Foolish is he who hopes our intellect
Can reach the end of that unending road
Purgatorio, Cant. III
Part I — Science
Knowledge is power might well be the epithet for our time. Science has transformed our world. Technology saturates almost every aspect of our lives, for better or worse, and the expansion of our knowledge, tools and abilities to understand and interact with the material world is beyond the imagination of someone living even a hundred years ago. You cannot doubt the immense authority of what we call science as an epistemological endeavour, our cataloguing of ideas and information into reliable and measurable theories, and the near global unity of the project is remarkable. The truth of science, for the most part (barring, say, fundamentalist creationists objecting to theories about the origins of life), is sufficiently self-evident as to be removed from ideology. It can be used by ideology, as we’ll get to, but as an endeavour it’s truth has a kind of one way proof system because at a basic material level it is functional. Function is a kind of bottom level proof of knowledge, the abstract mathematical theories of physics are not limited to the chalk boards of those who dreamed them up, but are taken into the world and used to transform it, and if they don’t work, they aren’t. That means the internal coherence of an idea, or a formula, doesn’t really have any meaning until it can be tested and it’s predictions proved or disproved. In a competitive system of expediency, science is a tool of results. If you claim to have a theory that understands the protein structure of a virus, and to have produced a vaccine for it, and the vaccine doesn’t work, your theory must be reexamined. What we know is tested by what we can do. Modes of apprehending the world are modes of action.
Modes of apprehending the world are also by necessity modes of language. The theories of science are used as heuristics for interacting with the world, as tools, but they also are used as ways of describing facts or truths about what we call reality. Science can take us a fair way into understanding ourselves, theories of evolution, developments in genetics and neuroscience allow us to have a remarkable depth of knowledge when it comes to understanding what forms and shapes us, how we become what we are, why we do things we do. But it is inevitable that when we ask questions about the world and our place in it, it seems that there are forms of problem that lie beyond the reach of science as we understand it.
We are conscious beings. Reality begins in our own perception, in the inner is-ness of being inside our own minds. Consciousness as reality seems to present a kind of problem for the capacity of science. The first is functional, in that we don’t exactly understand what role being conscious plays in the mind, why we can’t in theory be ‘zombies’ who think and act without the actual conscious perception of thinking and acting. But there is a more important stumbling block here, which is that the perception of things creates a kind of actual meaning that we don’t know how to reduce to a bottom up description of the world. In my last essay on will I defined this as ‘level problem’:
“…that is, how do events on a small scale meaningfully relate to events on a large scale? This might seem obvious in some areas, we can analyse the molecule-level structure of a virus for example and understand how it causes at a large level things that we call ‘symptoms’. But when it comes to the mind things are more complicated. If you are reading this article the chances are you believe in rational thought, the ability to think logically, sequentially and reach conclusions that can be in some way relied upon, even if they are not absolute. But to believe that you have to have an a priori belief in firstly the possibility of truth, and secondly the ability of thoughts to relate to thoughts on a non-reducible level. When we use a word like ‘spoon’ it is a symbol referring to an object, but the contents of that thought have an actual reference, it can’t be one bundle of atoms making reference to another bundle of atoms — something actually exists on the level of thought that is not reducible to underlying mechanism. You cannot say that the meaning is there on the level of reference but not there on the level of mechanism or material. Being conscious seems to produce a kind of being not the same in likeness to what we might ‘think of’ as inanimate reality, or ‘stuff’. This is why the metaphor of a computer for the brain seems to break down when it comes to consciousness, no reference point in a computer is actually a reference point, in the sense that because there is no ‘perceiver’ within the system things are not actually things to the computer, it is us who perceive them as so. ‘Data’ and ‘algorithm’ are both reducible in our ‘level problem.’ This is the difference between ‘information’ and ‘data’. It seems the actual meanings of words are like trees falling in a forest, it may be there or it may not, but it is us who need to be there to make it so. Consciousness is meaning. Reality is more than just stuff.”
To approach it from another angle: migrations are a remarkable and not entirely well understood part of nature. The house martins that flock over the poplar trees beyond my house probably migrate from sub-saharan Africa, travelling to specifically known places and returning each year. They don’t need to ‘know’ where to go. Turtles, who migrate large distances of the sea, seem to use some kind of connection to the earth’s magnetic field in order to travel to specific breeding grounds over long distances. Again, unlike our own minds, they don’t need to explain to themselves how they are going to find where they are going, it is just action. One of the products, it seems, of language in the brain is our capacity, and therefore need, to ‘make conscious’ forms of knowledge that for animals are just part of their seamless existence in the world. Creating bottom up explanations for creatures that may or may not be conscious, but for whom consciousness has nothing to do with epistemology, is comprehendible. But not so much for us.
One way of thinking about this is that words are kinds of heuristics the mind itself produces, symbols we use to feel our way through an underlying substructure, and that evolution has provided us with remarkable capacities to correlate our words to the real word that just so happens to allow us to have a conception of what we call ‘truth.’
The problem here is that whatever reality is, we can never actually ‘say’ it. Words can themselves only ever be kinds of symbols for an underlying reality we both know and don’t know at all. The theory of evolution, for example, is a remarkably convoluted way of saying that an enormous mesh or tapestry of particles interacted with each other, and even that is another kind of convoluted way of saying that something happened involving quantum fields, or whatever the most fundamental level is considered to be, and even this remains a kind of representation. The tapestry produces pictures that we name, but those pictures aren’t really there, it’s just a reality that the brain hallucinates into being to represent what really is.
But the problem is a more serious one even than this. How can words themselves actually have a downward role in causative knowledge? Our brains themselves are composed of this substructure that is reality, and whatever ‘words’ we use to ‘know’ reality are redundant because our brains already are reality. We are after all, entirely composed of the same particles aren’t we? In a material sense this makes consciousness a kind of epiphenomenon, it’s contents are merely a kind of rising reflection of things going on ‘underneath’ that plays essentially no causative role. Free will does not exist, consciousness is a kind of illusion, merely smoke rising up from the battle. Truth cannot be ‘realised’ because why would the cells of your brain need to realise it? Why would they have any relation to it? Even if words were just representations of reality, how could their representation in the mind affect what is going on? The realisation of ‘truth’ recognised for it’s own merit cannot change a thought’s obedience to the underlying law of things.
But scientists don’t believe this. The entire endeavour of science is based on the idea that conscious creatures can create structures of words or mathematics that are representations of reality, that allow us to actually move towards ‘truth’, even if it not absolute. Not only this but that the creations of the mind have downward causative effect, that their truth facilities their function: knowledge actually changes the world. Not as a mere reflection of things already going on, but because it’s representation within a mind is meaningful. We can know truth, in some representational way.
Part II — Words
The realisation of science is that if we limit the idea of the world to an idea of something like ‘material’ and limit language to a kind of ‘literal’ representation where words have a direct relation to underlying forms of thing or concept, we can produce a remarkable capacity for interacting with the world. It is a bottom up concept, based on the idea that the world is made primarily of components governed by laws of cause or probability, however mysterious they may be, and that everything ‘above’ is reducible and subordinate to the lowest level, and thus a kind of epiphenomenon. (fig 1, below)
As we have seen this presents us with a kind of paradox, if we ourselves are made of this same level of reality, our own representations of reality are kinds of epiphenomenon too, and this leaves us with a contradiction between an apparent level of reality as ‘stuff’ and the level of reality by which we interpret it, or a level of ‘meaning.’
We might at this time postulate the idea that if words are meaningful representations of an actual reality, then that reality is made of more than can be reduced to the level of scientific operation. The world of meaning through it’s representation creates other forms of apprehending the world that are not correlates of material reality. One of these might be morality, along with abstractions. Ideas like ‘beauty’, ‘goodness’ or ‘love’ are not scientifically useful terms. We realise this when it comes to the world of fields like ethics and philosophy, that we have to use a different form of language structure to the scientific, and create kinds of argument that are internally persuasive and coherent but not necessarily themselves correlates of reality.
Above this exists another kind of language structure. This is the structure of myth and story, language of personal and collective idiom, of metaphors, allegories and representation. This is the world of religion, poetry and art, a kind of language that does not have or claim to have a direct thing-for-thing relation to reality, or certainly not in a strict sense, but uses forms of language that allow us to go beyond literal renditions of the world, that is to say it is imaginative. One of the great struggles of the modern age has been the refusal of modern religious people to accept this, and an insistence that the language structure of religion is scientific, or literal.
But this same linguistic category error is accepted widely, the assumption of a scientific world view is that these forms of representation are not epistemologically functional. Religion, for example, is often represented as an archaic form of science, a ‘superstition’ made redundant by scientific developments. This may be true in some areas and in many ways science banishes superstition where forms of cause can be understood, but when we look at our society, how we understand ourselves, how we structure our actions, interpret what the facts of science tell us, or what we believe we should do with them, we are still fundamentally rooted in forms of language that have no relation to the scientific. Most of us understand the world as moral, recognise that moral rights and imperatives shape and necessitate our functioning. Where does this come from? Is the moral content of language, it’s stories and abstractions, reducible to scientific terms that are themselves reducible to the material reality it represents, or does something more exist?
One way of considering this is to imagine that we have got our world view upside down. Let’s propose that if the world of meaning exists as much as the world of matter, then morality itself is not a reducible concept. Most religious systems have come to the conclusion that the centre of all things is the highest moral value (fig. 2), and in many ways this is how we still structure our reality. Much of our action is involved in the moral. Science offer us forms of what we can do, but it feels like this is intractably bound up with what we ought to do. How would we relate or consider our epistemological relationship to language if the moral really was as important a constituent of reality as the material?
Part III — Art
Structures of language that apprehend a moral reality are vital to understanding ourselves in the world. No concept of science can ever tell us what we should or ought do, since answers to this question can only ever be arbitrary. If knowledge is power, what are we to do with it?
In the origins of man art, culture and religion are not separable entities. All three relate to both an individual and a corporate identity, a meaning that orientates the world. It is a development of fairly recent history to seperate the category of ‘art’ into the realm of merely entertainment, a product of commercialisation and the expediency of modern life that reduces meaning into forms of stimulation and gratification that can be commodified. This is concomitant with a decline in trust and belief in institutions and establishment, and a banishing of ‘art’ as having a place in culture or religion that would make it synonymous with it, and with our identity within it. If as we have argued it is possible to see the world not just as composed of the material but composed equally of meaning and morality, how might we produce an understanding of art as a kind of epistemology? A kind of truth that subordinates the power of scientific truth, not because it competes with it, but because it tells us what we should use it for, what we should do and be?
To consider this from the perspective of language, it’s useful to think about how the reading of a poem mirrors the way we read and create meaning in the world. Let’s say you are reading a poem, and in the poem there is a description of a room, containing images like a black cat, a pen with spilled ink and a man searching for something. At the end of the poem it is revealed he has a daughter that has died. Each rereading of the poem enables a kind of reinterpreting of the contents of the poem — the black cat or the ink may be seen as symbols of death, searching for something lost may be seen as a metaphor for recovery. This is a simplistic image but it illustrates the relations between symbol and meaning within a poem — the first reading means the images create a kind of abstract ‘aboutness’ and each rereading means there is a kind of co-creative feedback process between the metaphors, symbols and abstract meaning of the poem as a piece of art. This has some relation to how we read meaning into the world, we rely on symbols, images, metaphors, tropes and a rich conceptual language structure to uphold an ‘aboutness’ that imbues the world in return with meaning. Here abstract concepts are important, beauty, love, goodness, are forms of coherent meaning, ways that we interpret the moral not just as ‘a thing we ought to do’ but a kind of spirit that gives everything life, a reference point in and beyond action.
This means the representational truth of poetry is not objective and not subjective, meaning is not arbitrarily created because meaning really exists (the extent to which it does would take us into theology), but it’s creation cannot be entirely subjective or arbitrary. But because it’s language is richly metaphorical and symbolic, it cannot be reduced to an objective kind of language.
We can relate this to the scientific ideal that words must have a direct relation to things or concepts in order to function as an epistemology. From the perspective of the imagination, the recognition that the non-reducible components of consciousness mean that such meaning has actual existence, can be shared, is moral, and requires language that is symbolic and metaphorical and partakes in a whole system of collective self-understanding. Religion at its best, for example, in this context can be seen as kinds of language structures that are ‘about everything’, because they give meaning to the entire world, they allow us to read the world as symbols within a sign system that represent a meaning we all do or could share, one connected to value and purpose.
Art in this sense can then relate both to the time and circumstances of an individual, be intensely personal, unique and transient, or collective and enduring. It is both universal and individual, we continuously partake in it creatively, and are all invited to add a voice. For a religious person this ‘meaning’ constitutes not just an abstract meaning but an ontological reality. I began this essay with an epithet for our time: ‘knowledge is power’. The West is formed and shaped by a religious reality that, at it’s best, upturns the concept of power beneath love. The cross, a roman symbol of domination and power, the freedom to subjugate and humiliate is transfigured into a symbol of a God who identifies with ‘the least of these’. In spite of it’s relation to complicated forms of human power, this meaning system has shaped the entire Christian West; cathedrals, village churches, poems, hymns, symphonies and rituals have been shaped under the meaning system that still, in a vestigial way, shapes our own time. At a point in history where we realise we must still wrestle with the question of whether might makes right, or whether there are more meaningful conceptions of the world than power, we have to consider how our view of truth shapes the meaning we construct for our world. Materialism gives us power, but not wisdom. As T. S. Eliot puts it in his ‘chorus from the Rock’:
“Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence… Where is the life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
The Italian poet Dante Alighieri believed that the metaphorical system of hell, purgatory and paradise allowed him, at least imaginatively to stand before the divine light from which all things come. His poem ends with the words “…my desire and will were moved already, like a wheel revolving uniformly — by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.” I cannot conceive of an epistemology worth having more than that.
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Bless you, Matthew.
