Ignorance, Error, and Mystery

 

The extent of our ignorance is stupendous. We know next to nothing about vast tracts of reality. If the world is the totality of facts, then our knowledge is confined to a tiny proportion of these facts. Just think of the distant past and remote future: all those individual facts about which we know nothing. We know hardly anything of what happened in the universe during the last five seconds. The universe is huge, populous, and mostly far away—nearly all of what happens is unknown to us. Nearer home we have the microscopic and invisible world: we certainly don’t know what is going on atomically in particular objects at particular times. Nor are we aware of the individual lives of bacteria and the like. We are almost entirely ignorant of what is going on the minds of sentient organisms, even the people we know quite well. We get glimpses, but most of it is quite hidden from us. The spotlight of knowledge falls on a minute section of reality; the rest is ignorance. And this is something we know perfectly well: we are not in the dark about the extent of our ignorance. Of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, but we do know that reality contains dimensions and scales that guarantee human ignorance—the expanses of space and time, in particular. Ignorance is only to be expected, and nothing to feel ashamed about: reality is intrinsically unknown to us in its full extent. Realism implies ignorance: being real does not imply being known.

            The skeptic thinks that ignorance extends even further than this: we are ignorant about what we think we know. We think we know about the local external world, but the skeptic says we are ignorant about it—as ignorant as we are about the remote external world. We think we sometimes know about the minds of others, but the skeptic says we are ignorant about this too: not only do we not know about the minds of bats, we don’t know about the minds of our nearest and dearest. Nor do we know the recent past, or the laws of nature, or what will happen next. All is blind ignorance. We might be making constant errors as well as simply not knowing various things. But even if the skeptic could be rebutted, it would still be true that we are massively ignorant. No one would think that your average animal knows very much of the universe—why should they?—and we are no different. Ignorance is simply a fact of nature, a biological necessity. Nature is sublimely indifferent to how much of it is known, and very little is.

            In the light of this vast ocean of the unknown, it is hardly surprising that some things are mysteries—things that cannot be known. Things have explanations, but not all explanations are known by us, or even could be known to us. It all depends on the available evidence and our powers of intellectual ingenuity. Many crimes remain mysteries: no one knows who committed them (apart from the criminal). Historical events in general may be quite mysterious, even the origins of large-scale wars (see Tolstoy’s War and Peace). Take a typical murder mystery, real or fictional: there may be a range of suspects but no way to decide among them, or there may be no such range—just total mystery. Detectives try to remedy such ignorance, but there is no guarantee that they ever will. Thus we are perfectly familiar with the type of ignorance we call mystery: the type in which we don’t know the correct explanation for a certain event and never will. Here is a mystery that I recently came up against. I have a pond in my garden in which I keep several fish: one day several new fish appeared in it as if from nowhere. The new fish were clearly not of the same species as the old fish—green and yellow with a red tail not red and white. Where did they come from? I didn’t put them there, and they couldn’t have arisen by natural reproduction. Could someone else have put them there? But who would do that, and for what reason? Did they somehow find their way there from some other pond? But fish can’t walk on land. Did they fall with the rain? But how can fully-grown fish fall with the rain? It was a complete mystery, and I never solved it. Several months later the four new fish died of natural causes, remaining mysterious till the end. The mysterian was faced with a real-life mystery! Such things happen. I didn’t suppose that God did it, or that the fish spontaneously arose from nothing, or that I must have put them there in my sleep: I ruled out these possible explanations. But nothing else occurred to me—the mystery fish remain a mystery to this day. I am completely ignorant as to the correct explanation of their appearance. If only I could have asked them!

            I mean these pedestrian remarks to bear on the question of mysteries in philosophy and in science–for example, the mystery of consciousness. Given the prevalence of mystery, it should not be surprising that certain natural phenomena present deep mysteries. Mystery is a form of ignorance (ignorance of explanation) and ignorance is everywhere: we are ignorant of far more things than we are knowledgeable about. Nor should it surprise us if the mystery is terminal: it is surely obvious that we will never completely remove all ignorance—there is just too much in reality for our brains to take in. Our faculties are limited and the world is broad and deep. True, science has made an impressive assault on our natural state of ignorance, but even science will never remove all ignorance. There will always be things that no human knows, often quite boring things. Some of these things may concern phenomena that are quite close to home—including our own consciousness. Does anyone think that a human mind could know the entire state of a person’s brain at a given moment? No, there is just too much going on in those billions of neurons. Human knowledge has its limits, so we shouldn’t dismiss suspicions of mystery out of hand. It would be strange if there were no mysteries given the amount of ignorance there is. I am not trying to prove mystery here, merely to put the claim of mystery in its proper epistemic context. The existence of mystery is the existence of one kind of ignorance, but ignorance is the natural condition of the human cognitive system—as all other cognitive systems. There are very few things that we are not ignorant about in the wide sweep of things. It is easy to focus on what we know, given that by definition it comes within our cognitive reach, but the area of what we don’t know is incomparably vaster, notwithstanding its rather hazy presence to our minds. We do better to think of reality as what we don’t know about rather than what we do. From nature’s point of view, most of it is secret, offering only glimpses to curious minds.  [1]

 

C

  [1] There should really be a branch of epistemology dealing with ignorance in addition to the branch dealing with knowledge.

 

 

Particle Psychology

 

Physics is particle physics. The physical world consists of atoms that consist of particles (electrons, protons, neutrons). This was discovered not so long ago, though it was conjectured by the ancient Greeks. It is not part of common sense and is not suggested by perceptual appearance. If anything, physical objects look continuous not granular. We have empirically discovered, as a result of arduous experimentation, that big objects are made of invisible small objects, and that these small objects have a characteristic structure consisting of a nucleus surrounded by orbiting particles. This is one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, on a par with the discovery of the heliocentric theory; it is something to emulate, envy, and aspire to. It sets an example to all other sciences. But is it an example that has been followed? Have the other sciences discovered anything analogous to the atomic theory of particle physics? In particular, are there psychological particles analogous to physical particles? Is psychology particle psychology?

            Do the other sciences speak explicitly of particles and atoms? We might cite the doctrine of logical atomism: language consists of atomic sentences compounded into molecular sentences, where the atomic sentences contain subatomic parts, viz. words. The picture is that elementary semantic particles (words) combine to form atomic wholes that can then combine to form molecular compounds (conjunctions, negations, etc.). These molecular compounds can then form larger semantic entities such as paragraphs or speeches or books. The semantic universe is thus a universe of elementary semantic particles that join with other such articles to form larger units—ultimately the whole of semantic reality. We could even go cosmological: there are semantic planets and solar systems and galaxies (e.g. the works of Shakespeare). Language has infinite potential, so we can envisage an enormous proliferation of semantic entities existing alongside the physical galaxies described by cosmology. Maybe there are just a few primitive semantic particles, analogous to the physical particles, which generate this whole hierarchy of existence. Logicians talk about the “logical particles” and we might seek to model logic on particle physics (including cosmology). We have found higher-order uniformity in nature: nature is organized atomically, with elementary particles lying at the bottom, physical or semantic. It is particulate, corpuscular, and combinatorial. Similarly, linguists speak of grammatical particles, defined by the OED as follows: “a minor function word that has comparatively little meaning and does not inflect, e.g. in, up, off, or over used with verbs to make phrasal verbs”. Admittedly, this restricts grammatical particles to a small subclass of semantic units, but we can envisage a more generalized notion of grammatical particle that takes in verbs and nouns. Isn’t linguistics really about the constituent structure of language, and hence a theory of linguistic atoms and their combinations? And what about biology—aren’t cells the analogue of the particles of physics? A whole organism is like a medium sized physical object: it contains organs as parts (physical and mental) and these organs are made of cells, the atoms of the body. The cells in turn have subatomic constituents (e.g. mitochondria) and even a nucleus. So biology looks like an atomic theory too: it follows the pattern of particle physics—an encouraging emulation. Biology is particle biology. The cells are invisible to the naked eye and took some discovering; their discovery was a major piece of scientific progress. Again, a high level uniformity in nature is revealed: things turn out to be collections of invisible units not continuous substances. Reality is particulate, discrete, and reticulated, though it could have been continuous, smooth, and unbroken. Geometrically, it is like a matrix not a continuous solid. We could say that science is particle science.  [1]

            But what about psychology—is it too an atomic theory? Superficially, it may appear so: it deals in such units as concepts, phenomenal points, and combinations thereof. We look at a train of thought and discern constituent structure: the train consists of carriages, the individual thoughts, and these are made of simpler elements, usually designated as concepts. The concepts are like the subatomic particles of logical atomism, with thoughts as the atoms. In vision, likewise, we have an array of components corresponding to points in the visual field: here green, there red, with an impression of square woven in. The brain is certainly a particulate entity, with its neurons and their simpler parts, reaching down to the level of chemicals. But in the case of psychology the analogy starts to creak (maybe it should have started to creak earlier): the whiff of metaphor starts to permeate the proceedings. It is true enough that mental processes such as reasoning consist of simpler cognitive elements, and it is true that thoughts are made up of concepts: but are concepts really like subatomic particles? Here an uncomfortable dilemma presents itself: concepts are either the end of the line, or they are not. If they are, then our atomic theory peters out disappointingly early—there are no deeper psychological particles to be discovered. But then we don’t have the kind of empirical discovery that characterizes atomic theory in physics, since we know a priori that thoughts are composed of concepts. But if concepts are not the end of the mereological line, and there are more basic psychological particles to be discovered, then we have hitherto failed to identify what the basic particles of the mind are. This means that psychology has not made the kinds of empirical discoveries that physics so spectacularly and arduously made. It is merely reporting a boring fact of common sense, namely that we have concepts and they compose our thoughts. This is like “discovering” that animal bodies have limbs or that trees have leaves. The mere existence of parts does not an atomic theory make. Physicists knew that physical objects have parts long before they established the atomic theory we now justly celebrate; parts are not atoms. Likewise, parts of thoughts are not atoms in the epistemologically significant sense exemplified by physics. Concepts are not like electrons and protons, but more like limbs and leaves.

            The thing about atoms is that they have a specific structure that has an explanatory aspect. They are not merely very small parts but articulated structures: they have a distinctive architecture. Thus they have a discrete nucleus made up of protons and neutrons surrounded by a shell consisting of orbiting electrons of varying numbers. The constituent particles have various properties, notably electric charge, positive or negative. All this explains the behavior of the matter composed of these particles, thus allowing for the reduction of chemistry to physics. It is not just a matter of conjoined chunks, mere aggregation. Atoms and their constituent particles are organized in a certain way, not anticipated by common sense or contained in the very concept of matter. That is why atomic theory ranks as a momentous scientific discovery; it is not the mere the assertion of invisible granular parts. It is the analogue of the discovery of the solar system as a system of interrelated parts orbiting a sun under the force of gravity. This is not merely the claim that the planets and the sun are parts of a larger whole; it is a theory of how the parts hang together. The atom is often compared to the solar system in its internal structure, but we could equally compare the solar system to the atom (and might have done so if we had revealed the structure of the atom first): both are tightly organized complex wholes held together by forces and laws, the nature of which we have managed to articulate (if not finally explain). But nothing like this is true in psychology: the mere observation of constituent structure is a far cry from the kind of explanatory atomic theory supplied by physics. Where is the nucleus of the concept, where the conceptual electrons, and where the law-governed orbits? At least in the case of the biological cell we have something approximating to this, but in the case of concepts (or points in the visual field) nothing comparable suggests itself: we just have the banal observation that thoughts are made up of concepts. In order for psychology to become particle psychology it needs to do a lot more than that. I don’t say it cannot do this more, but in its current state it does not. It is an entirely open question whether psychology can mimic the model of particle physics; certainly nothing in it now deserves to be compared to that model. And nothing we now know of the mind suggests a research program capable of development into a full-blooded particle psychology (the same is true of linguistics once we take the measure of genuine particle physics). So nothing in our current psychological knowledge warrants any claim of prestige deriving from a supposed analogy with particle physics. Not that this is a common claim—but it is worth making explicit how feeble the analogy to physics actually is. Physics is particle physics, but psychology isn’t particle psychology. The gulf is wide and deep. One might well suppose that a quite different paradigm would be appropriate for psychology—though what this might be remains to be determined. At any rate, we should not tacitly assume any reassuring analogy to physics based on the idea of atomic composition. The “corpuscular theory”, so beloved by Locke and Boyle, primitive though it was, finds no counterpart in psychology (with “ideas” as the mental corpuscles). By all means let us continue to stress the combinatorial nature of the mind–its generative, recursive, discretely digital character—but let us not interpret this as a vindication of a hankering for the glories of modern physics. We have not discovered the hidden particles of the mind, along with their architectural features, in anything like the sense in which physicists have unveiled the hidden particles of the physical world.  [2] Whether this shows that psychology is still in its infancy, or that its maturity is the same as its infancy, remains moot.

 

Colin McGinn                    

 

  [1] It is an interesting question whether there could be a general particle theory not just a variety of special particle theories. Are there any abstract properties shared by all particle theories (beyond truisms)? Is the concept of a nucleus essential? Does the idea of an orbit find a place in all atomic theories? Is there always some sort of glue holding the atom together? It seems unlikely that such concepts generalize in the way required, in which case the idea of a general theory of particles seems infeasible. Still, the question is worth pursuing.

  [2] Much the same can be said of mathematics: composition without atomicity. We certainly have the idea of elements that combine according to fixed rules, addition being the obvious example, and maybe we can make sense of numbers as parts of other numbers; but it would be stretching a point to claim a significant analogy with particle physics. Again, where is the idea of a laboriously discovered structure with the abstract architecture of a physical atom? Are there nuclear numbers and orbital numbers? Are there mathematical forces that hold numbers together? The idea seems metaphorical at best. Mathematics is not particle mathematics, though it is a generative system with divisions and discontinuities (as well as continuous quantities). Physics really is special in that it reveals a hidden layer of reality that is not anticipated by our ordinary perceptions and conceptions, and is in many ways alien to them. The physical atom is a universe apart (so to speak), and this is before we get to the peculiarities of quantum theory. Psychology has yet to encounter its subversive quantum theory—particles as anti-particles, in effect. It is conservatively Newtonian, steeped in common sense.

 

 

Night and Day

 

How firm is the distinction between night and day? What is night and what is day? What kind of distinction is this? Clearly there are periods during which it is neither night nor day—at dusk and dawn. Night is turning into day, but it is neither one nor the other. We don’t have a simple name for this time period, which lasts I would say for about 20 minutes; we could call it “nay” or “dight”. So the distinction between night and day is not sharp and not exhaustive. Nor is it universal: there is no night on the sun, and no day at the center of the earth. Things that are always bathed in light have no night, and things that are always dark have no day. In the land of the blind the distinction presumably makes no sense, since light is not sensed there; the distinction is not apparent to blind people, except perhaps by testimony. Is what we would call night really day for nocturnal creatures with superior vision to ours? They can see at night as well as we can see during the day, and they conduct their waking activities in our night; perhaps sunlight blinds them so that everything is dark for them during our day.  [1] Do they invert our day and night? What if the moon was larger and always reflected a lot of sunlight onto the earth—would that abolish night for us? The sleeping hours might be just like an overcast day. But then, is it really night for us now when the moon is bright and full? What about eclipses—do they literally turn day into night? And what if heat replaced light as the stimulus for vision—wouldn’t that undermine the night-day distinction? If things were warmer at night than during the day, people would see better at night, so there might be a linguistic switch with the words “night” and “day”. The distinction between day and night is friable and relative, pragmatic and contextual; there is no rigid absolute dichotomy. I can imagine a principled eliminativism about night and day: there are really no such things, not as aspects of objective reality; there is just a continuously varying amount of light and grades of visual acuity. You don’t find physicists talking much about the physics of day and night; the whole idea is centered on human concerns and powers. We can certainly imagine beings that have no use for the distinction, but without missing out on any objective matter of fact. When the Beatles sang about a Hard Day’s Night they were reflecting on the superficiality of the distinction. If night is defined as the hours of sleep, its status as objective looks distinctly questionable; it is perfectly possible to do a day’s work in the night hours (so called). People often say that two things differ as night and day, as if this was a rigid and sharp distinction; but in fact the distinction is vague, pragmatic, and relative. 

            Note that in another use of “day” we include the night as part of the day. You can say with perfect propriety, “What day is it today?” in the dead of night. The names of days of the week clearly include the period we call night. These distinctions map onto objective motions of the planet and are not as soft and pliable as the use of “day” in contrast to “night”. The semantics of these words ties them to certain anthropocentric conditions: “x is day” is true if and only if x has enough light to make human activity feasible, or the human eye can make things out clearly. We then reify this notion into something that seems to us to transcend human concerns, but reflection suggests that night and day are not independent of our particular contingent place in nature (they are part of the “relative conception” not the “absolute conception”). Just imagine if we became nocturnal because of some mutation in our eyes: we sleep when the sun casts the most light, are able to see only when the light is low, and are most active between the hours of 10pm and 6am; then we would surely start to refer to the hours of the 24-hour day quite differently. Night is when we can’t see so well, tend to feel sleepy, and want to stay home; day is when we see clearly, are wide awake, and feel like venturing forth. We do better, conceptually, to think of night as just another part of the day—the part in which the day is darker, quieter, and scarier. Alternatively, day is just the attenuation of night, the time when night becomes less opaque. If the difference of sunlight were less dramatic, with a lighter night and a gloomier day, we would surely think this way. This is one of those cases in which ordinary language (and ordinary thought) mislead us about reality: the words and their use make us think that we are dealing with a more solid and durable distinction than we really are. Rectifying this tendency, we could find ourselves more willing to stay at home during the day and more willing to go out at night (the “late day”); and be less prone to feeling guilty about afternoon naps and middle-of-the-night snacks. We need to free ourselves from the tyranny of the night-day dichotomy. The sun and the moon have vied for human worship; it is time to grant them equal status. Sun-time and moon-time are all parts of the same continuous day. The distinction between day and night is not written into the fabric of the universe. The day is bright night and the night is dark day.

 

Co

  [1] Is it analytic that the night is dark? How dark?  What if we had artificial light everywhere? The starry sky is quite bright at night. Is it analytic that the day is light? How light? What if the earth were enveloped in a light-blocking mist?  The cloudy sky can be quite dark at noon. So it is unclear that lightness and darkness can be used to define day and night more precisely.

I have lived in this country for 30 years, but I count myself an outsider. What we have witnessed in the last week, and in the last few years, has undoubtedly been ugly in the extreme, but to my eye it is not so far removed from business as usual in America. The same tendencies towards conspiracy theories, hysteria, gullibility, brutality, and delight in destruction are everywhere, including in American universities. They are not the exclusive property of the political right (appalling as that is ) but are quite independent of political affiliation. They are features of the American psyche, but Americans are oblivious to it. They are part of the national character, going back a long way. Of course, there are some good things about America, but people need to wake up to their blind spots and habitual reactions. Yes, I am talking to you.