Howard Bloom, in his book “Global Brain”, jumps on the bandwagon of opinions that find the human sense of reality hallucinatory by vitue of brain processes that appear to be involved in localized, customized assessments of incoming sensory data and of social influences on how the data is interpreted.
Biological development of organisms refutes these philosophical abstractions. In the first place, no organism could feed or procreate without having some internal mechanism that can accurately depict what exists beyond its soma. The ability of all organisms to manipulate matter (humans just do it better) suggests some accurate knowledge of what exists beyond the body. What is an ememy? What is a toxin? Abstract answers tothese questions amount to death and extinction.
Our microscopes and telescopes allow us to see macrocosms and microcosms beyond our human mesocosm. Such seeing has allowed us to deal with toxic microbes and to consider how to deal with meteorites that could demolish our planet. Science is not the enemy of philosophy unless philosphy cringes from verifications of the accuracy of sense data.
Where Bloom errs, IMHO, is in his confusing belief with reality. Belief can be described as social agreements that one finds personally comforting. Reality may not offer social or personal comfort. It may offer cataclysm. We use social agreement to verify all of our ideas about reality. What the agreement verifies, on the most basic level of knowing, is shared experiences among organisms.
Thats not exactly true, theres universal shared experiences we have, that most sane people agree aren’t part of reality, but which the majority of people accept.
For example, humans are meant to detect, prey, protectors or predators from fragmentary information, so people everywhere jump and see things in shadows, if we were to all agree those shadows are real (many many many people would/do) it wouldn’t make them real. or for example, there is no social consensus on the age of the earth in the united states, what people agree on though, doesn’t change the probability of that age.
We don’t use social agreement to verify the truth all the time, is all i’m saying.
As to the nature of reality and all this, I agree with you, philosopher like to throw issues of biology to the wind and pretend they never existed. Its not only an issue that people say ‘we can’t know anything outside the human brain’ (we can sure as fuck know that we evolved in an environment that we had to evovle defences against bacteria from, and other predators, we can say that much about ancesteral environments and thousands ofother things.
Exactly the point i’ve tried to make, these aren’t abstracted philosophical points, but problems any organism that wants to survive for more then 10seconds, faces, and bringing up run of the mill philosophy arguements about the nature of ‘reality and cognition’ just doens’t hold any weight when you’re looking at it through a scope of evolutionary biology.
and I agree, its not evolutionary biology/evolution thats in question when someone brings up a random philosophbical point about it.
Cy,
Closed-mindedness does not apply here. Nothing of reality is unexperienced.
We don’t experience crystals as being mainly empty space, we didn’t arrive at that conclusion through a social-agreement either. We arrived at that conclusion, through as you pointed out above using scientific tools, like microscopes and telescopes and all nature of things.
I’m not sure exactly where you are going with this, Ierr, but isn’t it an accident that a given oragnism “knows”? Those that cannot sustain themselves, which cannot “eat”, die. There is no difference between a mouse that is born without a brain and/or a mouth and one that has both - except that we call the first a mutation and the second, a mouse (in a complete sense). No difference in that both are organisms, and can both exist, and live, if only for a short time. But length of time is not relevant, is it? Everything eventually dies.
Just want to see how that point will fit what you are saying.
I am not sure that all beliefs are comforting. Again, I am not sure of your point. Religion is a comfort to some, but a horror to others.
What of this - beliefs are socially determined, but individually accepted. Surely many beliefs will be nearly universally accepted - what of the psychotic? What if there were a group that believed that voices in our heads really were from God? Haven’t people said that they have actually heard God talk to them? You know, people like…Moses?
Thanks, Faust,
Where I’m coming from is the idea that experience is knowing. If experience can be internally processed and replicated (hence memory), it becomes the precedent for all of our ideas, inventions, discoveries. It appears to me that organisms progress in development from knowing into unknowns, never into unknowables. For a mouse, 1+1=2 is an unknowable, even if it is indigenous to its celluar operations. It has no relevance to mouse survival. The type of philosophical ideas I disagree with are those that would bifircate knower from what can be known, that would deify unknowable abstractions (as religions do), or that would pit what
senses are for against what they cannot do.
Oh, I get it. It is basically an exegesis of Hume-as-empiricist. This is essentially the Logical Positivist view - that only data has (potential) meaning, and that metaphysics is, by definition, meaningless. Metaphysical entities are empirically unknowable, and so are meaningless. Empty words, that is.
Deifying unkowable abstractions is a case of reification.
Correct?
Right to a point, Faust. I do like Hume on this. I simply find the logical positivists outdated. Not every metaphysical concept amounts to reification. Some can and do include the organic process of moving from the known into the unknown. I think Spinoza is a pioneer in this area of thinking, especially in his view of organisms’ awarenesses. In other words, for me logical positivism places undue limits on what can be known while Bloom, et.al., misinterpret the process of knowing. That reality may be customized, as in the mouse context, does not make it unknowable elsewhere.
I’m not sure I get that. Can you give me an example of a metaphysical idea that is “unkown” as opposed to “unknowable”?
If that serves the topic, which I think it does.
Look into combinatorial explosion OP, its more added weight to what you’re talking about, at least, in-so-far about evolution and brains.
Faust, Thanks for your tolerance. Maybe the thoughts below will explain more of where I’m coming from.
Bloom’s “Global Brain” is a great read, whether one agrees with his findings or not. He serves up delicious prose, spiced by hard findings from research and succulent opinions. He utilizes a vast assortment of referential material including ideas from physics, biology, history, sociology, ethology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and philosophy. He expresses concepts gleaned from these sources in a way that makes them accessible to the layman. So where’s my beef?
i admire his extension of Dawkins’ meme concept into the concept of a collective mentality. It’s almost Spinozan! Where I balk is in my suspicion that an evolving physical process might be seen as a thingy, a noun replacing a verb.
Where I’m coming from–IMHO, mind is a brain function. Brains collate raw data from genes, somas and senses. Brains then utilize the scrunched data to prod an organism into action in the need/supply survival interactions.
It is doubtful that, prior to rest, lions lie around discussing the day’s kill or the possibilty of tomorrow’s. The difference in action potential between humans and all other animals is that humans can have a delay between action and response, a delay in which alternate responses can be considered. Currently, evolutionists blame the delay on our aquistion of a sizeable, prefrontal cortex, a late physical addition in our accumulations of survival equipment.
In the distance between urge and activity there is room for conjectures about what ifs. These conjections, actually projections of the known into the unknown, are based on experience of recurrent phenomena, an experience that generated empirical science. Such projections are explorations of unknown territory from the vantage point of what is known.
It is my firm belief that a metaphysics beginning at physics is possible. It would amount to an excursion from the known into the unknown, not a claim that there are unknowables or that one can reverse the process and define what is known by the what ifs. Such an excursion does not exclude experienced concepts about creativity or spirituality. It is the known universe that allows usto have ideas about unknown universes or polyverses. Because we are aware of vacuums, we can conceive of black holes. It doesn’t work the other way around.
So, my problem with Bloom amounts to his considerations of reality as an hallucination, a consideration that defies survival realities, regardless of whether these are seen as collective.
Sorry, Cy. You haven’t a clue!
I might understand this. Does it trivialise or miss your point to say that we are capable of postulates?
Mind is a brain function, yes - in my vocabulary, it’s a metaphor, or perhaps partly a metaphor and partly a collective noun - one that includes many other processes, but I am in basic agreement with you here.
I think I also agree that it is far more difficult to believe that we could survive if our perceptions don’t somehow connect with a real world outside us (for what are we, then?) than it is to assume that we are hallucinating.
Do I seem to get you, now?
Yes, we are in tune. We do postulates. They are our reaches from the light of the known into the darkness of the unknown. When the reach grabs onto something substaintial we survive. If this were only a matter of hit or miss or trial and error, we would still need some known vantage point from which to locate what we need from any environment. Thanks for understanding.
Thanks for posting.
…
how don’t i understand? How doesn’t combinatorial explosion play into what you’re saying about organisms and the environment and survival? for any degree of freedom the amount of potential choises goes up dramatically, within just a few minutes the potential amount of choices a human could make is vast, in a few hours, beyond any decent human calculation so to make any coherent actions at all, let alone an action that led to survival, we’d need to have massive programming about the outside, external, real environment.
survival is a tiny tinyy tiny tiny subset of all possible actions. Which i understood you agreed with?
Perhaps i don’t understand but your explanation didn’t clear it up any for me.
cyrene,
Perhaps understanding the difference between particulars and generalizations might help? … maybe?
Bloom argues that our internal mechanisms (cell factories) are primarily concerned with maintenance. He even goes so far as to contend that the 95% of our DNA, often labelled “junk DNA” because it does not appear involved in the making of “known” drives and dispositions, simply does maintenance work. He sees neuronal-brain activity as preoccupied with maintenance. From those ideas he concludes that our internal mechanisms “see” sensory data as suspect, certainly not as viable contributions to our personal sense of reality.
Yes!!! Without survival nothing else is possible!
this is a bit of a tangent but i have been thinking about causality ~ maybe there is a parallel between this and the comparative of ‘metaphoric’ or ‘anti-metaphoric’ thought…
within the entire we have two apparently distinct fields; causal relationships of group blocks; e.g. a human [group box ‘x’] is composed of its evolutionary path of events, and of its contents - its materials. then in terms of every days events & coincidences, we have a second causal strain, these are the usage and the interactions between group boxes. there is evolutionary causality then the usage of that construct, so we have the human form and its environment within which we have a second set of causal relationships which would be everything from coincidence to general societal factors.
so what i am saying is that, your ‘anti-metaphoric’ position describes the primary causal field, or the mechanical side of reality. then i would agree with one part of what i think you mean and say that this is not purely subjective.
sorry about that tangent but i was just thinking about anti-metaphoric philosophy, i think it is an interesting direction and one that hasn’t been properly addressed. maths dont mean nothin’, do we even have a valid description of the world ~ if that is possible. science takes everything apart, so it begins to see everything as metaphoric, as does philosophy.
what happens to the non metaphoric nature of reality, we could say that reality in truth cannot be a metaphor in any way? nor can any aspect of it?
hmm
Quetz,
Good stuff, mon amie. First, I’m not opposed to metaphor. I see metaphor as the brain’s interpretation of physical experiences. I just oppose any idea that suggests that our sense of reality can be confined to either personal or social takes. Both contribute. Epigenetics is the current study of internal/external complementations. Bloom is, essentially, attempting to describe human reality in terms of evolutionary psychology. In so doing, his “reality” is a shared hallucination concept does not jive with reality as established in adaptational progressions.
While there have been many attempts to discredit causality (synchronicity, mutation, random or chaotic influences, correspondences and parallelisms, etc., etc.), the motion of our becoming can include all of these objections and still be cause and effect.