Philosophical Detritus III: Reality.

This is the third in a series of essays about abstractions in philosophy. Here, I continue the critique and extend it to another abstract concept that seems to trip many people up: reality.

Reality is one of the most common abstract metaphysical concepts used by both amateur and professional philosophers. We all like to say things like "In reality,..." We love to cite reality as the ultimate authority. "In reality..." is treated as a killer argument. And we try to ground our ideas of truth in reality.

However, these informal or common-sense uses of the term belie a deep and pervasive malaise in professional philosophy (the world over). After millennia of argument—across human cultures—there is no consensus on what "reality" is. Nor is there any consensus on what "truth" means (I'll come back to this). Metaphysics keeps promising insight into these problems, yet it never produces anything testable or even conceptually stable. New ways to approach reality keep emerging, but none of them ever manages to solve the problems it promises to solve.

And yet, at the same time, we all feel confident we know what reality is, or that we would know it when we see it.

When a problem has been argued over by clever people for a century without any consensus emerging, we may begin to suspect that we have framed the problem poorly. However, when we have argued for millennia and failed to reach any satisfactory conclusion, it calls the whole enterprise of philosophy, or at least metaphysics, into question.

Metaphysics is bunk. But why is it bunk?

Reality and Epistemic Privilege

Questions about reality are the principal topic of metaphysics.

• What is real?
• What does it mean for something to be real?
• What is the nature of reality?

Reality is such a basic concept that you might expect there to be a long-standing consensus about it. After all, given how most of us use the term "reality", it ought to define itself. And as noted, we all seem to have a "common sense" view of reality. However, there is no general consensus on reality amongst philosophers, and there never has been. On the contrary, reality is one of the most disputed concepts in philosophy. As with many problems I've written about in recent years, there is not only an existing discordant dissensus, but it is growing all the time as new propositions are floated that try (and usually fail) to take the discussion in different directions.

We need to be clear about the implications of this dispute over "reality". If philosophers cannot even agree on what reality is, they cannot agree on anything else. There is a structural failure in the field of philosophy, an impasse that has existed for thousands of years. Lacking agreement on “reality,” philosophy fragments into self-contained silos with no common reference point. Nonetheless, this ambiguous and disputed concept continues to play an essential role in philosophy and daily life.

The problem with all these abstract metaphysical concepts is that we only have experience and imagination to go on. No one has privileged access to reality, so no one actually knows anything about reality. There is no epistemic privilege with respect to reality.

Everyone’s access to reality is mediated by factors such as perception, cognition, language, theory, and culture. There is no way around this mediation; no way to get unmediated access to reality, whatever it is. In my "nominalist" view, reality is an abstract concept; an idea. And, thus, the idea that we could have direct access to reality is quite bizarre.

Still, the idea that some amongst us do have epistemic privilege is widespread, especially in relation to religions. People are constantly stepping up to confidently tell us that they alone have privileged access to reality and can tell us what it is. It is very noticeable amongst Buddhists who like to invoke reality.

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”--Kalu Rinpoche

"the development of insight into the ultimate nature of reality." --Dalai Lama

“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”--Thich Nhat Hanh

Closer to home, for me, the founder of the Triratna Order, Sangharakshita (1925 – 2018), argued that imagination was our "reality sense". This idea was inspired by English Romantic poets rather than Indian Buddhists. No word in the canonical languages of Buddhism means "imagination". It's not a concept Buddhists made use of prior to contact with Europe. Moreover, the "reality" imagined by Sangharakshita and his followers is distinctly magical, vitalistic, and teleological (all of which seem unreal to me).

Buddhists are not exceptional in seeking to leverage the dissensus on reality to stake a claim to privileged metaphysical knowledge. Nor are Buddhists the only ones who meditate. Hindus also have a long history of meditation, and they have arrived at radically different conclusions about the significance of meditative states. So too with the Sāṃkhya philosophy, which most people now encounter in the context of haṭha yoga.

There is no "reality sensing faculty" and no way to know reality directly. I do not doubt that some people experience altered states in meditation, though I would say these largely arise in the context of sensory deprivation. Whatever those states are, after 13 years of intensively editing, translating, and studying Prajñāpāramitā texts, I no longer find it plausible that altered states in meditation reflect reality (or that "reality", in any European sense, was an important concept in Buddhism prior to European contact).

Obviously, if we cannot get information about reality directly, then we cannot know reality in any conventional sense. In other words, the big problem with metaphysics is epistemic.

To be more precise, there is no epistemic justification for any metaphysics. We don't know reality. And we cannot know reality. All traditional metaphysics arises from speculating about experience.

This is not a new observation. David Hume (1711–1776) came to similar conclusions. He famously noted that we never see a separate event that we could label "causation". What we call "causation" is merely a regular sequence of events. If event B is always seen to be preceded by event A, then we say that A caused B. And this generalised to metaphysics. Hume argued that all knowledge is either sensory experience or ideas about sensory experience. And experience is not reality.

I have encountered many people, mostly Buddhists, over the years who professed to believe the opposite of this, i.e. that experience is reality. The corollary is that we all have our own reality. This is solipsistic and egocentric. We can show why this is false by coming back to the main argument.

Half a century earlier, Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was able to formulate relatively simple expressions using calculus that made accurate predictions about the motions of objects.

(where F = force, v = velocity, p = momentum)

And since, for any event we can witness on earth, these expressions predict future motion with considerable accuracy and precision, they surely reflect some kind of knowledge about reality. We can confirm this by using the same equations to retrodict past events that have already been observed, so we know the outcome of the process in advance. Newton's laws of motion are a very robust description of motion as it could be observed in the 18th century. In the course of my formal education, I personally demonstrated the efficacy of all these laws of motion.

At the very least, this is objective knowledge.

Thus, there is a tension between Hume's observation that we cannot know reality and Newton's observations that appear to describe reality very well.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) attempted to resolve this tension by redefining "metaphysics" as a critical inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge and experience possible, rather than as speculative knowledge of things beyond experience. In his view, metaphysical ideas like causation, space, and time are a priori forms unconsciously imposed on experience by our minds. In other words, "space" and "time" are not part of reality and don't exist independently of an experiencing mind. Similarly, causation is how we explain sequences of experiences, not an aspect of reality. This means metaphysics cannot reveal things as they are in themselves, but only the necessary structures of how we must experience them.

The problem with Kant is that his view still requires a metaphysics, since he tacitly assumes that all humans experience the world in exactly the same way. This is a speculative view about human nature and requires something both universal and beyond experience. And I don't think it works because this is not something that Kant could know (even now). Worse, this is not my experience of other people. Exposed to a range of people, one of the most striking things we notice is that we do not all experience the world in the same way. Some aspects of experience are unequivocally not shared; they are subjective.

Kant might have gotten around this by emphasising that empiricism is more than just observing nature; it also crucially involves comparing notes about experience with other people. But he did not. It is precisely comparing notes about experience, noting the similarities and differences, that allows us to parse the commonalities in experience.

Kant doesn't really account for Newton's objective knowledge. Rather than positing that every human being sees the world in exactly the same way, it makes more sense to me to say that objective knowledge of this type is independent of the observer. From observations like Newton's laws of motion, we can infer that there is an objective world, which does have its own structures and systems. Still, this world can only be appreciated via mediated experience. At the very least, we may say that our ideas of space and time, for example, must be analogous to something objective, or we could not use them to predict the future in the way that we do.

Similar dissatisfaction with Kant drove the emergence of phenomenology. Husserl, for instance, wanted to suspend all assumptions about “reality itself” and focus instead on experience as it presents itself. Note that, despite the many successes of phenomenology, we all still rely on metaphysical frameworks to structure our understanding of the world. But this retreat from objectivity is also hamstrung by the fact that we can make valid inferences and predict the future.

However, despite the emergence of phenomenology, speculative metaphysics continues to dominate philosophy. Arguments about "reality" are ongoing and diversifying as time goes on.

Rescuing the Concept of Reality through Pragmatism

As far as I can see, some form of realism is inescapable. Realist explanations do the best job of predicting the future. Newton's laws of motion are still in daily use by scientists, engineers, and technologists precisely because they accurately predict the future. All the attempts to deprecate realism have ended in failure: specifically, failure to predict the future as realist explanations do.

Newton's laws of motion are objective facts. They are apparent to any observer. The laws have limits, and there are situations in which they fail to be accurate or precise enough. Still, within the well-known and accepted limits, the laws of motion apply.

And at the same time, we still only have experience to go on. Which means that realism has to have a pragmatic character. We can infer objective facts—such as Newton's laws of motion—and these allow us to predict the future. Being able to predict the future, and thus reduce the burden of uncertainty (without ever eliminating it), is nontrivial. Of course, such a pragmatic approach can never provide the kind of certainty that metaphysics promises, but then metaphysics has never delivered on such promises either.

I come back to a crucial point already made above: comparing notes. When we compare notes, especially in small groups, we immediately see that some aspects of our experience are shared and some are not. By painstaking observation and comparing notes, we can infer which things appear the same (or at least similar) to everyone and which are only apparent to ourselves.

Take the example of the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth. It doesn't matter who observes this or what method they use; it always turns out to be ~9.81 ± 0.15 ms^-2. It doesn't even matter which units we use. We could measure it in fathoms per century squared, as long as we know how to convert one unit to another.

So the acceleration due to gravitation is more or less the same for everyone. And we can account for the variations with factors like elevation and the density of the underlying bedrock. We can say, therefore, that gravitation is independent of the observer. Another way of saying this is that gravitation is objective. And having inferred this, we can imagine many ways to test this with a view to falsifying it. An inference that both makes accurate and precise predictions (and retrodictions) and also survives rigorous attempts at falsification can be considered an accurate indicator of reality.

But we don't just compare notes on individual phenomena. Gravitation is a particular phenomenon, and we can compare this to other forces and how they operate. For example, we might look at gravitation in the light of observations of other kinds of motion. If we had a theory of gravitation that predicted motion that disagreed with our theory of motion, then we would be at an impasse. But this is not the case. When we investigate nature, we find that our inferences support and reinforce each other.

Newton's law of gravitation is consistent with his laws of motion. And they are both consistent with other formal regularities in the universe. And we now have explanations that go beyond the limits of Newton but which show that Newton's laws are special cases under certain limits.

Note that values obtained in this way should always include some measure of uncertainty. We aim to measure things with a high degree of accuracy and precision, but there is always some measurement error. And our inferences often rely on assumptions that may introduce inaccuracy or imprecision.

The physical sciences are inherently pragmatic. We aim to arrive at valid inferences that allow us to predict the future to a desired level of accuracy and precision. Doing this allows us to compile useful and robust inferences into a system of inferred knowledge that is highly reliable. Newton's laws are paradigmatic of such knowledge.

And when this is the case, we don't need to know what cannot be known. What we can and do infer is enough to be getting on with. We can step back from speculating about unobservable metaphysics and focus on what can be observed.

Note that this is not the same as the instrumentalism that afflicts quantum mechanics. Quantum theory was developed in a milieu profoundly influenced by logical positivism. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, and others collectively resisted any attempt at a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that since we could not observe the nano-scale (in the 1920-30s), we could not know it. They rejected both Schrödinger's realistic interpretation and both his and Einstein's critique of non-realist approaches. Schrödinger's cat was intended as a refutation of the Copenhagen view, but ended with Copenhagen adopting the cat as their mascot. The modern, Von Neumann-Dirac, formalism still resists realist interpretations. The majority of physicists simply accept that no realist interpretation of nanoscale physics is possible, even though we now have images of individual atoms, which allows us to affirm that atoms are objective phenomena.

While principled arguments exist for idealist or other non-realist views, such approaches have never allowed us to predict the future in the way that realism does. There is no idealist equivalent of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the systematic accumulation of useful knowledge that characterises science. To my knowledge, idealists have made no contribution to understanding the world.

Pragmatism allows for pluralism. Of course, most people do not want pluralism. They want answers. They want certainty. I sympathise. I want answers too. But after a lifetime of seeking answers, this is as close as I have come to a satisfactory solution.

Conclusion

"Reality" seems to be paradoxical. It is both intimately familiar and foundational to our worldviews and, at the same time, forever beyond our perception and understanding.

Thousands of years of argumentation over reality and the nature of reality have not resulted in a consensus; rather, it is the source of a growing dissensus.

Very many people reify reality, i.e. treat the abstract concept of reality as a thing in itself.

Since reality is an abstract concept, the nature of reality is abstract.

No one has epistemic privilege with respect to reality. No one knows. And the people who claim to know—including religious gurus—are misleading us or have themselves been misled. Sincerity is no guarantor of accuracy or precision. Belief is a feeling about an idea.

The emergence of phenomenology was not the end of metaphysics.

We can rescue this ambiguous and paradoxical abstract concept via pragmatism.

It has been apparent for some centuries that we don't have to rely on speculative metaphysics. We can and do infer objective facts about the world.

There are patterns and regularities in experience that only make sense in a realist framework. At the very least, experience must be analogous to reality, or we'd get lost and bump into things all the time. The precision and accuracy with which we can describe patterns and regularities in experience, and use these to predict the future, also argue pragmatically for adopting realism.

The most obvious of these descriptions and predictions come from physics, but we get them from all kinds of sciences, including social sciences.

Pragmatic objectivity is something we can aspire to and, at our best, approach. It's not the same as certainty, but it is good enough to be getting on with.

However, my sense is that promises of certain knowledge will always be attractive to some people. And this leaves those people open to manipulation and economic exploitation.

~~Φ~~

Philosophical Detritus II: Consciousness

In the previous essay in this series, I made some fairly banal comments about abstractions from something like a nominalist point of view. Nominalism is usually couched in metaphysical terms, but my approach is epistemic and heuristic. I don't say "abstractions don't exist", I say "abstractions are ideas". 

Ideas are ontologically subjective. We can have objective knowledge about ideas, it's just a different kind of knowledge than we can have about objects. As John Searle puts it:

The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of that domain.

For example, ideas do not have properties such as location, extension, or orientation in space or time. Still, ideas are knowable. Counting systems and numbers are abstract and thus ontologically subjective, but 2 + 2 = 4 is an epistemically objective fact about numbers.

At the same time, we can treat ideas as metaphorically located, extended, and orientated. An apt example would be "the ideas in my head". Metaphorically, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. With this mapping from objects to ideas in place, we can now make statements in which qualities of objects and verbs that apply to manipulating objects are applied to ideas. 

Unfortunately, this opens up the possibility of (1) treating the abstract as real (reification) and (2) treating the abstract as independent of concrete examples (hypostatisation). There is a third problem, which has no widely-accepted name, but which we can call animation, which is treating ideas as if they have their own agency (compare Freud's psychoanalytic theory which gives emotions their own agency). That is to say, without care we may conclude that ideas are real, independent, and autonomous agents.

The point of taking this approach to abstractions is pragmatic. Over the years I have participated in and witnessed many philosophical discussions. Not a few of these have concerned the nebulous abstraction consciousness. And on the vast majority of occasions the discussion is plagued by unacknowledged reification, hypostatization, and animation. In other words, the abstraction "consciousness" is routinely treated as a real, independent, and autonomous agent. For example, these are some actual questions recently asked on Quora.

• If we did not have a consciousness, would we have thought of the idea of consciousness?
• If science was able to clone an exact copy of me, including my consciousness, would it be me?
• How can we upload human consciousness via AI?
• Is there any scientific evidence that we are all one consciousness?
• Is it possible to transfer consciousness to another body like a clone or machine?
• Is it scientifically possible to transfer self consciousness from one body to another?
• What is the real nature of consciousness? Can it be engineered or exported by humans, or does it exist beyond us?
• Is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe, or is it an emergent phenomenon of complex biological systems?
• How likely is it that humans will eventually be able to fully explain consciousness?

These kinds of questions are asked again and again with minor differences in emphasis. They are also answered over and over again. It appears that having many available answers does not reduce the desire to ask the question. I think part of the problem is that answers are wildly inconsistent. Asked a yes/no question, Quora answers often say "yes", "no", and "maybe" with equal confidence and authority.

In this essay, I will attempt to apply my heuristic to cut through some of the bullshit and bring some order to one the most confused topics in philosophy: consciousness. This is not as difficult as it sounds. 

Meaning is Use

Observing how people use this term "consciousness", my sense is that that vast majority of people use "consciousness" as a synonym for "soul". That is to say they treat "consciousness" as a nonphysical entity that is both independent of their physical body (including their brain) and, at the same time, integral to their identity and/or personality. For the majority, it seems, consciousness is a kind of secularised soul, stripped of the supernatural significance given to it by christians, but still a real, independent, autonomous agent. 

Being independent of the body means that "consciousness" is able to survive death. It is hypostatized consciousness, for example, that allows for techno-utopian ideas such as "uploading consciousness", "transferring consciousness" from one body to another (including the wildly incoherent concept of the "brain transplant"), as well as various kinds of disembodied consciousness (including post-mortem consciousness).

In these examples, "consciousness" is something that is not causally tied to a body and, as such, it can exist without a body or be moved between bodies, including non-human bodies. Like the soul, the uploaded consciousness is disembodied and effectively immortal (which explains some of the ongoing appeal of the fallacious idea). "Uploading consciousness" is an analog of the christian narrative of resurrection or the buddhist narrative of rebirth. It's an afterlife theory. In my book Karma and Rebirth Reconsidered, I argued that all religious afterlife theories are incoherent because they all contradict each other. 

A particular mistake that almost always goes with consciousness qua soul, is vitalism. This is the idea that what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter is some kind of animating principle or élan vital. In antiquity, this principle was almost always associated with breath (see, e.g. my essay on spirit as breath). In Judeo-Christian mythology, Yahweh breathes life into Adam, animating him. The word animate derives from a root meaning "breathe". Similarly, psykhē (Greek) and spīritus (Latin) originally meant "breath".

As anyone who has experienced the corpse of a loved one knows, its intuitive to think that something animated them and that their corpse is the body minus that animating principle. For example, I vividly recall seeing my father's corpse in 1990 and having this reaction.

Actually, what's missing in the experience of see the corpse of a loved one is our emotional response to them. There is a neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome, in which localised brain damage can leave a person able to recognise familiar faces, but unable to experience emotional responses to them. They frequently arrive at the bizarre conclusion that the people they know have been replaced by doppelgangers.

My father's corpse was like an exact replica of him, that wasn't moving or responding. All the personality was gone. Like many people my first intuition was that my father's life and personality had gone somewhere. Which is to say, that they still existed apart from the body. With a lot more life experience and learning under my belt, I can now see that, while the difference between living and dead is stark, it's our own lack of emotional response to corpses that we are trying to explain.

As a teenager, I remember going to the funeral of my best friend's father who died quite young. My friend and his nuclear family were all disconcertingly smiling and happy. They were not overtly religious in the conventional sense of being members of a religious community. Nevertheless, for them, the deceased man was still a very strong presence. They felt him still there with them. They were not sad, at the time, because in their minds, the father was not gone wholly gone or inaccessible.

I get the attraction to and plausibility of vitalism. I just don't believe it. Vitalism was discredited when we discovered how to synthesise organic compounds in the late 19th century. We don't have to add any "vital principle" or "life force" to account for animate matter.

Despite being secularised and stripped of significance, the idea of a consciousness qua autonomous entity that survives death still has a religious flavour. Witness the people who assume that "consciousness" is an entity then go around seeking evidence that supports this view. 

By contrast, a rational approach would begin with concrete evidence. If we were to start over, and re-examine the evidence, no one would propose the concept of a soul.

The abstract concept “consciousness” has become a dead end.

• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a concrete or real thing or entity are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a separate or disembodied thing are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as an autonomous agent are false.

And from what I can see, very little of what remains is useful. Some metaphorical uses of "consciousness" are common:

• A stream of consciousness.
• The fabric of consciousness.
• A field of awareness.
• A thread of awareness
• The tapestry of the mind
• A vessel of thought
• The machinery of the mind.
• A lens of perception.

However, all of these uses are prone to hypostatisation, reification, and animation. 

Intentionality

One way around the mistakes people make is to acknowledge Dan Dennett's observation that consciousness is (almost) always intentional. We can say that consciousness (almost) always has an object or condition. Heuristically, we can say that consciousness is always consciousness of something. If we always follow "consciousness" with "of _____" and fill in the blank, we are much less likely to go wrong. For example:

• Concrete: “I am conscious of feeling cold.” ✓
• Abstract: “There is consciousness of feeling cold.” ✓
• Reified:
• “There is a consciousness.” X
• “My consciousness...” X
• “Consciousness is…” X
• “Consciousness does…” X

Unfortunately, even true abstract statements about experience are likely to be misinterpreted in ways that falsify them.

The exception to conscious states being intentional is the state of "contentless awareness" sometimes experienced in sleep or meditation. See for example the discussion: "Can you be aware of nothing?" in The Conversation.

For Buddhists, note, that I now distinguish "contentless awareness" from "cessation". Following cessation there is no awareness. The state of śūnyatā (also an abstract noun) is not a conscious state. It is an unconscious state, though seemingly distinct from sleep or anaesthesia.

Contentless awareness probably corresponds to the higher āyatana stages, for example "the stage of nothingness" (ākiñcaññāyatana) or "the stage of no awareness or unawareness"(nevasaññānāsañña). Prajñāpāramitā texts make it clear that having any kind of experience or memories of experience is inconsistent with śūnyatā.

To sum up

"Consciousness" is an abstract concept. An idea. Ideas are not real, independent, and autonomous agents. Ideas are ideas. Ideas are subjective; though we can have objective knowledge about them.

Talking about consciousness as a soul is a dead loss. But, then, there is very little talk about consciousness that is not a dead loss. And this includes most of "philosophy". 

Consciousness as a abstract concept is intentional. This can be reflected in statements that include what we are conscious of.

~~Φ~~

Rationality

There's been quite a lot of talk of "meta-rationality" lately amongst the blogs I read. It is ironic that this emerging trend comes at a time when the very idea of rationality is being challenged from beneath. Mercier and Sperber, for example, tell us that empirical evidence suggests that reasoning is "a form of intuitive [i.e., unconscious] inference" (2017: 90); and that reasoning about reasoning (meta-rationality) is mainly about rationalising such inferences and our actions based on them. If this is true, and traditional ways of thinking about reasoning are inaccurate, then we all have a period of readjustment ahead.

It seems that we don't understand rationality or reasoning. My own head is shaking as I write this. Can it be accurate? It is profoundly counter-intuitive. Sure, we all know that some people are less than fully rational. Just look at how nation states are run. Nevertheless, it comes as a shock to realise that I don't understand reasoning. After all, I write non-fiction. All of my hundreds of essays are the product of reasoning. Aren't they? well, maybe. In this essay, I'm going to continue my desultory discussion of reason by outlining a result from experimental psychology from the year I was born, 1966. In their recent book, The Enigma of Reason, Mercier & Sperber (2017) describe this experiment and some of the refinements since proposed.

But first a quick lesson in Aristotelian inferential logic. I know, right? You're turned off and about to click on something else. But please do bear with me. I'm introducing this because, unless you understand the logic involved in the problem, you won't get the full blast of the 50-year-old insight that follows. Please persevere and I think you'll agree at the end that it's worth it.

~Logic~

For our purposes, we need to consider a conditional syllogism. Schematically it takes the form:

If P, then Q.

Say we posit: if a town has a police station (P), then it also has a courthouse (Q). There are two possible states for each proposition. A town has a police station (P); it does not have a police station (not P or ¬P); it has a courthouse (Q); it does not have a court house (¬Q). What we concerned with here is what we can infer from each of these four possibilities, given the rule: If P, then Q.

The syllogism—If P, then Q—in this case tells us that it is always the case that if a town has a police station, then it also has a courthouse. If I now tell you that the town of Wallop in Hampshire, has a police station, you can infer from the rule that Wallop must also have a courthouse. This is a valid inference of the type that Aristotle called modus ponens. Schematically:

If P, then Q.
P, therefore Q. ✓

What if I tell you that Wallop does not have a police station? What can you infer from ¬P? You might be tempted to say that Wallop has no courthouse. But this would be a fallacy (called denial of the antecedent). It does not follow from the rule that if a town does not have a police station that it also doesn't have a court house. It is entirely possible under the given rule that a town has a courthouse but no police station.

If P, then Q.
¬P, therefore ¬Q. ✕

What if we have information about the courthouse and want to infer something about the police station. What can we infer if Wallop had a courthouse (Q)? Well, we've just seen that we cannot infer anything. Trying to infer something from the absence of the second part of the syllogism leads to false conclusions (affirmation of the consequent)

If P, then Q.
Q, therefore P. ✕

But we can make a valid inference if we know that Wallop has no courthouse (¬Q). If there is no courthouse and our rule is always true, then we can infer that there is no police station in Wallop. And this valid inference is the type called modus tollens by Aristotle.

If P, then Q.
¬Q, therefore ¬P. ✓

So, given the rule and information about one of the two propositions P and Q, we can make inferences about the other. But only in two cases can we make valid inferences, P and ¬Q.

rule	given	inference	validity
If P, then Q.	P	Q	✓
	¬P	¬Q	✕
	Q	P	✕
	¬Q	¬P	✓

Of course, there are even less logical inferences one could make, but these are the ones that Aristotle deemed sensible enough to include in his work on logic. This is the logic that we need to understand. And the experimental task, proposed by Peter Wason in 1966, tested the ability of people to use this kind of reasoning.

~Wason Selection Task~

You are presented with four cards, each with a letter and number printed on either side.

The rule is: If a card has E on one side, it has 2 on the other.

The question is: which cards must be turned over to test the rule, i.e., to determine if the cards follow the rule. You have as much time as you wish.

~o~

Wason and his collaborators got a shock in 1966 because only 10% of their participants chose the right answer. Having prided ourselves on our rationality for millennia (in Europe, anyway) the expectation was that most people would find this exercise in reasoning relatively simple. Only 1 in 10 got the right answer. This startling result led Wason and subsequent investigators to pose many variations on this test, almost always with similar results.

Intrigued, they began to ask people about the level of confidence in their methods before getting their solution. Despite the fact that 90% would choose the wrong answer, 80% of participants were 100% sure they had the right answer! So it was not that the participants were hesitant or tentative. On the contrary, they were extremely confident in their method, whatever it was.

The people taking part were not stupid or uneducated. Most of them were psychology undergraduates. The result is slightly worse than one would expect from random guessing, which suggests that something was systematically going wrong.

The breakthrough came more than a decade later when, in 1979, Jonathan Evans came up with a variation in which the rule was: if a card has E on one side, it does not have 2 on the other. In this case, the proportions of right and wrong answers dramatically switched around, with 90% getting it right. Does this mean that we reason better negatively?

"This shows, Evans argued, that people's answers to the Wason task are based not on logical reasoning but on intuitions of relevance." (Mercier & Sperber 2017: 43. Emphasis added)

What Evans found was that people turn over the cards named in the rule. Which is not reasoning, but since it is predicated on an unconscious evaluation of the information, not quite a guess, either. Which is why the success rate is worse than random guessing.

Which cards did you turn over? As with the conditional syllogism, there are only two valid inferences to be made here: Turn over the E card. If it has a 2 on the other side, the rule is true for this card (but may not be true for others); if it does not have a 2, the rule is falsified. The other card to turn over is the one with a seven on it. If it has E on the other side, the rule is falsified; if it does not have an E, the rule may still be true.

Turning over the K tells us nothing relevant to the rule. Turning over the 2 is a little more complex, but ultimately futile. If we find an E on the other side of the 2 we may think it validates the rule. However, the rule does not forbid a card with 2 on one side having any letter, E or another one. So turning over the 2 does not give us any valid inferences, either.

Therefore, it is only by turning over the E and 7 cards that we can make valid inferences about the rule. And, short of gaining access to all possible cards, the best we can do is falsify the rule. Note that the cards are presented in the same order as I used in explaining the logic. E = P, K = ¬P, 2 = Q, and 7 = ¬Q.

Did you get the right answer? Did you consciously work through the logic or respond to an intuition? Did you make the connection with the explanation of the conditional syllogism that preceded it?

I confess that I did not get the right answer, and I had read a more elaborate explanation of the conditional logic involved. I did not work through the logic, but chose the cards named in the rule. 

The result has been tested in many different circumstances and variations and seems to be general. Humans, in general, don't use reasoning to solve logic problems, unless they have specific training. Even with specific training, people still get it wrong. Indeed, even though I explained the formal logic of the puzzle immediately beforehand, the majority of readers would have ignored this and chosen to turn over the E and 2 cards, because they used their intuition instead of logic to infer the answer.

~Reasons~

In a recent post (Reasoning, Reasons, and Culpability, 20 Jul 2017) I explored some of the consequences of this result. Mercier and Sperber go from Wason into a consideration of unconscious processing of information. They discuss and ultimately reject Kahneman's so-called dual process models of thinking (with two systems, one fast and one slow). There is only one process, Mercier and Sperber argue, and it is unconscious. All of our decisions are made this way. When required, they argue, we produce conscious reasons after the fact (post hoc). The reason we are slow at producing reasons is that they don't exist before we are asked for them (or ask ourselves - which is something Mercier and Sperber don't talk about much). It takes time to make up plausible sounding reasons; we have to go through the process of asking, given what we know about ourselves, what a plausible reason might be. And because of cognitive bias, we settle for the first plausible explanation we come up with. Then, as far as we are concerned, that is the reason.

It's no wonder there was scope for Dr Freud to come along and point out that people's stated motives were very often not the motives that one could deduce from detailed observation of the person (particularly paying attention to moments when the unconscious mind seemed to reveal itself). 

This does not discount the fact that we have two brain regions that process incoming information. It is most apparent in situations that scare us. For example, an unidentified sound will trigger the amygdala to create a cascade of activation across the sympathetic nervous system. Within moments our heart rate is elevated, our breathing shallow and rapid, and our muscles flooding with blood. We are ready for action. The same signal reaches the prefrontal cortex more slowly. The sound is identified in the aural processing area, then fed to the prefrontal cortex which is able to override the excitation of the amygdala.

A classic example is walking beside a road with traffic speeding past. Large, rapidly moving objects ought to frighten us because we evolved to escape from marauding beasts. Not just predators either, since animals like elephants or rhinos can be extremely dangerous. But our prefrontal cortex has established that cars almost always stay on the road and follow predictable trajectories. Much more alertness is required when crossing the road. I suspect that the failure to switch on that alertness after suppressing it might be responsible for many pedestrian accidents. Certainly, where I live, pedestrians commonly step out into the road without looking.

It is not that the amygdala is "emotional" and the prefrontal cortex is "rational". Both parts of the brain are processing sense data, but one is getting it raw and setting off reactions that involve alertness and readiness, while the other is getting it with an overlay of identification and recognition and either signalling to turn up the alertness or to turn it down. And this does not happen in isolation, but is part of a complex system by which we respond to the world. The internal physical sensations associated with these systems, combined with our thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, about the situation are our emotions. We've made thought and emotion into two separate categories and divided up our responses to the world into one or the other, but in fact, the two are always co-existent.

Just because we have these categories, does not mean they are natural or reflect reality. For example, I have written about the fact that ancient Buddhist texts did not have a category like "emotion". They had loads of words for emotions, but lumped all this together with mental activity (Emotions in Buddhism. 04 November 2011). Similarly, ancient Buddhist texts did not see the mind as a theatre of experience or have any analogue of the MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor (27 July 2012). The ways we think about the mind are not categories imposed on us by nature, but the opposite, categories that we have imposed on experience. 

Emotion is almost entirely missing from Mercier and Sperber's book. While I can follow their argument, and find it compelling in many ways, I think their thesis is flawed for leaving emotion out of the account of reason. In what I consider to be one of my key essays, Facts and Feelings, composed in 2012, I drew on work by Antonio Damasio to make a case for how emotions are involved in decision making. Specifically, emotions encode the value of information over and above how accurate we consider it.

We know this because when the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is disrupted, by brain damage, for example, it can disrupt the ability to made decisions. In the famous case of Phineas Gage, his brain was damaged by a railway spike being drive through his cheek and out the top of his head. He lived and recovered, but he began to make poor decisions in social situations. In other cases, recounted by Damasio (and others) people with damage to the ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex lose the ability to assess alternatives like where to go for dinner, or what day they would like doctor's appointment on. The specifics of this disruption suggests that we weigh up information and make decisions based on how we feel about the information.

Take also the case of Capgras Syndrome. In this case, the patient will recognise a loved one, but not feel the emotional response that normally goes with such recognition. To account for this discrepancy they confabulate accounts in which the loved one has been replaced by a replica, often involving some sort of conspiracy (a theme which has become all too common in speculative fiction). Emotions are what tell us how important things are to us and, indeed, in what way they are important. We can feel attracted to or repelled by the stimulus; the warm feeling when we see a loved one, the cold one when we see an enemy. We also have expectations and anticipations based on previous experience (fear, anxiety, excitement, and so on).

Mercier and Sperber acknowledge that there is an unconscious inferential process, but never delve into how it might work. But we know from Damasio and others that it involves emotions. Now, it seems that this process is entirely, or mostly, unconscious and that when reasons are required, we construct them as explanations to ourselves and others for something that has already occurred.

Sometimes we talk about making unemotional decisions, or associate rationality with the absence of emotion. But we need to be clear on this: without emotions, we cannot make decisions. Rationality is not possible without emotions to tell us how important things are, where "things" are people, objects, places, etc. 

In their earlier work (See An Argumentative Theory of Reason) of 2011, Mercier and Sperber argued that we use reasoning to win arguments. They noted the poor performance on a test of reasoning like the Wason task and added the prevalence of confirmation bias. They argued that this could be best understood in terms of decision-making in small groups (which is, after all, the natural context for a human being). As an issue comes up, each contributor makes the best case they can, citing all the supporting evidence and arguments. Here, confirmation bias is a feature, not a bug. However, those listening to the proposals are much better at evaluating arguments and do not fall into confirmation bias. Thus, Mercier and Sperber concluded, humans only employ reasoning to decide issues when there is an argument. 

The new book expands on this idea, but takes a much broader view. However, I want to come back and emphasise this point about groups. All too often, philosophers are trapped in solipsism. They try to account for the world as though individuals cannot compare notes, as though everything can and should be understood from the point of view of an isolated individual. So, existing theories of rationality all assume that a person reasons in isolation. But I'm going to put my foot down here and insist that humans never do anything in isolation. Even hermits have a notional relation to their community - they are defined by their refusal of society. We are social primates. Under natural conditions, we do everything together. Of course, for 12,000 years or so, an increasing number of us have been living in unnatural conditions that have warped our sensibilities, but even so, we need to acknowledge the social nature of humanity. All individual psychology is bunk. There is only social psychology. All solipsistic philosophy is bunk. People only reason in groups. The Wason task shows that on our own we don't reason at all, but rely on unconscious inferences. But these unconscious (dare I say instinctual) processes did not evolve for city slickers. They evolved for hunter-gatherers.

It feels to me like we are a transitional period in which old paradigms of thinking about ourselves, about our minds, are falling away to be replaced by emerging, empirically based paradigms that are still taking shape. What words like "thought", "emotion", "consciousness", and "reasoning" mean is in flux. Which means that we live in interesting times. It's possible that a generation from now, our view of mind, at least amongst intellectuals, is going to be very different. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) 'Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.' Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2017) The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.

See also my essay: Reasoning and Beliefs 10 January 2014

Time for a Change

Zeno was an ancient Greek famous for inventing paradoxes:

The third [paradox] is … that the flying arrow is at rest, which result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments … . he says that if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. (Aristotle Physics, 239b.30)

In other words, if we think of an arrow flying through the air, the arrow is the same length throughout the flight. It takes up the same amount of space. At any given moment in time, the arrow is at a given location in space, taking up a given space. If we could freeze time at any random moment the arrow would appear to be stationary; it would not be moving, it would only be in one place. So if at any moment the arrow is stationary, it is stationary at every moment. Which is paradoxical. Nāgārjuna wrestles with motion and time in a similar way because moments are also built into the Buddhist understanding of time.

In a YouTube video interview, George Lakoff explains to an interviewer, in the space of approximately 3¾ minutes, that the paradox is due to the metaphorical nature of our thought and the framing of the problem. In this essay I'm going to recapitulate his argument in my own words.

Metaphorical

So the first thing to notice is the way I write about a space of time the previous sentence. This is a metaphor. It turns out that metaphor TIME IS SPACE occurs in almost every human language. But there are two main ways of conceptualising time as space. Firstly, time is a stationary path along which we move:

• We are approaching [the time for] lift-off
• We're past the time for apologies
• I'm looking forward to a future with jet packs

Or, time is a like river flowing past us:

• Crunch time is rapidly approaching
• The past is receding in my memory
• Time passed without me noticing

Time is typically a one dimensional space, so it can be long or short, for example, but seldom wide, narrow, or tall. Occasionally, we may talk about a window of time, though what this comes down to is a slot marked by a beginning and end time. Here, the metaphor is not TIME IS A WINDOW but, instead, MOMENTS ARE WINDOWS. TIME FLIES, but this is a variant on the flowing time metaphor where we are fixed and time goes past us. Time may also be a container, so that events happen "in time", in the space of an hour. Again, the metaphor is, MOMENTS ARE CONTAINERS. A window can be a container, because it is framed. In this essay, I'm going to focus on the linear spatial metaphors for time.

Metaphors are linguistic structures. In the first lot of three sentences we have a human agent which acts on time (time is the patient of the verb). In the second group of three, time itself is the agent of the action. In one, time is passively acted on by us and. in the other. time is actively acting on us. And the actions in both cases are motions (go, pass, approach, recede). These are linguistic structures that help us to conceptualise and talk about of the flow of events that make up experience. However, these linguistic structures do not correspond to structures in reality. Part of the reason they do not is that the two metaphors contradict each other. Time cannot be both stationary and in motion at the same time. Maybe we could call this Lakoff's Paradox.

In English, we cannot even discuss time except in terms of the spatial metaphor - length of time, how long is a second. Length is extension in space. We have no separate word for extension in time.*

* The obvious candidate, 'endure', actually comes from a root *deru meaning "to harden"; from which, ultimately, we also get our word 'true'.

These metaphors for time describe a linear progression. But it only seems to go in one direction. We can move in any direction in space, why is the dimension of time different? This is a question that Lakoff doesn't answer, but its always useful when thinking about time, to get into this.


Time's Arrow

The answer is well-known to us now as the arrow of time, a concept developed by Sir Arthur Eddington (who was also the first to test a prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity). The basis of the arrow of time is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says that in any closed system entropy always increases. More simplistically we can say that disorder tends to increase over time. So, comparatively, a whole egg has low entropy, a broken egg has more entropy (more disorder), and a scrambled egg has high entropy. The arrow of time means that if someone shows us a film of an egg being broken and cooked backwards we can almost always tell straight away because the film shows us things moving in ways that are not possible and events happening in an order that contradicts the arrow of time. In reality eggs never uncook themselves and reform into white and yolk.

Incidentally, it's frequently pointed out that living things are an exception to this rule because they sustain order against the second law. There are two responses to this assertion. Firstly, living organisms are temporary motes of complexity, and complexity varies differently than disorder. Entropy increases steadily over time, but the complexity need not. If we take the example of the universe as a whole, entropy steadily increases as times goes on, but complexity starts at a minimum, rises to a maximum at about 10¹⁰ years (about now, in fact), and then declines back to a minimum by about 10¹⁰⁰ years. The universe will continue to expand indefinitely, but once we reach a certain point the universe is as disordered as it can get and there is no arrow of time. Secondly, life increases the entropy of the universe more rapidly than non-living systems. For every low entropy photo of sunlight that falls on the earth, living things radiate 20 high entropy photons back into space. One way of defining living things is that we are systems for efficiently converting low entropy energy into high entropy energy. So life doesn't break the second law of thermodynamics, it uses energy to create complexity, that speeds up the increase in entropy locally. 

Coming back to time, it is a narrow path or flow, and it goes one way. But why do we see time as being broken up into moments? And is it really like that?

A Moment of Your Time

We measure time relative to cyclic phenomena. There are natural cycles such as planetary orbits, annual seasonal changes, the phases of the moon, menstrual cycles, the diurnal cycle, breaths, and heartbeats. And to these we have added phenomena such as burning candles, dripping water, oscillating pendulums, vibrating piezoelectric crystals, and finally the oscillations of radiation emitted by excited caesium atoms relaxing (in "atomic" clocks). In addition to this there are firing cycles of neurons in the brain that coordinate the beating of your heart, your breathing, and other cyclic bodily events, thought these are quite variable depending on how active we are. We measure time by counting numbers of regular cyclic phenomena. A stretch of time is so many repetitions of a cycle. A "moment" in time is the time for one iteration of the shortest cyclic phenomenon.

In reality, time is not composed of moments at all. Time is a way of conceptualising the procession of events that happen as the universe evolves. These events happen at their own pace. Events are not coordinated like a symphony orchestra is coordinated by a conductor. Events are more like a marathon where everyone runs at their own pace. 

The division of time (and space) into units is arbitrary. For example, note that years, months, and days are all based on natural cyclic phenomena, but they do not match up. A year is not a whole number of months (moon cycles) or days. This is why our calendars have to be adjusted occasionally, such as adding an extra day every four years, because the year is ~365.25 days. There is no "snap to grid" feature when it comes to time. 

Aspect and the Three-Times Structure

Coming back again to linguistics, when we use language to describe events, the verbs we use contain information on aspect. Different languages note different aspects, but aspect includes such information as the beginning, persistence, or ending of an event; and event in progress, completed, or yet to begin; and whether an event is continuous, cyclic, iterative, and so on. Amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) wrote some interesting essays on aspect in indigenous American languages. In English I can indicate continuing or completed actions in the past, present, or future.

• I was running (past, incomplete )
• I ran (past, complete)
• I am running (present, incomplete)
• I have run (present, complete)
• I will run (past, incomplete)
• I will have run (future, complete)

The structure of time into past, present, future is common to Sanskrit, and thus, I presume, to Indo-European languages in general. We can also indicate repetitive actions. So one walk is a tramp. To repeatedly walk over something is to trample it. One oscillation is a wag, many is a waggle, though in English we often express aspect through adverbs like 'constantly', 'repeatedly', 'occasionally', or 'persistently'.

In most English time metaphors, the present is where we are now, the future is what is in front of us, and the past is what is behind us. In the time-flow metaphors of some languages, the future is sneaking up from behind us and we cannot see it, while the past flows away from us in front, where we can see it. The future could be quite unnerving in such cultures!

If we are the agent, then the "present" is the moment we are in, where a "moment" is an entirely arbitrary unit of time. And we still favour traditional measures because our sense of time is geared to them. A moment is roughly a heartbeat. The idiom "in a heartbeat" means "instantaneously". But we also have idioms for moments such as "in the blink of an eye", "a finger snap", "half a tick". Of course we can measure time many orders of magnitude more precisely than this now, but anything much shorter than a heartbeat is difficult for us to imagine. Past, present, and future are features of the metaphorical structure of language, but not of time in reality, because the present is an arbitrary time.

In John Searle's language, the present is an observer-relative function. The present isn't an intrinsic feature of the universe, but occurs to us as a subjective feature of time. So, epistemically, we understand there to be this structure to time, and since we all agree on it, it is epistemically objective. But it is ontologically subjective. The present only exists in our minds, because our minds have the features they do. 

Time to Get Real

Which brings us to the question of the reality of time. When the interviewer asks Lakoff about the reality of time, he says:

"There may be no such time as "time in reality". And that's what's interesting. There may be just events in reality."

Time is unlikely to exist independently of our metaphorical conception of it. This seems to be consistent with the universe that physicists describe at quantum and cosmological scales. The universe simply evolves in patterned ways. Some of those patterns persist as structures and those structures form increasingly complex layers of structure. In a sense, we could say that from this point of view that there are no entities, there are just some persistent processes, like standing waves in a river. Many physicists now think that time is not fundamental, but that it emerges as a property of the interactions of quantum fields. What his might mean in human terms, like most of quantum theory, is far from obvious or, in fact, completely obscure. It may not even be possible to disentangle our metaphorical time and what time is in reality, if it is anything. 

This insight into the metaphorical basis for how we understand time is important for deconstructing Zeno's arrow paradox. The paradox is based on reifying the notion that time can be measured in moments. It assumes that the moments we perceive in time relative to some other cyclic events are real. But they are not. In reality, the evolution of the universe is continuous and not broken down into moments. 

As we know, different layers of the universe require different descriptions. At the quantum level, events may be discrete, such as the transition of an electron from one energy state to another. This is what the quantum part of quantum theory means. At the quantum level, change can be discontinuous. But at the macro level (i.e., at the mass, length, and energy scale relevant to human experience) change is never discontinuous. It may happen very rapidly, but it is always continuous.

So, if change is continuous and we divide it up into moments, what happens is that we lose information about the continuity of the process. The same thing happens when converting music to a digital format. If the sampling rate is less than about twice the highest frequency we can hear then the loss of fidelity at the high end starts to become obvious. The average healthy person can hear sounds up to about 20 kilo-Hertz. Which is why digital music samples at roughly 48 kHz or more. But even if we sample at 96 kHz or more, we still lose information. Other factors intervene. Our equipment for turning digital signals into analogue waves in the air will not produce 100% fidelity, either, so sampling a million Hz would be pointless. The point is that dividing time into moments is a lossy process.

Time is not a series of moments, it is an unfolding of events: a marathon rather than an orchestra. So, for example, there is no such thing as "the present moment" because the idea of a moment is defined relative to some cyclical event, and we are free to choose difference reference points. Different authorities define the present moment as lasting a different number of units or fractions of seconds. A second is the length of time that it takes for a 1 meter pendulum to complete an arc. Or a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom". In other words, a second is arbitrary, but if we all choose the same arbitrary measure, then we agree on how long a second is.

We now have enough information to understand the misunderstanding that creates the paradox.


Resolving the Paradox

Zeno's arrow is not stationary at any given moment. Moments are arbitrary and are arbitrarily long. If the moment is 0.001 of a second, the arrow is still moving during that time; though the amount of movement may be too small for us to see, it still moves. When the arrow is in motion, it is constantly moving. Similarly, if we observe a mountain for a year it may not perceptibly change, because mountains change on geological time scales (millions of years). A photograph of a bird on the wing may give the illusion of stillness if the exposure is short enough, but even then if one looks carefully one may find movement blur at the wingtips.

In reality, there are no moments. Moments are a structure that we subjectively impose on the flow of events. Time itself may be an emergent property of quantum systems. And events go at their own speed, with no coordinating universal clock. Time's arrow is a result of steadily increasing disorder in the universe and will disappear once entropy reaches a maximum. 

So Zeno's arrow paradox and Nāgārjuna's laborious fumbling around the subjects of time, duration, motion, and change, are difficult because they do not understand the distinction between how they conceptualise time and what time might be in reality. In other words, we once again meet the mind projection fallacy or the problem of confusing experience for reality. George Lakoff dispenses with Zeno in less than four minutes. Of course, there are many secondary questions and a lot of gaps to be filled in, but once a problem is correctly framed, things can move along more rapidly. 

~~oOo~~

George Lakoff (2016) How Does Metaphysics Reveal Reality? [Video] Closer To The Truth. https://youtu.be/mRX4vSJra6A

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality. MIT Press.

The Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus has been a staple of philosophical discussion and teaching for millennia. The folk version of this conundrum is grandfather's axe, in which the axe in question is favoured despite having had its head and handle replaced many times. Can it be the same axe? Grandfather thinks it is, and we, the audience hearing the story, doubt that it can be. I have certainly not surveyed every instance of it, but introductions to this story always seem to take the same approach to the problem and to leave it hanging as a paradox.

So why does this problem continue to fascinate philosophers? Partly, I think, philosophers like problems that can be argued over but not resolved (and their worldviews resist a resolution). However, I think it is also because the ship is a metaphor for ourselves. We visibly change over time and, at least for philosophers, this raises the question of identity. The combination of continuity and change seems to be particularly problematic for philosophers, East and West. 

The locus classicus of the story is Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans:

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” (14)

The problem is often portrayed as having only two mutually exclusive answers with nothing to decide between: it is either the same ship or a different ship. And thus the story contains a kind of paradox. I will try to show that it is only a paradox because of the way the problem is framed and that by reframing it we can resolve the paradox. I suspect that all apparent paradoxes are related to framing problems.

Over the years, philosophers have added new twists to the problem. What if we collect all the discarded old planks and build another ship out of them? Can there be two boats that we identify as Theseus’ ship? What if Theseus stays aboard the ship as it travels, but running repairs result in the same exchange of old timbers for new. Does Theseus arrive on the same ship that he set out on? And so on. All of these trade on the same framing of the problem.

The framing here focusses on the relationship of the complex wholes and parts (which may themselves be simple or complex). I want to reframe the problem by pointing out that in all of the arguments about Theseus's ship, no one ever questions that the structure is a ship and no amount of plank changing alters this fact. And this gives a clue to how to deal with the question. Let us start with the idea of "ship".

What is a ship? 

What are the minimal features an object must possess so that we can recognise it as belonging to the category "ship". And here I'm going to ignore the complexities of the semantics of ships versus boats and all their myriad variations. For my purposes ship here represents water-craft in a very general way. 

Firstly, any material that can be made watertight and is malleable can be used. One can build a ship from paper, wood, concrete, or steel. What really matters is the average density of the volume contained by the ship's hull. Any object which is less dense than water will float in it. A ship's hull encloses a large volume of space with a thin wall so that the average density of the enclosed volume is very much smaller than the density of the building material, and less than the density of water. Hence, we can build a ship from steel which is eight times denser than water, by ensuring that the hull encloses more than eight times the volume of the steel used.

Secondly, the hull must be water-tight, or as close to it as possible. In practice, most ship designs in the ancient world would have been leaky. Planks can be made to fit together with sub-millimetre accuracy, but still have to be caulked. (For a fascinating insight into ancient boat building techniques see the Jewel of Muscat Project)

convergent evolution

Thirdly, a ship needs to be hydro-dynamically efficient; i.e., it needs to move through the water easily. The best configuration for this is a hull that it is considerably longer than it is wide. A broad-beamed ship will still make way, but with considerably more effort than a long and narrow ship. A prow that converges to a point is also advantageous, though not essential. River boats often opt for a flat bottom and blunt prow, for example. A smooth surface is also advantageous. The efficiency of these criteria can be seen in the way that the evolution of aquatic animals has tended to converge on the same long, thin, pointy, smooth design.

Lastly, a ship needs some kind of motive power to propel it through the water. A water-craft that is not propelled is a raft. A ship can be propelled by any number of sources of power, though in ancient Greece it would have involved a combination of oars for rowing and a square or lug sail for the wind. Both methods impose constraints on the design. A mast must be stepped and stayed, and sailing requires a method to prevent leeway, for example; while oars require a fulcrum and somewhere for rowers to sit (or stand, in some designs).

With just these features, an object may be called a ship. But there is something more going on here. A ship is not a ship merely because it possesses some intrinsic features. A log possesses most of these features. A ship performs a function. The function of a ship is to transport people and/or cargo over water. Note also that we can use "ship" as a verb and it is no longer confined to moving cargo by ship. As John Searle has pointed out, a function is an observer-relative feature of the object. In other words, the object we are calling a "ship" can perform the function of transporting Theseus to Minos and back, but this is not an intrinsic feature of the ship. The intrinsic features a ship has make it suitable for performing this function, but the function itself is relative to the observer. And observer- relative features of an object are created by the mental states of the observer.

For example, if we take the ship out into the middle of the desert and show it to people who've never seen a large body of water, they might not be able to deduce its function from intrinsic features. They may well conclude that, rather than displacing water, the hull is designed as a cistern for storing water. And that the configuration makes it easier to drag over sand. The intrinsic features of the object alone do not tell us what function it serves for human beings. We have to have the concept of a ship in our minds, as well.

Consider also someone visiting Athens who did know the story of Theseus. They might see a ship, but they would not see Theseus's ship. The connection between the ship and Theseus does not exist for them, because they haven't heard of Theseus. One might argue that Theseus exists despite his not being known about and that, even in ignorance, the ship is still Theseus's ship. However, the uninformed visitors could not discover this information through examining the ship. The ownership by Theseus is not an intrinsic property of the ship. The association with Theseus is also observer- relative.

So "ship" is an observer-relative feature of an object with the appropriate intrinsic properties. Thus, a "ship" is not an ontologically objective fact. Nor is "Theseus's ship" an ontologically objective fact. The "ship" is an epistemically objective fact, but ontologically it is subjective, i.e., it only exists relative to mental states in the observer.

So, in fact, the idea of "Theseus's ship" involves some intrinsic subjectivity. And part of what makes the ship interesting is the analogy of our own identity. I'm a good example because my name appears to be unique in history. There is, and has only ever been, one being called Jayarava. The fact that I am Jayarava is an ontologically subjective fact. But in my Sangha it is epistemically objective - everyone in my milieu knows that's who I am, and many do not know me by any other name (i.e., did not know me before my ordination). On the other hand, parts of me are ontologically objective. If you, literally, run into me, you'll certainly feel it. And parts of me are both ontologically and epistemically subjective, i.e., my private thoughts. So my "identity" as Jayarava spans all these possibilities (and possibly more) depending on the point of view of the observer.

The identity of Theseus and of Theseus's ship both rely on a range of types of facts and this makes the problem very much more complicated. There are no simplifying assumptions we can make without excluding essential information. 

Part/Whole Gestalt

A ship, as I have defined it, is a combination of materials and construction. Considerable time and effort is required to turn the materials into an object with the necessary intrinsic features to perform the function of ship. The parts have to be shaped and then fixed together in ways that create the necessary structure and give it enduring integrity. However, the usual way of framing the problem of Theseus ship only looks at materials and ignores the structure itself. This may be why no one seems to notice that despite all the changes, the ship is still a ship.

It seems that many philosophers are blind to the role of structure in the world. Ships are complex objects, made of many parts assembled in the right order to fit the category of 'ship'. There is a tendency to default to a reductionist paradigm in which only the parts are relevant to the question of identity. We do not see structure as real. We only see substance as real. Therefore, if we are going to invest identity in anything it ought to be, in this view, in substance. Structure is apparently incidental. 

If we replace one plank of wood in a ship made from dozens of planks, we have no problem in identifying the structure as the same, with a repair. If we replace all the parts, we struggle because in reductionism the parts are where identity is vested. If there are no original parts, then identity is lost. Somewhere in the middle is a cross-over point. We're not quite sure where it might be, but at some point we begin to suspect that if we replace that arbitrary number of parts, then the identity of the whole somehow changes. And this despite the fact that the ship is continually existent as a structure.

This see-saw—yes/no—approach has characterised Western philosophy for years. Eastern philosophy was mired in its own problems, but clearly the Buddhist philosophy that I am familiar with also tended to reductionism and thus did no better at dealing with change. However, there is a better approach.

It is better to acknowledge that the ship is both made from parts and constitutes a whole. When we analyse the ship into parts we see that parts on their own are not ships and mostly do not have the necessary intrinsic features to be a ship. The epistemically objective "ship" only emerges when we assemble all of the parts into the appropriate structure and we, the observer, have the appropriate mental states. The integrated whole has features which the the parts to not possess: especially buoyancy, hydrodynamics, and motive power. To fully understand the concept of ship we have to take into account both sides of the coin: substance and structure; as well as the observer relative status of the concept of "ship". 

In this view, the structure of the ship is causal. The structure causes the ship to float, to displace water, and to move in ways that parts alone cannot. The materials on their own do not have these features, or at least not enough of them to fit into the category ship. A lump of steel rapid sinks in water. But if we hollow it out so that it encloses a volume more than eight times the volume of the original lump, then it will float. Given the density of steel as a substance, we expect it always to sink. But a steel ship floats because it is ship-shaped. Here structure is more important than substance in understanding the nature of a ship.

The structure also persists over time, despite the replacing of some or even all of its parts. So the structure also exists and is causal. The structure does not exist independently of its parts, but since identical parts can be substituted with no change in the structure, then structure is not absolutely dependent on its parts. Indeed, we can often remove parts from a structure and it remains intact as a structure. Removing a plank from above the water-line of a ship does not destroy the intrinsic features of the object, nor does it stop the object from performing the function of ship.

Thus we can say that the structure is real. Reductionists assert that only substance is real. Antireductionists assert than only structures (or systems) are real. My view, following Richard H. Jones (2013), is that both substance and structure are real. The planks and the ship are both real, and the structure has emergent features that are not features of the planks. Planks have their own important features that enable them to function as a good building material. The individual fibres or cells of wood do not have the features of a large tree cut into planks.  At every scale we look at, both substance and structure are important. However, if you dismantle a structure into its parts, the features of that structure no longer exist. So the reductionist approach to structure nets us no information because it destroys the object of interest. This is a fact every biologist is aware of.

Identity

I've already pointed out that identity is an observer-relative function and not something intrinsic to insentient objects. We may project it onto objects, but in this case the identity is something we believe and someone who does not believe this will not be able to deduce it from simply interacting with the object. In this section I want to raise some other problems with how Theseus's ship is identified.

Is the ship that sits in the harbour and gradually has all its parts replaced Theseus's ship? The question assumes that Theseus is a point of reference. But Theseus himself is subject to change. He ages. He sails to Minos and kills the Minotaur. How could such events not change him? Is he the same man afterwards? Well, yes and no. The structure that we think of as Theseus has been extended by having new experiences and some of the parts have been exchanged, but the fundamentals are still there. When Theseus returns, everyone recognises him as Theseus. But they probably also notice that the events at Minos have changed him as well. There is both continuity and change.

Some people approach the question of the identity of Theseus's ship by ignoring the continuity and focussing on the fact of change. In this case, neither Theseus nor the ship is the same. And the difference takes on an exaggerated importance when continuity is excluded from the equation -- and some ignore the change and focus on the continuity.

I can walk out my door and within a few minutes be standing on top of a large mound of dirt, piled up by the Normans in 1068 CE, which has commanding views of Cambridge and the surrounding area. The mound has been there for about 950 years as I write this. Or, on a slightly longer walk, I can visit buildings that were constructed in the 13th Century. These are structures that have persisted for centuries. Not without change and/or repair, but still, arguing that they don't exist is nonsensical. There they are, and there they have been for centuries! One has to go under, over, or around them, one cannot just pretend they are not there. For those who believe that a brick wall does not exist, the recommended procedure is to bash your head against it repeatedly, until wisdom dawns.

These objects are real by any sensible definition of the word. Real and impermanent. Impermanence does not make an object unreal, it only makes it temporary. Buddhist intellectuals have struggled with this because ancient Buddhists defined existence as permanent. An impermanent object cannot be said to exist. In fact, they were mixing up experience and reality. The original target of the criticism was the existence of absolute being (ātman) in experience (pañca-skandhāḥ). Since experience is impermanent, no absolute being could be found in experience. Unfortunately, they went too far with this and equated all being with absolute being. From this, they argued that no being of any kind could be found. But this is simply a misunderstanding of an ancient criticism of ātman. 

Over time, structure persists. In the light of this we can say that the structure of the ship once owned by Theseus persists, helped by the exchange of rotten planks for good ones. At the same time, the substance of the ship has changed so that no plank of the original is left; but because planks are essentially identical this doesn't affect the structure. If we vest identity solely in the structure, then this is Theseus's ship. If we vest identity solely in the substance, then it is not Theseus's ship. There is no paradox here, because where we vest identity is simply an arbitrary decision we make, though probably motivated by presuppositions and non-reflective beliefs.

Similarly, if we take the old planks and build a new ship, how we see it depends on whether we focus on structure or substance. The new ship is a new structure, made from old substance. So, if identity is substance ,this is the same ship and, if it is structure, it's a completely different ship.

The two extremes are not the only possible answers here. Part of what philosophers do to win arguments is to back us into corners by artificially making us choose one side of a duality. This is another example of the arborescent fallacy, which sees us frame the question as having an either/or answer. In this fallacy, the world appears to us as a series of binaries. The term arborescent is also used in graph theory and botany; and was the title of an album by Ozric Tentacles. Another name for this is false dilemma. Edward de Bono independently wrote about this problem as a feature of neural networks, which he called knife-edge discrimination (1990: 108ff).

After my critique of the tree metaphor in evolution (Evolution: Trees and Braids) I stumbled onto the same critique produced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980), whence the name arborescent meaning 'tree-like' (from arbor 'tree' and the suffix ‑escent  'a process or state of being'). Unfortunately, having looked at their book I found it suffered from all the usual faults of French philosophy of that period: the writing style is obscurantist and the argument jumbled and poorly structured. So I still don't know what they say about the fallacy except what is on Wikipedia (so potentially I know nothing).

The problem of Theseus' ship is framed according to a logical fallacy that results from a cognitive bias to see things in binary terms. Once I realised that both substance and structure were real, the problem I knew as grandfather's axe no longer seemed to me to be an either/or problem. The apparent paradox is simply a limitation artificially imposed by intellectuals who haven't fully grasped the situation they live in. They labour away with theories about how the world should be, based on idealistic or romantic fantasies. Education is a good thing, but all too often it leaves us with unexamined presuppositions that hinder our understanding. For example, most people finish their science schooling believing in reductionism and this is an obstacle to understanding because reduction is strictly limited in its application. 

Another complaint is that identity is a fairly slippery concept. It makes more sense to speak of a conscious entity having identity than a ship. Without a mind, the ship itself has no sense of identity. Therefore, any identity that we perceive is a quality that we have projected into the ship. Identity in this case doesn't reside in the ship at all. It resides in our own minds! What we're really wondering is whether we recognise the ship as being the same or not, which again comes down to whether we look at substance, structure, both, or neither. And I argue that we have to look at both.

Since no object is entirely stable, no matter how long it persists, insisting that identity is a function of some fixed quality rather than something dynamic is just arbitrary. Castle mound is by no means exactly the same as it was ~950 years ago when it was heaped up as the base for a defensive stockade to guard a key crossing point on the River Cam. But it is a mound and there has continuously been a mound on that spot for ~950 years. A mound exists. Whether the mound exists is just something to argue about in a framework that doesn't allow a resolution. If we focus on the grains of soil, then it is not the mound, but another identically shaped mound in the same location as yesterday (by coincidence apparently). If we focus on the structure itself it is the same mound, but the parts have all changed.

Answers are so often already implied by how we frame questions. Logic doesn't stop us getting things wrong.

Conclusion

So, to recap, the problem of Theseus's ship is problematic mainly because of how it is framed and the presuppositions of the person who asks the question. Reductionist methodologies cannot cope very well with persistent structure. Reasoning from the assumptions and methods of reductionism on its own produces nonsense and/or contradictions.

To understand and appreciate structure requires an antireductive approach. We have to see structures as persistent, dynamic systems, with their own (emergent) features and causal powers: e.g., buoyancy and hydrodynamism. Such a structure can function as a ship, but only in relation to other systems, such as the ocean. Also, the function of the object as a ship is an observer-relative function. While it is epistemically objective, the fact of being a "ship" is ontologically subjective. A naive observer would not look at a ship and conclude that it could convey people and cargo across the ocean, especially if they were not familiar with oceans.

Identity is not vested in either parts or wholes of any inanimate object, but in our own conscious states. Any identity Theseus's ship might have is a projection from our minds onto the object. It is Theseus's ship if, and only if, we believe it to be so. Different people, at different times and places, may have different reasons for believing that it is Theseus's ship, but apart from a tiny number of long dead eye-witnesses (whose testimony may still be inaccurate), the rest of us take it on faith.

If we restrict ourselves to focussing on substance and change then the ship is not the same. But if we restrict ourselves to structure and continuity then it is the same. But the dichotomy is not intrinsic. Any object we can see has both structure and substance. Both are real and therefore when considering the question of Theseus's ship, both are equally important.

The problem is that we seek something essential in a complex object in which the parts are being changed for identical parts but the structure remains stable. To simply ask "Is it the same ship?" is an incomplete question. One might counter, "the same as what?" Or in other words, what is the point of comparison?

If we resolve the paradox by reframing the problem and selecting appropriate methods to understand it, does it shed any new light on the problem of identity? I'm not sure that it does. We all have this experience of continuity with change. We have memories that provide us with continuity, even if they are not 100% accurate. Over a normal human lifespan change occurs rapidly at the beginning, slowly in the middle, and rapidly at the end. But we experience ourselves as continuous through our lives. Not, as some Buddhists insist, as unchanging, but as connected over time. We all understand that we change physically and mentally. Externally, we age and, internally, we accumulate experience.

That there is change-with-continuity or continuity-with-change seems fairly obvious when you think about it. However, everywhere we turn this is denied. Theists argue that we have an unchanging eternal soul. Buddhists deny any kind of continuity when discussing metaphysics, but insist on continuity when discussing morality. Philosophers frame the problem of Theseus's ship so that it is a paradox. But everyday experience is of change and continuity. There is a dialectic between substance and structure and it is helpful to acknowledge the contribution of both to experience. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

de Bono, Edward. (1990) I Am Right - You Are Wrong. Penguin

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Continuum, 2004. [First translated into English 1987; originally vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie]

Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.