PHILOSOPHY
Irrational Questions — Irrational Answers
This article explores how questions seeking unrelated connections lead to philosophical and scientific dead ends
Not only in everyday life, but also in philosophy and science, questions are asked to which there are no answers or cannot exist. The reason is, the questions are irrational. What does that mean? These are questions that seek to connect topics or descriptions of topics that have nothing to do with each other or that are located on different levels of description.
An example from philosophy: the question of how body and mind are related is irrational, because the terms body and mind describe two different levels of two different descriptive worlds with two different conceptual systems. And there is no causal relationship between the two.
To make it clear what is meant, an example is taken to the extreme: how are prime numbers related to water? Here you immediately notice that this is a nonsensical question. It has no rational reference and is therefore irrational. Another example is the question of what it’s like to be a bat. This sentence, known from philosophy, is also irrational, because how could you put yourself in the shoes of a bat?
The phrase was formulated to make it clear that this is an impossible undertaking. Nevertheless, there are currents in philosophy that believe that the subjective side of experience must be included in the research process. And that’s irrational.
How do such irrational questions come about? One possible answer is to ontologize phenomena, i.e. to present them as if they were transcendent questions that have always existed. The concepts that have taken on a life of their own in this way become an instance and challenge us to establish relationships between them, between the concepts, not between the contents. It is sometimes astonishing what a robust life of its own these kinds of ontologized concepts have. After all, the above-mentioned mind-body problem has existed for over two thousand years.
Irrational questions can be traced back to incorrect linguistic schematizations. Terms are secretly associated with meanings that point to a different linguistic context.
In the mind-body problem, the body is associated with the body, the soul with the brain. In reality, there is no such distinction, because every organism has a body, and its brain is part of that body, so not an addition. In addition, we know that a biological body consists only of cells, and Descartes searched in vain for a spirit or soul. If we want to express physiologically what is called spirit in philosophy, we must form the physiological concepts necessary for this. To do this, a corresponding theory is necessary.
This kind of linguistic misunderstanding also leads to the belief that consciousness can be created in machines. The misunderstanding here again lies in the ontologization of the concept of consciousness, as if it were a substance that can be transported, expanded or copied at will.
But if you don’t focus on the concept, but on the content, it’s easier not to be fooled. Then you see that consciousness is a state, a quality that can be measured in the brain. It’s like an aggregate state of a system, and you realize the system is conscious.
One can immediately see that such an aggregate state can neither be transferred nor artificially generated, because in contrast to physical systems, to which energy can be supplied, for example, the supply of consciousness into machines is not possible.
The ‘state of matter’ consciously, presupposes a system that is not only self-organized, but autocatalytic. It produces the products that are necessary for its own existence. If this process is disrupted, it produces incompatible substances and becomes ill. And consciousness is a property of nervous systems that are not input-output machines, but that are excited and in this way create excitation patterns that are meaningful to the brain.
So it is the brain that generates those thoughts that are necessary for its existence.
Such connections are overwhelmed by simple linguistic schematizations. The content is lost, the term alone becomes meaning-leading. And so it quickly leads to the reversal of levels of abstraction and description, thus to wrong answers and, as a consequence, to wrong goals.
The situation is similar with the popular question of how spirit or thoughts arise from matter. Matter and thought represent two different levels of description and are therefore not causally related. Therefore, such a question is irrational.
Many a physicist has despaired of this irrational question and then claimed that there is no consciousness at all. Or he solved the question esoterically and thought that the spirit was already present in matter, which then leads directly to panpsychism.
You can see the confusion that linguistic distortions can cause. Therefore, one should always make sure that scientific, philosophical, but also everyday questions are always asked within a correct frame of reference.
