Reality: It is what it is. (And also isn’t.)

What is real, and what do we invent that we think is real? How might we tell, and with all the complex ways to approach the subject, how might we be clear when we talk about reality? Hear a story of Immanuel Kant and how he resolved a sticky wicket in a way that helped save the reliability of science itself. 

What comes up in this episode:
~  David Hume’s challenge to science  ~

~  The difficulty in talking about Reality ~

~  Thales as El Mariachi  ~

~  Snot rockets ~

~  Intellectual Hygiene ~

Referenced or mentioned:

~  David Hume ~

~  Immanuel Kant  ~

~  Issac Newton  ~

~  The Milesian School  ~

~  Arche / First Principles ~

~  Heraclitus ~

Dope quotes in this episode: 
~  Immanuel Kant: I freely confess that it was the remembrance of David Hume that first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction.

Credits / Links:

~  So, You’re A Philosopher’s homepage: ponderpus.com  ~

~  Text or leave a voicemail for Chris : 469.626.7355 ~

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hmm. Let's start with a story. A tale about a man who realized he had missed something vital. Something that, if left unaddressed, could shake the very foundation of science itself. A pair of rust-colored squirrels fitfully chased up the bowl of a linden tree, causing a blackbird to take wing. Emmanuel Kant looked up from his musing as he walked, and his smile widened. It was a perfect day to walk the Lindalay, and he should know, for he walked the tree-lined avenue every day, on the same late afternoon hour, without fail. He was more than halfway done with his normal route, approaching his home, and it was such a lovely afternoon he was tempted to slow his pace. But no. It wouldn't do to disappoint the housewives along his route. He knew his reputation. He was said they set their clocks by his punctuality, the measured strikes of his cane tick-tocking down the lane. Some teased him about the mechanical nature of his life, encouraging him to venture more than a couple of miles from Kunisburg. And yes, it was true. Besides lecturing at some of the neighboring towns, he'd never traveled far from his home. But though his body never ventured far, his mind's travels were epic, vast and limitless. Every new development in thought that found its way across his desk charted new adventures. The inspired and original thoughts of his own inner space made him an explorer without peer. Newton's work alone had changed the course of human history. He thought back to this morning's lecture at university, and how the students had leaned forward as he had explained Newton's third law of motion, demonstrating with math and mental models how every action is matched by an equal and opposite reaction. No, he was quite content with this life, he thought, enjoying the warm sunlight glowing through the thin linden leaves, inhaling the sweet scent of the blossoms. It made him think of honeyed tea. But look, there. The first signs of approaching autumn. A few of the leaves were yellowing, some already quite developed. The disturbed blackbird alighted above this and he watched as the slight shaking of the branches caused the yellowest leaf to fall. As it drifted, Kant realized he was being hailed by a group of young men on the lane. Her professor the tall one had his hand raised, which he lowered once their eyes met. They were students. In fact, they were at his lecture this morning. He greeted them, but did not stop walking, nodding at each as they fell into step around him. Back for more Newton, are you? I wonder how you knew to find me here. He liked to keep these youngsters on their toes if he could. It helped sharpen the mind for conversation and examination. They were, indeed, wanting to follow up on the morning lecture, but with an interesting twist. It seems one of them had gotten a hold of some of David Hume's works, and wanted to know about his assertion about causality, and how might it affect Newton's third law. You are referencing Herr Hume's claim that cause and effect is not a feature of the cosmos, but an unreliable psychological construct? Gentlemen, it is a clever idea, but it needn't trouble Herr Newton. Nor you. They seemed satisfied enough, he thought, and they parted with well wishes. An unseasonably chill wind sowed through the canopy, displacing a few more leaves as he stepped off the lane, up to his door, and entered his home. He noticed his cheery mood had dimmed somewhat as he hung his cane in his coat. A few moments later, he realized he was just standing by the door, staring at nothing. He moved out of the hall and into a large room outfitted with a desk, a table dotted with piles of books and papers, a chair by an open window. To the table he went, directly to one of the piles, from the middle of which he removed a book, which he began to leaf through, hunting. He stopped and began to read. The house quiet, except for the softly sighing wind outside the window. As he read, he slowly stepped to the chair and lowered himself to sit. Then slowly lowered the book to his lap. After some time he shook his head, lifted the book, leaned forward, and let it fall. After it struck the floor, Kant leaned back and sighed. Well, Herr Hume, I may have dismissed you too quickly. This is disturbing. This story is how I imagine Immanuel Kant's reaction went when the significance of his fellow philosopher's claims settled on him. That Hume had suggested something that had the potential to undermine a foundational concept in science. To paint the picture of the time, Kant was kicking around in the Enlightenment heyday. The intellectual world was pulling away from the dogma of religion think, and feeling pretty optimistic about the human mind's ability to use reason to figure things out. Newton had published his Principia, where he had laid out scientific principles that many felt like were the Rosetta Stone. It was only a matter of time before humanity had decoded the universe and reality. Kant was no exception. He was feeling pretty secure in a different kind of dogma, one of scientific reliability. Then along comes old David Hume, skeptic supreme, and drops a subtle, slowly falling bomb. There was no internet to get ideas out in front quickly. Going viral meant something very different back then. Hume published his ideas in a book that he said was dead born upon publishing. In other words, nobody cared. He tried again and wrote a book that was a little more accessible, that was called An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And slowly people started to notice that what he had done was kind of massive. He proposed that, since we cannot directly experience what is happening in reality between cause and effect, cannot actually experience causation itself, that we just came up with a name for it and moved on. If you just shrugged, you're not alone. I struggled to see what the big deal was at first, but when you consider that causation is a core component of the scientific method, and if Hume was right, then we really can't count on causation as a stable justification for why event B follows event A, then it casts a significant shadow of doubt across the whole deal. It's very likely Kant had encountered Hume's ideas and perhaps dismissed them at first. It may have seemed like a distinction without a difference. But eventually he went on record as saying that Hume interrupted my dogmatic slumber. So now that he was beginning to awaken, how might he respond? He had many tools at his disposal to address the puzzle. He was a professor, a scholar, a Newtonian, and, most importantly, a philosopher. And so are you. So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Let me think.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

My name is Chris, and I believe you have a philosopher inside you. They may be hiding or have a small voice, but they are there. And I'd like to introduce you. So there I was, on the patio of my favorite coffee house on a sunny Saturday morning, holding forth on the subject of reality with three friends. Not directly about reality, but using it as a reference point. As in, navigating life starts by receiving a signal from reality, which we then interpret. One of my fellow interlocutors, Sean, metaphorically held up a hand and said that he had a problem with that word. Reality is different for you than it is for me, he said. And I knew where he was coming from, but I fell into a frustrating trap. I thought I chose the right approach by asking him to clarify his terms. I started asking questions to be sure I understood where he was coming from, but I messed up when I rushed to respond to his answers rather than sitting in the tension of uncertainty. So, what about the sun? I asked. Amateur! He responded with some variation of that's what we've all collectively agreed to call it, and I continued to fumble through a frustrating exchange that touched on individual interpretation, social conditioning, lived experience, and the difference between the phenomenological world and the not that. To be clear, the frustration I felt wasn't at him, it was at me. I could see what was happening, that I was chasing chaff instead of staying locked on target, but even though I was witnessing myself do it, I lacked the practice and the language to articulate what I was sensing. And to be perfectly transparent, I was also worried about protecting my idea a little bit, when I should have let that go until we could address the whole what is reality thing. So that's two lessons learned. We got past it, and we all had a lovely time, but the frustration lingered. I figured I needed to close this loop with Sean before I would really feel like I could move past it. So naturally, I decided the best way to do that was to research, write, and produce a podcast episode. And here we are. One of the things that is challenging about reality is not only the attempt to understand it, but the way we go about attempting it. There are many ways to think about it, and I think Sean actually touched on all the main framings in his explanations, which is very easy to do. It's very easy to overlap framings in any discussion on any topic, which is why Philosophy Proper sets out to identify frames of reference that aid in clarity. Metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, and so forth. Even then, stuff will overlap, but the framing can help by saying we're looking at this problem only from this angle. We, and by we I mean humanity, have always sought to understand reality. Tracking how we framed that quest would probably take more time than either of us have, so I'll do a very general categorization of major shifts in attitudes and methods. First, we had the mythic age. How far back does that go? Go back as far as you can imagine, start there. Humans of the time generally saw reality through narrative lenses. If they can make any sense of what was happening, if they could come up with an explanation for how something came to be, they used observation and narrative invention to assign cause and effect relationships to divine or supernatural agents. When fire consumed the forest, it was a hungry fire spirit sating its desires, maybe sent because somebody in the tribe pissed off a deity. So then, after the Mythic Age, kicking off around 800 BC, was what philosopher Carl Jaspers called the Axial Age. This was a bit of an intellectual revolution. Around the globe, cultures began to shift their opinions on reality. A few standout thinkers started taking a view that reality might be intelligible without having to rely on mythical explanations. That maybe it was possible to figure out what reality was and how it worked using observation and thinking and hypothesis. Different cultures took on different emphases. Sometimes it was more of a social emphasis or a metaphysical or natural. In Greece, for example, they took a naturalistic point of view. They assigned cause and effect to natural reasons rather than divine agents. Fire wasn't a demon that ate wood. It was a natural force that transformed wood into smoke, heat, and ash. From there follows the system-building period. This is where classical and medieval philosophers really got moving. Building on the Axial Age predecessors, they began to not only ask what reality is, but create structured frameworks, using logic to ask better and better questions. Natural philosophy comes to the fore here and is in direct conversation with religion and theology. Humankind begins to feel that they've got this on lock. They really are coming to grips with this reality thing. Then comes the scientific revolution. Now we have the next generation of thinkers, shifting intellect yet again. We take the attitude and ambition of the Axial Age, the structure and theory of the philosophy age, and now we begin testing everything. Cause and effect moves from something observed that inspires a question, such as why does this fire burn up that wood? And it becomes something that can be used to test. Does fire burn wood the same way every time? And this becomes one of the foundations of the scientific method. If I can observe the same results under the same conditions, and so can anyone else, we can reasonably assert we understand this very specific aspect of reality. It's worth noting that none of these were clean shifts. These developments of thought and process evolved at different rates, in different ways, and at different times around the world, but in each case nothing was really replaced. Mythic ideas and divine agents are alive and well today, but in each metashift of thinking, an expansion of the methods of examination occurred, which increased and enhanced the human capacity to engage with and make sense of reality. There are many, many, many ways we can approach defining and understanding reality. There are tons of theories alive today, and for every theory, it's likely there's at least one person who believes in that theory. Plenty of people believe there is no spiritual world. Plenty of people believe that there is a spiritual world. Among those, some believe it only exists in the form of an afterlife. Others believe agents from that world are active in our world. There are theories that our entire existence is a computer simulation, or the dream of a demon, or that you, my darling listener, are the only thing that exists, and you are inventing everything else that isn't you. Which, hey, if that's the case, thank you for thinking of me. I'm really glad to be here. But sticking to core themes of philosophical thought as it relates to the inciting incident at the coffee house, I'm gonna limit myself to Western philosophical traditions, and even then try to move in broad categorical terms so we can trace our thinking. I want to look at what's generally accepted today, and then high back to the Milesian gang that sort of broke the seal on this particular genie bottle. And to clarify, these are generally accepted frames of how to look at reality, broad strokes in the attempt to paint the picture. So let's start with objective reality. This is reality as it exists outside the experience of the human mind. The stars, the mountains, atoms, energy, life. The basic claim here is that these things exist whether or not anyone observes them. Next up is phenomenological reality, or a less fun way to say it, experienced reality. Taste, color, the feel of wind in your hair, the drop in your gut when you hear the words just friends. This is reality according to consciousness. Now, at its most basic, we could stop there with these two framings, but there are a couple of more that are useful, such as constructed reality, or social reality. We're talking about money, the concept of justice, marriage, language, that a minute equals sixty seconds. These are things that we use as a society to help us navigate existence. Facts that we collectively agree are facts. And this next one is a little bit of a fudge, but let's include it. Epistemic reality, which really is a framing that looks at how we can know anything at all about reality. What do we use to understand it, and are the tools we are using coherent? I say I'm fudging with this because it really isn't a separate kind of reality, but more of one of those philosophical tricks to help us examine it. So, how can we know the sun is there if no one's actually visited it? This is tricky in conversation and examination because we have to be careful not to collapse the categories. The question of if the sun exists is an ontological question. Does the sun exist or not? The question of how we can tell if it exists is an epistemological question. How can we know if we can't go there? I know, who cares, right? The only time this really matters is if the collapsing of categories causes confusion and when the distinctions create clarity. Because there is a very important distinction here. Just because knowledge is uncertain doesn't mean that nothing exists independently of knowledge. So how does science approach understanding reality? Why? Philosophically, of course. Scientists use a layered approach, accepting that there is an objective reality that exists outside of our understandingslash experience of it, accepting that human minds interpret sensory information as a way of understanding things, and accepting that there is an element of collective constructed reality that also plays a role, which means that the best intellectual hygiene to use in approaching the understanding of anything requires holding these three things at least all at once. Now, these approaches are certainly not new. Let's skip on back to the Axial Age and the Milesian school of thinkers. When history asks the question, who is the first Western philosopher? the answer often comes back as Thales of Miletus. But he had a couple of buddies. Anaximander and Anaximenes. Alright. Imagine Antonio Benderis in his role of El Mariachi in the movie Desperado. That's Thales. The two fellow mariachi that show up to fight with him are Anaximander and Anaximenes. Except instead of Mexico, it's ancient Turkey, and instead of guitar cases full of guns, they're slinging early science. So these three formalized the idea that there was a fundamental element in the universe, that everything was made up of some form of one something. Thales said the fundamental element was water. Anaxameneus said that the fundamental element was air, and Anaximander said, You guys are weak sauce, the fundamental element is infinity. Today, if somebody popped up and said, hey, the entire universe is made of water, you'd say, Excuse me, ma'am, this is a wendy, and dismiss them. But if you look at the mental processes these boys were using, you can see the precursor to solid use of reflection in trying to understand the natural world. And just to clarify, it wasn't as simple as everything is made of water. It was an attempt to uncover what they were calling the first principle, or the thing from which everything else came. The Greek word for this concept is arche. Thales was noticing patterns. He saw that life depends on moisture. Water changes form. It's everywhere. Back then they thought the land was supported on water. And he wondered, could this be an underlying principle of reality? So this band of thinkers more or less started this idea that maybe we could find natural sources for the intelligibility of the universe. Then along comes my boy Heraclitus, who says, yeah, and and maybe it's not just the stuff of the universe that is understandable, but the rules of the universe that govern how stuff works. That even though reality is flux, there's an underlying order that can be discovered and understood. And then Socrates and Plato and so forth started to organize things and suggest maybe what we perceive and what is real are different things, blah blah blah. And it goes on down through history where we land on our little intellectual turf war between Hume and Kant. Kant, as a result of his attempt to resolve the puzzle put forth by Hume, came up with the idea that reality, as experienced by human minds, can be considered in two ways phenomena and pumina. Phenomena is stuff as it appears to us. Numena is stuff as it is itself. So phenomena is the sun as perceived. Numena is the sun as it exists independently of our perception. So, why, out of all the frames of reality, did I pick Kant's for this episode? To me, his ideas of Numena and phenomena felt elegant, an easy-to-grasp binary framing of reality that more or less addressed what I already understood to be true. That there is reality, and there's the version of reality that my mind makes available to me. According to Kant, this duality may provide clarity, but it does come at a price. It means we cannot ever truly access reality itself. That because of the way the human brain is designed, there's a permanent barrier betwixt the twain. Sorry. I need to start a pretentious jar and drop a dollar in every time I cross the line. Probably retire in a few episodes. So Kant, having realized that Hume had pointed out some pretty sloppy assumptions on behalf of the scientific and philosophical communities, he set out to try and reconcile it. Hume was saying, look, we more or less have based our understandings of reality and the hope for human progress on science. And a really, really important part of science is causality. But really are we actually seeing cause and effect? Like, is causality actually a thing? Maybe all we're doing is inventing this idea to explain why one event follows another, why we see it happening. If all we're seeing is event A and then event B, event A and event B, maybe our brains invented this concept. Well, if event A is always followed by event B, then event A must cause event B to occur. Hume is saying we can't really know if event A causes event B to occur, because we're just creating something to explain that relationship out of habit. We see it happening over and over, we get used to expecting it. So this is a logic problem, and let me tell you, when I say I struggled to understand why this was such a big deal in the world of the Enlightenment Age, I really struggled. But eventually I got there. As a pure logic problem, Hume is saying that because causality can't be proven to exist, that we can't prove it in a way that makes it absolutely secure, which is kind of important to science. Therefore, in that context, it's just as reasonable to imagine a world where the sun does not rise tomorrow, as expected, as one in which it does rise as expected. And it's not like the entire scientific community read this idea and threw up their hands and went to take up fishing or something. They were still doing science, but many of them, like Kant, thought, well, hell, this isn't good. We need to address this concern. So he went to work and he flipped the problem. Instead of thinking causality is no longer a solid measuring stick for understanding reality, because human minds just made it up, he reasoned that human minds have certain rules for how we possibly can examine reality, and cause and effect is one of those built-in ways our mind organizes what we experience. Let me put it this way: You, Hume, and Kant are feeling hangry, and you pop into your local Popeyes for a bucket of wings and some sides. They go get waters, you hit the soda fountain for a suicide. Hume starts telling one of his stories about his time with the Jesuits, and of course it's hilarious. He hits the funny bit right when you're washing down a biscuit, you try to hold in your laughter, choke, and soda jets out your nose. Let's see what happens in their brains at this moment. Hume's brain goes, I've seen things shoot out of noses before, but I really can't logically justify using causation to connect the laughter and the squirt. I'll assume they're connected out of habit, but I can't prove it, even though I know I'm hilarious. This line of thinking doesn't stop science, but it does shake the foundation it stands on. Now, Kant's brain is divided up into a bunch of departments. There's tons of them, but we're only going to name a few. Time is one, space is another, and we'll name another one causality. When we experience something, the mind takes this packet of information and simultaneously organizes it by department. Time organizes sequence. It looks at it and says, the laugh happened first, the squirt happened after. Space says, this happened right in front of me, so I should move my tray out of the way of the snot rocket. And causation looks at it and organizes it as the laugh led to soda shooting out the nose. Kant is saying, we don't have a choice. We must experience things in terms of causality as a method to understand reality. Which is where he takes a bow for showing that science is still strong. Because of how our mind structures our understanding of experience, causation is still a valid, reliable aspect. And this is what led him to Numena and Phenomena. He's saying that because of the way our brains are structured, we cannot actually access reality as is. I know, I know. At this point, you're thinking, these philosophers can go kick rocks. Who is this Jabrone to tell me I can't directly access reality? You're not alone. I find it kind of funny and telling that even other philosophers will dog on each other and accuse each other of chasing pendantic rabbits down imaginary holes. Me personally, I like to examine how I feel when I read or hear a dense philosophical concept. I like to try and suss out what the heart of the matter is and see where I can apply it or safely discard it. Which leads me back to that Saturday afternoon discussion. Now that I've done all this research and thinking, I feel better prepared to think about reality in discussions, to be able to identify in myself as well as others when framings begin to overlap and collapse, and to hold that tension and determine where, if at all, I should clarify things. Because in the end, that's gotta be the goal of these dialogues, right? To understand and to be understood, to edify each other. So now I can go back to Sean and close that loop. We can look at his argument, separate all the various framings, and see if they may or may not impact my theories. Or maybe I'll just send him a link to this episode. I don't lose sleep over understanding reality. But knowing that there are different ways to think about it, that there is what is, there is how my mind organizes my experience, there's my private interpretation of that experience, and there's the fact that everyone on the planet has their own private interpretation of experience. And holding all these things together and dynamic tension and navigating between them is something that we're actually designed to do is pretty damn cool. So, the next time you're in conversation and something tickles the back of your mind, you find yourself wondering what frame of reference might help you understand what you're experiencing in that moment? Do me a favor. Say hi to your inner philosopher for me.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Yes. I think very deeply.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

Socrates himself was up on the software and break the fuck up with the bucket and break the drunk.