Adam: I don’t think we can know anything.
Paul: And do you know that you can’t know anything? That’s a contradiction of terms.
Adam: Everything becomes a contradiction of terms once you realise that the foundation of thought is without foundation. If all knowledge is obtained through reason, then one can only prove reason using reason. It’s almost hilariously circular. 1+1=2, our own existence — nothing is provable now.
Paul: But you used reason to come to that conclusion.
Adam: Well yes, of course I did. Reason is inescapable. My argument is a contradiction, but so is every single other argument.
Paul: Which is exactly why we cannot question reason. By your own admission reason is inescapable. We can’t question it because once we do, all else becomes meaningless. Reason is unnegotiable. We must accept reason as a given, because otherwise all we can do is run without actually moving.
Adam: Once we accept that reason is unprovable, from that point no amount of running will ever get us anywhere. We can entertain reason and play games with it. But at the end of the day, we still know nothing — we haven’t gotten anywhere at all.
Paul: Well, we have to entertain it anyway. You are entertaining it now. There’s no choice involved. There is no thought outside of reason. So even if we aren’t actually getting anywhere, all we can do is run. Treadmills are good exercise anyway.
Adam: Neither of us can think without reason that’s true, but you can’t possibly speculate about the inner machinations of other people’s minds.
Paul: You’re right. We’re both characters in a dialogue written by the same person. This can only explain one perspective — one solution of many. Maybe others can do without reason I don’t know. Others will find their certainty in God. But for us, we must take reason as a given. We personally don’t have a choice.
Adam: I know we don’t. Well not “know”. But I’ll entertain reason. Now what next? Beyond pure mathematics and tautologies like “tall men are tall” there is little we can know directly from reason alone.
Paul: The ultimate goal is for all our assumptions of “knowledge”, all philosophy, all science, to arise out of unnegotiable foundations. Zeno described this logos — the network of pure reason which animates the universe. Call it a meta-theory of everything, one that grounds all of science. That’s the most desirable objective.
Adam: We both know that isn’t possible.
Paul: Well, we’ve agreed that reason is unnegotiable. Let’s begin with this and see where it can take us. Perhaps not just reason is unnegotiable. Certain empirical propositions may well be too.
Adam: To doubt pure rational truths like 1+1=2 makes the language by which we use to doubt the truth meaningless. I will concede that. That’s the sense in which reason is unnegotiable. But empiricism? I can have a conversation about our sensory perceptions being illusory, and our language remains perfectly meaningful. There’s nothing unnegotiable about it.
Paul: But what is meaningless is to doubt that we have these perceptions. If we accept reason, which we have, it is ,by extension, meaningless to question that I am perceiving my hands. This truth is as unnegotiable as 1+1=2.
Adam: So, you’re saying even if our hands don’t exist, even if our perception of them are illusory, we can say for certain that we are perceiving them, or, at the very least perceiving something?
Paul: Exactly. These are the unnegotiable empirical propositions. Everything we perceive exists, at the very least, just as a perception.
Adam: But this still doesn’t solve anything. We still can’t prove the existence of any material world beyond our perception. Science can still never be grounded.
Paul: But science is not the study of the material world beyond our perception. There can be no study of the world beyond our perception. The world beyond our perception is by definition unknowable, and thus meaningless. All we can know is just our direct experience of the world — the phenomena. Thus, science is the study of the phenomenological world, not the material world.
Adam: But surely science is the opposite of that? It’s the attempt to remove our perceptions of reality and see the world objectively.
Paul: No, this is not what science is at all. Science is simply based upon experimental evidence, which we can only interpret through our sensory perception. It cannot study things-in-themselves, the noumena. It only deals with phenomena. We have seen this even more clearly in the 20th century, with the development of Quantum Mechanics. Observing a classical system does little to change its nature, but to observe a quantum system requires high energy radiation which will change the properties of the system. Thus, we can never see the systems in themselves, and can only talk about our experience of them.
Adam: Well, some interpretations of quantum mechanics do seek to explain an underlying reality between our observations. The Bohm pilot wave interpretation, or the many worlds. You are just describing one of multiple scientific explanations.
Paul: But the other explanations are not scientific. We cannot explain the reality between our observations because we cannot observe it. Science is based on the experimental, thus it can only ever describe phenomenological reality, not the material world in-itself. But what the sciences do, at least, the most fundamental of the sciences, is remove the constructions we oppose onto the phenomena.
Adam: What constructions?
Paul: Almost everything around us, that we talk about are emergent constructs, that transcend the phenomena, and are not fundamental in it. The most fundamental elements of phenomenological reality are, at the moment in science, particles and waves, all forms of energy. Everything else is a simply a combination of different particles or different energy quite obviously. An object like a chair is thus simply a construct we project onto these phenomenological fundamentals.
Therefore, even if particles are said to be objectively real materialistic objects, which as we have previously said is unprovable, a chair is still not a material “thing”. It is an immaterial, transcendent thing applied onto a collection of material things.
Adam: How on earth can something made out of material things be immaterial?
Paul: A chair cannot be made out of material things because a chair is a concept. If, say, that a chair is made up of say 10²⁰ particles, and these particles are floating around in space and then suddenly manifest themselves into a chair, I do not then have 10²¹ + 1 material objects. Their existence with a chair-like arrangement does not suddenly create an extra material object. Instead, there are 10²¹ material objects and one immaterial construction applied to these materialistic objects.
Constructs depend too on how we use them. A large stone in a park could conceivably be used as a table or a chair, and thus we could correctly call it different things depending on its use. The construction applied to it can change, without any relevant materialistic change to the particles that make it up.
Adam: But the stone isn’t provably made up of materialistic things, right?
Paul: No, it’s, as far as we know, simply made up of phenomena, perceptions. But what this illustrates is that constructions exist separately to base line phenomena.
And I believe the separation of constructions from our baseline phenomenological reality can solve certain ambiguities in philosophy. Take the ship of Theseus for example. Within the baseline phenomena that make up the ship, it’s particles, there is constant flux. In this sense the ship is never the same as it was before. A does not equal B. However, if we apply a construction to the ship, any change can still exist within a definition we apply to it. In this sense we can say it is the same ship.
Adam: What about if I have a ship and then paint one plank blue? Do we still apply the same construction?
Paul: Depends on what the construction is. If we are defining this particular ship as one that is completely red, then one plank blue would mean the construction no longer applies. But if instead we just define the construction without reference to its colour, the same construction can apply?
Adam: And what if we replace all the planks of one ship, and then use those planks to create another? Which ship most aptly conforms to our original construction?
Paul: Depends on what we value most about the construction of the ships: it’s original materials, or its continued existence. But ultimately, it’s just a question of semantics.
Constructions will often have imprecisions to them. Like with a heap of sand. How many grains must I take away before it is no longer a heap? Or equally starting with no grains of sand how many must I add before it can be called a heap? It is only by removing the constructions and considering the world as baseline phenomena will the picture be more consistent, because the heap does not exist in the baseline phenomena.
Adam: So, the things that can be said to unnegotiably exist are the baseline phenomena and then the constructions we impose upon these phenomena?
Paul: There’s also the inherited background by which we interpret all phenomena — the very lens of our perception itself. This is the sense in which mathematics and rationality exist.
Adam: Why draw the distinction between the phenomena and mathematics? Do they not exist in the same level of reality?
Paul: No. We can mathematically conceive of ideas which we will never perceive. 10^-10¹⁰⁰ is a number so small that it doesn’t exist anywhere in science, or anywhere in any phenomena. Therefore, mathematics represents the totality of possibilities for the phenomena. Then from the phenomena we project constructions onto them.
And the goal of the most fundamental of the sciences is to deconstruct these constructions, to properly understand the base line phenomena, through mathematical language. Science is a study of the most basic constituents of our perceived world. The perceived world, phenomenological reality, which is unnegotiably real. So, I’ve just grounded the sciences.
Adam: No, you haven’t. How much of science can we actually know now? Is general relativity un-negotiable? The existence of atoms? They are not a part of our phenomenological reality because we have no direct experience of the experimental evidence. All of science relies upon the testimony of other people, people we can’t even verify exist beyond our perception.
Paul: What if we can say that the existence of perceptions necessitates the existence of external stimuli? Then we can say people do exist independent of our perception.
Adam: No. It’s perfectly logically possible for all perception to be a creation of the mind. Therefore, the existence of things-in-themselves is not unnegotiable. We cannot know that other minds exist independent of ours.
Paul: Perhaps we need to take a leap of faith to say that other minds are independent entities?
Adam: I’m not doing a leap of faith.
Paul: Well, did we not take a leap of faith in order to believe in reason? Why is this any different?
Adam: Because that leap was, as we established, unnegotiable. We didn’t have a choice. I’m only leaping when I don’t have a choice. Because otherwise belief becomes arbitrary, and we are in no position to criticise any one else’s views because our views themselves are unfounded. Suddenly, the most absurd, or most evil views you can imagine — well it’s just people taking differing leaps.
I might concede that without faith we are still running without actually getting anywhere again. But if where we put our faith is arbitrary, to where exactly are we running? To some common-sense view of scientific thought? We have to have already taken a leap of faith in this belief order to show that the belief is preferable.
Paul: But I don’t think this leap is entirely arbitrary. We observe the existence of other people within our perception, and their existence beyond our perception is an entirely reasonable explanation for this.
Adam: But it is entirely arbitrary to prefer this explanation over one where it’s all just a creation of the mind.
Paul: So then do you believe they are just a creation of the mind then?
Adam: There is no reason to prefer either, so I believe neither.
Paul: Well, that’s just absurd then. You are Buridan’s donkey, equally placed between two barrels of hay, condemning yourself to starve to death simply because you haven’t the courage to pick one.
Adam: Well, which one do I pick?
Paul: We both enjoy entertaining these little thought experiments but at the end of the day we act as if other people do exist. So, we have three options: believe that people are a creation of the mind, a contradiction to how we act; believe in nothing and paralyse ourselves, or believe in the idea that is consistent with the way in which we act.
Adam: Can we then believe in anything if it’s consistent with our action then? Hitler had three choices: believe that Jewish people are equal, a contradiction in how he acted; believe in nothing and paralyse himself, or believe the Jewish people are inferior, the idea which is consistent in the way he acted.
And let’s say we do take this leap of faith, that other minds do exist. We still have to take another leap that the wealth of scientific evidence isn’t just a mass fraud.
Paul: Surely on the balance of probability we can conclude that it isn’t a mass fraud?
Adam: Perhaps, but it isn’t unnegotiable. It’s very possible for it to be wrong, and thus uncertain. We can never truly know it, even if we entertain all these leaps you make us do.
Paul: But if we do entertain the basic axioms of scientific thought, we can engage in science in the hypothetical and reach “knowledge” from that. If one water molecule is one oxygen and two hydrogens, then following this it is unnegotiable that two water molecules will have two oxygens and four hydrogens.
We can say we know this as a direct consequence of rationality or mathematics, which if we remember represents the totality of possibilities for phenomena. It’s just we don’t know for certain if that possibility would adhere to our phenomenological reality — it’s a theory which we can’t test every part of ourselves. And I think we can be okay with this because it all still remains mathematically true, we are happy to solve quadratics, we are doing the same thing. Neither necessarily adhere to our phenomenological reality.
Adam: Well, I am not okay with this. You can have this continuous back and forth with me, to feign some sort of sophisticated philosophy but at the end of the day I will never agree. Our belief will thus remain schizophrenic. You haven’t shown the sciences to arise from unnegotiable foundations, and you haven’t solved the original problem. We still can’t show rationality is a valid means to come to any conclusion, we just took it as a given. So, we still don’t know anything. For all this running will have still gotten nowhere.
Paul: I am aware of all of this. I am painfully aware of all this. But I suppose I will continue to operate under the philosophy I’ve outlined. Treadmills are good exercise anyway.