots of stuff about bring about what I'd ever since take you and actually as it turns out recently I was working on working on a presentation and a book chapter that I have to do in Vienna and a couple of months ahead of meeting about our theoretical biology and philosophy and the meeting in the finite causality in biology hmm and so I had to reread some of the basic computer on causality and it's a mess it's a complete mess I mean they do it there's so many different philosophical kinda literature in biology isn't no it was in philosophy yeah I invited is usually don't don't think too much about it is they just use the word cause instead of our intuitive fashion and you know they say you know this is phenomenon called that or that best kind of action by Epicure organism cause that sort of thing yeah but but in body philosophy there are many many different can't accounts of causality so which are completely decoupled as far as i can tell from anything is going on in sciences i mean a scientist would recognize some of many of these accounts as anything to do what they're doing and instruction it struck me as probably what's going on there is that causality actually refers to a multiplicity of things and that should be kept distinct and we should be using different words for it which is I think why there is so much confusion about what Audrey's and causes or not reasons are certainly explanation for behaviors it is might cause you mean something like explanations run that it's a cause right and it's not a hard on a sense of a cause in classical mechanics exactly yeah you know one of the popular on the standing of causes which actually have a lot of sympathy for is clearly based on physics and it is that a car no cause of interaction basically is transferring of a conserved quantity from one object to another right so controlling these are things like energy momentum things like that right so yeah I would say that if I thank my my fists on my desk at this moment what is happening there you are causing a noise and causing a preparation and yes that cause can be described very nicely as a transference of conserved quantity physical quantity from my body to the desk absolutely that is very very good description what's going on now try to translate that to [Music] the reason or cause while Massimo last night went out to dinner after the movie is because you wanted to enjoy a nice meal with is containing now that these are in terms of conserved quantities that somehow changed the system set up your hot appetizer no that's not started writing talking about right but now does that mean that might might behavior than what time cause that you know they had no reasons for doing why they of course I did but those reasons are actually not describable in terms of causality understood in that particular physical eastway there's not to say of course this was something non-physical going on well as you know i'm right of it I don't believe in nothing and even though a lot of the underlying motor movements involved we're cause and precisely x rays you're talking about but the acts of going to the dinner was not caused in that way and unless you want to say there are no active going to dinner right we all anything almost wonder whether it's right it's an illusion right I know you can't even believe people say these things I'm they're doing things yeah right I mean which brings us to Dennis so he hands it mean that struck me I would I la this is this recent book that Dennis wrote that Stefan was used by thomas nagel in the new york review of books which we will link to i don't think it's behind a paywall so linked to not anymore yeah yeah yeahs anything out but none more so you know Nagel didn't let me finish the decorator named Anita two liters and characters as far as I'm breathing Englishman I actually think they're both very interesting philosophers I think there are seriously he's taking for different reasons and when I my red-hot needles live- own latest book which I'd rather thought was mine and cosmos staff night you know you should usually lead to yeah well you know that one also struck me as soon as we meet guiding in short of the opposite way we've said it yeah did you do reviews huh well did you know any d informal comes with something about economics what book sorry um I think that I think actually one good way of understanding that the discrepancy in differences in the opposition debt and nagle get that is something i wanted to always be we buy it what they're doing but some eccentric a negative too far on the way that you need to be my best image and juice category scientific one and then if you got to the opposite he's going home full reductions at this point on the scientific image and surely going or big meeting at illusion much of the my document but what Dad was doing in these ratings book is no sir articulating the idea that consciousness is quoting voice an illusion nah what the hell do you mean by that so some other commenters already what was your are you going you're already annoying it's only the first day which is what I behind so if you just get out today and he wasn't even a post as you know it's please the links to articles that are interested to be four weekend and yet that generated a lot of comments already some of those come in two number lines of well let's see what what does you need to have an illusion so our conclusion broadly speaking can be simply a misperception what's going on right well that's not I think then if not what then it means because it's not an interesting at all in its an existing it up because it level everything pretty much becomes an illusion you know so right now for instance i'm looking at you through a computer center or not is a screen of my ipad but instead of course all this is an illusion is no electrons that are put together in a particular way by the underlying mechanism of the ipad right so it's early i'm looking in an illusion nah not for us and the turkey but they're not helpful at all nobody would be you know first you don't get any explanatory inside when you say that i am putting in an illusion right now and second of all nobody would disagree yes of course in that sense it is illusion but it's not useful what then it actually says comes out but by by way of one of these analogies he says that consciousness is a lot like the little icons of folders that you have on a desktop computer right so those fogies so you look if you hear user of a computer you have to alter it is on your desktop and you click on them make open just a detail or folders and then inside quote of course they stop then you can look at and transfer copy and sorry for price but of course that really is an illusion there is nothing like a folder there is no inside there's no inside it's not an actual container right that's a future the micro scanner did nothing inside and therefore death really qualifies as a solution rather useful engine because this is something that allows me to move things and do operate with thing on my computer but that really needed that illusion but to say that consciousness is like death ah to quote a famous phrase by John CR o ye of the Chinese room is like that denying the data the data there is that of course discussion is unconscious right now but I work hard to explain right good that's what we need to explain right we say that that's an illusion because you know really what it is it some kind of neural machinery at the bottom you're not saying anything you're really not selling anything that I don't know yes of course they stuff you've been dodging me you're just saying I refuse to explain it is what you're really saying right you're saying well I understand them through the noodle machining the bomb that that makes cause responsible questioning how does that work and you don't say you don't explain how it works by telling me that nut we did not happen criminally of course we've talked earlier about the church one approach to pain in terms of C fibers right telling me that pain is really the key fibers of my neurons unifying it's not making pain go away right the pain is an illusion I have an undeniable irreducible experience of pain from the systems are conducted and that's not going to go away it's not an illusion it's a perfectly valid description of a psychological state of a subjective thing if you tell me yes but what's really going on is a certain particular am in a particular way of buying your your friend responding a stripped away I would say that is not what is really going on that is a part of what's going on that is nice that's a physical job straight yeah it makes it possible for me to feel pain yeah yeah so let me ask you this then because this is this ring goes back to sellers on all that really talk now it's a way of expressing the view that the scientific image is primary right and sellers at least the general consensus is that sellers thought that in an important way the scientific image was primary but nonetheless insisted on ultimately a synoptic vision that included both decide to begin to manifest image now I don't think it matters as much what sellers meant by it is what we can do with it from it seems to me impossible to say that one or the other is primary in any absolute sense it seems to me that the only what Noah sent you can make of anything being primary is relative to a set of interests or relative to a frame of reference yes are you of that view also do you think there is a way with the scientific image is properly primary no I don't think that and I think that actually feathered from what I understand me I know Celtics color of course but for my name is anything that so it wouldn't say that thanks big image is from earning an absolutely what it is is if your goal is to understand at bottom how the world works mechanistically then the way to go is the scientific image if I want to know how galaxies are put together how human beings evolved how you know anything else physical happen in the world then yes scientific image is the way to go because that gives the a better this could not be correct prescription music so it's still a description you know we can forget that science is still human activity and therefore expounded by human rationality humanity set accommodations and joins of work but nonetheless if I if my goal is to understand how the world works yes that then ascended image experiment but in my goal is to interact with other people in a meaningful way to run my life to make priority publish priorities should have chilled relations to engage in normative statements and so on sport then the scientific image is not from it tells me better little it just gives me dekha information you know like like the examples of neural nets or the depends in my brain that are going on when I fall in love yes but that's secondary that's just a curiosity now you know it's not like I go out with somebody in a developer relationship and I keep thinking well you know certain normally might by finding my brain right now that that tells me I'm zessica god that's just a proper thing it's like not a trick but it's but it's a conversation then we can have over dinner but that is no in no way influences the way in which I interact whether people so if the goal is to interact with other people to choose goal for your life to figure out where meaning in your life goes comes from an earnings report but you always need an online service up that makes the Fabbrica you apply then the manifest images primary not the not the same thing anyone so that's why I'd like the idea of you serious coming vision yeah now it is another way which I would probably but he actually makes some sense to me here's no language to thank for article put it on he said that the distinction between the scientific image in the and the manifest image is analogous to can't distinguish between the phenomenal and aluminum yeah and and he's currently because square cos would say oh yeah but we don't have any activism all right but that's not the sense in which it's analogous I don't think I mean it's analogous instance of the numeral in the world as not not as represented right perfect write it the world is editing itself without the presentation right from a neutral point the way we put it from a non personal point of view from from a nerd neutral perspective yeah yeah yeah and I find that very useful I find that very very very appealing again because and and especially as a scientist philosopher I really appreciate these these idea of the gyroscopic region because I do like the idea that I'm able to switch back and forth and then integrate also whenever it's necessary whenever it's useful the two images because that we were saying earlier sometimes the scientific image studies that influence the manifest imagery we change our view of the world game part as a result of major insight from science right i mean what was that science witnesses demonstrated that the universe is much much larger than we thought you know that people doctors people forget that galaxies will not discovered guilty early part of the th century which is amazing it really sucks how recent right most of our understanding is right i mean i mean yeah right now but we thought there was just one galaxy yeah we thought it was just one the university was the Milky Way galaxy yeah what is or isn't the bus but you know these nebulae they were called nebulae originally and they were thought to be in trouble active object it was only in the ER be executed the s with research by Hubble and others that it was it became clear that bees actually actually very very far apart from them and they are exacting just like our Milky Way now Dan seems to me that change or should change my money says because now I feel part of a much broader cotton was much larger cotton with and let that change the way in which I saw broadly think about things I mean is the way you represent everything it seems to me I mean I didn't even affect the significance you attached to things and and and and yeah no I agree with that um do you think it goes it away though I mean maybe some of the reason why people think and I'm not not talking about crude science isthmus but more thoughtful people think that there's a certain product primacy to the scientific image is because while the scientific image can inform the manifest image perhaps they think that it can't go the other way then the manifest image does not ever inform the scientific image now what do you think of that I mean do you think the manifest image ever informs the scientific image oh that's a good question I'm not sure to be that the money regiment informed offended image as much as it was constrained on it and then I agree with that right yeah find that in doing so it yeah he said he says look without a manifest image there would be no scientific in with showed a sense but geologically and methodologically the Thunder begin which is dependent upon the manifest on but it purports to give an independent account of all of reality on at least all the reality from no perspective so to speak I mean one way it happened yeah look so I think let me do one example let's take one them again which is you know the quintessential example of specific image of the world but quantum world is so real that in fact it is very weird but we have trouble and because of that weirdness we have trouble understanding it beyond sir the calculation right there's a big hole there's a whole school of thought in fundamental physics that sort of excuse any interpretation of quantum mechanics and is referred to often jokingly as the shut up and calculate school right that no quantum mechanics is a mathematical theory and all you need to do with it is to plug in the numbers and you very precise that these interpretations are innocent fantasies right they don't get into a metaphysics yeah they're unnecessary and their shirt them that's how incredible don't you think oh that that seems credible don't you think it is credible now the problem is that a lot of times you just are not happy with that why are they not happy with that because they want to understand the world not just to describe it right science isn't just in the business of making positions that they experimental around you can use that word a gate that we were just all do statistics no one depending on your lying providing online but not as I say what they want to bring it into the manifest image they want to be able to understand they want to be able to represent it exactly yeah why we get all these discussions about you know metaphors don't get many world and wait a more simply Oh life is both a particle and our way that is an attempt to reduce the scientific image to the manifest image be laughing we can think about particle their metaphors ma'am every we can think about particles invisible way we can't think about what light actually excited neither particle Norway it's something else if you don't think that behaviors think they resizing based no clearly understood way from political perspective but it is the metaphor we are we keep insisting in using metaphors we cannot do we all miss the country people do science right exact science is an activity right we cannot do without matter where I needed in science right right so jeans at blueprints for instance which I think it's actually a flawed at the port button but again it I better go because it's really in today so you're you're you're saying that if you wanted to see what science would look like if it wasn't being in some ways interpreted in terms of the manifest image it would just be pure statistics as what you're saying okay yeah oh you're mad yes that's right there will be no interpretation if you make a great hero in a sense what you're doing is to bring you have to bring in metaphorical language and why is that because we're human being we want to same thing we don't just want to describe things we run you know we don't have an instrumental do you assign on the guest sciences over to Metro Court but we want to understand you don't get you know when I got into science as a young you know kid growing up in Delhi I didn't get into it because so i could make very precise predictions about things in the world I got into it because i went to understand but to make sense of things yeah but when they stand make sense means that to some extent you have to reconcile the Sun is a big project that involves interpreting it involves interpreting the material that you're that you're young interpretations we can do on in terms of this mighty fast image yeah I how we think that's right there yeah yeah so I generally the only way to do science and the other way was perhaps machines do them right but you got so when a computer when we hand over tasks to a computer so but you know still we interpret the we interpret birthday what's his computer then tells us right I mean it's still size for someone right yes and I think they recorded at us it is true that I think it's very sad to the scientific image constantly implanted and hopefully update the my best image I don't take the money much does the same but what the money best image does it constrains the way in which we make sense of the scientific yeah it's done it in a different way I mean they both affect each other i mean the side of again which actually contributes information yep the manifest image can make use of although it has to be careful not to do these sort of piecemeal importing of a notions like mechanistic causality over into human action let's say right but what amount of has divx does is this the frame in which we interpret everything that we talked that we
Unofficial librarian of vegan and socialist movement media.
PhiloVegan Wiki: https://tinyurl.com/y7jc6kh6
Vegan Video Library: https://tinyurl.com/yb3udm8x
Ishkah YouTube: https://youtube.com/Ishkah
User avatar
NonZeroSum
Master of the Forum
Posts: 1159
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:30 am
Diet: Vegan
Location: North Wales, UK

Re: The Scientific Image of Man

Post by NonZeroSum »

discover my time science and I get a meaningful talks yes exactly and we cannot do without it because we're human beings and you mean want to understand things and put meaning to it yeah your meaning understanding valleys all the stuff those are part those are good then the money sexy much not the Ben typically oh maybe yeah I sentencing I realize now and I don't know whether even you realize that because you say it so often if you realize that this was the point and that is I can't say how many times I've heard you say to people that size of the human activity right and I wonder if you realize the full like residents of what that meant when you say that the people right i mean not not until nine on until i started thinking in terms of me so it has not become one of my favorite philosophers this paper is just amazing for that reason yeah yeah it helped me make sense of a lot of things that i had some kind of intuitions about it and I felt some discomfort about buddy I was missing the gentle over oceans or different framework you no sense of them and now I think I had them and I hope that work our listeners and you know will actually go out and check it Lisa the Stanford article and Eve not as you say the paper in our but I don't think it's unreadable for and if you read it with the Stanford article I think you can probably get through it pretty well well this is really fascinating this is really good stuff Massimo and I appreciate it very much and we have to postpone a taping we're going to do another one that's been with Massimo and another person's sky Cleary on the subject of Stoicism and existentialism we had some cousin and I'm going to be moderating as a disembodied voice so you won't have to look at this go away um but one of my students actually told me it was cute which sort of bolstered me a little bit cuz she was quite attractive morning but uh so that we're going to be doing that on Monday yeah I know a Tuesday Tuesday excuse me oh yeah oh and going up that'll double go up not too long after this one and your book is cut is going to be out May nice man I'm so that's how do you start go pre order it yeah damn it oh my god I check the other day how are you how do preorders yeah it would number one new release in Greek and Roman philosophy so on Amazon so yes if people keep pre-ordering inventing we'll keep it there we shall get me I'm told by my publishers that pre-orders now are actually crucial to make or break it for book because if they did not preorder then people stopped paying attention it gets high on the rankings reviewer staying at achievements are talking about it and sort of yeah yeah great well we'll be sure to talk about that when it comes out alright Massimo take care of yourself you too all right talk soon
Unofficial librarian of vegan and socialist movement media.
PhiloVegan Wiki: https://tinyurl.com/y7jc6kh6
Vegan Video Library: https://tinyurl.com/yb3udm8x
Ishkah YouTube: https://youtube.com/Ishkah
User avatar
NonZeroSum
Master of the Forum
Posts: 1159
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:30 am
Diet: Vegan
Location: North Wales, UK

Re: The Scientific Image of Man

Post by NonZeroSum »

Ray Brassier's reply in Nihil Unbound; Enlightenment and Extinction


The Apoptosis of Belief[1]

1.1 The manifest image and the myth of Jones: Wilfrid Sellars


In ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’,[2] Wilfrid Sellars proposes a compelling diagnosis of the predicament of contemporary philosophy. The contemporary philosopher is confronted by two competing ‘images’ of man in the world: on the one hand, the manifest image of man as he has conceived of himself up until now with the aid of philosophical reflection; on the other, the relatively recent but continually expanding scientific image of man as a ‘complex physical system’ (Sellars 1963a: 25) – one which is conspicuously unlike the manifest image, but which can be distilled from various scientific discourses, including physics, neuro-physiology, evolutionary biology, and, more recently, cognitive science. But for Sellars, the contrast between the manifest and the scientific image is not to be construed in terms of a conflict between naive com-mon sense and sophisticated theoretical reason. The manifest image is not the domain of pre-theoretical immediacy. On the contrary, it is itself a subtle theoretical construct, a disciplined and critical ‘refinement or sophistication’ of the originary framework in terms of which man first encountered himself as a being capable of conceptual thought, in contradistinction to creatures who lack this capacity. To understand why Sellars describes the manifest image as a sophisticated theoretical achievement in its own right – one as significant as any scientific achieve-ment since – it is necessary to recapitulate Sellars’s now celebrated ‘myth of Jones’.

In his seminal ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’,3 Sellars proposes a philosophical fable about what he calls ‘our Rylean ancestors’, who have acquired language but who lack any conception of the complex mental states and processes we take to be the precondition for any sophisticated cognitive behaviour. When these Ryleans attempt to explain a human behaviour such as anger, their resources are limited to a set of dispositional terms – e.g. ‘bad-tempered’ – which are opera-tionally defined with regard to observable circumstances – such as ‘ranting and raving’ – these in turn being deemed sufficient to explain the observable behaviour – in this case, ‘rage’. But these operationally defined dispositional concepts severely restrict the range of human activities which the Ryleans can explain. They lack the conceptual wherewithal for explaining more complicated behaviours. It is at this stage in the fable that Sellars introduces his ‘myth of Jones’. Jones is a theoretical genius who postulates the existence of internal speech-like episodes called ‘thoughts’, closely modelled on publicly observable declarative utterances. These ‘thought-episodes’ are conceived as pos-sessing the same semantic and logical properties as their publicly observ-able linguistic analogues, and as playing an internal role comparable to that of the discursive and argumentative role performed by overt speech. By postulating the existence of such internal processes even in the absence of any publicly observable speech-episodes, it becomes possible to explain hitherto inscrutable varieties of human behaviour as resulting from an appropriately structured sequence of these internal thought-episodes. Similarly, Jones postulates the existence of episodes of internal ‘sensation’ modelled on external perceptual objects. ‘Sensations’ are understood as instances of internal perception capable of causing cognition and action even in the absence of their externally observable counterparts. Following a similar pattern of reasoning, Jones goes on to postulate the existence of ‘intentions’, ‘beliefs’, and ‘desires’ as rela-tively lasting states of individuals which can be invoked as salient causal factors for explaining various kinds of behaviour: ‘He pushed him because he intended to kill him’, ‘She left early because she believed they were waiting for her’, ‘He stole it because he desired it’. The nub of Jones’s theory consists in establishing a relation between persons and the propositions which encapsulate their internal thought episodes: Jones teaches his peers to explain behaviour by attributing proposi-tional attitudes to persons via the ‘that’ clauses in statements of the form: ‘He believes that …’, ‘She desires that …’, ‘He intends that …’. Though not yet recognized as such, these propositional attitudes have become the decisive causal factors in the new theory of human behav-iour proposed by Jones; a theory which represents a vast increase in explanatory power relative to its behaviourist predecessor. All that remains is for individuals to learn to use this new theory not merely for the purposes of explaining others’ behaviour, but also to describe their own: one learns to perceive qualitatively distinct episodes of inner sensation just as one learns to understand oneself by ascribing beliefs, desires, and intentions to oneself. The theory is internalized and appropriated as the indispensable medium for describing and articulating the structure of one’s own first-person experience. The philosophical moral to this Sellarsian fable consists in Jones’s philosophically minded descendants coming to realize that the propositional attitudes stand to one another in complex logical relations of entailment, implication, and inferential dependency, and that Jones’s theory exhibits a structure remarkably akin to deductive-nomological models of scientific explanation. For these philosophers (and they include Sellars himself), Jones’s theoretical breakthrough has provided the key to uncovering the rational infrastructure of human thought; one which is crystallized in the sentential articulation of propositional attitude ascription. ‘Beliefs’, ‘desires’, ‘intentions’, and similar entities now become the basic psychological kinds to be accounted for by any theory of cognition.

But what is the ontological status of these psychological entities? It is striking to note that though Sellars himself attributes a functional role to them, this is precisely in order to leave the question of their ontological status open. According to Sellars, ‘[Thought] episodes are “in” language-using animals as molecular impacts are “in” gases, not as “ghosts” are in “machines”’(1997: 104). Thus the point of the Jonesean myth is to suggest that the epistemological status of ‘thoughts’ (qua inner episodes) vis-à-vis candid public verbal performances is most usefully understood as analogous to the epistemological status of, e.g., molecules vis-à-vis the publicly observable behaviour of gases. However, unlike gas molecules, whose determinate empirical characteristics are specified according to the essentially Newtonian lawfulness of their dynamic interaction, ‘thoughts’ in Sellars’s account are introduced as purely func-tional kinds whose ontological/empirical status is yet to be determined.

Accordingly, for Sellars, the fundamental import of the manifest image is not so much ontological as normative, in the sense that it provides the framework ‘in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provides the ambience of principles and standards (above all those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives’(Sellars 1963a: 40). Thus, the manifest image does not so much catalogue a set of indispensable ontological items which we should strive to preserve from scientific reduction; rather, it indexes the com-munity of rational agents. In this regard, the primary component of the manifest image, Sellars suggests, is the notion of persons as loci of intentional agency. Consequently, although the manifest image is a ‘disciplined and critical’ theoretical framework, one which could also be said to constitute a certain kind of ‘scientific image’ – albeit one that is ‘correlational’ as opposed to ‘postulational’ (Sellars 1963a: 7) – it is not one which we are in a position simply to take or leave. For unlike other theoretical frameworks, Sellars maintains, the manifest image provides the ineluctable prerequisite for our capacity to identify our-selves as human, which is to say, as persons: ‘[M]an is that being which conceives of itself in terms of the manifest image. To the extent that the manifest image does not survive […] to that extent man himself would not survive’ (Sellars 1963a: 18). What is indispensable about our manifest self-image, Sellars concludes, is not its ontological commit-ments, in the sense of what it says exists in the world, but rather its normative valence as the framework which allows us to make sense of ourselves as rational agents engaged in pursuing various purposes in the world. Without it, we would simply not know what to do or how to make sense of ourselves – indeed, we would no longer be able to recog-nize ourselves as human. Accordingly, Sellars, echoing Kant, concludes that we have no option but to insist that the manifest image enjoys a practical, if not theoretical, priority over the scientific image, since it provides the source for the norm of rational purposiveness, which we cannot do without. In this regard, the genuine philosophical task, according to Sellars, would consist in achieving a properly stereoscopic integration of the manifest and scientific images, such that the language of rational intention would come to enrich scientific theory so as to allow the latter to be directly wedded to human purposes.


1.2 The instrumentalization of the scientific image


It should come as no surprise then that the manifest image continues to provide the fundamental framework within which much contempo-rary philosophizing is carried out. It encompasses not only ‘the major schools of contemporary Continental thought’ – by which Sellars, writing at the beginning of the 1960s, presumably meant phe-nomenology and existentialism, to which we should add critical theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism – but also ‘the trends of contem-porary British and American philosophy which emphasize the analysis of “common sense” and “ordinary usage” […] For all these philosophies can be fruitfully construed as more or less adequate accounts of the manifest image of man-in-the-world, which accounts are then taken to be an adequate and full description in general terms of what man and the world really are’ (Sellars 1963a: 8). Despite their otherwise intractable differences, what all these philosophies share is a more or less profound hostility to the idea that the scientific image describes ‘what there really is’, that it has an ontological purchase capable of undermining man’s manifest self-conception as a person or intentional agent. Ultimately, all the philosophies carried out under the aegis of the manifest image – whether they acknowledge its existence or not – are united by the common conviction that ‘all the postulated entities of the scientific image [e.g., elementary particles, neurophysiological mechanisms, evolutionary processes, etc.] are symbolic tools which func-tion (something like the distance-measuring devices which are rolled around on maps) to help us find our way around in the world, but do not themselves describe actual objects or processes’ (Sellars 1963a: 32). This instrumentalist conception of science is the inevitable corollary of any philosophy that insists on the irrecusable primacy of man’s manifest self-understanding. Thus, although they are the totems of two otherwise divergent philosophical traditions, the two ‘canonical’ twentieth-century philosophers, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, share the conviction that the manifest image enjoys a philosophical privilege vis-à-vis the scientific image, and that the sorts of entities and processes postulated by scientific theory are in some way founded upon, or deriva-tive of, our more ‘originary’, pre-scientific understanding, whether this be construed in terms of our ‘being-in-the-world’, or our practical engage-ment in ‘language-games’. From there, one may or may not decide to take the short additional step which consists in denouncing the scientific image as a cancerous excrescence of the manifest image (this is a theme to which we shall have occasion to return in chapters 2 and 3).

To his considerable credit, Sellars adamantly refused this instru-mentalization of the scientific image. For as he pointed out, the fact that the manifest image enjoys a methodological primacy as the originary framework from which the scientific image developed in no way legiti-mates attempts to ascribe a substantive primacy to it. In other words, even if the scientific image remains methodologically dependent upon the manifest image, this in no way undermines its substantive auton-omy vis-à-vis the latter. In this regard, it should be pointed out (although Sellars does not do so) that to construe scientific theory as an efflorescence from the more fundamental phenomenological and/or pragmatic substratum of our manifest being-in-the-world is to endorse a form of philosophical reductionism with regard to science. Yet unlike its oft-criticized scientific counterpart, the tenets of which are fairly explicit, even when it cannot carry out in fact the reductions it claims to be able to perform in principle, partisans of this philosophical reduc-tionism about science conspicuously avoid delineating the conceptual criteria in accordance with which the structures of the scientific image might be reduced to the workings of the manifest image. Unsurprisingly, those who would instrumentalize the scientific image prefer to remain silent about the chasm that separates the trivial assertion that scientific theorizing supervenes on pre-scientific practice, from the far-from-trivial demonstration which would explain precisely how, for example, quantum mechanics is a function of our ability to wield hammers.

Sellars never succumbed to the lure of this crass philosophical reduc-tionism with regard to the scientific image, insisting that philosophy should resist attempts to subsume the scientific image within the manifest image. At the same time, Sellars enjoined philosophers to abstain from the opposite temptation, which would consist in trying to supplant the manifest image with the scientific one. For Sellars, this cannot be an option, since it would entail depriving ourselves of what makes us human. However, it is important to note that the very terms in which Sellars formulated his hoped for synthesis between the mani-fest and scientific images continue to assume the incorrigibility of the characterization of rational purposiveness concomitant with the Jonesean theory of agency. Yet it is precisely this model of rational-purposive agency – along with the accompanying recommendation that the scientific image should be tethered to purposes commensurate with the workings of the manifest image – which some contemporary philosophers who refuse to sideline the scientific image are calling into question. These philosophers propose instead – obviously disregarding the Sellarsian edict – that the manifest image be integrated into the scientific image. While for Sellars it was precisely the manifest image’s theoretical status which ensured its normative autonomy, and hence its ineliminability as an account of the nature of rational agency, for Paul Churchland, an ex-student of Sellars who has explicitly acknowl-edged the latter’s influence,4 the manifest image is revisable precisely because it is a corrigible speculative achievement that cannot be accepted as the definitive account of ‘rational purposiveness’. Indeed, for Churchland, there is no guarantee that the latter notion indexes anything real independently of the particular theoretical framework embodied in the manifest image. Though the manifest image undeni-ably marked a significant cognitive achievement in the cultural devel-opment of humankind, it can no longer remain insulated from critical scrutiny. And while the adoption of the propositional attitude idiom in subjective reports seems to have endowed the manifest image with a quasi-sacrosanct status, lending it an aura of incorrigible authenticity, this merely obscures its inherently speculative status. Thus, Churchland invites us to envisage the following possibility:
[A] spontaneous introspective judgement is just an instance of an acquired habit of conceptual response to one’s internal states, and the integrity of any particular response is always contingent on the integrity of the acquired conceptual framework (theory) in which the response is framed. Accordingly, one’s own introspective certainty that one’s mind is the seat of beliefs and desires [or ‘purposes’] may be as badly misplaced as was the classical man’s visual certainty that the star-flecked sphere of the heavens turns daily.
(P. M. Churchland 1989: 3)
Where Sellars believed stereoscopic integration of the two images could be achieved by wedding the mechanistic discourse of causation to the rational language of intention, Churchland proposes to supplant the latter altogether via a neurocomputational enhancement of the scientific image which would effectively allow it to annex the manifest image, thereby forcing us to revise our understanding of ourselves as autonomous rational agents or ‘persons’. However, as we shall see below, Churchland’s attempt to annex the manifest image to the scientific image is vitiated by a fundamental epistemological tension. Like Sellars, Churchland emphatically rejects the instrumentalist conception of science con-comitant with the ontological prioritization of the manifest image: he claims to be a scientific realist. But as we shall see, his realism about sci-ence is mined at every turn by his pragmatist construal of representation.


1.3 Cognitive catastrophe: Paul Churchland


In his now-canonical 1981 paper ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’,5 Churchland summarizes eliminative materi-alism (EM) as:
the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phe-nomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by com-pleted neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our intro-spection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more pow-erful by far than the commonsense psychology it displaces, and more substantially integrated within physical science generally.
(P. M. Churchland, 1989: 1)
Unsurprisingly, the claim that commonsense psychology may be false has tended to provoke alarm, especially (though by no means exclusively) among philosophers who have devoted their entire careers to the task of integrating it into the ambit of natural science. Thus Jerry Fodor has remarked, ‘If commonsense intentional psychology were really to collapse that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of the species.’6 Since professional philosophers of mind are not generally known for their apocalyptic proclivities, the claim that one of their number might be harbouring the instrument of ‘the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of the species’ cannot but command our attention. Contemporary philosophy of mind is a domain of often highly technical controversies between specialists divided by allegiances to competing research programmes, but where the truth or falsity of the eliminativist hypothesis is concerned, the stakes would seem to transcend the bounds of this particular sub-discipline and to have an immediate bearing upon human culture at large. For what Churchland is proposing is nothing short of a cultural revolution: the reconstruction of our manifest self-image in the light of a new scientific discourse. What is at stake in EM is nothing less than the future of human self-understanding.

Churchland’s formulation of the eliminativist hypothesis [7] can be boiled down to four claims:

1. Folk-psychology (FP) is a theory, hence susceptible to evaluation in terms of truth and falsity.

2. FP also encodes a set of practices, which can be evaluated in terms of their practical efficacy vis-à-vis the functions which FP is supposed to serve.

3. FP will prove irreducible to emerging neuroscience.

4. FP’s neuroscientific replacement will exhibit practical as well as theoretical superiority over its predecessor.

Given these premises, Churchland cites three basic regards in which FP has shown itself to be profoundly unsatisfactory:

1. There are a significant number of phenomena for which FP is incapable of providing either a coherent explanation or successful prediction: e.g., the range of cognitive fractionation engendered by brain damage, the precise aetiology and typology of mental illness, the specific cognitive mechanisms involved in scientific discovery and artistic creativity.

2. FP is theoretically stagnant, it has conspicuously failed to develop in step with the rapidly accelerating rate of cultural evolution or evolve in accordance with the novel cognitive requirements imposed by advanced technological societies.

3. FP is increasingly isolated and anomalous with regard to the corpus of the natural sciences; specifically, it is conceptually irreducible to the emerging discourse of cognitive neuroscience.

Critics of EM have responded to each of these charges using a variety of argumentative strategies. They have denied that FP is a theory in the scientific sense and hence that it can be evaluated in terms of ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’, or indicted for its failure to explain anomalous psy-chological phenomena. They have denied that it is stagnant or anachro-nistic in the face of technological evolution or that it can be judged according to some superior standard of practical efficacy. Finally, they have challenged the claim that reduction is the only way of ensuring the integrity of natural science.8

Rather than recapitulate Churchland’s premises and the objections to them individually, I shall consider the EM hypothesis from four different angles: (1) the nature of Churchland’s neurocomputational alternative to FP; (2) the charge that EM is self-refuting; (3) the latent tension between Churchland’s allegiance to scientific realism and his irrealism about the folk-psychological account of representation; (4) the accusation that EM, and reductionist science more generally, is incapable of acknowledging the reality of phenomenal consciousness.


1.4 The neurocomputational alternative


Churchland defines FP in the following way:
‘Folk psychology’ denotes the pre-scientific, commonsense concep-tual framework that all normally socialized humans deploy in order to comprehend, predict, explain and manipulate the behavior of humans and the higher animals. This framework includes concepts such as belief, desire, pain, pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention, and so forth. It embodies our baseline understanding of the cognitive, affective, and purposive nature of people. Considered as a whole, it constitutes our conception of what a person is.
(P. M. Churchland 1998b: 3)
As we saw above, it was Sellars who provided the basis for Churchland’s characterization of FP as a quasi-scientific theory within which the notion of ‘personhood’ plays a central role. However, Sellars introduced propositional attitudes as functional kinds, leaving their ontological status deliberately indeterminate. But for Churchland, to attribute causal efficacy to functional kinds is already to have endowed them with an ontological status. What he considers problematic is not the func-tional role account of psychological kinds, but rather the premise that FP provides anything like a reliable catalogue of psychological functioning. Yet Churchland’s antipathy to the characterization of propositional attitudes as functional kinds stems not so much from an antipathy to functionalism per se but rather from a deep suspicion about the reliability of FP as a guide to the individuation of the salient psychological types. Thus, his own neurocomputational alternative to FP proposes a different approach to the task of identifying psycho-logical functions. By way of contrast to the ‘top-down’ approach to the study of cognition, for which linguistic behaviour is paradigmatic, Churchland champions a ‘bottom-up’ approach which seeks to ascend from neurobiologically realistic models of rudimentary sensory-motor behaviours to the more sophisticated varieties of linguistically mediated cognitive activity.

Consequently, Churchland proposes to replace FP, according to which cognition is conceived of as an intrinsically linguistic medium structured through the ‘sentential dance’ of propositional attitudes, with a new model drawing on the resources of connectionist neuro-science. According to this new paradigm, the internal kinematics of cognition find expression in activation patterns across populations of neurons, as opposed to sententially articulated structures, while its dynamics reside in vector-to-vector transformations driven by learned configurations of synaptic connection, as opposed to deductive inferences governed by relations of logical entailment from one sentence to another. Thus, while the brain’s basic unit of representation is the activation vector, its fundamental computational operation is the vector-to-vector transformation, as performed on those configurations of neuronal activation. Crucially, according to this paradigm, a ‘theory’ is no longer to be understood as a linguaformal system of propositions connected to one another by relations of logical entailment; it consists rather in a determinate partitioning of vector space into a manifold of prototypical divisions and sub-divisions relative to typically reiterated inputs.

Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize how, for all its claims to greater biological plausibility, this new ‘prototype vector activation’ (PVA) model of cognition remains a computational idealization. In this regard, it perpetuates the functionalist distinction between psychological types and their material instantiation. But where traditional functionalism modelled this distinction in terms of the difference between an abstract computational state (characterized in terms of some Turing machine state) and its biophysical instantiation, it is configured here in terms of the distinction between weight space and vector space. While the weight configuration uniquely determines the partitioning of vector space, only the latter is to be identified with the theory or conceptual scheme in terms of which a network represents the world. Thus it is by acquiring a determinate configuration in synaptic weight space that a brain comes to achieve a specific prototypical partitioning of its vector activation space. And it is this partitioning of vector space, rather than that configuration of synaptic weights, which provides the functional index for the theory in terms of which the brain represents the world. As Churchland puts it:
People react to the world in similar ways not because their underly-ing weight configurations are closely similar on a synapse-by-synapse comparison, but because their activation spaces are similarly parti-tioned. Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyn-cratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization.
(P.M. Churchland 1989: 234)
It should be remarked at this juncture that Churchland’s claims on behalf of this model’s greater degree of biological realism have not gone unchallenged. Churchland invokes a relation of ‘resemblance’ between these so-called neural networks and brain-structure without specifying what the relation consists in or what the criterion for ‘resem-blance’ might be. The putative ‘analogy’ between the units of a network and the neurons of a brain provide no guarantee that the network’s instantiation of a vector prototype will be isomorphic with the brain’s instantiation of a psychological type. Moreover, the unification of psychological categories remains autonomous with regard to the neurobiological level. John Marshall and Jennifer Gurd [9] have pointed out that pathology reveals fractionations of psychological functioning which provide constraints on the organization of cognitive function. Behavioural disorders index functional categories which are subject to different neurological instantiations – different physical aetiologies can engender identical cognitive disorders. So although cognitive function is undeniably related to neurological structure, it cannot be straightforwardly reduced to it. Thus while Churchland is undoubtedly right to emphasize the desirability of adopting a bottom-up approach to psychological research, he faces two difficulties.

First, the empirical ‘resemblance’ between brains and neural nets is no guarantee that the latter are inherently superior to other, less neuro-logically ‘realistic’ models of cognition. For it is the nature of the appropriate criterion for ‘realism’ that is in question here: should it be neurobiological? Or psychological? Churchland cannot simply assume that the two necessarily overlap.

Second, in the absence of any adequate understanding of the precise nature of the correlation between psychological function and neural structure, whatever putative resemblance might obtain between neural architecture and network architecture sheds no light whatsoever on the relation between the latter and the abstract functional architecture of cognition. Where network architecture is concerned, although some degree of biological plausibility is desirable, empirical data alone are not sufficient when it comes to identifying the salient functional character-istics of cognition.10

We will not pursue this issue further here. But we must now consider a still more damaging objection which is frequently raised against EM: that its very formulation is fundamentally incoherent.


1.5 The ‘paradox’ of eliminativism


Sellars was arguably the first philosopher to discern in the logical infra-structure of folk-psychological discourse, with its relations of inferential entailment, what has since been brandished as the emblem of FP’s irreducibility to neurobiological or physical explanation: ascriptions of belief and desire inscribe the explananda within a normative (conceptual) space of reasons which cannot be reduced to or encom-passed by the natural (material) space of causes. This supposed dis-tinction between the putatively ‘rational-normative’ character of FP discourse and the merely ‘causal-material’ factors invoked in reductive explanation has tempted many philosophers to attribute some sort of quasi-transcendental, and hence necessarily ineliminable status to the FP framework. Indeed, the notion that FP is necessarily ineliminable because it enjoys some sort of quasi-transcendental status motivates what is surely the most popular attempt at a knock-down ‘refutation’ of EM. Consider the following argument: the eliminative materialist claims to deny the existence of ‘beliefs’ (and of ‘meaning’ more generally). But to do so he must believe what he claims (or ‘mean’ what he says). Thus his belief that there are no beliefs is itself an instance of belief, just as the intelligibility of his claim that there is no such thing as meaning itself relies on the reality of the meaning which it claims to deny. Consequently, the proponent of EM is guilty of a performative contradiction.11 It is important to see why this attempt to indict the eliminativist of self-contradiction is dubious from a purely logical point of view and otherwise suspect on broader philosophical grounds. From a purely formal point of view, the logic of the EM argument cer-tainly appears to conform to the familiar structure of proof by reductio ad absurdum: it assumes Q (the framework of FP assumptions), then argues legitimately from Q and some supplementary empirical premises (which we shall describe below) to the conclusion that not-Q, and then concludes not-Q by the principle of reductio. There are no glaring or obvious anomalies here. Anyone wishing to denounce eliminativism as self-refuting using this stratagem should be wary lest they find themselves unwittingly indicting all arguments by reductio on the grounds that they too begin by assuming what they wish to deny. For the ‘self-refuting’ objection against EM to be sound, its scope would have to be such as to successfully invalidate all argument proceeding by reductio as necessarily incoherent. Although this may turn out to be possible (even if it is extremely doubtful), there is certainly nothing in the attempted refutation as it stands to even hint at how this could be done. Consequently there is every reason to suspect the fault lies in the ‘self-refuting’ argument against EM, rather than in EM’s argumentation by reductio per se (cf. P.M. Churchland 1998b: 28–30).

In fact the crucial sleight of hand in this attempted ‘refutation’ of EM occurs in the second step, specifically the claim that ‘the elimina-tivist’s belief that there are no beliefs is itself an instance of belief, just as the intelligibility of his claim that there is no such thing as mean-ing itself relies on the reality of the meaning which it claims to deny’. But the intelligibility of EM does not in fact depend upon the reality of ‘belief’ and ‘meaning’ thus construed. For it is precisely the claim that ‘beliefs’ provide the necessary form of cognitive content, and that propositional ‘meaning’ is the necessary medium for semantic content, that the eliminativist denies. Thus Churchland’s claim is not that there is no such thing as ‘meaning’ but rather that our spontaneous experi-ence of ‘understanding’ what we mean in terms of propositional atti-tude FP does not provide a reliable guide for grasping what Churchland calls ‘the underlying kinematics and dynamics’ of meaning. According to Churchland’s neurocomputational alternative to FP,
[A]ny declarative sentence to which a speaker would give confident assent is merely a one-dimensional projection – through the com-pound lens of Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas onto the idiosyncratic surface of the speaker’s language – of a four or five dimensional ‘solid’ that is an element in his true kinematical state. Being pro-jections of that inner reality, such sentences do carry significant information regarding it and are thus fit to function as elements in a communication system. On the other hand, being subdimen-sional projections, they reflect but a narrow part of the reality projected. They are therefore unfit to represent the deeper reality in all its kinematically, dynamically, and even normatively relevant respects.
(P. M. Churchland 1989: 18)
We shall see later just how troublesome this invocation of a ‘normative’ aspect to these multi-dimensional dynamics will prove to be for Churchland. Nevertheless, at this juncture, what should be retained from this particular passage is the following: Churchland is not simply claiming that there is no such thing as meaning tout court – a misleading impression admittedly encouraged by some of his more careless formulations – but rather that ‘beliefs’ (such as ‘that FP is false’) and ‘propositions’ (such as ‘FP is false’) are rendered possible by representations whose complex multi-dimensional structure is not adequately reflected in the structure of a propositional attitude such as a ‘belief’, and whose underlying semantics cannot be sententially encapsulated. The dispute between EM and FP concerns the nature of representations, not their existence. EM proposes an alternative account of the nature of representations; it is no part of its remit to deny that such representations occur.

Ultimately, the question-begging character of the ‘self-refuting’ objection to EM becomes readily apparent when we see how easily it could be adapted to block the displacement of any conceptual frame-work whatsoever by spuriously transcendentalizing whatever explanatory principle (or principles) happens to enjoy a monopoly in it at any given time. Patricia Churchland provides the following example, in which a proponent of vitalism attempts to refute anti-vitalism using similar tactics: ‘The anti-vitalist claims there is no such thing as vital spirit. But if the claim is true the speaker cannot be animated by the vital spirit. Consequently he must be dead. But if he is dead then his claim is a meaningless string of noises, devoid of reason and truth.’12 Here as before, the very criterion of intelligibility whose pertinence for understanding a given phenomenon – ‘life’ in this case, ‘meaning’ in the previous one – is being called into question, is evoked in order to dismiss the challenge to it. But just as anti-vitalism does not deny the existence of the various phenomena grouped together under the heading of ‘life’, but rather a particular way of explaining what they have in common, EM does not deny the reality of the phenomena subsumed under the heading of ‘meaning’ (or ‘consciousness’), but rather a specific way of explaining their characteristic features.

Obviously, the key claim here is that the possibilities of ‘intelligibility’ (or ‘cognitive comprehension’) are not exhaustively or exclusively mapped by a specific conceptual register, and particularly not by that of supposedly intuitive, pre-theoretical commonsense. In this regard, Churchland’s point, following Sellars, is that the register of intelligibility commensurate with what we take to be ‘pre-theoretical common-sense’, specifically in the case of our own self-understanding, is itself theoretically saturated, even if long familiarity has rendered its speculative character invisible to us. Though science has immeasurably enriched our understanding of phenomena by way of techniques and resources quite foreign to commonsense, as those resources begin to be deployed closer to home in the course of the investigation into the nature of mind, they begin to encroach on a realm of phenomena hitherto deemed to have lain beyond the purview of science, specifically, the phenomena grouped together under the heading of ‘meaning’, which for many philosophers harbour the key to grasping what makes us ‘human’. The issue then is whether, as these philosophers insist, science is constitutively incapable of providing a satisfactory account of what we mean by ‘meaning’, or whether it is the authority of our pre-scientific intuitions about ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningfulness’ that needs to be called into question. In debates surrounding EM, it is important to dissociate these broader issues concerning the question of cognitive priority in the relation between the scope of scientific explanation and the authority of our pre-scientific self-understanding from the narrower issues pertaining to EM’s own specific internal consistency. As we shall see, the vicissitudes of the latter do not necessarily vindicate those who would uphold the former.
Unofficial librarian of vegan and socialist movement media.
PhiloVegan Wiki: https://tinyurl.com/y7jc6kh6
Vegan Video Library: https://tinyurl.com/yb3udm8x
Ishkah YouTube: https://youtube.com/Ishkah
User avatar
NonZeroSum
Master of the Forum
Posts: 1159
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:30 am
Diet: Vegan
Location: North Wales, UK

Re: The Scientific Image of Man

Post by NonZeroSum »

.


1.6 From the superempirical to the metaphysical


The most serious problem confronting Churchland’s version of EM resides in the latent tension between his commitment to scientific realism on one hand, and his adherence to a metaphysical naturalism on the other. To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to appreciate the two-tiered relation between Churchland’s PVA paradigm and the linguaformal or folk-psychological accounts it is intended to displace. On the one hand, Churchland explicitly or empirically posits the explanatory excellence of the PVA model on the grounds of what he calls its ‘superempirical virtues’: conceptual simplicity, explanatory unity, and theoretical cohesiveness (P.M. Churchland 1989: 139–51). On the other hand, that excellence is implicitly or metaphysically pre-supposed as guaranteed a priori by an adaptationist rationale for the congruence between representation and reality.

Thus, although Churchland’s PVA model of cognition remains explicitly representational – with propositional attitudes being supplanted by vector prototypes – it is one wherein representation no longer operates under the normative aegis of truth-as-correspondence. In lieu of truth, Churchland proposes to discriminate between theories on the basis of these super-empirical virtues of ontological simplicity, conceptual coherence, and explanatory power:
‘As I see it then, values such as ontological simplicity, coherence and explanatory power are among the brain’s most basic criteria for recognizing information, for distinguishing information from noise’ (P. M. Churchland 1989: 147).13
But as a result, Churchland is obliged to ascribe degrees of neurocomputational adequation between representation and represented without reintroducing a substantive difference between true and false kinds of representation. For by Churchland’s own lights, there are no substantive, which is to say ontological, differences between theories: all theories, including FP, consist in a specific partitioning of a brain’s vector activation space.14 Yet there is a noticeable tension between Churchland’s insistence that theories are to be discriminated between solely on the basis of differences in degree of superempirical virtue, rather than in representational kind, and his conviction that the PVA paradigm which reveals this underlying neurocomputational structure common to all representations exhibits such an elevated degree of superiority vis-à-vis FP in the realm of superempirical virtue as to necessitate the latter’s elimination. As a result, Churchland’s case for eliminativism oscillates between the claim that it is entirely a matter of empirical expediency,15 and the argument that seems to point to the logical necessity of eliminating FP by invoking the PVA model’s intrin-sically metaphysical superiority. It is this tension between elimina-tivism’s avowals of empirical humility and its unavowed metaphysical presumptions which we now propose to examine in greater detail.

On the one hand, since ‘folk-semantical’ notions as ‘truth’ and ‘reference’16 no longer function as guarantors of adequation between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, as they did in the predominantly folk-psychological acceptation of theoretical adequation – which sees the latter as consisting in a set of word-world correspondences – there is an important sense in which all theoretical paradigms are neurocom-putationally equal. They are equal insofar as there is nothing in a parti-tioning of vector space per se which could serve to explain why one theory is ‘better’ than another. All are to be gauged exclusively in terms of their superempirical virtues, viz., according to the greater or lesser degree of efficiency with which they enable the organism to adapt successfully to its environment. In other words, if all ‘theories’ are instances of vector activation, and if the PVA paradigm – to which all other theoretical paradigms reduce according to Churchland – dispenses with the notion of theoretical ‘truth’, then we are obliged to stipulate that theories be judged pragmatically in terms of the greater or lesser degree of adaptational efficiency with which they enable the organism to flourish:
If we are to reconsider truth as the aim or product of cognitive activity, I think we must reconsider its applicability right across the board […] That is, if we are to move away from the more naïve formulations of scientific realism, we should move in the direction of pragmatism rather than positivistic instrumentalism […] it is far from obvious that truth is either the primary or the principal product of [cognitive] activity. Rather, its function would appear to be the ever more finely tuned administration of the organism’s behaviour.
(P. M. Churchland 1989: 149–50)
Thus, Churchland is perfectly explicit in explaining why he considers the PVA paradigm of cognition to be ‘better’ than its folk-psychological rivals, and he proposes a precise formula for gauging theoretical excel-lence. Global excellence of theory is measured by straightforwardly pragmatic virtues: maximal explanatory cohesiveness vis-à-vis maximal empirical heterogeneity purchased via minimal conceptual expendi-ture. One theory is ‘better’ than another if it affords greater theoretical cohesiveness along with greater explanatory unity while using fewer conceptual means to synthesize a wider assortment of data.

But the problem for Churchland is that it remains deeply unclear in precisely what way the extent of an organism’s adaptational efficiency, as revealed by the degree to which its representation of the world exhibits the superempirical virtues of simplicity, unity, and coherence, could ever be ‘read off’ its brain’s neurocomputational microstructure. In what sense precisely are theoretical virtues such as simplicity, unity, and coherence necessarily concomitant at the neurological level with an organism’s reproductively advantageous behaviour? Churchland simply stipulates that the aforementioned virtues are already a consti-tutive feature of the brain’s functional architecture without offering anything in the way of argument regarding how and why it is that a neural network’s learned configuration in synaptic weight space is necessarily constrained by the imperatives of unity, cohesion, and simplicity. Indeed, Churchland frequently adduces empirical data that would seem to imply the opposite: viz., his discussion of the ways in which a network can stop learning by becoming trapped within a merely local minimum in its global error gradient (P. M. Churchland 1989: 192–4) Perhaps Churchland’s reticence in this regard is a matter of caution. For in order to make a case for the neurocomputational necessity of superempirical virtues, Churchland would need to demon-strate that the latter are indeed strictly information theoretic con-straints intrinsic to the vector coding process, as opposed to extrinsic regulatory considerations contingently imposed on the network in the course of its ongoing interaction with the environment. However, in pursuing this particular line of argument, Churchland immediately finds himself confronted by a choice between two unappealing alternatives.

The first alternative follows inescapably from the fact that, by Churchland’s own admission, the process of informational transduction via which the brain processes incoming stimuli is physically demar-cated by the boundaries of the organism. Beyond those boundaries lies the world. Thus, if Churchland tries to integrate the superempirical virtues into the neurocomputational process by pushing the brain’s coding activity out beyond the physical boundaries of the organism so that they become constitutive features of the world, he is forced into the uncomfortable position of having to claim that the physical world is neurocomputationally constituted. Since for Churchland perception and conception are neurocomputationally continuous, the result is a kind of empirical idealism: the brain represents the world but cannot be conditioned by the world in return because the latter will ‘always already’ have been neurocomputationally represented. We are left with a thoroughgoing idealism whereby the brain constitutes the physical world without it being possible to explain either how the brain comes to be part of the world, or indeed even how the world could have originally produced the brain.

Alternatively, instead of trying to achieve a neurocomputational reduction of the superempirical virtues by projecting the brain’s cod-ing activity out onto the environing world, Churchland can abjure the notion of an absolute physical boundary between world and infor-mation as already coded by the brain’s prototypical vector partitions in order to allow the physical world to reach ‘into’ the brain, thereby allowing a pre-constituted physical reality to play an intrinsic role in neurological activity. But in widening the focus of his epistemological vision in this way, Churchland will be obliged to abandon the repre-sentationalist dualism of brain and world, and to forsake his deliberately neurocentric perspective in order to adopt a more global or meta-neurological – which is to say, meta-physical – perspective. Clearly, however, such a shift threatens to undermine the categorical distinction between processor and processed, network and world, which is funda-mental to Churchland’s account. Since this distinction underlies Churchland’s commitment to neurobiological reductionism, and underwrites all his arguments for eliminativism, we cannot expect him to find this second alternative any more appealing than the first.

Thus, Churchland cannot effect a neurocomputational reduction of superempirical virtue without engendering a neurological idealism, and he cannot reintegrate the neurocomputational brain into the wider realm of superempirical virtue without abandoning elimina-tivism altogether. Nevertheless, let us, for the sake of argument, set the former of these two difficulties aside for the moment and suppose that Churchland were to manage a successful but non-idealizing reduction of superempirical virtue. The trouble then is that in arguing that sim-plicity, unity, and coherence are constitutive functional features of the brain’s neuroanatomy, Churchland is but one slippery step away from claiming that brains represent the world correctly as a matter of evo-lutionary necessity, i.e. that they necessarily have ‘true’ representa-tions. Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of claim that Churchland had sworn to abjure: ‘Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs, so long as the organism reliably exhibits reproductively advantageous behavior’ (P. M. Churchland 1989: 150).

Consequently, everything hinges on whether the superempirical virtues are a precondition or a by-product of the organism’s ‘reproduc-tively advantageous behavior’. Churchland implies the former, on the basis of what appears to be a latent brand of neurocomputational ideal-ism, whereas all available empirical (i.e. evolutionary) evidence seems to point to the latter, and hence towards a less neurocentric account of representation. From the perspective of the latter, that successful net-works do indeed tend to exhibit these superempirical characteristics as a matter of empirical fact is uncontroversial, but it is a fact about cog-nitive ethology, which is to say, a fact which makes sense only within the macrophysical purview of evolutionary biology and in the context of the relation between organism and environment, rather than a fact obtaining within the microphysical or purely information-theoretic ambit of the brain’s neurocomputational functioning. That the macro-physical fact has a microphysical analogue, that the ethological imper-ative is neurologically encoded, is precisely what we might expect having suspended the premise of an absolute representational cleavage between the micro and macrophysical dimensions, and accepted the extent to which these must remain not only physically conterminous, but bound together by reciprocal presupposition.

Thus, considered by itself, the neurocomputational encoding of super-empirical virtue is not enough to vindicate Churchland. For Churchland’s account is predicated on the idealist premise that neurocomputational representation is the necessary precondition for adaptational success, that neurocomputational function determines evolutionary ethology. Consequently, and in the absence of some non-question-begging account as to how macrophysical facts pertaining to evolutionary ethology ultimately supervene on microphysical facts about the brain’s neuro-computational functioning, it seems that the superempirical virtues Churchland invokes in order to discriminate between theories must remain extra-neurological characteristics, characteristics which reveal themselves only in the course of an ethological analysis of the organ-ism’s cognitive behaviour within the world, rather than via a neuro-logical analysis of the brain’s microstructure.

Accordingly, the tension between eliminativism’s avowals of empiri-cal humility and its latent metaphysical pretensions reveals itself when it becomes apparent that the pragmatic or superempirical virtues in terms of which Churchland proposes to discriminate between theories cannot be accounted for exclusively in neurocomputational terms. The superempirical virtues seem to exceed the neurocentric remit of the neurocomputational economy. And it is in trying to accommodate them that Churchland begins unwittingly to drift away from the rigidly empirical premises that provide the naturalistic rationale for elimina-tivism towards a metaphysical stance wherein the PVA model begins to take on all the characteristics of a metaphysical a priori. As a result, the tenor of the argument for the elimination of FP shifts from that of empirical assessment to that of metaphysical imperative.

For presumably, were Churchland correct in maintaining that the superempirical virtues of ontological simplicity, conceptual coherence, and explanatory power are, as he puts it, ‘among the brain’s most basic criteria for recognizing information, for distinguishing informa-tion from noise’, then a conceptual framework as baroque, as obfusca-tory, and as allegedly incoherent as FP would have been eliminated as a matter of evolutionary routine, and Churchland would have been spared the trouble of militating so brilliantly for its displacement. If superempirical virtues were already endogenously specified and intrinsic to the brain’s neurocomputational microstructure, then it would appear to be a matter of neurophysiological impossibility for an organism to embody any theory wholly lacking in these virtues. Paradoxically, it is the eliminativist’s supposition that the former are intrinsically encoded in the brain’s cognitive microstructure that ends up considerably nar-rowing the extent for the degree of superempirical distinction between theories, ultimately undermining the strength of the case against FP. Thus, although Churchland’s trenchant critique of philosophies which insist on transcendentalizing FP as an epistemo-logical sine qua non is well taken, it would seem that, whatever else is wrong with it, FP cannot be as chronically deficient in the superem-pirical virtues as Churchland requires in order to render the argument for its elimination incontrovertible – certainly not deficient enough to explain why Churchland insists on ascribing such a dramatic degree of superempirical superiority to the PVA paradigm.

Thus, even as the PVA paradigm continues to insist that all theories are neurocomputationally equal inasmuch as all display greater or lesser degrees of superempirical distinction, EM insinuates that the PVA paradigm is nevertheless more equal, more pragmatic, more superem-pirically virtuous than all previous folk-psychological paradigms of cognition. What underlies this claim to radical superiority? Given that Churchland seems to accept Quine’s thesis that theories are underde-termined by empirical evidence (P. M. Churchland 1989: 139–51), the superiority of the PVA paradigm cannot be held to reside in any pre-cisely quantifiable increase in the efficiency with which it enables the human organism to process information. For according to Churchland, there can be no absolute – which is to say, theory neutral – measure of superiority when we compare the degree of adaptational efficiency bestowed upon organisms by the theories they incorporate. By trans-forming the data it purports to explain, every theory shifts the empir-ical goalposts as far as adaptational efficiency is concerned.17 Thus, it is perfectly possible to envisage the possibility of ‘subtler’ or more ‘refined’ versions of folk-psychological theory endowing organisms with all the additional discriminatory capacities, conceptual enhance-ments, and explanatory advantages of the PVA paradigm favoured by Churchland.18

But if this is the case, it suggests that, for Churchland, the putative superiority of the vector activation paradigm is ‘meta-empirical’ in a sense which is more than pragmatic and quite irreducible to those super-empirical virtues in terms of which Churchland discerns theo-retical excellence: a sense which is meta-physical rather than merely super-empirical. This is to say that Churchland holds the PVA paradigm to be irrecusably superior to all available linguaformal alternatives sim-ply because he implicitly supposes that it alone is capable of furnishing a genuinely universal explanation of cognition that encompasses all others. Thus, all theories are equally instances of vector activation, but the vector activation theory of vector activation is more equal because it is revealed as the precondition for all the others. Accordingly, the PVA paradigm is at once the latest in a historically embedded empirical sequence, and the latent precondition which explains the veritable character of the succession of paradigms encompassed in that sequence. The PVA paradigm is the universal prototype of which all other models of cognition are merely instantiations. In Hegelese, we might say that the latter are instances of vector coding in themselves, but not yet in and for themselves. For Churchland explicitly claims that he has found the veritable material instantiation of what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’19: this is precisely what a network’s prototypical partitioning of vector activation space is. And we should also bear in mind that a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense – just as in Churchland’s meta-physically transformed sense – is as much a metaphysical ‘factum’ as an empirical ‘datum’. Thus, a network’s prototypical vector configuration is at once an empir-ical fact, and the precondition for anything’s coming to count as an empirical fact, for it is what predefines the parameters for all perceptual judgement. In other words, Churchland’s neurocomputational para-digm is at once empirically given as an intra-historical datum, but also, and in the very same gesture, posited as an a priori, supra-historical factum that furnishes us with the supposedly universal explanatory precondition for our ability to recognize and explain the historical sequence of paradigm shifts for what they were: changing configura-tions in vector space.20

Ultimately then, Churchland cannot provide a coherent account of the relation between network and world because he lacks any resources for establishing the correlation independently of his prototype vector paradigm. A model of representation cannot be at once a representation of the world and what establishes the possibility of that representation. It cannot represent the world and represent that representation. In Churchland’s work, this dichotomy becomes inescapable in the tension between his determination to be a realist about scientific representa-tion while remaining a pragmatist about the genesis of scientific repre-sentation in general. But this is not just a problem for Churchland; it vitiates the variety of philosophical naturalism which draws its account of the nature of science from one or other variety of evolutionary adaptationism. As Fodor rightly insists, the success of adaptationist rationales in explanations of organic functioning does not provide a legitimate warrant for co-opting the former in order to account for cognitive functioning. [21]

The trouble with Churchland’s naturalism is not so much that it is metaphysical, but that it is an impoverished metaphysics, inadequate to the task of grounding the relation between representation and reality. Moreover, Churchland’s difficulties in this regard are symptomatic of a wider problem concerning the way in which philosophical naturalism frames its own relation to science. While vague talk of rendering phi-losophy consistent with ‘the findings of our best sciences’ remains entirely commendable, it tends to distract attention away from the amount of philosophical work required in order to render these find-ings metaphysically coherent. The goal is surely to devise a metaphysics worthy of the sciences, and here neither empiricism nor pragmatism are likely to prove adequate to the task. Science need no more defer to empiricism’s enthronement of ‘experience’ than to naturalism’s hypo-statization of ‘nature’. Both remain entirely extraneous to science’s subtractive modus operandi. From the perspective of the latter, both the invocation of ‘experience’ qua realm of ‘originary intuitions’ and the appeal to ‘nature’ qua domain of autonomous functions are irrelevant. We shall try to explain in subsequent chapters how science subtracts nature from experience, the better to uncover the objective void of being. But if, as we are contending here, the principal task of contem-porary philosophy is to draw out the ultimate speculative implications of the logic of Enlightenment, then the former cannot allow itself to be seduced into contriving ever more sophistical proofs for the transcen-dental inviolability of the manifest image. Nor should it resign itself to espousing naturalism and taking up residence in the scientific image in the hope of winning promotion to the status of cognitive science. Above all, it should not waste time trying to effect some sort of synthe-sis or reconciliation between the manifest and scientific images. The philosophical consummation of Enlightenment consists in expediting science’s demolition of the manifest image by kicking away whatever pseudo-transcendental props are being used to shore it up or otherwise inhibit the corrosive potency of science’s metaphysical subtractions. In this regard, it is precisely Churchland’s attempt to preserve a normative role for the ‘superempirical virtues’ that vitiates his version of EM.


1.7 The appearance of appearance


Unfortunately, Churchland is not the Antichrist, and EM’s pragmatic accoutrements deprive it of the conceptual wherewithal required in order to precipitate cultural apocalypse. But this is not to lend succour to the defenders of FP, for even if the latter is neither as monolithic nor as maladaptive as Churchland makes out, and hence likely to sur-vive as a set of pragmatic social strategies, all the indications seem to be that it will play an increasingly insignificant role in the future develop-ment of cognitive science.22 Nevertheless, Churchland’s estimable achievement (along with Daniel Dennett) consists in having driven an irrecusable philosophical wedge between our phenomenological self-conception and the material processes through which that conception is produced. Perhaps more than any other contemporary philosopher, Churchland’s work gives the lie to phenomenology’s ‘principle of principles’, which Husserl expressed as follows:
No conceivable theory could make us err with respect to the princi-ple of principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legit-imizing source of cognition, that everything originally (so to speak in its personal actuality) offered to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
(Husserl 1982: 44) [23]
The critical force of Churchland’s project is to show how the ‘limits’ which phenomenology would invoke in order to circumscribe the legitimacy of ‘originary intuitions’ cannot be phenomenologically transparent since they are themselves theoretically drawn. Moreover, whatever else may be wrong with it, EM is perfectly conceivable, yet this is precisely what phenomenology’s transcendental pretensions cannot countenance. Consequently, this conceivability alone suffices to under-mine the putative indubitability of our ‘experience of meaning’, along with the supposed incorrigibility of our ‘originary presentive intuitions’. Regardless of the specific shortcomings of Churchland’s own PVA para-digm, linguaformal ‘meaning’ is almost certainly generated through non-linguistic processes, just as our phenomenological intuitions are undoubtedly conditioned by mechanisms that cannot themselves be intuitively accessed. The upshot of Churchland’s work, in a word, is simply that we are not as we experience ourselves to be.

In this regard, by drawing attention to the incommensurability between phenomenal consciousness and the neurobiological processes through which it is produced, Churchland casts doubt upon the trans-parency which many philosophers – and not just phenomenologists – claim must be granted to the phenomenon of consciousness construed as ‘the appearance of appearance’. These philosophers insist that where phenomenal consciousness is concerned, the appearance– reality dis-tinction cannot be invoked short of occluding the reality of the phe-nomenon of consciousness altogether, for ‘the appearing is all there is’. As Searle puts it, ‘[C]onsciousness consists in the appearances themselves. Where appearance is concerned we cannot make the appearance–reality distinction because the appearance is the reality.’24 But the notion of ‘phenomenon’ or ‘appearance’ in this strong phenomenological sense harbours an inbuilt circularity. This appeal to the self-evident trans-parency of appearance conveniently dispenses with the need for justifi-cation by insisting that we all already know ‘what it’s like’ for something to appear to us, or for something ‘to be like’ something for us, or for other sentient entities capable of registering appearances in the way in which we do (indeed, this is precisely the force of Heidegger’s Dasein, construed as the locus or site of phenomenological disclosure, which ostensibly avoids substantive metaphysical presuppositions pertaining to physical and/or biological differences between ‘conscious’ and ‘non-conscious’ entities). It is this seeming, and not its constitutive conditions, that has to be accounted for ‘in its own terms’. Indeed, the founding axiom of phenomenology (Husserl’s ‘principle of principles’) could be simply stated as: appearances can only be understood in their own terms. But what are ‘their own terms’? Precisely the terms concomi-tant with the first-person phenomenological point of view. It is this assumption that leads many philosophers to insist that where appearance is concerned, any attempt to introduce an appearance – reality distinc-tion is absurd, a misunderstanding of what is at stake: viz., the appearing of appearance as such, and not as something else. But if we enquire as to the source for the evidence that this absolute appearing occurs, the reply is invariably that it comes from ‘our own conscious experi-ence’. Thus we are invited to account for the autonomy of the appear-ing as such, and in order to do this, not only can we not invoke any appearance–reality distinction, we are obliged to stick to describing this phenomenal seeming strictly in its ‘own’ terms, without interpreta-tive overlay or editorial amendment. But how exactly are we supposed to describe appearance strictly in its own terms, without smuggling in any extrinsic, objectifying factors? In actuality, the more closely we try to stick to describing the pure appearing and nothing but, the more we end up resorting to a descriptive register which becomes increasingly figurative and metaphorical; so much so, indeed, that it has encouraged many phenomenologists to conclude that only figurative and/or poetic language can be truly adequate to the non-propositional dimension of ‘meaningfulness’ harboured by ‘appearing’. Accordingly, much post-Heideggerian phenomenology has been engaged in an ongoing attempt to deploy the figurative dimension of language in order to sound sub-representational experiential depths, which, it is claimed, are inherently refractory to any other variety of conceptualization, and particularly to scientific conceptualization. In this regard, the goal of phenomenology would consist in describing ‘what it’s like’ to be con-scious while bracketing off conceptual judgements about ‘what it’s like’. Yet as a result, an intimate link between phenomenology and literary hermeneutics has to be forged in order to stave off the obvious threat harboured by the phenomenological axiom: that the more we stick to describing pure appearing qua appearing, the more we realize that we invariably have to assume something inapparent within appear-ances in order to be able to describe them at all – we have to excavate some originary dimension of (non-propositional) ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ (as Heidegger and his successors sought to) in order to describe the autonomy of appearances in their ‘own’ terms. Thus phenomenology invariably petitions figurative language in order to carry out its descriptive task. Yet it might be better to concede that the aims of phenomenological description stricto sensu are best served through the artifices of literature, instead of hijacking the conceptual resources of philosophy for no other reason than to preserve some inviolable inner sanctum of phenomenal experience. For the more attentively we try to scrutinize our originary phenomenal experiences independently of the resources of language, the more impoverished our descriptions become. This is not to say that there is no more to consciousness than what can be linguistically mediated and articulated, but on the contrary, to insist that consciousness harbours an underlying but sub-linguistic reality which is simply not accessible to first-person phenomenological descrip-tion or linguistic articulation. Ironically, and contrary to phenomenol-ogy’s guiding intuition, the reality of consciousness is independent of the subject of consciousness. Only the objective, third-person perspec-tive is equipped with conceptual resources sensitive enough to map consciousness’ opaque, sub-linguistic reality. For as Thomas Metzinger has pointed out, it is precisely the simplest, most rudimentary forms of phenomenal content that cannot be reliably individuated from the phenomenological perspective, since we lack any transtemporal identity criteria through which we could re-identify them. And in the absence of such criteria, we are incapable of forming logical identity criteria grounded in phenomenological experience, and consequently cannot form phenomenal concepts for these elementary experiential data. Though we can discriminate fine-grained differences in phenomenal content, we seem to be incapable of identifying those same contents individually. Once these phenomenal primitives have vanished from the conscious present, we cannot access them, whether through subjective phenomenological reflection, or through conceptual analysis operating within intersubjective space. Thus the primitive data of phenomenal consciousness are often epistemically and phenomenologically unavail-able to the subject of consciousness. But this is precisely why the only hope for investigating the sub-symbolic reality of phenomenal con-sciousness lies in using the formal and mathematical resources available to the third-person perspective:
The minimally sufficient neural and functional correlates of the corresponding phenomenal states can, at least in principle, if properly mathematically analyzed, provide us with the transtempo-ral, as well as the logical identity criteria we have been looking for. Neurophenomenology is possible; phenomenology is impossible.
(Metzinger 2004: 83)
In his recent Sweet Dreams,25 Dennett correctly identifies the funda-mental quandary confronting those who would uphold the uncondi-tional transparency of the phenomenal realm: if the constitutive features of ‘appearing qua appearing’ are non-relational and non-functional, and hence inherently resistant to conceptual articulation, then even the first-person phenomenological subject of experience lacks the resources to apprehend them; he or she will always be separated from his or her own immediate experience of the phenomenon per se by some medi-ating instance, for every description of a phenomenal representatum entails transforming the latter into the representandum of another phe-nomenal representatum, and so on. In this regard, Dennett’s penetrating critique of some of the more extravagant superstitions entailed by philosophers’ ‘qualiaphilia’ chimes with Derrida’s critique of Husserl: the notion of an absolutely transparent but non-relational phenomenal appearance is incoherent much for the same reason as the idea of consciousness as locus of absolute self-presence is incoherent.26 If one acknowledges that the conceit of a phenomenal appearing devoid of all relational and functional properties is nonsensical, then one must concede that phenomenological experience itself shows that we our-selves do not enjoy privileged access to all the properties intrinsic to appearance qua appearance. Accordingly, there is no reason to suppose that appearing is absolutely transparent to us, and therefore no reason not to accept the idea (long advocated by Dennett) that the phenome-non of consciousness itself invites a distinction between those features of appearance that are apprehended by us, and those that elude us. For if appearance is sufficient unto itself, the price of upholding the claim that our experience of appearance is entirely adequate to that appearance would seem to be a position perilously close to absolute solipsism (this is precisely the option embraced by some of Heidegger’s phenomenological heirs, suh as Michel Henry).27 Of course, having conceded that the notion of a non-manifest appearance is not entirely oxymoronic, the question remains whether to raise the stakes by insist-ing that this latent or non-manifest dimension of phenomenality transcends objective description altogether, as did the early Heidegger, who chose to see in it the unobjectifiable being of the phenomenon, which science is constitutively incapable of grasping; or whether to grant that this non-manifest dimension is perfectly amenable to description from the third-person point of view characteristic of the sciences, and hence something which falls under the remit of the sci-entific study of the phenomenon of consciousness. Obviously, such a choice depends on a prior decision about the scope and limits of scientific investigation, and about whether or not it is right to remove certain phenomena, specifically those associated with human con-sciousness, from the ambit of that investigation as a matter of principle. More abstractly, this can be characterized as a speculative decision about whether to characterize the latency of phenomena in terms of unobjectifiable transcendence, as Heidegger does with his invocation of ‘being’, or in terms of immanent objectivity, as Churchland and Metzinger do when invoking the un-conscious, sub-symbolic processes through which phenomenal consciousness is produced. Our contention here is that the latter option is clearly preferable, since it begs fewer questions; yet it remains compromised by an alliance with pragmatism which vitiates the commitment to scientific realism which should be among its enabling conditions. Naturalism may not be the best guar-antor of realism, and in subsequent chapters we will try to define the rudiments of a speculative realism and elaborate on some of the con-ceptual ramifications entailed by a metaphysical radicalization of eliminativism. Our provisional conclusion at this stage however, is that far from being some incontrovertible datum blocking the integration of the first-person point of view into the third-person scientific viewpoint, the appearing of appearance can and should be understood as a phe-nomenon generated by sub-personal but perfectly objectifiable neuro-biological processes. Indeed, as Metzinger persuasively argues, there are solid grounds for maintaining that the phenomenological subject of appearance is itself a phenomenal appearance generated by in-apparent neurobiological processes. Thus, for Metzinger, concomitant with this subversion of our phenomenological self-conception is a subversion of our understanding of ourselves as selves.28 Yet faced with this unantici-pated twist in the trajectory of Enlightenment, which seems to issue in a conception of consciousness utterly at odds with the image of the latter promoted by those philosophers who exalted consciousness above all other phenomena, philosophers committed to the canon of rationality defined by Kant and Hegel have vigorously denounced what they see as the barbaric consequences of untrammelled scientific rationalism. Ironically enough, it is precisely those philosophers who see the fundamental task of philosophy as critique who have proved to be among the staunchest defenders of the legitimacy of the manifest image. In the next chapter, we will examine one of the most sophisticated defences of the latter in the shape of the critique of Enlightenment rationality proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
Unofficial librarian of vegan and socialist movement media.
PhiloVegan Wiki: https://tinyurl.com/y7jc6kh6
Vegan Video Library: https://tinyurl.com/yb3udm8x
Ishkah YouTube: https://youtube.com/Ishkah
Post Reply