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Suppose I drew a circle on a flat, boundless plain. There are two regions: inside and outside. One of these regions is consciousness, and the other is everything else.
Which is which?
If you said the inside is consciousness you are a Western thinker. The circle is the subject. The plain is the object. The circle is small. The plain is big. The circle is finite. The plain is infinite.
If you said that the outside is consciousness you are an Eastern thinker (I use these terms loosely for the purpose of discussion). The circle is the object. The plain is the subject. The world is small. Consciousness is big. The world is finite. Consciousness is infinite.
For Western thinkers, the circle is a permeable membrane around a cell. Objects in the world pass through the membrane into consciousness and are digested there. Objects outside of consciousness are there, waiting to be discovered.
For Eastern thinkers, the circle is a wall around a city, a Rome, Baghdad, Jerusalem, or Constantinople. Consciousness is outside, the besieger of reality demanding to get in. It can guess at what is inside, but the gates never open. Occasionally, an eyewitness will sneak out and tell something of what is inside. All of them say that the city is like nothing you’ve ever seen, but they can only tell you what it is like by comparing it to something else that exists outside the city. It is like that tall building or that deep pit. Or if you took that river and that mountain and combined them together you’d have an idea.
Science gives us the Western view. It assumes from physics to chemistry to biology to neuroscience that the mind is a product of the brain — that we are the universe trying to know itself. If we are the universe, then we are the cell membrane. The universe shares its secrets with us through science.
Philosophers have long known that this is a lie.
We are not the universe trying to know itself. We are consciousness trying to reconstruct what we think the universe is like, like archaeologists studying a long buried city thousands of years old.
Nevertheless, most scientifically literate people think science tells us what is true and find it unfathomable that there are people who believe that scientific conclusions are just somebody’s biased opinion.
Most of my readers probably fit in the first group, and you might think that rejecting scientific conclusions is stupid, and those who do so are anti-intellectual morons. Philosophers, however, have shown that there is a grain (a tiny one) of truth to the second position, in that scientific truth is actually a contradiction in terms.
Now, we all know what scientists think of philosophers.
Richard Feynman once said “philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds” which may be true, but ornithologists are smarter than (most) birds and find ornithology quite useful.
Scientific truth is a contradiction in terms because the goal of science is not finding truth. It is improving hypotheses.
Western thinkers like to think that science is about finding truth or at least facts. The mind is searching for and taking things in from the outer world.
Yet, the true process of science is not about letting things in from the world, but besieging the world and, by questioning and guessing from what eyewitnesses say and trying to filter out the apparent contradictions, improving what we imagine that world to be like.
Philosophical truth is different. It is not based on evidence but on logical conclusions from self-evident premises. This is because philosophy is a meta-discipline. It is a discipline that studies other disciplines and attempts to analyze the frameworks by which they operate. It studies study. It analyzes analysis.
So science can never be about truth, unlike philosophy or mathematics, because it cannot accept premises as self-evident. Rather it has to infer premises from measurements. The premises are our hypotheses. The evidence we collect are the conclusions. It is backwards from math and philosophy.
Many philosophers of science stop there, but we can go further and question not only the truth of scientific theories, but the truth of scientific facts and that is what many philosophers going back to Kant have done.
All facts have to be expressed in some kind of language, be it words, mathematical notation, or some abstract symbology. Measurements cannot be expressed as mere numbers. Those measurements have to be defined. The procedures for obtaining those measurements must be expressed. These definitions by which data are collected however are in some sense taken as self-evident as philosophical premises.
Philosophers understand well, however, that all premises are subject to question. The definitions by which facts and data exist are mental concepts living within consciousness, not out there somewhere.
Even a concept so basic as a “thing” is a premise. The world doesn’t understand things. Our brain essentially forces us to believe in things just like it forces us to believe in colors and musical notes. We cannot deny that these exist, but they are still concepts.
This means that what we think of as the universe is really made of mental concepts fitted into a mental framework that our brain finds useful. All the facts and data that science is built upon are themselves built upon, not the “real world”, but these mental concepts. That doesn’t mean they aren’t at all related to the real world of course, but they are still part of us, not the world.
Still we may be fooling ourselves if we believe that an alien decomposes the universe in anything like the same mental framework. Would they even consider the data and facts we take for granted as self-evidently so?
The aliens in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact communicated using prime numbers which Sagan considered part of the “universal” language of mathematics and science. But is that really so?
Sagan assumed that aliens would have a concept of numbers and use similar mathematical rules and definitions as we do so as to have a concept of prime numbers (not to mention encoding those in a recognizable radio waveform modulation). But why must that be true? Is it perhaps human arrogance to believe that our way of viewing even something so basic is universal?
Sagan’s Western viewpoint assumed that the universe contains universal concepts which exist “out there” in a Platonic sense, where any sentient being can access them. We are all like bubbles of consciousness, floating in a sea of mathematics. I think that Sagan failed to understand just how different aliens might be from us. If he had taken the Eastern view that all those concepts exist “in here”, in the mind, the human mind, he would have seen that even something as basic as prime numbers cannot be taken for granted. I wonder if a sentient fungal colony, for example, would have a use for numbers.
Human beings, and other higher animals, evolved concepts into a very low level common language that was useful, particularly for predators to identify prey and work together to get food. It was the need to communicate concepts like number and location of prey, fruit and nuts, as well as size of things such as water sources that gave rise to the basics of mathematics, not some access to universal truth.
To have numbers you have to have a concept of discrete objects separate from one another. It also implies a notion of possession or at least location. I have 2 apples. There are 2 apples on the tree. I pick them and so I gain 2 apples. Now I have 4 apples. All of these are extremely useful but are they universal? I argue that they are so useful to creatures with brains that move about and hunt and gather that we take them for granted, yet they are not by any means the only way to parse the world.
Still, you may object that quantum theory proves that the universe is constructed according to our understanding of mathematics. After all, isn’t the world discrete and “quantum”? Are not atoms and subatomic particles divided up from one another and exist at distinct locations? Yes and no. Quantum theory has discovered the reverse. The world is made up of fields that appear continuous. While we can detect individual particles and they have discrete properties as far as we can tell when we measure them, quantum theory implies that, when unobserved and isolated, particles have no such discrete existence. They exist as smeared out waves with no definite existence. That means that to say the universe is quantum does not mean it conforms to the mathematics of the integers. It does and it doesn’t.
We still don’t understand quite how particles lose their continuous nature. The process by which this happens is called “decoherence” and is an irreversible process by which a continuous quantum field, by interacting with its environment, becomes discrete. A smeared out atom, for example, becomes a localized atom.
Thus, our best science, quantum theory, at times can contradict the logical structure of the statement “I have 1 apple”. It can contradict the notion of location implied by “I have”, smearing these out across time and space. It can also contradict how many things there are and what they are implied by “1 apple”. It may be 1 apple or 2 oranges or nothing at all. Once I measure it, it has a definite existence that I can understand, but is that something that depends on human consciousness or is it “out there”?
Oh ho! You say. Nonsense! Mathematics is clearly built into our universe and I shall demonstrate it thusly: bees.
No, not you. Your non-anthropomorphic, bug-eyed relatives.
Bees communicate concepts of distance and direction which are closely related to the mathematical concept of a vector. So we could conclude that even though bees are alien from us they understand mathematics. Behold the bee “waggle” dance:
Just as our concepts of numbers, distance, direction, and any number of mathematical ideas evolved in order to communicate the locations of food, water, and prey, bees evolved this mechanism to show their hive where good nectar can be found.
From this we can maybe conclude that bees, like us, have evolved to understand mathematical ideas that are built into the nature of the cosmos.
One of the problems with this is that, like our friend above, we are anthropomorphizing the bees. Yes, they evolved this dance to solve this problem. That does not mean that bees have a shared understanding of the mathematical concept. We don’t know if bees are conscious at all. Moreover, even if they do understand what they are saying, we don’t know that they understand it anything like the way we do.
Consider an example. Human beings are capable of communicating personal experience with one another, but only insofar as they have a common frame of reference. When it comes to mathematical concepts, everyone has that common frame. But how can you explain falling in love to someone who has never been in love? Likewise, the bees cannot explain to us what it is like to communicate the location of nectar because we are not bees. We are inferring the mathematical language they are using from our own language. It isn’t the same as sharing a universal language.
The world of the boundless plain of consciousness surrounding the “real” world isn’t universal. It is my consciousness. By a trick of evolution, human beings can share consciousness through language and common reference frames. This is how I am able to write this and for you to, I hope, understand it.
Projecting our scientific concepts “out there” into the world is a useful fiction. It led to the scientific method in which we believe that we can understand the world. If we believed that the world is inherently unknowable and that science is a construct of our shared consciousness, we might be far less motivated to discover new things. Aren’t we just fooling ourselves?
Taking that path you run into a slippery slope which is exemplified in contemporary misunderstanding of post-modernism.
First let me define post-modernism. The basic premise is that narratives about history and historical events are not universal. Yes, it has to do with how we understand history. Bear with me.
Post-modernism has a bad rap in our society because it has been confused with denying the existence of truth or facts. That isn’t true. It is about how language cannot contain truth about the real world. Rather words (which may include mathematical notation as well) form a variety of narratives which may contradict one another but all of which can be said to be valid. The reason why is because post-modernism suggests that language is ultimately self-referential – words do not correspond to real things but only to other words. You cannot provide a clear and unambiguous definition of anything in the real world. You can of other words – that is why math is so precise – but not the world within the walled city.
Ultimately our brains contain neural circuitry responsible for translating sensory experience into words. That translation mechanism is partly learned but largely evolved. Once in words, however, it is free of arbitrary translation and can follow mechanistic rules that enable the definition of true and false concepts. If we all share those rules, we all can agree on true and false.
Yet, it is entirely possible to come up with multiple competing formulations of mathematics and science simply by using different sets of words with different rules. All of these can be “about” the same physical process. We decide which one is “best” using rules of thumb like Ockham’s razor as well as scientific consensus and a shared vocabulary.
Philosopher’s call this the “grue” paradox.
The grue paradox comes from two equivalent hypotheses:
All emeralds are green.
All emeralds are grue.
Green just means whatever we think of as green. Grue means green until 2100, say, and blue after that. Since 2100 hasn’t happened yet (unless you are reading this about 80 years from now), you cannot deny the statement.
This is a toy example of course and nobody but a philosopher would find the concept “grue” useful. But it is true that, especially in quantum theory, there are numerous competing narratives for how to explain what we observe when we make measurements. All of them conform to the real world, and it comes down as much to what scientists “prefer” to believe as what is true.
Now, that doesn’t mean scientists or anyone can believe whatever they want. For example, you can’t say that climate change isn’t happening because that is just a conclusion scientists “prefer” to believe. Once you have accepted a particular framework for interpreting information and translating that into language, you are not free to come to conclusions that contradict the facts. In most cases, we have all bought into a particular framework already, been inculcated into it from birth, and only isolated tribes with no written language have a truly different way of seeing the world, and even then they are still human.
No, these frameworks are not obvious in the hard sciences and few of us would be comfortable rejecting the abstract logic that we have come to know and love. They become much more pronounced, however, in the “soft” sciences like sociology, psychology, economics, and especially the humanities, including anthropology and history, which are open to interpretation and definitions are not agreed upon. This is where post-modernism truly thrives.
It may be true that mathematics exists somewhere within that walled city, but we have no access to it. We can only access the mathematics that exists outside on the plain, in the world of consciousness. We can share this with each other because of our shared evolution and culture, but we cannot really know what it is like not to be us, so we cannot be sure that a truly alien species, even one on our own planet, shares our way of seeing the universe. We don’t have the ability to deviate from the frameworks that we have evolved to accept, but we do have the ability to question definitions and frameworks imposed upon us. That is the gift of post-modernist thinking.
In this way, consciousness can be said to be our universe, our all. Anything that we are not conscious of does not exist for us. Our minds have given us tools to navigate and understand the world in the form of useful concepts: numbers, direction, size, and so on. We have over the centuries built this into a mighty edifice of thought, but we cannot confuse the bricks and mortar of thought for reality itself. We are not in the world. The world is in us.