All Things Are Full of Gods, page 17
HEPHAISTOS: I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m not just a blacksmith, you know. I’m a fairly accomplished engineer, and not a bad mathematician in my own right. Believe me, I know that mathematics is a language, and the most abstract of languages at that. No doubt, though, you know there’ve been many attempts to naturalize the origin of mathematical thought.
PSYCHE: None of which comes near to explaining the range of mathematical applications in every sphere of quantitative reasoning: physical, scientific, statistical, economic, or what have you. And it’s especially absurd to try to make developments in mathematics conform to an evolutionary logic. Advances in the language of mathematics arise from mathematical premises, not from physical causes, because mathematical truths are necessary truths, true in every possible reality, and would be true if there were no physical reality at all. Yet the mind is capable of really interacting with these strictly immaterial entities—mathematical principles, that is . . . and logical principles too—none of which can be grounded in physical or even psychological processes. Just consider truly immense computations . . . or consider the capacity of the mind to conceive of infinity, and even to employ the infinite as a function within mathematical reasoning, even though no sensible representation of what we’re thinking about is possible for us. Well really, Phaesty, even you must at times be amazed at the mind’s obedience to necessary abstract laws and principles, far beyond anything a physicalist or psychologistic reduction of thought could possibly explain.
HEPHAISTOS: I grant that it’s remarkable. Amazing even. I grant that the rational mind’s capacity for abstract concepts like “beauty” or “goodness” is as well, and that its capacity for unrepresentable ideas like indivisible geometrical points or “infinity” is positively astonishing. So are its capacities for speculative reasoning and imagination and inspired innovation. But nature is overflowing with things remarkable, amazing, and astonishing. Perhaps you underestimate what nature can accomplish.
HERMES: And perhaps you fail to see that nature can accomplish so much only because it’s suffused with powers that exceed the merely natural.
PSYCHE: Or, at the very least, that nature isn’t the mechanical economy you take it for. Really, we needn’t take wing into the otherworldly mysteries of mathematics to show as much. Why, just consider what we’re doing here.
HEPHAISTOS: Bickering?
PSYCHE: Reasoning. The very act of rational thought, however elementary, is already a contradiction of the physicalist narrative. Reasoning involves sequences of premises and conclusions, semantic content regulated by a logical syntax rather than by material causality, ideas connected to one another by logical entailment rather than by exchanges of physical energy. The entire sequence of any rational reflection is determined by meanings and their conceptual implications. The simplest equation—2 + 2 = 4—is something utterly unlike any kind of physical event. The simplest syllogism—“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal”—is a dynamic process outside of and contrary to the laws of mechanism.
HEPHAISTOS: Different, perhaps. But contrary?
PSYCHE: I would say so. Mechanical processes are series of brute events, determined by purely physical causes, obedient to impersonal laws, whereas thinking is a process determined by symbolic associations and rational implications. Yes, perhaps the electrical events in the neurology of the brain can serve as vehicles of transcription for thoughts; but they can’t be the same things as the semeiotic and logical contents of those thoughts. The firing of one neuron might induce another neuron to fire, which leads to another firing in turn, as a result of physical necessity, but certainly not as the result of logical necessity. The strictly consecutive structure of a rational deduction—that simple equation, that elementary syllogism—simply isn’t, and can’t be reduced to, a series of biochemical contingencies, and the conceptual connections between a premise and a conclusion can’t be the same thing—or follow the same “causal” path—as the organic connections of cerebral neurology. One can’t be mapped onto the other. Nor, by the same token, should the semantics and syntax of reasoning be able to direct the flow of physical causes and effects in the brain. Not, at any rate, if anything like the supposed “causal closure of the physical” is true. So, really, the syllogism as an event in the brain should, by all rights, be quite impossible. And, while we’re at it, I might note that consecutive reasoning is irreducibly teleological: one thought doesn’t physically cause its sequel; rather, the sequence is guided by a kind of inherent futurity in reasoning—the will of the mind to find a rational resolution to a train of premises and conclusions—that elicits that sequel from its predecessor. Teleology is intrinsic to reasoning and yet repugnant to mechanism.
Oh, really, don’t you see the problem here, Phaesty? There can’t be both a complete neurophysiological account of a rational mental act and also a complete account in terms of semeiotic content and logical intentionality; and yet physicalism absolutely requires the former while every feat of reasoning consists entirely in the latter. The predicament becomes all the more utterly absurd the more one contemplates it. If, for instance, you seem to arrive at a particular belief as a result of a deductive argument—say, the belief that Socrates is mortal—physicalist orthodoxy obliges you to say that that belief is actually only a neurological event, mindlessly occasioned by some other neurological event. On the physicalist view of things, no one has ever really come to believe anything based on reasons; and yet the experience of reaching a conclusion tells us the opposite.20
HEPHAISTOS: So, at least, it appears to us.
HERMES: Oh, not this again.
HEPHAISTOS: Yes, O fleet-footed god, this—as you say—again. Whenever we reach the end of this interminable inventory of imponderables, I’ll have occasion to make my case for what’s called “functionalism” at greater length, I hope. Here, though, I’ll just say that I find it perfectly conceivable that a highly efficient functional system of input and output—that is, an “informational” system of stimulus and response—in processing data and converting it into behavior, just might, as a kind of economical user-interface, generate the illusory representation that one is “reasoning along” with a sequence of logical entailments rather than being carried along by the impersonal flow of operational algorithms converting data into behavior . . .
HERMES: This computational jargon is insufferable.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, screw your courage to the sticking place and suffer it long enough to tell me why what I’m saying is so implausible.
PSYCHE: Well, there’s the not insignificant fact that you yourself don’t believe it. Your very words betray you. You engage in reasoned argument because you believe semantic meaning generates logical entailments, which can be followed and can yield reasonable conclusions. And you trust those conclusions. This you prove every time you adopt a course of action dictated by reason—say, the solution to an engineering problem in designing one of your lovely automata.
HEPHAISTOS: I may, as a matter of habit, proceed on the assumption that I actually believe what I believe. That’s the whole point of that user-interface I just mentioned: to spare me the task of arduously synthesizing the flow of data for every discrete action I undertake. Very well, I may be doomed to believe that I believe. That too is just good engineering: I’m constructed to function efficiently. Moreover, I can trust that countless epochs of evolutionary attrition have winnowed away less efficient functions, killing off less well-adapted systems of input and output, and that therefore what I believe that I believe is optimally suited to my environment, and allows me to act with extraordinarily successful predictive confidence. Who cares if I really know what I’m doing? What’s true knowledge of reality, after all, other than control over one’s environment? Knowledge is the ability to act. Knowledge is power.
HERMES: There’s something altogether bracing in an epistemic nihilism that radical, I must say.
PSYCHE: And yet something distinctly absurd as well. I mean, for one thing, since there are many ways in which illusion might prove more evolutionarily beneficial than a correct apprehension of reality, what you’re saying obliges you to grant that your so-called functional system might have very little to do with the true nature of things at all.
HEPHAISTOS: Yes. And? Call me a pragmatic Kantian: all I can know are the conditions that allow for practical action. I don’t have any grasp of things in themselves—not even of the true thing-in-itself that might hide behind what I perceive as my own rational thinking. Where I’m confronted with the manifest image of a reasoning mind, the true scientific picture may be of nothing other than the functional mechanical processes of a brain.
PSYCHE: And yet that too won’t do, my dear obstinate friend. I don’t mean to be tediously repetitious, but you can’t found a reductionist physicalism on an infinite regress. If you believe that you believe, then you have a belief; and, if you want to argue that that too is just a condensation of functions into—forgive me, Hermes dear, for the vulgarity of the computational argot—into a user-interface, then you must account for how it is that you believe that you believe that you believe. And so on in infinitum. You’ll never escape the foundational reality of semantic intentionality. And this is just a general law. Every time you claim that some self-evident aspect of mental existence is illusory—whether consciousness or intentionality or rational thought—you necessarily presume the operation of the very faculty whose existence you’re denying in describing the supposed illusion.
HEPHAISTOS: And if that infinite regress is more an impression than a reality? Let’s dip our toes for a moment in that seemingly bottomless abyss. I’m not done with the metaphor of mirrors mirroring mirrors. I can imagine a kind of feedback echo within a system—a strange loop or tangled hierarchy21—that creates the sense of the self watching itself watch itself, forever and ever along an infinite corridor of ever more original selfhood, whereas in fact all that’s happening is a kind of constant oscillation between and circulation among hierarchically interrelated faculties . . .
PSYCHE: No, you’re missing the point. It’s not simply a personal sense of endless reflective regress that’s at issue here, impossible as that is, nor even that it’s clearly meaningless to say that physical and functional loops and tangles somehow generate conscious awareness. No, the regress in question is logical. You can’t get outside of the prior reality of the things you’re trying to explain away. Let’s say thought is, as you suggest, simply a functional flow of input and output (to use that rebarbative language), which the brain then represents to itself as a logical sequence of connected ideas, accompanied by judgments of belief or disbelief or by an impulse of further curiosity. First of all, to whom is this representation appearing if it must assume the qualities of personal subjective experience? Why would it have to do so if there weren’t really a subject there to be deceived into believing it believes? And how can the brain fabricate the illusion of continuous, unified, intentional consciousness except by way of continuous, unified, intentional consciousness? An illusion of consciousness must be a consciousness of that illusion. But that’s only the beginning of the problem. In order to represent the flow of information in a functional system as though it were actually a semantic and syntactic economy of logical premises, conclusions, concepts, and entailments, all expressed symbolically, the brain would still have to possess a real semantic and logical faculty capable of imposing the “appearance” of semeiotic meaning on that flow of stimulus into response, and capable too of making that imposed meaning hold together as a rational “narrative.” That very faculty would still remain an inexplicable reality—the very same inexplicable reality as before—in a putatively mechanistic universe. If you can reconstruct or represent a physical process in terms of reasons rather than of physical causes, and arrange those reasons in a coherent logical and conceptual sequence, then you’re in fact already really reasoning, in the most non-physical of ways. Even the ability to be deceived on this score depends on a coordinating intentional faculty that merges perception and ratiocination under the aspect—the intention—of logical entailments rather than of physical effects, and hence a faculty that possesses a mastery of logical consequents, even if its conclusions are flawed. Your supposed “user-interface” must still employ a completely semeiotic, completely linguistic, completely intentional, completely rational system, as it were, in order to produce this supposed “illusion” of a semeiotic, linguistic, intentional, rational agency. It requires mastery of the very grammar of meaning it denies exists. I don’t see how you can explain the paradox away. A successful explanatory reduction of any mental phenomenon to physical causes would have to reduce even its appearance to something that could not appear as it is; to reduce consciousness solely to appearance is in fact to affirm its reality. It makes no sense.
HERMES: And how very vacuous this language of “strange loops” and “tangled hierarchies” really is—as if mere repetitive oscillations and circulations and twisting lemniscates of physical processes could somehow explain the qualitative chasm between mindless third-person events and first-person subjectivity . . . as though thought were a physical object, like a Möbius strip in which inside and outside are one continuous surface. These are nothing but placeholder concepts, promissory notes on a theory that will never ever come. Geometrical complexities and qualitative complexities are not two versions of the same thing.
PSYCHE: Let me ask you, Phaesty: Are you willing to say that perhaps reason itself is an illusion?
HEPHAISTOS: [Pausing and lowering his eyes to his hands before speaking:] That’s a hard question to answer, because I know what your next step will be if I simply say “Yes.” You’ll say I’ve rendered all my own arguments null and void. You’ll say I can’t even really honestly embrace materialism, since materialism is a reasoned position—a conceptual edifice constructed from semantic bricks and syntactic mortar. And, naturally, you’re well aware that any metaphysical naturalist’s self-understanding is most vulnerable just here, in his or her conviction that naturalism is an austerely rationalist position. None of us likes to play the role of the glad absurdist purveying paradoxes. So, touché; I won’t deny that it’s a hit, a very palpable hit. But, once we’ve awarded that particular pass to you, let’s come again en garde. Let’s say yes, I think it’s arguable that what we experience as reason may be a kind of epiphenomenal or instrumental disguise on the part of a physical system that processes stimuli into behaviors; but I would also argue that there are evolutionary imperatives at work at all times, as a result of which those intrinsically illusory consecutive logical connections aren’t so much illusory as, oh, I don’t know, allegorical. They’re morphologically correct, as analogies of the relations between different things—a is to b as x is to y—rather as a fabulist might try to impart a moral lesson by personifying slander as a thief and depicting lost reputation as a stolen purse, and might do so with such deftness that the listener thinks he’s really hearing a story only about a thief and a stolen purse, though all the while the real meaning is subtly implanting itself in him. And these analogies or allegories are useful because, in each case, evolution has progressively conformed the representational narrative to the shape of the physical process underlying it. They’re successful representations, even if the true import of the little dramas they enact on our private cognitive stages escapes our comprehension.
PSYCHE: But even that rationalization can’t be anything other than another dissemblance, surely. Even that explanation can’t be asserted strictly as a truth. In fact, it can’t be true at all, since there wouldn’t be any rational truth to speak of in that case.
HEPHAISTOS: Even so. I must here trust simply in the verdict of evolutionary efficacy. And I’m willing to do that while acknowledging that I only imagine I have reasons for doing so. So, yes, perhaps when I juxtapose the premises “Every man is mortal” and “Socrates is a man,” as though they’re connected semantically, I’m really only describing a representation of the physical juxtaposition and connection of two neural electrochemical events in my brain; and then, in seeming to conclude that “Socrates is mortal,” I’m really only representing a physical conjunction as a logical entailment—a processing of data as an understanding of meaning. So be it. And maybe my introspective sense of having formulated a coherent syllogism merely represents another electrochemical event that somehow fortifies and further synthesizes that flow of data. And, yes, maybe even the reasoning of the argument I’m making to you now is just one more performance of a representational allegory.
HERMES: In which case, nothing really means anything at all. All seemingly intrinsic rational connections are just extrinsic neural associations, tricked out in masquerade costumes. No argument employs a logical syntax, because no such thing as a syntax really exists. Words mean nothing . . .
HEPHAISTOS: They mean precisely what they accomplish. They discharge their part in a functional system, and do so as viable “tokens” of a process that can’t be directly known in all its details, but that can generate cognitive correlates in the forms of apparent rationales . . . again, as user-interfaces or practical tools of navigation.
HERMES: Why would it need to? Why can’t the process operate without such . . . allegorization?
HEPHAISTOS: For reasons . . . excuse me . . . as a result of causes I’ve already mentioned: perhaps certain complex systems naturally produce the illusions of consciousness and intentionality and rationality as part of the larger process of input and output. Maybe those illusions are also the most convenient and economical user-interfaces possible.
