Hume’s argument for skepticism in Enquiry

In the Enquiry, Hume begins with the statement that human beings have no innate knowledge and that all ideas are born from sensory impressions. Once we have these ideas in our mind, we are, in some cases, free to explore them without constant access to the sense perception, but only after we have first had an experience of whatever idea it is that we are exploring. After establishing this, he goes on to pose two categories which our thoughts can be divided into. The first of these categories he calls the “Relations of Ideas.” This category includes those few things which Hume believes we are able to have certain knowledge of. These things are primarily Mathematics, Geometry, and Logic. Hume believes that these things, though they must first be experienced through the senses are thereafter available to our minds in the same way that I, having seen a triangle, do not need to have a triangle in front of me in order to know what constitutes a triangle. The second category that Hume posits is known as the Matters of Fact. This category contains basically everything that is not, mathematic, geometric, or logical. The things which make up this category are totally dependent on the senses in the same way that, even after I have first experienced the color blue, I am unable to give a definition of blue other than to point to a sensory perception and say “That object is blue.” Next, he deals with the ways in which human beings organize these matters of fact. Hume states that we link the matters of fact together in our thought in three primary ways. The first of these ways is Resemblance. That is to say, that we group ideas together according the resemblance they bear toward one another, in the way that ice cubes resemble snow in being cold and frozen. Secondly, we group ideas according to Contiguity. This is to say that we group things in time and space according to when and where we sense them. Finally, we place ideas in causal relations by saying that event “A” causes event “B.” According to Hume, not only are these matters of fact completely dependent upon our sensory perceptions, but they are also wholly unable to be judged as existent or true in any way. This is, Hume states, because we have no way of sensing any force of causality. Therefore, we have no way of knowing if the linkages we draw between matters of fact exist, and we also have no way of knowing if there is any reality behind our sensations beyond pure sense perception. Also, because we have no understanding of causality and indeed no certainty in the existence of the world itself, we then are also completely unable to place our certain trust in the sciences. Lastly, because we have no sensation of causality, we have no way of knowing that the future will resemble the past, which means we can only act upon probabilities, rather than upon the belief that something will happen because it has happened in the same way before. Because we have no way of knowing of the existence of causality, or any like between future and past, we have no way of knowing what, if anything, causes our impressions of the world. Lastly, according to Hume, because all human ideas must be grounded in sense data, anything which is spoken of by a human being, but which cannot be experienced as an impression, is nothing more than a mixing of formerly sensed impressions, is worthless, and must be thrown out. Having made these statements, Hume leaves us with an unbridgeable epistemological gap between the self and the outside world, and no true and certain knowledge may be gleaned about the world beyond that gap. Kant, however, believes he has found an answer to Hume’s skepticism and, in the Prolegomena, he attempts to lay out the bridge across this epistemological gap. This is an undertaking that he is only partially successful in accomplishing.

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

 Analytic and Synthetic Judgements

First in the Prolegomena, Kant redefines Hume’s categories of ideas. This first category he names Analytic Judgments. These analytic judgments, Kant believes, are apriori in nature. By this, he means that they exist independent of the physical world, are intuitive, and are not derived from the physical world. Also, they can be known to be certain, and generally explain through process of definition and logic. I believe Hume’s example of “Bachelor” being defined as an unmarried man, would fit into this category. Likewise, this category corresponds roughly with Hume’s Relations of Ideas. The second category which Kant divides human ideas into corresponds roughly with Hume’s Matters of Fact. Kant names this category Synthetic Judgment, or Synthetic Aposteriori Judgment. The Synthetic Judgments are those judgments which are made through the use of the senses about the world around us. These Synthetic Judgments, Kant states, are not able to be known with certainty, and are dependent on the physical reality. An example of this category would be a statement along these lines. “This book bag is blue.” The truth of this statement is reliant on whether the book bag truly is blue or not and relies upon sensation for its confirmation. Though both of these categories are useful, Analytic judgments being useful in that they can be certain and synthetic judgments being useful in that they are applicable to the world, only these two categories would not be sufficient to allow Kant to escape from the skepticism which Hume found himself in. Therefore, Kant recognizes the need for a third category of ideas which are able to bridge the gap between the self and the external world with the certainty of judgments intact.

Synthetic a priori knowledge

Kant labels this third category Synthetic a priori Knowledge, and states that the things which fall under this category are both intuitive (a priori), and constant, but also must be applied to the world to form synthetic judgments which vary with changing sensation. Included in this category are The Forms of Sensibility, and the Categories of the Understanding. These two concepts are what Kant believes have enabled him to escape the skepticism of Hume. So, to fully understand Kant’s argument, we must explore the nature of these concepts. In setting out his thoughts, Kant began to study the world and came across a few simple truths about the way in which every human being experiences the world. These truths are as follows. Every human being experiences the world in both space and time. This is to say, that any object which is experienced by a human is experienced as existing somewhere in the space that is around them, and is also experienced as existing in time, be it the present time, as something they are currently examining, the past, as a memory of what once was, or the future, as an idea of something that will come to pass. Also in studying human sense perceptions, Kant comes to believe that there are only twelve types of judgments that can be made by a human being about the world. That is to say, that every judgment made by a human being about anything that exists to him or her physically will fit invariably into one of these twelve categories. These discoveries on Kant’s part form the basis for his theories of the Forms of Sensibility, which are space and time, and also the Categories of Understanding, which explain the way in which human beings process their experiences of the world. These forms and categories must have sense data with which to interact. Because of this, Kant posits the existence of the Noumenal World.

The post Kant’s Prolegomena as an Argument Against Hume’s Skepticism appeared first on Rare Essays.

For Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other supernatural mythologists who give humans a very special role and purpose in the world, the answer is clear: no way. But even naturalist philosophers have argued against such a possibility. There’s always the weak argument, “humans created robots so they can’t have consciousness, or at the very least they can’t ever be equals.” The refutation to that one is fairly self-explanatory. Relating to the possibility of consciousness, humans have made machines that have achieved things far beyond their individual capabilities. Relating to ethics, if a created being meets one’s ethical criterion, why must his neurocentrism stand in the way?

More sophisticatedly, John Searle argues that computers process syntax, but not meaning; that is, they can consistently process inputs and produce outputs, but they do not actually understand the information moving through them. I find this position very interesting, because it makes a strong differentiation between meaning and syntax. When it comes to minds, however, can’t everything be ultimately reduced to syntax (in input, processing, and output)? It would seem that meaning is just a particular richness of syntax. Searle appears to be arguing that there is something to meaning above and beyond the mapping of a particular thing to a certain permutation of, say, binary switches, which he claims to be merely syntax.

Is Qualia valid?

Searle’s distinction between meaning and syntax has very close parallels to the distinction between consciousness and function, or as the discussion is commonly focused, between qualitative experience and the physical. The primary concept at hand is qualia, a thing which conscious beings experience which has reality above and beyond the material components of the brain. The philosopher Frank Jackson (who may have changed his position recently) initially made his case for qualia by posing the following hypothetical about Mary the scientist:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use color television.)

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

My answer to the quandary of Mary the scientist is that she does learn something new, in as much as her new exposure creates even the slightest functional change. If she is able to newly distinguish between objects, as would be expected if one began to see in color instead of black and white, that is fundamentally a process of learning. It seems that Jackson’s case is begging the question: Mary experiences something new, therefore, she learns (where “experience” contains the concept “learning”).

If functionality can explain any corresponding changes in Mary’s knowledge, Occam’s razor (an essential tool, especially in a discussion like this) requires that qualia be done away with. This narrows the question: supposing there were no functional difference, does Mary learn something new? That can almost be a tautologous “no,” depending on one’s meaning of “learn.” Better yet, when two creatures are functionally indistinguishable, is it possible for one to have this ‘qualia’ and the other not? What about even functionally and materially indistinguishable, save for some process that generates qualia? I will argue a firm “no” to the existence of qualia of this kind, throwing it in the philosophical trash pile on top of forms, universals, nouemena, essences, and all other kinds of fantastical and useless constructions. Note here that I am not arguing against experience, feelings, and so on; I am merely arguing against the position that there exists a realm of non-physical things (indescribable by language).

Evidence for Qualia: How do we know it’s there?

A commonly used example of qualia is color. At one point or another many people think when they’re children, “when I see green, is someone else seeing red? It’s a possibility mannn.” Some take this as irrefutable proof of qualia, when really it is just the absence of proof or disproof. To show what I mean, we can start with another classic example: color-blindness.

Color-blindness is, most certainly, a functional deficiency. People who are red-green colorblind can not distinguish between red and green objects, a deficiency which manifests itself in their responses to them (like failing to recognize traffic lights). But what about the case of perfectly inverted spectra, in which every color is perfectly inverted with its opposite?

I find the case of inverted spectra questionable, or, further, that such a case could even possibly exist. How could we test for the presence of inverted spectra in others? In short, we can not, because there would be no functional difference even if it were the case. While a test can be devised for something like red-green colorblindness by showing a red patch and a green patch and seeing the subject’s response to them, such a test can not work with inverted spectra. Supposing someone saw what was to them “actually” purple but others saw it as “actually” red and pointed to it and taught that person to call it “red,” and this were done perfectly over the entire spectrum, that person would report the colors in the same way as everyone else. Note the trouble I face here, in putting “actually” in quotes: what is “actual” purple? We have the scientific measurement of wave frequency, which is by all means actual and objective, but the “actual purple” commonly referenced is of the qualitative kind, which has no inherent and objective means of measurement!

But, someone may respond, though we don’t have access to others’ experiences, wouldn’t we be able to detect inverted spectra if it happened to us by reflecting on our memories? This counter-objection seems dubious. It must presuppose the possibility of inverted spectra to prove the possibility of inverted spectra. Even supposing, again, that inverted spectra is the case, whatever it is, it is doubtful whether even we would be able to know it. We use color as a means of distinguishing objects; on the other hand, we can only distinguish color by means of objects. That chair is purple; that table is red. Supposing tomorrow I came home and saw that only my chair turned red and my table turned purple, I would know that they changed colors on the basis of comparison of my distinct memory of the chair and table against the backdrop of other colors. However, suppose instead that all the colors in the spectra were inverted in my experience, inverting the colors of everything in my apartment. When I woke up the next day, would anything seem out of place? What would happen if my experience of all the objects in my lifetime from which I experienced and derived my color along with all future ones were perfectly inverted? Remember, inverted spectra is not simply putting on a pair of glasses that retranslates the light waves it’s receiving and sends them through your eyes (that’s cheating!); it’s actually changing your experience of purpleness to redness.

Hence, a true case of inverted spectra would also apply to my memories. If I thought, “purple,” or I thought of my memory of something purple, like my purple chair, there it would be: sitting there in my apartment, looking experience-red. Nothing would strike me as queer about that, because I wouldn’t have some store of supra-experiential color information with which I could say: “aha! My experience changed!” Inverted spectra depends on an implicit assumption that we somehow have an a priori knowledge of color that we can then gauge against our experiences.

You can see how even trying to speak in this manner about color experience devolves into presupposition-loaded nonsense. Overall, I am trying to draw attention to the absurdity of claiming the possibility of inverted spectra, by showing that there isn’t any meaningful way of speculating about it: there is no proof or disproof, and there is a much more reasonable explanation sitting nearby. The idea of qualia existing in itself is just an idle speculation, like mine that there is currently a deer crapping on my head, but both he and the crap are totally invisible, immutable, amaterial, and undetectable. Where we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence. There is no meaningful access that we, at least as human beings, could possibly have to this mysterious world of color experience. The only means by which we can ever gauge anything of this “qualitative” kind is by measuring it against other things, a distinctly functional process. Occamite reduction thus does away with the magical realm of qualia.

Implications for the nature of consciousness

In light of that, consciousness is often treated like a binary state – one is either conscious, or not conscious, one has qualia, or doesn’t have qualia – as though it were a singularly defined characteristic, with one sole consciousness that a mind either possesses or does not possess. By this logic, there must be a point at which consciousness disappears when a certain “puzzle piece” is removed, and likewise, a point at which a piece is added and it appears. This also goes hand in hand with the position that basically entails that there are all the operative functions of the brain, but consciousness is a phenomenon above and beyond those functions that exists in itself – lending itself to the possibility of philosophical “zombies” who act in every way totally identical to a human being who had consciousness, but without consciousness.

It would be more appropriate to describe consciousness as itself playing a functional role. It would fit with our understanding of evolution, and would overcome the dastardly problems of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy. More explicitly, we should not treat consciousness as an irreducible property in itself. If a man goes blind, he’s still conscious, right? What if all of his senses are subsequently eliminated totally? Is he still conscious? Consciousness would be better described as an agglomeration of functional interactions with the external world, in contrast to it being simply a light-switch. The role of that thing which we call color is to allow us to distinguish between objects on the basis of their interaction with light, which apparently is pervasive and discriminatory enough to be a useful tool for prolonging our survival. The components of our consciousness, the five senses, give us consciousness by means of how they transmit information about reality into a center within which that information is integrated. In any case, there is no other explanation for and description of consciousness in philosophy that does not eventually devolve into explicit and direct reliance on the unknown.

Oh yeah, and about them robots: approximating its original intention, we can appropriately revise our initial question to something like, “can a robot ever possess the essential qualities commonly associated with human feelings?” Realistically, this is a question of empirics. First, a precise definition of the nature and breadth of the “feelings” must be decided. Then the components of the mind in question must be tested to determine if those conditions are met. It’s a difficult task, but technology may make it possible to actually derive a series of functional tests that can fully probe the expansive range of human consciousness.

The post An Argument Against Qualia (and some stuff about Robots and Consciousness, too!) appeared first on Rare Essays.

A universal describes a member of a class of mind-independent entities in reality that is not a particular thing, but an attribute, relation, etc. The realist position on universals posits that individuals share attributes with other individuals and that this commonality is manifested by the existence of universals. However, several philosophers have objected to this position, on the basis of objections because of the metaphysical strangeness or lack of necessity of universals, among others. In “On What There Is,” W.V. Quine addresses some of the logical and grammatical issues of ontology, and then relates them to the dispute over universals. Quine applies Russell’s theory of descriptions to form ontological propositions that entirely avoid referring to universals and invokes Occam’s razor to repudiate them as a result. One potential drawback to Quine’s approach is that he possibly fails to consistently apply Occam’s razor- as he applied it to the problematic singular descriptors- to the quantifiers (the “bound variables”) with which he replaces singular terms. Beyond that issue, however, Quine makes a convincing case against realist position on universals.

Before exploring universals, Quine discusses a series of preliminary concerns important for establishing his argument. He begins the article by declaring the problem of ontology to be finding the answer to a simple question: “What is there?” Because of the evident fact that there is disagreement on these issues, the first part of his argument is dedicated to exploring the issues of rival ontologies, manifested in the form of a dispute between him and a pseudonymous philosopher, McX. If McX recognizes certain entities (has a different ontology), but Quine does not, Quine “cannot admit that there is something which McX countenances and I do not,” because it contradicts his initial rejection. Quine refers to this traditional Platonic predicament of non-being as Plato’s beard: “nonbeing must in some sense be,” Quine notes, “otherwise what is it that there is not?”[1]

One instance of Plato’s beard in action is a disagreement between McX and Quine over the entity “Pegasus.” McX contests that if Pegasus somehow were not, then the use of the word Pegasus could not possibly be talking about anything- but its usage does talk about something, rendering that position incoherent, resulting in the conclusion that Pegasus is. Because McX clearly does not believe that space and time contain “a flying horse of flesh and blood,” he must provide details about what Pegasus is if it is not that. Quine rules out the possibility that it is just an idea in the mind, pointing out that it is not what “Pegasus” is referring to when people deny it.[2]

Distinguishing Naming and Meaning, via Russell’s Theory of Descriptions

An essential point of contention between Quine and McX reduces to what Quine describes as a gap between naming and meaning, and whether an utterance can be significant or not if does not purport to name some entity existing in reality. In the case of Pegasus, McX argued that if Pegasus were not, then the word would convey nothing (in other words, it would be insignificant). Quine invokes Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions to resolve this issue, disentangling the ambiguities and fallacies caused by McX’s poor language use. In particular, the theory of descriptions functions as a means of rephrasing the articles “the,” “a,” etc. to create propositions with better-defined referents. For example, the propositions “the current Czar of Russia is cute,” can be true or false, but in both cases could imply that there is either a Czar of Russia who is cute or a Czar of Russia who is not cute. However, it could be the case- as it is- that there is no current Czar of Russia. Russell’s theory of descriptions would rephrase the original statement as “There exists someone who is Czar of Russia who is cute,” thus making clearer the propositional nature of the existence of the Czar, in addition to his cuteness.

Quine utilizes Russell’s famous “The author of Waverly was a poet” example in order to illustrate the lack of ontological commitment entailed by singular descriptors, by showing that the descriptor can be contextually rephrased into another statement with a truth value. McX falsely assumes that there must be some objective reference in the statement, “the author of Waverly was a poet,” for the statement to be meaningful. Under Russell’s translation, however, the statement is changed to “Something wrote Waverly and was a poet and nothing else wrote Waverly,” thus shifting the burden of objective reference from the descriptive phrase to what is referred to by logicians as a “bound variable” (“something”). Bound variables- words such as “something,” “nothing,” and “everything”- are not names of specific entities, but refer to entities generally with a meaningful ambiguity.[3] The significance of the quantifiers does not require the presupposition of any preassigned objects. To be, according to Quine, is “to be the value of a bound variable” (emphasis added). With quantifiers in mind, Quine asserts that the notion of statements of nonbeing defeating themselves “goes by the board.”[4]

To reinforce his point, Quine anticipates and alleviates a potential problem with converting names to descriptors. In the “Pegasus” example, the word- a supposed name- cannot be processed immediately by Russell’s theory, and it must be rephrased to apply (e.g. “Pegasus was” becomes, perhaps, “Something was a winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon, and nothing else was that”). To make alleged names subordinate to Russell’s analysis, the word must first be translated into a description. Even if there is no evident definition or descriptive translation, an irreducible attribute of being Pegasus can be applied, granting the use of predicates “is-Pegasus” or “pegasizes,” resulting in the possible descriptor “the thing that is-Pegasus/pegasizes.” In summary, all (alleged) names can be converted to descriptions, and by Russell’s theory of descriptions, those descriptions can be eliminated. Quine thus concludes,

We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant.[5]

The post W.V.O Quine: On What There Is (Summary & Critique) appeared first on Rare Essays.