There’s a large class of ideas that are easily endorsed in principle but usually rejected in practice. A crisp example: it is common today to reject colonialism, the practice of imposing political, moral, or economic orders on peoples whose right to self-determination we do not respect. But in practice, most people have basically colonial feelings about any culture they come into contact with which varies from, opposes, or resists their own; that is, they believe the cultures in question are “wrong,” “inferior,” “immoral,” “dangerous,” and “need to be changed,” by force of law or actual violence. It sometimes feels as though most Americans feel this way about most other Americans: “We must control how children are educated to ensure that they learn the right things” has been part of colonialism since the beginning. In the abstract, many of us say we reject this kind of supremacist attitude towards instances of human diversity which substantially diverge from our natures or norms; in practice, we rationalize why it’s not only good but mandatory that some cultures change —convert— or be destroyed, and if we’re honest, we’d fervently hope for the absolute annihilation of the other in many cases.
Typically, we achieve this position by asserting that such cultures will destroy our culture if not weakened, contained, or eradicated first. Widespread relativism incentivizes this pattern because it denies all bases for comparison or assessment —anything which might be tarred as “objectivist”— leaving only the undeniable fact that death and suffering are, in a word otherwise rejected by this philosophy, “bad.” As such, all conflicts come to be cast in terms of death and suffering, often speculatively (“Don’t you see where this leads?”). When you cannot have stable values or moral authorities, everything is a slippery slope and everyone is simply a possible victim defending themselves against aggression.1 That this aggression is regularly mutual is largely ignored, and after all, sometimes we really are victims afraid of aggression.
In any event: many of us are anti-colonialists who would happily subordinate vast swaths of the earth —or our own country— to our preferred regimes in the name of our truths and values. In the West, it’s always the good old days!
There are so many ideas like this that it’s perhaps better to say that our principles, generalized beliefs, and stated values are mostly unrelated to how we adjudicate specific dilemmas; they border on lies we tell ourselves, instances of self-deceit and performance, and guide little of our daily reasoning.2 The “job to be done” of beliefs is to support a certain story of ourselves, not to make sense of the outer world. We use more flexible —and less coherent— systems for that work, while our beliefs are free to support our preferred identifies.
Another good example of such an idea —easy to accept, rarely applied, and also related to relativism and the problem of authority— is the claim that paradigms of knowledge change. That is:
We have general frameworks for investigations of a scientific or philosophical nature which define what is and isn’t admissible, what processes are supported or rejected, what conclusions are possible or excluded.
These frameworks are not “real” in the sense of being present outside of human consciousness; like all knowledge they are inventions, creations, and they are composed primarily of metaphors; they produce further metaphors (like measurements) but also periodically technologies.
As paradigms shift, metaphors are discarded; no one believes in the four to five “classical elements” as the basis for all matter anymore; no one studies the humors in medicine; no one bases their calculations on a geocentric universe; Democritus’ conception of atoms is not in any textbooks; and so on. Newton’s laws, used to construct countless engineering marvels, are no longer considered accurate descriptions of how the world works!
As David Deutsch —who pointed out the above example of Newton— put it: “I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories “misconceptions” from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors. Thus we could say that Einstein’s Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton’s Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler’s. The neo-Darwinian Misconception of Evolution is an improvement on Darwin’s Misconception, and his on Lamarck's… Science claims neither infallibility nor finality.”
Importantly, this Deutschian / Popperian conception of knowledge is still compatible with progress (which is an undeniable reality); each misconception or paradigm or set of metaphors is “unreal” and in a very literal sense “not true,” but they are ever-improving, getting closer and closer to something —reality— which we will never “reach.”3 Reality will always be mind-mediated for us.
What this means, quite straightforwardly, is that our best knowledge will also be discarded, superseded not only by better knowledge but by entire new paradigms and frameworks which render it obsolete (and often incomprehensible). That is to say: it’s the best we’ve got, but it’s not true.
Presented thusly, almost everyone assets to this picture of how knowledge works. But it’s hard to really believe this in the day to day about our knowledge, which persistently appears to be really true! Our conflicts imbue our beliefs with reality —I refer again to one of the great book titles of all time: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning— and although all our terms and concepts will seem idiotic and meaningless in the future, today they are made real by their use in organizing our battle lines. Nevertheless: in a few centuries, the very words you use to refer to groups, for example, and even your conception of which groups exist in any meaningful way, will be considered laughable and false.
In fairness, it is impossible to imagine what future theories will utterly transform our “true beliefs” into ludicrous, parochial errors; we can only be sure that such theories will come. Scientific discoveries in particular are often weird; to an ancient scholar, our knowledge of what matter is —mostly empty space, fields of questionable particles, a latticework of vibrations and forces— would be beyond any myth (or even our own science fiction). And likewise future paradigms will strike us as absurd if we’re lucky enough to live to see them. Perhaps we’ll concretize a Many Worlds theory that leads to some physics that suddenly change what nearly everything is: matter, energy, spacetime, consciousness, the idea of the individual, etc. While I don’t find it compelling, String Theory has something of this quality: many of our deepest questions and the answers we’ve explored are rendered instantly irrelevant if we think that all particles are just “the vibrations of strings,” whatever the hell that might mean.
In any event: many of us know that knowledge is always provisional but live as though our own is utterly certain.
I am not a scientist and am not scientifically literate. I did study philosophy, however, which, depending on one’s vantage, either also has this property of paradigmatic succession or is, as an entire field, a paradigm which has been succeeded! The other night, stoned and falling asleep, I came across a tweet that piqued my interest:
I had never heard of George Berkeley, but I learned that he lived from 1685-1753 and argued that material reality does not exist apart from the mind.
It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?4
And:
…though we give the materialists their external bodies, they by their own confession are never the nearer knowing how our ideas are produced: since they own themselves unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should imprint any idea in the mind. Hence it is evident the production of ideas or sensations in our minds, can be no reason why we should suppose matter or corporeal substances, since that is acknowledged to remain equally inexplicable with, or without this supposition. (PHK 19)
While I love mysticism and am open to arguments suggesting that mind is a profoundly important component of reality, I was unpersuaded. This is in part because in the 17th and 18th centuries, we simply knew too little of how sensations work, how the mind works, how physics work for me to credit his deductions.5 Philosophy of this and later eras often seems to take language and language-based concepts far too seriously; they rely, for example, on definitions and what definitions imply or rule out to select explanations, whereas I do not consider language isomorphic enough to reality to be used this way. An extreme case of this is St. Anselm’s famous ontological argument for the existence of God:
The first, and best-known, ontological argument was proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century C.E. In his Proslogion, St. Anselm claims to derive the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived. St. Anselm reasoned that, if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being—namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists—can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived—i.e., God—exists.
This feels like a game, and not one that logically compels any conclusion whatsoever! Who cares what human words or human imaginative concepts “imply” or “necessitate”? Just as you cannot derive an ought from an is, you cannot derive a fact from a concept. I’ve always wondered if I’m missing something in this argument, because the entire contraption feels preposterous to me. Is it unfair to note that one can conjure the concept of a unicorn than which no greater can be conceived, too?
Reading very old philosophy is an excellent way to experience on how metaphors and paradigms shift. The entire framework of these arguments has been deprecated. We do not look to sentence-logic for the structure of reality anymore, and few would believe that an individual sitting alone with their writing is likely to discover the fundamental nature of matter and energy simply through reflection. We now insist on different methods, which produce different kinds of metaphors: measurements, for example, or mathematical formulas.
This is just one reason among many why that tweet is quite wrong: not only is Berkeleyan idealism totally unlike the simulation hypothesis, but even if it were identical in nature, it is still sometimes necessary to update metaphors. The claims
the universe is a dream in God’s mind; and
the universe is a simulation running on a computer
have similar properties; they both assert broadly that this world is unreal and its full nature cannot be ascertained from our vantage inside a contained context within a larger, presumably inaccessible reality. But the totality of their reasoning is quite different, and one might easily be true while the other might be false; the paradigm of one might yield truth while the paradigm of the other might yield only error. It is thus debatable whether, as many argue, the simulation hypothesis is “just a new version” of older philosophical claims, or whether our discovery of computation and simulation meaningfully changes the nature of such theories.
Possibilities:
Translation of metaphors across eras leaves intact some core element of various theories, such that eternal questions recur in new form but without substantially changing; or
Translating metaphors in fact means changing the arguments, such that each paradigm is capable of producing some theories that couldn’t be produced before (and is incapable of addressing some questions that other paradigms could).
Somehow, both seem true to me, but I don’t know why or what accounts for different theories winding up in one or the other category. Reading Berkeley on materiality reminded me a bit of reading Erwin Schrodinger, who despite living long after him was something of a mind-first mystic himself: “Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
How to square discontinuity and persistence in fields of human knowledge is beyond me. Perhaps the gap between our stated beliefs and our daily thoughts is less a matter of confusion or personal failure than a necessary way of accommodating this simultaneity: beliefs as scaled maps reflecting ideal projections, daily thinking as local navigation of chaotic environments which contain a great deal that our beliefs do not address.
Cultural conflict is not an easily-resolved matter, to be clear. Many cultures are, indeed, “totalizing,” and in my view most Western political-moral cultures are universalist; for centuries, our most active thinkers in such areas have been consistent: there is only one way to be, to think, to act; deviations from the truths of this way are to be punished. What such thinkers appeal to varies —God, power, money, science, reason, tradition— but the position is always the same. When in a single country you have multiple totalizing cultures, conflict is inevitable and adjudication will always be a matter of context-specific improvisational dynamics. No one is in control and there is no meta-framework.
The gap between who we say we are or want to be and who we actually are is immense and the source of many cultural and psychological phenomena.
That we cannot “reach” it is due to the nature of mind and language; everything we can access is a mediating metaphor of one kind or another, from sense-perceptions (inventions of our minds correlated with external stimuli) to measurements (there is such thing as an “inch” apart from human thought).
“Repugnant” had a specific meaning in old philosophy, namely, that an argument had intolerable contradictions of flaws and had to be rejected. Hardcore!
We don’t really know any of this now, either, actually, but we’re much closer than we were then and know a great deal of what will matter for any eventual comprehensive explanation (for example, the physics of light and how the eyes work).
I think that mostly development of theories is driven by advances of experimental techniques. In some fields we have that, in some - we don't.
For the question of universe = dream of God/universe = simulation, we haven't REALLY had that much in terms of experimental advances (or so it seems to me).
But for consciousness, we are having experimental advances. We can now poke consciousness with a stick!
https://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Koubeissi-et-al_Electrical-stimulation-disrupts-consciousness.pdf
To me, that signals that we will likely legit get better theories of consciousness soon than we've ever been able to have.
Metaphors for the mind are an area of special interest. Throughout history people constantly analogize the brain to the technology of the day - whether an aqueduct, pneumatic network, mechanical contraption, combustion engine, or central processor. The same is probably true of other things beyond the frontier of knowabiltiy - like dreams, the universe, the afterlife. I see these stories more as...cultural artifacts? Reflections of our society, maybe. Than any kind of scientific effort.
Also thinking about the elephant and the rider - the prefrontal cortex as the “press secretary” of the mind. If we think that principles don’t really guide action, what does? Feeling/intuition? What trains that, and what can override it? Or are we all just victims of fate?
Alright that’s enough - thank you for injecting my brain full of paradoxes on a weekend where i’m just trynna relax you bastard.