Intelligibility

One of a series of lectures given at St Brides Liverpool in 2010 and 2011. The list is here.

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms J.B.S. Haldane.1

This is the second of two lectures looking at the presuppositions behind everything we know: that the world is ordered, and that we can understand that order. If either of these is not true, then we know virtually nothing.

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Here we explore the question: even if the world is ordered, what business have we got to presuppose that our minds are capable of understanding it? You may think you are sitting reading this text, but sometimes you get things wrong. How do you know your ideas are ever true?

I’m not a psychologist or a neurologist, but even if I was the world’s greatest expert on the mind, I would still have to presuppose that the ideas in my own mind represent the way things really are. The question is: can we justify this presupposition? On what basis can we assume that our knowledge is not pure fantasy? The main religious traditions teach that God has created the universe and has also designed our minds to understand it. Is there an alternative theory that works as well without God?

As before, I shall start with some ancient theories which deny the reliability of the human mind, and then move on to modern equivalents.

Gnosticism

The most extreme ancient theory comes from second century Gnostic texts. The word ‘Gnostic’ comes from ‘gnosis’, which is Greek for knowledge. Scholars still debate the nature of Gnosticism, but some of their texts take an extremely negative view of the world and human life.

A common story is that there was once just a single good god. One thing led to another, things went wrong, and an evil or stupid god created the world. This god is often identified with the God of the Old Testament. An element of the good god then fell to earth. The evil gods controlling the earth wanted to keep it there, and the way they did this was by creating human bodies, and putting a little bit of the good god into each body.

This means that each human being is created evil but contains within it a spark of the good god. The ancient Greeks usually understood humans to be two things, body and soul – the soul being roughly the same as the mind. Gnostic myths often give us three elements: the body and soul created by the evil gods, but also this spark of the divine, the spirit. The point is to distinguish between the way most people normally think, which is complete error, and the truth buried deep within us which can be woken up.

Various myths describe how the supreme good god sends a messenger or redeemer from the realms above, down to this earth, to tell us about our real condition. This messenger is often Jesus. Jesus has to enter the evil world, which is risky because it is governed by evil gods, so he takes the form of a human in order to deceive them. His task is basically to warn people that the world is evil, and tell them how after death their soul can ascend back into heaven. When people accept the message, they learn to despise all physical life and long for the day when their spirit will be freed from its bodily prison and make its way back to the highest heaven where it belongs. Here’s a Mandean poem:

From the day when I came to love the Life, from the day when my heart came to love the Truth, I no longer have trust in anything in the world. In father and mother In brothers and sisters I have no trust in the world… In what is made and created I have no trust in the world. In the whole world and its works I have no trust in the world. After my soul alone I go searching about, which to me is worth generations and worlds. I went and found my soul – what to me are all the worlds? I went and found Truth as she stands at the outer rim of the worlds.2

Today the myths are different, but the basic idea, that the normal human mind completely misunderstands reality, is still popular. Many Christian groups make a sharp distinction between what they believe, which they claim is directly revealed by God, and other people’s beliefs which are the erroneous products of the mere human mind.

But if the human mind is normally deceived about the nature of reality, how do you know that your alternative insight is true? How can you be sure the message you have received is not also erroneous? Because this question can always be asked, this kind of Gnostic theory generates countless sects all competing against each other.

Intelligibility based on God

The second century Catholics denounced these Gnostics as heretics, and defended the Jewish principle that one good God created the world and designed human minds to understand it. When the Roman Empire collapsed it was the Christian Church which became the main sponsor of scientific learning. It remained so for over a thousand years; this is why the debates over Copernicus and Galileo were so significant.

The matter did not get seriously examined again until the early Enlightenment, and even then it was only a question of fitting it into a new rational structure. Descartes began with himself, argued from himself to the existence of God, and then argued:

I recognize that it is impossible that he [God] should ever deceive me, since in all fraud and deceit is to be found a certain imperfection; and although it may seem that to be able to deceive is a mark of subtlety and power, yet the desire to deceive bears evidence without doubt of weakness or malice, and, accordingly, cannot be found in God.3

In effect Descartes was continuing the Catholic tradition that God has designed our minds to understand the world. Empiricists agreed; thus John Locke:

The infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our senses, faculties, and organs, to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here. We are able, by our senses, to know and distinguish things.4

Knowledge and determinism

What happened to break this consensus down? By the end of the eighteenth century two major changes had taken place to the understanding of knowledge. One change was that reason became self-authenticating; people no longer thought it necessary to justify it. They were very optimistic that the human mind can work out scientifically how the universe functions, because everything that happens is caused by something else. This is the source of the idea that, if we knew every law of nature, and the exact condition of the universe at a given point of time, we would be able to predict the future of the universe from then on.

The other change was the rise of materialism. Instead of two realms, the physical one which we are learning about and the spiritual one where human minds think, there is now just one realm, the physical universe, and it operates according to eternal laws of cause and effect. So all the thoughts of our minds are the products of determined brain processes.

dualism-monism

If you believe both those, you have to explain how the thoughts in our minds can arrive at true beliefs purely as a result of physical processes. This is pretty difficult. Scientists and philosophers alike are divided on this question. My view is that most of the debate hasn’t come to terms with the full implications of taking God out of the picture.

Determinism

The core issue is determinism. If our minds are determined this means we do not have open futures. If Jane offers you tea or coffee and you say you would like tea, you are free in the sense that you are choosing what you want, but you did not have an open future. In exactly that situation you were bound to choose tea, even though you think you were free to choose coffee. This is determinism. If it is true, a lot of normal human activities are completely misguided. The main ones are blaming, thanking, deciding, and all moral judgements. They are misconceived because people none of us have any freedom to do other than we do. Some philosophers therefore argue that believing in free will is both misguided and necessary.

One question which arises is: if all our thoughts about the world are determined, caused by something else, can we ever know whether any of them are true?

To take an example, Judy holds the belief that Paris is the capital of France. She read it in a book. If all our beliefs are determined, caused by something else, she would like to think that her belief in Paris being the capital of France is somehow caused by Paris actually being the capital of France. It may be indirect causation, but if this belief of hers would have been caused whether or not Paris really is the capital of France, she has no reason for supposing that her belief is true.

Mental processes as physically caused

So how does Paris being the capital of France end up influencing the thoughts in Judy’s mind? We can try it in two ways, depending on what we believe about the human mind. Some people believe there is no such thing as the human mind over and above brain processes. So if we could wire Judy’s brain up to the kind of machine they are going to invent in 50 years’ time, and give names to all her possible brain states, we may find that her belief in Paris being the capital of France is caused by her neurons being in state 12347.

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In that case, what caused her neurons to be in state 12347? Presumably the electrical currents from her eyes, which were in turn caused by the rays of light from the page of the book, which were in turn caused by the shapes of the ink on the page. We’ve got to get all the way from Paris like this, with every effect physically caused, so that the end product in her brain accurately matches the reality hundreds of miles away. Hardly surprisingly, the people who think this is how it works tend to be non-realists. They think the existence of Paris, and France, is just a linguistic convention.

Mental processes as mentally caused

Other determinists believe that the mind is more than just the physical brain, in the sense that we have mental processes which cannot be explained in terms of physical processes. There are parallels to this idea: in the same way there are biological processes which cannot be explained by the laws of physics, even though they depend on the laws of physics.

If the mind is more than physical brain processes, it becomes easier to get to Judy’s mind from Paris. She thinks Paris is the capital of France because she read it in a book which she trusts, and the book was written by somebody who knows about these things. It’s the mental processes which get us from Paris to Judy’s thoughts.

wp40076fa7_06On this theory, our thoughts are determined by mental causes as well as physical ones. The trouble is, if determinism is true it still does not follow that Paris really is the capital of France. What causes Judy to think it is? She seems to remember reading it in a book. So now we ask: what causes Judy to think she remembers reading it in a book? Some mental or physical process causes her to think she remembers. What process causes her to think she remembers it, and what caused that? Was it anything to do with Paris actually being the capital of France, or not? Precisely because all her thoughts are caused, Judy can never step outside this determined sequence of mental causes and effects to find out whether her belief is really true.

In other words, if all our thoughts are determined by a strict sequence of cause and effect, we believe what we are caused to believe, and we have no way of stepping outside our causal sequence to find out whether any of our beliefs are true.

Elitism

Many leading scientists have made a fundamental error here, which is basically elitism. They argue as though their minds are completely different from the minds of the people they are studying. I have already mentioned one example. Some determinist philosophers think that belief in free will is erroneous, but necessary for the good of society. What this means is: you and I know that there is no free will, nudge nudge wink wink, so all talk of morality, and all blaming and thanking, is completely misconceived: but other people need to believe in free will for the good of society. But if it would be a social disaster for other people to find out the truth, why isn’t it a disaster for you and me to find it out? Aren’t you and I going to be the prime suspects for undermining society?

Since the eighteenth century, when the high estimation of human reason was combined with materialism, there has been a very strong elitist tendency. The assumption has been that we, the enlightened ones, know best what is good for people. They do not know because their minds are determined. The first social science to buy into it was economics, and economics remains the most influential proponent of social engineering. To illustrate the point I shall offer three examples, though from other disciplines.

Skinner

B F Skinner was a leading behaviourist in the middle of the 20th century. He believed all human behaviour results from conditioning: when our actions get rewarded, we repeat them. The concept of the mind is a fiction and we have no real freedom. He expressed this clearly in a popular book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, where he consistently expressed a strong concern to improve the lot of human life. He believed this should be done by abandoning the false ideas of freedom and dignity, and instituting a regime of positive and negative reinforcers to condition behaviour:

In what we may call the pre-scientific view… a person’s behaviour is at least to some extent his own achievement. He is free to deliberate, decide, and act, possibly in original ways, and he is to be given credit for his successes and blamed for his failures. In the scientific view… a person’s behaviour is determined by a genetic endowment traceable to the evolutionary history of the species and by the environmental circumstances to which as an individual he has been exposed… the second view shows a marked advantage when we begin to do something about behaviour… The environment can be changed, and we are learning how to change it.5

This passage illustrates his elitism in two ways. Firstly, at the beginning of the passage he denies that human beings are free to deliberate, decide and act on our decisions, but at the end he is confident that ‘we’ can learn how to change the environment and set about doing so.

Secondly, it is central to behaviourist theory that our thoughts do not affect our behaviour. Our thoughts are mere by-products of brain processes. So how did he develop his own behaviourist theory? He did not describe it purely in terms of chemical processes in his brain. He used mental language. He looked at the evidence, decided which were the best hypotheses and developed them through mental processes. If his theory is true, then the reason why he did his research is that he was being rewarded for it – and whether it was true was irrelevant. He often noted that people accused him of being inconsistent in these ways, but he never produced a satisfactory response. Of course he couldn’t.

 

Dawkins

My second example is Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. This is another popular work by a scientist, and is elitist in the same ways. Dawkins writes:

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.6

In the subsequent debate he commented on this passage:

That was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular way favoured by biologists.7

He responds to his deterministic conclusions with an appeal for change:

If you would extract a moral from this book, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs.8

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth… We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.9

Mary Midgley comments:

If we take seriously the view that we are nothing but gene-machines. the advice given seems as futile as inviting a chess machine to play leap-frog.10

Determinism and evolution

Dawkins’ theory was based on a specific element of evolution. My third example is the general principle of evolution. It is often understood deterministically. Darwin had his concerns:

The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?11

More recently Patricia Churchland has put it more robustly:

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive… Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.12

The point is that evolution has given us minds which are good at getting us to move the way we need to, not to think true thoughts.

Adaptation and exaptation

Others like Karl Popper have argued that the ability to work out what is true should give us an evolutionary advantage.

The way it would work is by adaptation and exaptation. Adaptation means those members of a species better suited to a particular environment have more offspring, so the species gradually changes.

Exaptation means a change caused by adaptation turns out to be useful for a different purpose than the original one. So human minds might have been adaptations to help survival, which later as it happened enabled us to think about scientific hypotheses and mathematical equations.

Could such an exaptation enable human minds to distinguish between truth and falsity? How could evolutionary theory explain such an exaptation?

Roger Trigg believes it cannot:

Given evolution, it may seem obvious that we have evolved in such a way that our reason is attuned to the workings of the world. This would seem to be a requirement in ordinary living. In the case of our metaphysical and scientific thinking, matters are not so clear. There seems no evolutionary reason for supposing that they must somehow fit the world. Evolution, through natural selection, has been a long process, and human reason has been employed in such activities only for a minute part of that time, and in a few places. It is unlikely that this would have played a significant role in human genetic evolution.13

What Trigg is arguing for is that the human mind’s ability to think about these things needs to be explained in some other way, not by evolution. The problem is not evolution theory itself, but evolution interpreted as a deterministic explanation of all behaviour, including thinking.

We do not have to interpret it like this. Darwinian evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection works on different individuals responding to their situation in different ways. This means that at any one time there are variations which may or may not have an evolutionary advantage. So although some evolutionists are determinists, others are not.

In each of these three illustrations of elitism, the theory may well explain some human behaviour; but when it is treated as an explanation of all human behaviour, it refutes itself because the theory itself turns out to be just the determined product of a few mental processes.

Physical and mental processes

To apply this to science in general, science works on the basis that whatever happens is the effect of causes, and those causes are in turn effects of other causes. Any process which transcends that sequence of causes and effects cannot be studied by science. If the sun was really free to decide for itself whether to rise tomorrow morning, that would mean that no amount of science could predict in advance whether it will. Determinism works on that level.

However, if our minds were determined in the same way, then we could never find out whether any of our thoughts are true. Non-realists can be quite happy with this conclusion. The world we are caused to believe in is the only world we can ever know about, so we may as well treat it as though it was the real world, even though we shall never find out whether it really is. Of course most scientists are realists. They think they are studying the real world, not just inventions of their minds. If they are right, they have to accept that our minds are free, and therefore cannot be fully explained by science.

Conclusion

In order to justify our conviction that we know anything at all, we have to presuppose some hypotheses which we cannot prove. We have to presuppose

  • that there is a physical universe, which we can perceive through our eyes and ears;
  • that the universe is ordered, so that some future events can be predicted by minds capable of understanding the laws of nature;
  • that the human mind, despite being a product of the universe (via the brain) somehow bucks the trend and can freely think undetermined thoughts;
  • that the mind can sometimes distinguish between true and false thoughts, and choose to seek truth.

These hypotheses are so difficult to reconcile with each other that many scientists and philosophers refuse to believe them all. I have tried to show that if we do not believe them all, we know nothing.

So I end up as I have ended up in most of these lectures. It is possible that all these hypotheses happen to be true, as just a surd fact, an accident of the way the universe worked out, something utterly inexplicable; but this is a rather unscientific conclusion. After all, if we have no way of explaining how they are true, we have no reason to suppose they are true. The Gnostics and the non-realists may be right after all: maybe we really do not have a clue about the real world – if there is one.

Given that we cannot prove that we know anything at all, what we need is a hypothesis which could explain how these presuppositions could all be true, and could fit together consistently. If we can think of such a hypothesis, we can then test it by asking questions about it.

When the early Catholics reacted against the Gnostics by claiming that God designed the world, and designed our minds to understand it, they were unwittingly preparing the way for modern knowledge, by establishing its essential presuppositions. Neither modern science nor modern philosophy has produced a satisfactory alternative.

Notes

1 Haldane, J B S, Possible Worlds and Other Essays, London: Chatto & Windus, 1927, Vol 2, p. 470.

2 Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion, London: Routledge, 2nd Ed 1958, pp. 90-91.

3 Meditation 4. Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, London: Penguin, 1968, pp. 132-3.

4 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London: Collins, 1984, 2.23.12.

5 Skinner, B F, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 101.

6 Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene: Oxford: OUP, 1976, p. Ix.

7 Dawkins, Richard, ‘In defence of selfish genes’, Philosophy, Vol 56, no 218, pp 572-573.

8 The Selfish Gene, p. 3.

9 The Selfish Gene, p. 215.

10 Mary Midgley, ‘Selfish genes and social Darwinism’, Philosophy, Vol 58, no. 225, pp. 365-377.

11 Letter to Graham William, July 3 1881, quoted in Helm, Paul, Ed, Faith and Reason, Oxford: OUP, 1999.

12 Churchland, P, Journal of Philosophy 84 (October 1987), p. 548.

13 Trigg, R, Reality at Risk, Brighton: Harvester, 1980, p. 13.

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