Philosophy Reconsidered

In my Ethics as Social Conscience, I identified Ethics as a cultural artifact. Now I affirm the generalization of that claim, that human intellectual activities are cultural artifacts in so far as they have a social or physical instantiation. This claim leaves aside what happens in people's brains except for what the physiologists have demonstrated.

Homo Sapiens

When I was about 21 years old, I began to feel that human biology had something to do with philosophy, but I had no idea what. That feeling persisted until I was near retirement a decade ago, when it began to turn into a working philosophy based on biology and culture.

As I got older, I lived an ordinary life increasingly far from academia. As my worldly involvement increased, the hold of academic rationalism decreased. Little by little, I realized that most people lived according to their biological and cultural makeup, not according to idealized conceptions taught in schools. I also learned that most people's lives are largely unaffected by political and religious propaganda, despite widespread (usually pro-forma) participation in those social institutions. What changes people's lives is their work assignments and the socio-economic rewards derived from work. Here, "work" includes all that happens in supporting oneself and one's family; i.e., what is required to maintain individuals, families and their associations.

During the last two or three decades, there has been an explosion of research in Primatology, Ecology and related fields. Attention to the environment has increased rapidly, probably due to belated recognition of the fragility of Gaia, the homeostatic planet on which we live. Species extinction and global climate change are finally "on the agenda" because those processes now threaten our comforts and existence in major ways. I, too, became increasingly aware of environmental problems and degradation, and also of our individual and institutional inability to confront and solve those serious threats.

For a long time, I could not understand why people did nothing about these and other problems. As long as I remained in the grip of academic rationalism, I believed in the power of reason or intelligence to motivate action. Things became much clearer as I broke the bonds of my early training, brainwashing as I now call it, and wiped the cobwebs from my eyes. I was assisted in this process by the wholesale retrogression of Americans from the liberation ethos of 1960s movements to the greedy, jingoist, imperialist neo-conservatism of the last few decades. I reluctantly discovered that there is a core American culture, evidenced in the stand-pat conformism of the 1950s, from which people will not deviate for long. Thus the revolutions of the 1960s were indeed motivated by cultural heretics, of which I am one, but the vast majority of the temporarily liberated returned to the prisons of their molds. The Baby Boomers, having had their illicit fun, knuckled under and buckled down, voted for Ronald Reagan and made Greed their Good. As a result of several American political debacles following the 1992 election of Pres. Clinton, I realized the importance of historical inertia and acculturation in guiding events. (I had first noticed these factors in 1966, but did not immediately understand their significance.) For me, the pieces of an undesired performance of History came together in the Conquest of Iraq, when I stumbled on my chaos Theory of History. I came to believe that History - the record of what people do - has little or nothing to do with reason or rational choice. That is, I discovered that much of what I was taught in my youth is either irrelevant, prejudicial or just plan wrong. In a round-about way, I came to my present understandings of politics, economy and morality.

Until modern times, the dominant mode of explaining our existence was religious and mythological. Myths work by metaphor and analogy; they are strongly suggestive, but not definitive. For example, we can conceive of Achilles because he was just like us in most respects, but he had only one weak spot. We can feel Achilles as superhero because he lived and loved like us, but more than us, and he died harder than us. So the story of a moral man can be glorified until he is a metaphor of a Superhero. This process is natural in human brains because it is the same process by which we conceive ourselves; i.e., we create our own story. Because we are just as impressed by the inventions of our brain as by the sensations of other organs, we give as much credence to the idea of oneself as to the existence of the plants in our gardens. Such beliefs are almost unshakeable, only giving way under extreme duress. But the very sturdiness of our beliefs becomes a way of believing, and that way of believing also makes us capable of adopting and holding beliefs which are empty or false.

In contrast to philosophy expressed as Biological Naturalism, most people have been taught from an early age that human beings are special. A major point of all traditional cultures, East and West, is the separation of human beings from beasts. Especially in the West, human beings are seen as half way between Angels and animals. On those traditional views, we are exalted because of our consciousness, understanding and skills. Spiritualists do not believe ourselves to be "dumb beasts" because we have souls. But, since the Renaissance, qualities proposed to distinguish humans from animals have increasingly been found in animals, making it more and more difficult to sustain the belief that human beings are special and apart. When one finally gives up trying to make H. sapiens different, we are left with human beings as part of Nature. Seeing it that way also completely changes the way we see Nature - the Universe in which we live - as well as ourselves, particularly by demystifying our ideas. Consequently, what comes to the fore is scientific understanding.

The fallout of my many, disparate experiences crystallized in the last few years in the writing of books. I felt forced to give a "rational" account of what I believe, even though I am skeptical about "reason." (Just how does one explain something irrational to auditors convinced of their rationality and the reasonableness of everything?) In the end, I decided the explanation has to start with the fact that we are primates, relatives of chimpanzees and bonobos. My philosophy had to start with biology and the place of human beings in the natural world. Looking upon our species as an evolved primate with some special skills puts most things in perspective and answers a lot of questions. So I believe the center of Philosophy, at least for human beings, is H. sapiens.

Philosophizing

Engaging in philosophical reflection and discourse is an ancient practice in every civilization, and may be older than civilization itself. There are lots of thoughts and experiences which trigger the philosophical mode in individuals; e.g., "Who am I?" and "Why Me?" Everyone has philosophical concerns sometime in their lives, but the systematic pursuit of philosophy seems restricted to a few people in those sufficiently organized societies which support an intelligentsia. In all the societies I know about, the Founder Effect has given a tremendous advantage to first thinkers, right or wrong. The world's dominant religions and philosophies originated over 2,000 years ago and are still going strong. It is very hard to get away from Confucian, Buddhist or Hindi thought in Asia, and just as hard to avoid Greek or Jewish thought in the West. The ideas implicit in those ancient religions and philosophies are taught children from the moment of birth because the interactions of parents and children are guided by them. For example, how each society deals with breast feeding reflects a philosophy of sex which, along with many other cultural practices, are rarely discussed in Philosophy departments. So almost everyone who would do philosophy starts off with an Everest of preconceptions to be overcome, which is one reason why one of the hardest things to do is have a NEW (necessarily, different) idea.

Since I am largely confined to my home due to poor heath, I do not have a great deal of contact with people. My isolation has interesting consequences. Among them, increasingly, it allows me to see people "in the buff" without any particular cultural preconceptions. Our everyday social lives enforce on us a world view (Schopenhauer's weltanschauung) which prevents any other understanding of events and ourselves. I take this last proposition as a fact, at least for myself, for the simple reason that my experience of people and History has been radically transformed in the last few years. While I can imagine how I held the views I once had, since it was I who had them, I cannot come to similar beliefs in my present state of mind. I think I was deluded because my hopes for myself and society were too strong, whereas now it matters little to me what the outcomes will be. In other words, it matters a lot whether one has a vested interest in the matters at hand.

I have had political and social concerns since I was a boy, probably for the most personal of reasons: I started life as an outcast in my parental home and the local society. I was made to feel very defensive and negative about myself and whatever I did, especially in school. I was shunned a lot. I finally began to overcome those psychological problems when I was about 30 years old, because I buried myself in my work. Even today, what I accomplished in my work - however little it may be - is the central feature of my life. Writing two books was especially helpful in clarifying what my life was about and what are my real concerns. It became clear to me that a lot of my philosophical understandings were the direct result of my position (or lack of it) in society. My social milieu had enforced itself on my psyche, making me into what society preferred to see of me rather than what I might have chosen for myself. This last may seem a peculiar, self-serving and perhaps internally contradictory statement, but I think it is true: social interactions guided my personality development throughout most of my younger life. "Who I am" is not something I created of myself, but is largely the result of bumping around in this world, doing this here and another thing there, all the while adjusting myself and my interactions as best I could to survive. Since that has been my experience as I now understand it, it is natural for me to consider the role of society interaction and culture generally in people's sense of themselves. That is, our consciousness is somehow wrapped up in our social nature as H. sapiens.

Can the sense of self - "selfhood" - be separated from consciousness? To make such a separation requires there be a sensing apparatus and its results; i.e., there is an "I" and "what I am." Such a dualistic theory implies that selfhood can be changed by the inner "I;" that there is something doing the choosing of the components and presentation of self. But I think such a theory is nonsense, because I am what I am. If we break down our personalities into a sequence of choices and acts, the total of what I am at any time makes the next choice. On this model, there is no inner "I," there is only a processing apparatus which tries to make sense of what it has done as well as continue to define that sense. This model is defensible exactly because our brains are very good at pattern recognition. Once the brain has the ability to review its decisions (this entails having memories) in a manner similar to its processing of sensations into perceptions, it can create the persona, the sense of self. The persona is the gluing of all the disparate activities into a picture just as we make a picture of the world around us. While this has been stated in visual terms, in fact persona operates at may levels and has many parts parallel to the structures of our bodies. All of the sensations delivered by the nervous systems are integrated into the persona.

Consequently, each person's world view is essentially different from that of others, even if there is some coherence among individual views. But, what is "coherence?" This is a complicated word because its explication must include interactive pathways; i.e., the feedback between oneself and perceived others. Nonetheless, here is how I think it works. In an assumed world of actors, there is me and everyone else. I think this assumption is the result of the way perceptions are delivered: "everyone else" arrives in the neural cortex as perceptions (processed sensations) from the nervous systems whereas "me" is internally generated in that cortex. Another way of understanding the result is as resolution of patterns;  i.e., the brain gets different streams of data which it organizes into patterns. Oneself and others have similar patterns, so all are seen as similar things; i.e., the sense of self cannot be resolved from the sense of others. "Self" and "other" are really the same thing which, probably for practical reasons, are put into different bins. As a result of seeing oneself and others as similar based on perceived patterns of activity, our brains make a further assumption: all these creatures have similar capabilities and thoughts. Thus, we assume that others have a similar worldview to our own because we prefer to interpret our experience of others that way.

A particularly obnoxious application of this last procedure is the assumption usually made by Imperial Conquerors: that subjects will understand the language and commands of their masters. Viceroys are often arrogant, so take their subjects inability to communicate or follow directions as a sign of ignorance or, more often, stupidity. Thus we have the myth of the backward, even primitive, colonials. That myth caused many an Imperial civil servant to regard posting to the colonies as punishment and dealing with the natives as beneath one's dignity. Of course, those attitudes at first humiliated, and then inflamed, Imperial subjects. When the time of Imperial weakness comes (as it always does), the colonials rebel and take revenge as has happened in Africa over and over. In some places, particularly India, the natives learned the Imperial British game and set out to beat their masters at it, which they did. In other places, such as Japan, a single contact with foreign Conquistadores, such as Kublai Khan's army or the Russian and American navies, was sufficient to provoke a long lasting rejection  of foreign influences. The net effect of Imperialism on China was eventually to produce yet another Chinese Empire.

How we view others makes a difference. That fact of our experience validates the notion that others exist independently of ourselves, but it does not prove it. What it does prove is that different weltanschauungs - world views - are not only possible, but have quite different consequences when applied. A recent application of this idea is "framing," as explained by George Lakoff, Tversky and Kahneman, et al. in their books.

Analytic Philosophy

The title is what became of English philosophy in the last half of the 20^th Century.

Perhaps it started with the quarrel between Leibniz and Newton over who invented the Calculus. Perhaps it was the result of centuries-long French and British hostilities, beginning with William the Conqueror and ending only shortly before World War I. Whatever the reason, English philosophy parted company with the Continent during the Scotch Enlightenment and has gone its separate way ever since. For the modern English, philosophy begins with David Hume and other British notables of his time, such as Adam Smith and John Locke, who opposed the Continental idealism of Kant, the Rationalism of Descartes and the Romanticism of Rousseau or Voltaire. Moreover, it must have been insufferable for the English in their pride to hear the pragmatic meanderings of upstart colonials such as the American Benjamin Franklin. Since the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War), English philosophy has been gloriously hermetic in its Imperialist righteousness, no matter the actual situation of the Empire. In fact, there was a brilliant line of English philosophers until World War I, after which the British world fell apart. In the disillusion and wreckage of the Great War, English philosophers grasped onto the Positivism lifeboat offered by Lord Bertrand Russell and the Continental refugee, Ludwig Wittgenstein. But, then, Wittgenstein sank his own boat in  his subsequent writing, Philosophical Investigations. After the next war, World War II, England sank into the confusion and poverty of has-beens, always the eventual price of vain glory. Out of that miasma arose the ultimate retreat, "whatever did you mean by that?" or linguistic analysis, which the English call "Analytic Philosophy."

I must admit to my all too obvious prejudice: I don't like Analytic Philosophy and have little use for it. In fact, I have not liked it since my first encounters with it in the 1960s. I feel people who do that kind of philosophy are just playing with words for several reasons:

1. Graduate students are doing it because their professors make them do it as the price of a PhD. Part of that price is inflicting the same teaching on unsuspecting undergraduates in proof of the bona fides of the teachers, usually graduate students.

2. Lawyers-in-training are doing it to pass the bar and get a job. Politicians are doing it for the same reason as Rhetoricians since before the time of Plato and Aristotle: to get a Big Job and make Big Bucks. The Royal Bank of Scotland has a long running commercial mocking those folks who use fancy, priestly words, but they should pull the ad now that they are among the fallen. Effective use of language, especially weasel words, can be a money-maker and often brings people to national prominence. Of course, there are always words and deeds; sometimes they even occur in combination.

3. People in finance and sales positions are increasingly students of Analytic Philosophy for the same reasons as those mentioned above. One financial counselor/salesperson told me her studies in Philosophy helped her to "see things from several points of view." Understanding another person's world view makes it much easier to fit what you are selling into that person's life. This requires no commitment to the product, but only a skillful use of the language the consumer is ready, willing and able to entertain.

4. People who enjoy parlor games, as well as those too bored with everything else, sometimes study Analytic Philosophy. In graduate school I had the distinct impression that philosophy was a well-to-do gentlemen's pass-time, a practice inconsistent with holding a day or night or any job. Analytic Philosophy is a great tool because, as Humpty Dumpty said, I can make words mean anything I want. Clearly, that game can go on as long as anyone wants.

The hope of English philosophy is that in having a clear understanding of the words we use, we thereby get a grip on "reality." Presumably, those words are wrappers of knowledge bundles which we can open and inspect, if only we know how. The examination of language has been greatly encouraged by recent developments in biology, anthropology and linguistics, all of which point to the close connection between human (and, by implication, any other) intelligence and speech. Unlike other forms of communication, such as signing and pointing, language enables an intelligent receiver to infer or guess content;, i.e., language is semantic and symbolic, not merely streaming bits of data.

Understanding language is just that. Neither trees nor lions understand our words or screams, although some big cats and bears will respond to human commands after extensive training. Understanding is something only intelligent critters do. So what we intelligent people gain from an intensive analysis of language is, at most, an explication of what we understood in terms of our other understandings. In other words, philosophical language analysis is a subset of linguistics, which, in turn, is a subset of human behavior. What language analysis does not reveal is anything about the "reality" in which human behavior is supposedly embedded, although one can speculate about the externals (surroundings) implied by linguistic structures. If we avoid overreach in our analysis, the most that can be said about language is that it is a self-supporting network. Since for mysterious reasons what we call knowledge is closely coupled to our linguistic capabilities, language also has the property that it can explain itself; i.e., it is reflexive.

The reflexivity of language leads to a lot of consternation among philosophers because it is commonly attempted to sort out statements 'in the language' from other, meta-linguistic statements. Thus, it is proposed that there are really two (or more) languages which happen to use the same words (expressions, symbols, etc), but have distinct meanings. Of course, that leads to the next problem: what is a meaning? This type of problem led Lord Russell to propose a class hierarchy, but that has the liability of infinite regress as exposed in the notion of the class of all classes (which, therefore, is a member of itself). The solution to this nasty problem is simply to accept that there is just one language which does not include any universal class of classes; i.e., there are no universal concepts. What language contains is relational terms, definitions of one item in terms of another. Whatever the terms mean is entirely left to each individual interpreter. The posted speed limit may be 65 mph, but what that means to me depends on how I drive the car; i.e., it depends on how I integrate the symbols on the sign with similar symbols on the dashboard, and how I move my arms, legs, etc. Having the concept of a speed limit and the further notion of obedience means adjusting my body while driving according to the signals I receive. But, if I cannot understand the significance of the signals or control the movements of my body according to those signals - if, in short, I am an armadillo - I may end up as road kill. The signals only have a purpose (intentionality) as applied in human situations because they were, in the first place, issued by humans. If, coincidentally, the signals have a larger interpretation than what the originator considered (intended), that is a matter entirely in the control of the interpreter.

If someone wants to present the idea of a class of all classes, or the notion of gods, spirits, souls, etc, that is their presentation. The fact of presentation implies nothing beyond that fact, except as I care to interpret it. The situation is most clearly seen in terms of computer processors: the same stream of data is treated differently by different chips. The mathematician may say that "1+1 = 2" always, but, with respect to computer processors, that is an interpretation of the various arrangements of circuits which do adding. Nonetheless, all of these things are reducible to (can be expressed in) the same binary language of 0s and 1s.

I think language is best explained as a network based on human interactions. Explanation is a kind of human activity.

Algorithmic Knowledge

Perhaps because I spent most of my life around computers, I have the peculiar notion that algorithms are a form of universal knowledge. Perhaps they are the only universal available to human beings. This is a broad claim - certainly one that is disputed - which has many ins and outs. Before digging into this subject, I wish to consider things which are seemingly not algorithmic.

Consider, for example, the things of this world. Things appear in our experience as perceptions of sensations. That is, assuming naive realism is true, we have sensations in the various organs of our bodies presumably stimulated by contact with an external world. Restated, without relying on naive realism, sensations are generated at the interface between our bodies and what we postulate to be the external world. These sensations become perceptions when they come to the attention of our brains, whether or not immediately and consciously. In this model, sensations are the raw data generated by sensory mechanisms which get organized into perceptions by the nervous system. When I hug a tree, my body has a lot of different sensations such as the smell and feel of tree as well as the sight of it. I can call something I see "tree," but will not positively identify it as such until it passes a number of non-visual tests. When I call things "trees" which are in my visual field, but with which I do not have direct contact, I am making a hypothesis based on previous experience; i.e., I assume the seen tree is sufficiently like other trees because its appearance is a close match.

The important thing about the preceding model of experience is that everything happens within an organism. The world external to an organism is a construct the organism makes based on its sensations. When we hypothesize the existence of an external world, as in naive realism, we do so in order to simplify the explanation of our experience. The external world is a shell enclosing and connecting different sensations. Our notion of the Universe consisting of all the matter and energy we know about is another form of shell. A shell, or world view, is not limited by its present contents: other things can be added to it or subtracted from it both in retrospect and in the future. A shell is what we make of our sensations processed into experiences. There is no à priori definition of shells, and no implication that different organisms share them (even if they have very similar world views). It is illogical to pass from the idea of a shell to its "real" existence.

If each organism constructs a shell from its experiences, the world view of an amoeba is probably quite different from that of a fish, a frog or a rabbit. But, how can we know that is true? I think it likely that other animals and plants save ourselves do not have that knowledge. H. sapiens has the special ability of constructing concepts, probably because of its neural wiring. That ability is well represented in our languages, but also in our visual and other sensory processes. The human sensation of touch is able to conjure up a great deal of information about the spatial configurations with which we have contact. Recognition of different 3-D geometries, such as curved or flat surfaces, is correlated with visual pattern recognition. While I can only feel surfaces, somehow I also apprehend those surfaces as covering space-filling bodies which I see. (We do not have direct experience of volume, so must infer it from the relationships of two dimensional surfaces.)  A great deal of sensory processing and integration is going on in our brains all the time, consciously and unconsciously. For unknown reasons, the information accessible to our conscious selves has been encoded into language. Thus, language is the key tool which expresses thinking and sometimes is the same thing as thinking.

How do I "know" what you or an amoeba thinks; i.e., what the shell is like in which you are enclosed? I can construct a facsimile of your world view using the language which explains the world with which I am familiar. Such a construction usually assumes that the "real" world of your experience is sufficiently similar to mine, so you must operate in a manner sufficiently similar to me. (Hypotheses about other organisms depend upon our notions concerning the external world.) This proposition shows that language (hence experience) is not merely reactive. Language creates its own images, thus we have the theater, movies and fiction; i.e., human art shows that we have the ability to conceive different worlds (shells). It is the ability to organize experience in many different ways that allows me to suggest how an amoeba may think. Consequently, language becomes metaphorical and analogical because we use it as the mechanism to express those different organizations. (Having somehow acquired language through an evolutionary process, H. sapiens uses it as a tool in the increasing number of applications in which it works.)

At this point, I must re-introduce the Turing Machine because Alan Turing's model is useful in explaining the computational basis of intelligence. A Turing machine is a very simple automaton which can read and write just one bit of data at a time, and execute instructions based on that data. Turing thought of the data as written on a tape, so machine has the ability to move itself or the tape in carrying out read/write instructions. Further, the machine has an accumulator - a simple memory - in which data can be stored. It has an instruction processor which can transfer data from the accumulator into the instruction stream; i.e., instructions are simply an interpretation of data. What Turing's invention shows is that there is no difference between process and fact: everything is reducible to interpretations of data. Again, in the end, there is just the data because interpretation is just a collection (selection or organization) of data. (Of course, what this model does not explain is how the data becomes a machine, as in the origin of life problem, or the existence of data in the first place.)

Using Turing's model, it is clear that everything about an organism can be reduced to sensations and their processing. All that exists is internal to the organism which does the processing. I think this sort of model is an adequate basis for explaining consciousness and all the other supposedly unique human traits and abilities. I note that most people do not object to using some such model in explaining the behavior of viruses, bacteria, crocodiles and bears. It is only when we get to humans and their familiars, or animals that seem to act in human ways, that we find objections to this abstraction. Somehow, we are supposed to be different although there is no evidence whatsoever to support such a claim. In fact, the political wars over evolution occur just because evolutionary theory shows that humans are not different; i.e., opponents of the scientific explanation seek to remove the science, thus the explanation.

But why should anyone accept the scientific explanation? After all, science proceeds by publicity and consensus, which entails some sort of public (real) world. This puts those who object to science in a peculiar position, for, if there is a real world, they must accept what science offers. Of course, there is the alternative that science is just plain wrong about the real world, that the world does not work according to scientific laws as we now understand them. There is some merit in that argument, as what is considered "science" has itself evolved through the ages. Modern people believe we have better science than our predecessors, but also allow that we could be wrong. One hallmark of modern science is public verification, an essential tool in forming consensus. Verification encourages those who do not agree with any proposal (hypothesis, theory, law, principle, etc.) to try it for themselves and make their own proposals. So, on agreed procedure, we cannot reject out of hand those who do not accept scientific explanations of human behavior and constitution.

Nonetheless, what we call "science" has the pragmatic virtue of  working; i.e., modern scientific knowledge is involved in almost every aspect of our lives. For example, the houses people occupy these days in the richer half of them world are cleaner and more efficient than their predecessors. The poorer half is replacing old housing with the new styles as fast as economically possible, because the advantages of modern design are obvious. For most people, life is far more pleasant and comfortable in a 20^th-21^st century house than a grass shack because of such amenities as hot and cold water, bathrooms and well equipped kitchens. The safety of of modern living depends on a myriad of practices such as chlorination and sewage treatment which, in turn, are based on near-certain chemical and biological knowledge. So, I endorse the common belief that the driving force underlying modern societies is science and the technology founded on it.

Consequently, it seems to me that Turing's work has far-reaching applications even if his basic concepts seem strange. For example, the impact of  the Turing machine is to turn questions about the nature of what we know into questions about how we know something. Experiences are something we have because we are conscious of having them, so the key question is how we are aware of ourselves and our experiences, not what are any of those things. Philosophically, this is to leave the question, "what is knowledge," in favor of another question, "how do I believe this?"

Constructivism

 I call this approach to Philosophy "Constructivism" because it brings process to the fore. Who or whatever I am, I must be able to have an experience of myself. In order to do so, my brain must perform in a certain way; i.e., the brain constructs the experience of self and everything else. Once the construct is before us, one may ask "what does it mean," but such a question does not necessarily alter the construction. Thus, the constructive process is more fundamental than the thing "in itself."

From a pragmatic point of view it matters little what I think I am or what are my experiences right now, especially since I have changed my mind a lot about those things from time to time. What does matter is that I can construct the object of my attention at will with sufficient accuracy. When thinking about triangles, I can bring to mind objects which are obviously three-sided. I do not need to have a particular object in mind. It is the same with anemones, quarks and zebras as myself. My coffee cups are not identified by some exact pattern (Platonic Form) but by my use of them, their storage place and similarity of shape and size. Everything is approximate if only because my memories are constructs. This is demonstrated by the all too frequent embarrassment of "senior moments" when I cannot remember a name, a place or what I was going. (Most philosophy is done in  classrooms filled with young people and their less than middle aged teachers, so examples based on our human failings are rarely considered.)

There are lots of objections to the Constructivist approach in Philosophy. I would prefer to say that there are lots of people who do not like Constructivism, because that removes the abstract, dehumanized character of "objections." When people object to a philosophical argument, the objections are put in terms which are seemingly rational, outside personal approval. According to that view of argument, a disinterested observer would recognize its validity, indeed must concur with the presenter. The trouble is, where are the "disinterested" observers? "Valid" and "truthful" are humanly invented terms applying on human presentations. I do not know of any propositions presented by any conscious beings other than humans. Something like the philosophy I am outlining must be the case, unless the transcendental insights of religious or spiritual people are true. If humans are material beings in a finite, material Universe, and if there are no transcendental experiences, and there is no idealized reality, then everything we know has been constructed in our minds. How could it be otherwise?

Descartes' cogito seems to prove that something exists, but we know not what exactly. At best and most, Constructivism is a form of psychological realism or subjectivism. That is, reality is in our heads because our heads contain brains capable of its construction. I think a sufficient test of that idea is construction of a non-human computer which has "independent thoughts." Of course, we, the constructors, must be ready, willing and able to recognize the construction as independent. (But, who else could do so?) Some would say that such a construction "proves" the Platonic reality of the Universe; i.e., a real Universe exists independently of oneself and consciousness. But that claim leaps beyond the evidence, for how could one know the Universe exists without oneself? Such a claim must always be a hypothesis made by a self-conscious being. It is not unreasonable to claim that there is a material Universe, an existence, if consciousness itself is the same as that material. That is, the human ability to think and reflect must be a capability of whatever of the Universe is. If so, it must be possible to construct other, non-human material things and processes with abilities analogous to those of humans without ever knowing the "is-ness" of what is. On this view of reality, what is psychological and what not is entirely a matter of the stance (frame of reference) one prefers to take from time to time.

Physicists, mathematicians and others strenuously object to this point of view, because they claim their work is about some invariant reality which exists in the Platonic sense. For them, we discover - do not invent - what is. But how is that possible? In the modern physical sciences, scientific propositions are supposedly based on observations and experiments, not any divined truth. If the Universe works according to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, it is because those laws are humans have conjectured about their experiences to date. In principle, it is unscientific to claim those laws are eternal truths, even if we prefer to think of them what way. (Scientific explanation proceeds from premises and rules of deduction all of which were invented and modified by people documented in History.) In my lifetime, the sciences have undergone major revolutions as new discoveries (observations) were made and integrated with the previously acquired body of knowledge. Old ideas have been modified or discarded in order to fit into the changed context. I take my experience of the progress of science as sufficient grounds to view scientific theories as incomplete descriptions and explanations of a hypothecated material Universe. What we know is how our experience works, not what the Universe is.

The same is true of mathematical propositions because they are what mathematicians present based on their work. I think the thing which suggests and supports the Constructive understanding of Mathematics is the computer. In fact, computers are nearly ideal mechanisms for expressing mathematical content on account of Alan Turing's proof that his Turing machine is capable of calculating any computable function. "Computable" simply means any rule-driven process, including those that gone on indefinitely. What is presumably not computable are functions that transcend denumerable infinity, such as self-consciousness and creativity. That people have stumbled onto geometry and algebra seems mysterious, even mystical, and seems not explained by any material process. It is true that only a few people are gifted with the ability to have an insight and write down new, important theorems or invent a mathematical subject. But, did Fermat really understand the challenge of his Last Theorem? While he claimed its truth, and said he had short proof of it, the recent, verified proof covers hundreds of pages (I have not read it) and required computer analysis of special cases. I think Fermat had an insight, but it is not likely he had a proof. There was something about the way Fermat's brain worked that could come to a mathematical conclusion which others can only perceive as an insight. We do not know how he did it, or how the other geniuses have their ideas, whether those ideas suddenly appear in dreams or come about after much thrashing about. Nonetheless, it is clear to interested parties when something is the work of genius, usually because that work changes significantly how others see the world. The invention of non-Euclidean geometries and Clerk Maxwell's use of field theory led to Einstein's General Relativity. The Newtonian model of the solar system led to Neils Bohr's concept of the atom and, when combined with Einstein's photoelectric effect and other work on photons, eventually led to Quantum Mechanics. Modern physics is highly mathematical, but does that entail the Universe has some sort of Platonic Form? Even if that were so, what is one to do with the mathematical ideas that do not end up in any Theory of Everything? So, I conclude that even the most "obvious" mathematical ideas, such as number, space and measure, are something that happens in brains and not elsewhere.

Does the Constructivist approach denigrate science or devalue mathematics? No, not at all. This view just makes intellectual activities of them, something humans and other brainy creatures do. This view also encourages physicists to be pragmatic, while at the same time freeing mathematical wizards to play whatever game interests them.

This philosophy is liberating because people are only restrained by what they are willing to try.

Posted 10/14/2008 02:13:11 PM                Last update: 10/14/2008

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