Puzzles of Color

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Puzzles of Color

 

The mantis shrimp challenges philosophical reflection. This little crustacean is reputed to have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Mounted on stalks, these eyes can move independently and rotate freely; it has between 12 and 16 photoreceptors compared to the human 3. It can see into what is called deep ultra violet. It uses these eyes in the close capture of prey where great precision is needed (it also has a powerful club with which it stuns its prey).  There is every reason to believe that this creature’s eyes are superior to human eyes; in particular, it has superior color vision. Presumably we don’t know what it’s like to be a mantis shrimp, since its color phenomenology outstrips ours (compare the bat’s perception of sound). Its visual phenomenology is like Technicolor compared to our dull monochrome. It sees more colors and it sees them better.

            This raises puzzling questions. First, it suggests that colors exist independently of vision: just as some colors exist independently of human vision, so there may be colors that exist independently of all (terrestrial) vision. For there could be a species superior even to the mantis shrimp in the perception of color, so that color does not consist in actually causing color experiences. The wavelengths of light clearly pre-exist perceivers and it seems right to say that things were red (say) before any animal saw them as red. We can try saying that they had a disposition to appear red, but then there is no categorical property that being red consists in. For various reasons it is preferable to accept that things have colors before being perceived as such. The mantis shrimp thus has access to mind-independent colors that many other animals have no access to. But it is a puzzle what exactly these colors are: not wavelengths, and not dispositions to appear—but then what? They seem neither objective nor subjective but somewhere between the two; they challenge the usual binary opposition of objective and subjective. They seem to have phenomenology written into them and yet they are not identical to anything in the mind. They are, we might say, objective-cum-subjective. Perhaps they are a primitive type of property that belongs neither to the world of physics nor to the world of psychology. Yet they belong to physical objects and are perceived by the mind.

            But that isn’t the puzzling question I most want to talk about. Suppose we say that colors are secondary qualities in the classical sense—dispositions or powers to elicit perceptual experiences. Then we must ask whoseperceptual experiences: is it our experiences or those of the mantis shrimp? Since its color vision is markedly superior to ours we can’t identify the two, which means that the same objects can elicit different perceptions of a given color: red looks one way to them and another to us. Are there then two reds? No, there are two appearances of the same red. But the shrimp sees red better than we do, so it can’t be that our experiences are determinative: better to say that the shrimp’s visual system gets to decide. But then couldn’t there be perception of red that outclasses even the mantis shrimp’s? The problem is that colors admit of more or less accurate perceptions of their nature, but that is not compatible with claiming that colors are such dispositions. No one’s visual system gets to decide what red is, because the appearance of red to different perceivers varies: being red must transcend how red looks to different visual systems. Suppose we try saying that the best visual system on earth determines the identity of the colors, say the mantis shrimp’s: then it follows that if this shrimp goes extinct we should turn to the second best perceiver of color on earth; but this move shifts the identity of red from one subjective appearance to another. There must be more to the color red than its subjective appearance to sundry perceivers of red. Maybe our visually acute shrimp gets the closest to the true nature of the color red, with us running a distant second, but neither of us gets to determine the intrinsic nature of the color red. But then the traditional secondary quality view of color has to be mistaken.  [1] That would be fine if we could see our way clear to identifying colors with physical properties like wavelengths, but that way is blocked for familiar reasons.  [2] The upshot is that colors again emerge as sui generis basic properties belonging neither to physics nor psychology; they occupy a curious no-man’s land of the objective-cum-subjective. Perhaps the mantis shrimp sees red exactly as it intrinsically is (that is certainly an appealing thought), but this judgment of exact correctness presupposes that something outside the shrimp’s visual system fixes the nature of the property—the shrimp gets it right according to an objective measure. We, on the other hand, see it through a glass darkly, or through a haze laughably. We certainly can’t claim that our visual impressions constitute the very nature of the color red. No one’s do. Colors are like shapes in having a nature of their own that is logically independent of how they appear to this or that perceiver, simply because different visual systems represent them differently. We might be said to be color blind not only with respect to colors we can’t see but with respect to colors we can, since our visual system might be, as it were, legally blind with respect to the real nature of color. But legally blind perceptions of color are hardly capable of constituting the essence of color. The quality we are seeing, then, is not identical to a disposition to elicit imperfect perceptions of color in us; there is such a disposition, to be sure, but it cannot be the color. Our perceptive shrimp has a better claim to fixing the true nature of the color, but even she is not capable of constituting color properties (save per accidens).

            The same point can be made about other sensible qualities: smells, tastes, and sounds might not reveal themselves to our specific sensory systems.  [3] Animals with superior senses to ours might experience these qualities quite differently from us, and in ways closer to their true nature. Yet none may quite get to the heart of the quality in question—perhaps no animal on earth has ever experienced what sugar really tastes like. So we cannot assimilate such qualities to dispositions to appear in certain ways to existing perceivers, since these appearances may be more or less inaccurate or imperfect. So again, the traditional secondary quality account cannot be correct. This leaves us with an implausible physical reductionism or an acceptance of a range of puzzling qualities that are neither one thing nor another. The world of sensible qualities lies tantalizingly out of reach, perceived only as veridically as the perceiver’s limited senses allow. Human sensation, in particular, might be feeble and misleading compared to other “humbler” creatures. To be sure, we have big penetrating brains, but our sense organs might well be rather superficial and misleading even with respect to qualities with which we fancy ourselves well acquainted. We might have a rather poor idea of what red is—not as poor as a blind man’s, certainly, but pretty dismal compared to the mantis shrimp’s. If we had a hundred color receptors instead of three, the world of colors might have a startlingly different phenomenology for us. We might then see colors as they really are.        

 

  [1] The traditional secondary quality theory of color was proposed at a time when human biological superiority was presupposed—it was assumed that the human perception of color must be authoritative. In our post-Darwinian age we are far more ready to accept that the human species might not set the standard for veridical perception. 

  [2] These reasons are discussed in my The Subjective View (1982).

  [3] The sense of touch is less clear at least for the perception of shape (but perhaps human sensations of heat inadequately reveal the true nature of being hot).

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The Ballad of Dolores Haze

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I have been writing songs lately, so I thought I’d share this one with you: think of it as sung in Country and Western style. 

 

The Ballad of Dolores Haze

 

He broke my heart

But you broke my life

He was a creature of art

You were a monster equipped with a knife

 

A pentapod monster, I’d agree with that

His pen and photography were never so bad

I loved him so, I don’t know why

It’s not as if he was much of a guy

 

You killed my mother

So you could get to me

He saved me from another

Who would never let me be

 

Clare Quilty was his name

He was impotent, or so he claimed

You were anything but

But I’d rather be trapped in a desolate hut

 

No, I never vibrated to your touch

How could I when I hated it so much?

You loved me, you say

You’d take me far away

 

But I’d rather stay in this town of hicks

With my ironically named Dick

Than hitch myself to your terrible beam

And live again in that despicable dream

 

You broke my life, you see

And that’s not nothing, that’s all of me

Oh, you are hurting, I can tell

And I do pity you in your self-made hell

 

Goodbye honey, please dry your tears

They’re nothing compared to my childhood years

And the motels and the cars

And the bars and the barmen and the cold gray stars

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Partial Skepticism

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Partial Skepticism

 

The solipsist is a partial skeptic: he doubts the existence of other beings, sentient or otherwise, but he doesn’t doubt his own existence. He might go on positively to affirm that nothing exists but himself. He favors one object over all others. What is the analogue of this for the material world? Suppose I come to the conclusion that no material object exists except my coffee cup: it is the sole object that is real, all the rest being illusory. I am a kind of coffee cup solipsist—I favor one material object above all others. Perhaps I feel that I know my coffee cup (hereafter “the Cup”) better than any other material object, given my close daily acquaintance with it; in any case I select this object as the sole possessor of reality (apart from myself). I may think I am a brain in a vat of the classic type, but with one exception—the Cup. Just as the traditional solipsist picks out one individual as real (himself), so this “solipsist” picks out one object as real, namely a certain cup. Evidently this is a coherent position: it is an epistemic possibility that only the Cup exists among all the other apparent material objects. Perhaps the mad vat scientist has set things up so that the only veridical perceptions are of the Cup, the rest being hallucinations; or the architects of the Matrix have a peculiar cup fixation. Everything in my visual field is an illusion save for that solitary beverage container. Hey, it’s logically possible. It is a question whether this form of partial skepticism is a new type of skepticism: is it another skeptical scenario that needs to be considered? Apparently it is. And once we have this type of skepticism on the table we can construct varieties of it: for example, are oak trees the only real trees? We just select a class of material objects as exempt from general skepticism. Similarly, a partial solipsist skeptic could, logically, claim that only persons of a certain type exist—say, only people under six feet tall. That again is an epistemic possibility.

            Why do these partial skeptical positions seem completely arbitrary and unmotivated? Formally they resemble classic solipsism, but they seem entirely without intuitive appeal. The reason is obvious: they have no epistemological basis. There is no reason to favor a single coffee cup or a particular species of tree or a certain height of person. But there is a reason to favor myself over all other objects, namely my immediate infallible knowledge of myself: I know for certain that I exist but not that other people exist. By contrast, I have no greater certainty about the Cup than about other objects: so it seems completely arbitrary to favor that object above all others. I wish to make two points about this observation. The first is that there could be epistemological reasons to favor the Cup: that is, there are possible worlds in which there is more reason to believe in the Cup than in other material objects (irrespective of whether either really exists). Suppose I have regular, clear, and vivid perceptions of Cup (it has a name now) but irregular, unclear, hazy perceptions of other objects—so much so that the possibility of hallucination becomes highly plausible for them. Then I would have reason to think that Cup exists but other objects probably don’t—whether or not this supposition is actually correct. If so, I might be tempted to accept a form of partial skepticism about the material world, or even to deny that any material thing exists apart from my beloved Cup. That is, in this world a position analogous to traditional solipsism would be rational (assuming that solipsism is rational): there is more reason to believe in one material object than in any others, as there is more reason to believe in myself than in other selves.

            The second point is that solipsism as a positive doctrine starts to look distinctly irrational in the light the analogy. For why should we entertain the move from an epistemological point to an ontological one? It is true enough that Cup might be the only existent material object—this is an epistemic possibility—but why should this incline one in the slightest to suppose that it is the only existent object? Likewise, it is an epistemic possibility that only I exist—this cannot be ruled out with absolute certainty—but it is a total non sequitur to infer that it is actually true. Such a conclusion is as arbitrary as supposing that only my coffee cup exists, even when I have more reason to believe that it exists than to believe in the existence of other material objects. The belief in solipsism is as irrational as the belief that only precious Cup exists: both are logical possibilities, to be sure, but there is not even a smidgen of evidence to indicate that either supposition is true. What is true is that people care a lot more about themselves than about other people, whereas they don’t tend to have such strong feelings about their coffee cups; but that is not a reason positively to believe that you exist and other people don’t. Certainty is one thing, truth another. Solipsism is no more likely to be true than the corresponding belief about a particular cup. Neither position can be refuted as an epistemic possibility, but neither position has anything solid in its favor. Yet people have been more strongly drawn to solipsism than to the analogous position with respect to material objects. Why?  [1]

 

  [1] I have not discussed here alleged reasons for supposing that only the concept of one’s own mind makes sensegiven the nature of mental concepts (only first-person uses are properly intelligible), limiting myself to the more popular claim that epistemological reasons favor solipsism. The idea that one’s own mind is uniquely favored ontologically should strike us as remarkably self-centered, a reflection perhaps of our natural selfishness.

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Stereotypes

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Stereotypes

 

Wittgenstein warned against the “craving for generality”: the mistaken desire to find uniformity where there is only diversity. Thus philosophers are apt to suppose that all words are names, all sentences are assertions, and all states of mind are experiential—despite a heterogeneity that is evident to unbiased inspection. In a word, they overgeneralize, often based on preconceived ideas. Hence his admonition: “Don’t think, look!” Evidently this is a natural tendency of the human mind, which we need to resist. At roughly the same time Nabokov was inveighing against what he called “generalities”, particularly on the part of historians. He begins his 1926 essay “On Generalities” with these words: “There is a very tempting and very harmful demon: the demon of generalizations. He captivates human thought by marking every phenomenon with a little label, and carefully placing it next to another, also meticulously wrapped and numbered phenomenon.”  He goes on to excoriate historians for indulging in the tendency to find spurious similarities, thus erecting oversimplified “epochs”, “ages”, and “periods”. Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion first introduced the word “stereotype” in its modern sense (before that it was used in the printing industry), i.e. as connoting a tendency towards social overgeneralization and simplistic grouping. Here again the fault lies in not looking, observing and recording, but instead relying on overly simple and homogenizing ideas. Thus, according to these three thinkers, we find people mistakenly supposing (a) that all words are names, (b) that all authors of a certain period are to be classified as (say) Romantics, and (c) that all people of a certain culture or ethnic group have such and such characteristics. In each case we have what we would now call stereotypical thinking; and the problem with it is that it is false and can be very harmful. Yet people keep on doing it: they keep on ignoring the facts, the details, and the individualities, preferring instead the meritless generalization, the lazy grouping, and the prejudiced espousal of alleged commonalities. In some cases this is clearly deplorable, contemptible, and just plain stupid; but human beings seem intent on indulging their craving for generality no matter the cost. It is as if they have a demented love of identity.

            I emphasize the pervasiveness of the phenomenon because social stereotyping is not some isolated and unique failing: it is built into the fabric of human cognition (which is not say it is incurable). It is entirely possible to stereotype animals, fictional genres, popular music, athletes, professors, and even rocks. Overgeneralization and preconceived ideas are the stuff of weak minds. Today there is a tendency to stereotype certain individuals as “powerful white males” and then run away with all sorts of misguided and erroneous ideas about this supposed class. Philosophers and other academics are not immune to this, shameful though it may be.  [1] Often it is done in order to advance a certain political agenda, but it is also just plain lazy thinking and good old-fashioned stupidity. It needs to be identified for what it is and condemned in the strongest terms. Stereotyping is never an acceptable way to think (sic). No doubt it has its biological origins in a need to economize on time—to make thinking more efficient. Fine, but not at the cost of accuracy and justice: because stereotyping people is a vicious and idiotic habit. It needs to be stamped out (is jail time too much to ask?). Children need to be educated strenuously in its fatuity and danger. It has to go.

            Under what circumstances does stereotyping take hold? I think it’s when people feel overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of the world (of course, there can also be emotional reasons, meme transmission, indoctrination, imitation, and the like). If the world is perceived as intolerably complex, people will want to simplify it and make it more manageable: it’s easier to think that every word is a name, every writer from a certain period belongs to a certain “school”, and that every person of a certain appearance is thus-and-so (generally a negative thus-and-so). This is no doubt understandable, but it is not commendable, or even forgivable. In a society like America, which has a very diverse population, the urge to oversimplify and classify is particularly strong: it’s just easier to try to subsume everyone under certain crisply defined categories. The task of education should be to combat this cognitive weakness. This is a type of therapy (as Wittgenstein recommended therapy for the disease of philosophical overgeneralization): people need to be cured of their stereotyping, as if it were a disease. In fact, it really is a type of mental disease—just an exceptionally common one (like the common cold). The first step here is to get a proper sense of its pathological character, its demonic morphology, its onset and progression. A stigma needs to be firmly attached to it. As it is stereotyping gets reinforced and solidified, but it needs to be exposed and ridiculed. But don’t count on academic philosophers to do any of this good work; they seem as prone to it as anyone else, sad to say. It really is a problem, despite its obvious malignity.  [2]

 

  [1] In fact academics are professionally prone to it, because they make a living erecting generalizations, producing taxonomies, and promoting theories; they would feel thwarted if restricted to reporting the facts. Recalcitrant facts are the enemy of the ambitious theoretician.

  [2] This is generally recognized, though people seem oddly blind to it in themselves (they just have betterstereotypes). I am attempting here to describe it succinctly and clearly so that its malign presence can more readily be eradicated.

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Ignorance and Solipsism

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Ignorance and Solipsism

 

Is it possible to refute solipsism-of-the-moment? Is it possible to show that there must be more to the world than oneself and one’s current state of consciousness? The standard approach has been to assert that certain propositions about the world beyond consciousness are indubitable—say, the proposition that I have two hands. The thought is that I can know with certainty that certain propositions about the external world are true, so I know that there is more to reality than my current state of consciousness. I want to suggest a different approach, namely that ignorance disproves solipsism: that is, I know with certainty that I am ignorant of certain things. Normally we take this for granted: we accept that there are all sorts of facts that we don’t know—because they are too far away, hidden behind things, too small to see, etc. We accept that the world is a big place and we have very limited knowledge of it. This assumes that the world extends beyond what is currently in one’s field of consciousness: if there is ignorance, then there must be something we are ignorant about. There must be more to reality than what is currently in one’s mind given that one is ignorant of certain things. For if that were all there is, then one would know everything about reality, there being nothing else. Solipsism is incompatible with ignorance; so if there is ignorance, solipsism must be false. The existence of ignorance refutes solipsism.

            That seems hard to deny, but can it be maintained that it is logically possible that there is no ignorance? We think we are ignorant of many things, but the solipsist could try saying that we are not—we know everything about the world by knowing that we exist and that we have such and such states of consciousness. But that seems like an enormous stretch: surely there are things that we don’t know! Is the solipsist committed to omniscience, happily so? That was not part of the original package; we didn’t think solipsism entails godlike knowledge of the entire universe. I thought I was ignorant of the date of a certain battle, say, but in fact I’m not ignorant of this because there was no such battle—there is nothing like that to be ignorant about. There aren’t any battles or people to fight them or places to fight them in. The only facts that exist are facts about my introspectively available consciousness, and I know all those. But still, the solipsist might insist, perhaps it is really so—this is just an unexpected consequence of accepting solipsism. It cures all ignorance! However, things are not quite so simple, because questions can be raised about the solipsistic world that we might not be able to answer. For instance, where do I come from, and what is the cause of my states of consciousness? Do I perhaps come from nowhere at all? I might not be able to answer these questions, which means there are facts I don’t know: there are facts about the universe that go beyond what I can know by introspection. So my self and its subjective states don’t exhaust all the facts. If I sprung from a deity’s act of will, then clearly there is more to the universe than me and my states of consciousness; but even if I just spontaneously burst into existence, this is a fact that is not contained in my consciousness. I am ignorant on the question of my origins, which means that not all facts can be known to me by mere introspection. Maybe there are no objects apart from me, but not every fact is contained within my current consciousness. And if that is so, the solipsist cannot have a complete account of all the facts: being a fact is not identical to being a fact of consciousness. More intuitively, the solipsist cannot consistently accept that ignorance is a fact of life for any knowing consciousness. It is quite true that particular claims to knowledge can easily be mistaken, but claims to ignorance are far more robust—and their truth undermines solipsism. If there are things I don’t know, then there are things other than me—things outside my current state of consciousness. The world cannot be the totality of facts of consciousness.  [1] It is my ignorance of reality that gives the lie to solipsism not my (purported) knowledge of it. Ignorance marks the place where reality diverges from consciousness of it.

 

  [1] I of course mean here facts that are presented to introspective knowledge such as the fact that it now consciously seems to me that I am seeing something red, not facts about consciousness such as the fact that it was brought into existence by a deity or sprung from nowhere. The solipsist’s view is that there are no facts save those that populate the field of consciousness, and this is what is incompatible with the existence of ignorance.

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How Things Really Look

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How Things Really Look

 

I wish to defend the legitimacy of a metaphysical concept that I have not seen discussed before: the concept of what might be called objective appearance. We are familiar with the concept of subjective appearance—the ways things appear to specific organisms with specific sensory faculties. These vary from case to case and may involve distortions, errors, and biases; perceptual illusions fall into the class of subjective appearances. Appearances in this sense are supposed to contrast with objective reality: there is only one objective reality, but there are many ways it can subjectively appear to organisms. Some appearances can be wildly inaccurate; others close to fully veridical. The same physical stimulus can elicit widely divergent types of appearance in different creatures, e.g. bats and humans. There is thus a question as to whether appearance matches reality: does reality appear to us as it really is or only as our contingent sensibility paints it (to use Hume’s metaphor)? This can be a matter of degree: appearances can approximate more or less closely to objective reality. It makes sense to say that one appearance is more veridical than another. But does it make sense to speak of how things objectively appear, i.e. how they appear when perceived as they objectively are? Is there such a thing as ideal appearance—the kind that gets things exactly right? We might picture God as enjoying such appearances: when things appear to God’s mind they appear exactly as they objectively are without any distortion, error, or specific viewpoint. His is a view from nowhere: things appear to God purely in their objective nature. When God sees an object it appears to him as it really is in itself sans any sensory specificity. Thus we arrive at the idea of how things really look: there is the way things look to imperfect terrestrial organisms such as ourselves and the way they look to a being that sees things as they objectively are. We can ask what difference there might be between how things actually look and the way they really look (say to a being like God—though we can drop this heuristic). The way an object really looks is the way it looks to a being that sees it purely as it objectively is—the way it looks in its own being, as it were.

            This is a commonsense idea, at least in its origins. If you see something in the dark you can ask what it looks like when properly illuminated. If you see someone in heavy makeup you can wonder what he or she really looks like without makeup. If you are subject to the Muller-Lyer illusion you can form the idea of what the lines would look like to someone not subject to that illusion (whether or not such a being exists). This is the concept of an ideal perceiver, analogous to the concept of an ideal observer in ethics: an ideal perceiver sees things according to how they really look not how they happen to look in particular circumstances. So there are subjective appearances of the kind ordinary perceivers experience and there are appearances of the kind that an ideal perceiver would experience. It is true that things really look a certain way to given perceivers even when the appearance is subjective, but there is also the notion of how things look to perceivers that see them as they really are.      [1] There is how something looks to me now and there is how it really looks when we exclude all subjective intrusions. This gives rise to philosophical questions such as: “How would the world look if it were seen as it really is?” That is, how would an idealized perceiver experience the world? Would such a perceiver see the world as colored, as Euclidian, as containing discrete objects? How would an ideal perceiver see space? How would such a perceiver see the physical world as described by Einstein? How would the quantum world look? How does the world really look when all subjectivity is subtracted leaving only the naked object? We even have questions like, “What would people look like if we could see into their souls, a la Dorian Grey?” That is, we have the idea of how things would look if we could see them just as they are in themselves. Maybe we never have such experiences, but we can conceive of them—we can apply our concept of vision in such a way as to allow for their possibility. We can conceive, that is, of objective visual appearances: how things would look if the mask were removed, so to speak.      [2]

            We can even ask this kind of question about colors: what does red really look like when you remove its specific appearance to humans? Maybe it looks the way it looks when the perceiver has taken LSD—brighter, deeper, sharper, and more resonant. We ordinarily see colors through our limited visual system (rods and cones, the optic nerve, the occipital cortex), but maybe other perceivers would see them differently, more accurately. An ideal perceiver of color confronted with our perception of color might assure us that there is a lot more to red than we think given our limited perspective on it. This would be the analogue of a dog telling us that there is a lot more to the scent of freshly mown grass than we suppose. The way things really smell far exceeds our contingent olfactory resources, as the way red really looks transcends our impoverished sense of sight. Similarly, the way the world of physical objects really looks is far removed from the way it looks to us, given the truth of relativity and quantum theory. If you could see the world as it really is, you might see far more dimensions to space—that’s what the world really looks like if you have the sense to see it right. There is the way pond water looks to the human eye and there is the way it really looks when you have eyes that can see the microorganisms swimming in it. If there were people with eyes this acute, they would assure us that the way we see things is not the way they really look—any more than actors on a movie screen really look the way they do when so presented.

            The metaphysical point of all this is that we need to replace the appearance- reality distinction with a threefold distinction between subjective appearance, objective appearance, and reality. Subjective appearances are not the only kind; we need the category of objective appearances, whether there are any such items in actual reality or not. But we also need to distinguish objective appearances from reality itself: although objective appearances represent nothing but reality, they are not the same thing as reality. Objects and their properties are never the same as conscious representations of them: here as elsewhere we need to respect the act-object distinction. So we need a robust division between these three items; total reality has a place for all three, none reducible to the others. Centrally, we need to acknowledge a double level of appearance—actual and ideal, subjective and objective, relative and absolute. This bears on the question of idealism: is reality to be identified with subjective appearance or objective appearance? In effect, Berkeley’s idealism is of the latter kind, since reality for him consists in ideas in the mind of God, which are not to be regarded as in any way biased, erroneous, limited, or subjectively tinged. Or it might be maintained that reality consists in a realm of ideal appearances in the mind of no actual conscious being but existing as potentialities (a kind of Platonic idealism). Reality, according to this conception of idealism, isn’t a motley collection of all the subjective appearances enjoyed by actual biological creatures but a far more streamlined and unified set of ideal appearances. We might call this “ideal idealism” or “objective idealism”. It certainly has advantages over the subjective type of idealism, which is wide open to charges of excessive plurality or stipulated favoritism. In any case, we have a new metaphysical option once we accept the category of objective appearances. We also have a new imaginative option: we can try to imagine how the world  would appear if it appeared as it is really constituted. We already do this, to some extent, but we could adopt it as an intellectual project: don’t just tell us how things really are; tell us how they would look if we could see them as they really are. We could call this “real phenomenology”: the phenomenology of reality as such—how reality would present itself to an ideal consciousness. This is the study of objective appearance: not a form of empirical psychology but a philosophical study of a certain ideal subject matter. It is an investigation of how things really look—rarified, no doubt, difficult, certainly, but not outside the realm of possibility.      [3] I would like to read a work of physical phenomenology that describes what electrons look like, or fields of force, or curved space-time: that is, what their objective appearance consists in under idealized conditions. This would enable me to link these things with the world I normally perceive—or explain what kind of alien sense perception would be necessary to perceive them. Think of it as a kind of conceptual empiricism: finding a link between reality and sense perception—though this is not empiricism of the classical type. Some enterprising theorist might even try to resurrect the empiricist view of concepts by proposing that concepts are equivalent to ideal sensory appearances not actual ones. Like possible worlds, objective appearances give us new theoretical entities to play with, opening up new theoretical options. We might even manage to elicit some of those “incredulous stares” of which David Lewis was so fond (I prefer to call them “stupefied frowns”). Do we dare to quantify over these entities? Sure, go right ahead and quantify over them, there’s no harm in that, quantification being a enjoyable diversion; but more seriously we should suppose that reality contains not just objective things and their subjective appearances to sentient beings but also objective appearances that are written into the very nature of things. Reality itself consists of how things are and how things (ideally) look. Even before perceiving beings came along things looked a certain way—ideally, objectively. Eyes just picked up on that fact. Reality can’t avoid appearing a certain way, even if there is no one to appear to. If that sounds paradoxical, consider the fact that square things have a square-like appearance no matter how, or whether, actual perceivers perceive them. That is just how the concept of appearance works.      [4]

 

      [1] Color blindness provides a good example: we say that the color blind fail to see things as they really appear, since they really appear to have colors. Of course, compared to other perceivers normal human color vision might be similarly limited with respect to how things really appear. We might not be sensitive to the full appearance of things (obviously that is true of the reality of things).

      [2] When things look blurry that is not part of how things really look, since things in themselves are not (generally) blurry, this being a feature of a specific sensory apparatus. Objective appearances would not be blurry appearances.

      [3] I don’t rule out the possibility that we can’t know what certain things look like, even though they do look a certain way; we might be imaginatively limited in this regard. Still, we can make a concerted effort to come to know how things look to ideal perceivers.

      [4] I am well aware that this is an especially thorny area, conceptually speaking. We need to recognize and then hang onto certain basic distinctions, and fight against the propensity of language to confuse and bamboozle us. The concept of appearance is by no means simple and straightforward.

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Papers and Posts

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Let me clarify something: the essays I post here are not really intended as conventional blog posts. They are papers I write as part of my ongoing research. I publish them here because it is easier and quicker than going through the usual publication channels, which for various reasons is not feasible for me now. I publish them for serious philosophical readers across the world and for posterity. I am not interested in commenting on “the profession”, save glancingly. 

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Pathological Belief

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Pathological Belief

 

There is something funny about belief: belief isn’t quite right in the head. The human belief system leaves a lot to be desired. Philosophers have been onto this for a while, noting the peculiarities of belief. Early on it was noticed that belief reports are referentially opaque: you can’t substitute co-denoting terms and be guaranteed to preserve truth-value. Someone can believe that Hesperus is the moon’s best friend and not believe that the Phosphorus is. So belief reports don’t have the logical form of a predicate applied to a subject; they are logically anomalous. This discovery provoked a lot of handwringing and even skepticism regarding the notion of belief. Perhaps there is no such thing as belief—that supposition would certainly remove the logical puzzlement belief occasions. And when are two beliefs the same? What makes one belief differ from another? Criteria of identity are sorely lacking. A properly scientific psychology might wish to eschew or otherwise scorn this element of folk psychology (the folk are a primitive and superstitious crowd). We don’t even know whether beliefs are “in the head”, and if they are not their causal powers look distinctly iffy. Then Kripke delivered his puzzle: belief is not only logically problematic; it is positively paradoxical. Pierre believes both that London is pretty and that London is not pretty—and yet he is a perfectly reasonable man. It is belief that is at fault in allowing such contradictory beliefs, not our friend Pierre (he reasons impeccably). If contradiction is not ground for banishment, then what is? Perhaps we should simply stop believing things, since belief is so fraught with logical and conceptual problems. We have stopped believing in specific propositions as human thought has progressed; maybe we should stop believing altogether. Why court paradox and conceptual incoherence? Belief just isn’t a very wholesome commodity, logically speaking; we would be better off without it. True, we would then have no means of assenting to a proposition, but that is a mixed blessing at best. Animals seem to get on quite well without full-blown belief (except those similarly afflicted), so maybe we should take a leaf out of their book. It is human belief that is problematic; other animals have different ways of negotiating the world (without indulging in referential opacity and contradiction-generating assent behavior). Time to refashion the human cognitive system and let belief quietly expire.

            That utopian hope is reinforced by a feature of belief that is less well explored by analytical philosophers, namely its irrationality. Not only is belief opaque and paradoxical; it is prone to the worst excesses of irrationality. People believe the strangest things on the slenderest of grounds: they positively leap at belief without pondering its reasonableness or possibly errant causes. This wouldn’t matter so much if it weren’t for another feature of belief—its connection to action. People act on these wacky beliefs: hard to believe, I know, given their wonky foundations, but lamentably true. Just consider the out-there ideologies that have permeated human culture and the horrific actions they have prompted. History would not be the same if belief were more responsible and controlled. Irrational belief is the cause of most of the atrocities that have marred human history. It is our capacity to believe crazy things (inter alia) that has led to massacres, pogroms, prejudice, religious wars, genocide, and all the other grotesqueries that bring such shame on the human race. Granted, we have some pretty nasty emotions too, and plenty of evil intentions, but it is our ability to believe garbage that really sets us splendidly apart. Our belief system is sorely lacking in proper regulation and rational self-criticism: people will believe anything if you say it enough times, and if it suits them so to believe. Belief is just too malleable, easily manipulated, prone to fantasy, emotion-driven, and just plain bonkers.  [1] It is a biological adaptation riddled with design flaws, faulty wiring, and damaging malfunction—a real lemon. It’s a wonder natural selection let it pass at all! It should have been eliminated long ago—and maybe it will be in due course.

            To get a sense of belief’s failings, imagine if its proneness to error resulted in something like visual illusion or hallucination: whenever you have a false belief about something it looks to you as if reality is that way. You believe that someone is an animal or a devil and lo and behold that’s what they look like—fur, four legs, no clothes, or horns, hooves, a demonic countenance. That is, your belief system intrudes on your visual system so as to make things appear as they are believed to be. This would result in massive visual illusion, a malfunctioning perceptual system, and a potential for accidents on a grand scale. Suppose you believe in ghosts: then ghosts would appear before you all night long. Or you falsely believe your husband is unfaithful and are promptly visited by vivid scenes of marital infidelity. Surely you would want to consult a doctor and get your eyes examined. But in the case of false belief we have a similar level of delusion that fortunately doesn’t commandeer our senses. Still, we might want to consult a belief specialist who can rid us of these wild suppositions and preposterous opinions. The whole problem is that people find their beliefs perfectly reasonable just because they have them, no matter how groundless and absurd they may be. The illusory nature of belief is not written on its surface, so falsehood can survive undetected and uncorrected. This is a dangerous way for a belief system to be. It leads to belief perseverance that is very difficult to curb.

            The problem, evidently, is that beliefs are just too unencapsulated (in roughly Jerry Fodor’s sense): they are far too prone to elicitation by factors quite irrelevant to their truth. Notoriously, beliefs are influenced by wishes and desires: people have a tendency to believe what they want to believe. This is a disastrous way to build a belief system—the very antithesis of what belief production ought to be. Why on earth did the genes ever construct brains that have this grievous flaw? Surely a minimal requirement on a good belief system is that it should notallow for desires to influence the course of belief formation—that’s the last thing that should happen! But that is exactly what the human belief system permits with giddy abandon (I see no evidence that animals are prone to such misfiring). Hopeless! Beliefs should only be formed by processes involving strict adherence to rationality, but in fact they come into existence for the strangest of reasons, or for no reason at all. This is a grievous fault in the whole system—like having teeth that break whenever you bite into something nutritious, or a tail that whips you in the face whenever you wag it. I can’t emphasize this point strongly enough: the human belief apparatus is appallingly designed, a complete mess, an utter balls-up. It needs to be totally overhauled, or simply consigned to the rubbish heap. It is true that it is possible by diligent effort and proper training to avoid the worst excesses of this defective contraption, but why should our brains present us with such a daunting task—which most people decline to undertake anyway? Animals don’t need rigorous drilling in critical thought and rational belief formation, so why are we so lacking? If there were a little white pill that could put an end to our chronic doxastic disease, wouldn’t we swallow it without hesitation? Surely we want to have healthy beliefs, like healthy teeth, and it is clear enough that our beliefs are all too often rotten misshapen embarrassments. I am not exaggerating: take a look at the average person’s belief system—it’s a complete mess in there (a hot mess, as they say). Who among us is sure that his belief teeth are as sound as they should be? Who can be certain that his desires are not exerting undue influence on his beliefs—after all, nothing in the brain is set up to prevent such a thing from occurring?  [2] We are saddled with a deeply flawed psychological apparatus that we are powerless to regulate with any guarantee of success. What we might call “Descartes’ nightmare” haunts us all: that our much-cherished beliefs are riddled with error and are products of irrational forces. For nothing about belief as it exists in humans can preclude large-scale lapses in veracity—beliefs are just too labile, too susceptible to manipulation. Shakespeare’s Othello can be read as a lamentation over the dire state of the human belief system: the title character has his beliefs manipulated and toyed with by a skilled exploiter of the weaknesses inherent in the human belief system. Othello is not a particularly dull or gullible man, but his beliefs are susceptible to influence from other parts of his psyche that have no place in rational belief formation. He represents us all: we are all the victims of a pathetically vulnerable psychological set-up that leaves us at the mercy of hucksters, tricksters, and our own weaknesses. The entire apparatus needs to be radically redesigned, or removed if the problems are too deep-seated. That was certainly the view of Mr. Spock as he bore witness to the frailty of human belief: he exemplifies the proposition that human belief can only be fixed by excising all emotion—an extreme position, no doubt, but one whose force is not lost on us. Humans diverged from other animals psychologically by developing a belief system with no precursor in the animal cognitive system; the result was something with an enormous downside, to put it mildly. Perhaps human language abetted this regrettable development by enabling excessive flexibility in the belief apparatus, in which case language has a lot to answer for. In any case, what we have to live with now is light years away from ideal. We could be forgiven for supposing that human belief is intentionally irrational—and hence intentionally harmful. I repeat: irrational belief is responsible for the worst excesses of human history. Just consider the ill effects of the belief that the white European races are naturally superior to all other races. Case closed. This is all possible only because belief in humans is so prone to error (motivated error, no doubt). If only we could stop Believing!

            This is why I speak of pathological belief: the problem lies in the nature of belief itself, or at least in the way that belief is embedded in the human psyche. It needs badly to get encapsulated, i.e. insulated from outside interference from other parts of the psyche (it needs to be more modular). We could simply cut the fibers linking the belief centers of the brain to the emotion centers (Chief Science Officer Spock would favor simply removing the emotion centers altogether), but one imagines ethical and other footling objections to such an evidently sound plan. Short of that I can only urge greater awareness of the architectural catastrophe that is human belief. We should regard our beliefs with extreme caution, as if they are dangerous animals, being conscious of their deceptive and credulous tendencies: they love to do stupid things and then conceal the fact under a mantle of apparent rectitude. They are not our friends; we should not trust them; we should question them at every turn. Wasn’t that Plato’s main message and Socrates’s constant plaint? We should regard our beliefs as potentially dangerous viruses not as cuddly little pets that will never let us down. There is definitely something funny about belief, and it isn’t funny.  [3]

 

  [1] In this respect it resembles fear, which is also highly labile. We easily acquire phobias that are hard to shed. There should be an analogue notion for belief: types of belief that are wildly excessive and out of sync with reality. This seems to be the state of most political belief.

  [2] It would be nice if there were something analogous to homeostasis in relation to belief—a mechanism that would automatically cool them down when they get too hot. As it is we have something like a positive feedback loop, as beliefs feed off each other to create ever more furnace-like conditions.

  [3] I am hoping that my rhetorical excesses here will be forgiven: it is hard not to get worked up about the perils of belief when one surveys the course of human history (including today). People are just far too in love with their beliefs.

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