Year: 2018

How Sex Minimizes Uncertainty

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This is in response to an issue raised by Scott Alexander on his Tumblr.

I actually responded to the dark room problem of predictive processing earlier. However, here I will construct an imaginary model which will hopefully explain the same thing more clearly and briefly.

Suppose there is dust particle which falls towards the ground 90% of the time, and is blown higher into the air 10% of the time.

Now suppose we bring the dust particle to life, and give it the power of predictive processing. If it predicts it will move in a certain direction, this will tend to cause it to move in that direction. However, this causal power is not infallible. So we can suppose that if it predicts it will move where it was going to move anyway, in the dead situation, it will move in that direction. But if it predicts it will move in the opposite direction from where it would have moved in the dead situation, then let us suppose that it will move in the predicted direction 75% of the time, while in the remaining 25% of the time, it will move in the direction the dead particle would have moved, and its prediction will be mistaken.

Now if the particle predicts it will fall towards the ground, then it will fall towards the ground 97.5% of the time, and in the remaining 2.5% of the time it will be blown higher in the air.

Meanwhile, if the particle predicts that it will be blown higher, then it will be blown higher in 77.5% of cases, and in 22.5% of cases it will fall downwards.

97.5% accuracy is less uncertain than 77.5% accuracy, so the dust particle will minimize uncertainty by consistently predicting that it will fall downwards.

The application to sex and hunger and so on should be evident.

Real Distinction II

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I noted recently that one reason why people might be uncomfortable with distinguishing between the way things seem, as such, namely as a way of seeming, and the way things are, as such, namely as a way of being, is that it seems to introduce an explanatory gap. In the last post, why did Mary have a “bluish” experience? “Because the banana was blue,” is true, but insufficient, since animals with different sense organs might well have a different experience when they see blue things. And this gap seems very hard to overcome, possibly even insurmountable.

However, the discussion in the last post suggests that the difficulty in overcoming this gap is mainly the result of the fact that no one actually knows the full explanation, and that the full explanation would be extremely complicated. It might even be so complicated that no human being could understand it, not necessarily because it is a kind of explanation that people cannot understand, but in a sense similar to the one in which no human being can memorize the first trillion prime numbers.

Even if this is the case, however, there would be a residual “gap” in the sense that a sensitive experience will never be the same experience as an intellectual one, even when the intellect is trying to explain the sensitive experience itself.

We can apply these ideas to think a bit more carefully about the idea of real distinction. I pointed out in the linked post that in a certain sense no distinction is real, because “not being something” is not a thing, but a way we understand something.

But notice that there now seems to be an explanatory gap, much like the one about blue. If “not being something” is not a thing, then why is it a reasonable way to understand anything? Or as Parmenides might put it, how could one thing possibly not be another, if there is no not?

Now color is complicated in part because it is related to animal brains, which are themselves complicated. But “being in general” should not be complicated, because the whole idea is that we are talking about everything in general, not with the kind of detail that is needed to make things complicated. So there is a lot more hope of overcoming the “gap” in the case of being and distinction, than in the case of color and the appearance of color.

A potential explanation might be found in what I called the “existential theory of relativity.” As I said in that post, the existence of many things necessarily implies the existence of relationships. But this implication is a “before in understanding“. That is, we understand that one thing is not another before we consider the relationship of the two. If we consider what is before in causality, we will get a different result. On one hand, we might want to deny that there can be causality either way, because the two are simultaneous by nature: if there are many things, they are related, and if things are related, they are many. On the other hand, if we consider “not being something” as a way things are understood, and ask the cause of them being understood in this way, relation will turn out to be the cause. In other words, we have a direct response to the question posed above: why is it reasonable to think that one thing is not another, if not being is not a thing? The answer is that relation is a thing, and the existence of relation makes it reasonable to think of things as distinct from one another.

Someone will insist that this account is absurd, since things need to be distinct in order to be related. But this objection confuses the mode of being and the mode of understanding. Just as there will be a residual “gap” in the case of color, because a sense experience is not an intellectual experience, there is a residual gap here. Explaining color will not suddenly result in actually seeing color if you are blind. Likewise, explaining why we need the idea of distinction will not suddenly result in being able to understand the world without the idea of distinction. But the existence of the sense experience does not thereby falsify one’s explanation of color, and likewise here, the fact that we first need to understand things as distinct in order to understand them as related, does not prevent their relationship from being the specific reality that makes it reasonable to understand them as distinct.

Mary’s Surprising Response

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In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett proposes the following continuation to the story of Mary’s room:

And so, one day, Mary’s captors decided it was time for her to see colors. As a trick, they prepared a bright blue banana to present as her first color experience ever. Mary took one look at it and said “Hey! You tried to trick me! Bananas are yellow, but this one is blue!” Her captors were dumfounded. How did she do it? “Simple,” she replied. “You have to remember that I know everything—absolutely everything—that could ever be known about the physical causes and effects of color vision. So of course before you brought the banana in, I had already written down, in exquisite detail, exactly what physical impression a yellow object or a blue object (or a green object, etc.) would make on my nervous system. So I already knew exactly what thoughts I would have (because, after all, the “mere disposition” to think about this or that is not one of your famous qualia, is it?). I was not in the slightest surprised by my experience of blue (what surprised me was that you would try such a second-rate trick on me). I realize it is hard for you to imagine that I could know so much about my reactive dispositions that the way blue affected me came as no surprise. Of course it’s hard for you to imagine. It’s hard for anyone to imagine the consequences of someone knowing absolutely everything physical about anything!”

I don’t intend to fully analyze this scenario here, and for that reason I left it to the reader in the previous post. However, I will make two remarks, one on what is right (or possibly right) about this continuation, and one on what might be wrong about this continuation.

The basically right or possibly right element is that if we assume that Mary knows all there is to know about color, including in its subjective aspect, it is reasonable to believe (even if not demonstrable) that she will be able to recognize the colors the first time she sees them. To gesture vaguely in this direction, we might consider that the color red can be somewhat agitating, while green and blue can be somewhat calming. These are not metaphorical associations, but actual emotional effects that they can have. Thus, if someone can recognize how their experience is affecting their emotions, it would be possible for them to say, “this seems more like the effect I would expect of green or blue, rather than red.” Obviously, this is not proving anything. But then, we do not in fact know what it is like to know everything there is to know about anything. As Dennett continues:

Surely I’ve cheated, you think. I must be hiding some impossibility behind the veil of Mary’s remarks. Can you prove it? My point is not that my way of telling the rest of the story proves that Mary doesn’t learn anything, but that the usual way of imagining the story doesn’t prove that she does. It doesn’t prove anything; it simply pumps the intuition that she does (“it seems just obvious”) by lulling you into imagining something other than what the premises require.

It is of course true that in any realistic, readily imaginable version of the story, Mary would come to learn something, but in any realistic, readily imaginable version she might know a lot, but she would not know everything physical. Simply imagining that Mary knows a lot, and leaving it at that, is not a good way to figure out the implications of her having “all the physical information”—any more than imagining she is filthy rich would be a good way to figure out the implications of the hypothesis that she owned everything.

By saying that the usual way of imagining the story “simply pumps the intuition,” Dennett is neglecting to point out what is true about the usual way of imagining the situation, and in that way he makes his own account seem less convincing. If Mary knows in advance all there is to know about color, then of course if she is asked afterwards, “do you know anything new about color?”, she will say no. But if we simply ask, “Is there anything new here?”, she will say, “Yes, I had a new experience which I never had before. But intellectually I already knew all there was to know about that experience, so I have nothing new to say about it. Still, the experience as such was new.” We are making the same point here as in the last post. Knowing a sensible experience intellectually is not to know in the mode of sense knowledge, but in the mode of intellectual knowledge. So if one then engages in sense knowledge, there will be a new mode of knowing, but not a new thing known. Dennett’s account would be clearer and more convincing if he simply agreed that Mary will indeed acknowledge something new; just not new knowledge.

In relation to what I said might be wrong about the continuation, we might ask what Dennett intended to do in using the word “physical” repeatedly throughout this account, including in phrases like “know everything physical” and “all the physical information.” In my explanation of the continuation, I simply assume that Mary understands all that can be understood about color. Dennett seems to want some sort of limitation to the “physical information” that can be understood about color. But either this is a real limitation, excluding some sorts of claims about color, or it is no limitation at all. If it is not a limitation, then we can simply say that Mary understands everything there is to know about color. If it is a real limitation, then the continuation will almost certainly fail.

I suspect that the real issue here, for Dennett, is the suggestion of some sort of reductionism. But reductionism to what? If Mary is allowed to believe things like, “Most yellows typically look brighter than most blue things,” then the limit is irrelevant, and Mary is allowed to know anything that people usually know about colors. But if the meaning is that Mary knows this only in a mathematical sense, that is, that she can have beliefs about certain mathematical properties of light and surfaces, rather than beliefs that are explicitly about blue and yellow things, then it will be a real limitation, and this limitation would cause his continuation to fail. We have basically the same issue here that I discussed in relation to Robin Hanson on consciousness earlier. If all of Mary’s statements are mathematical statements, then of course she will not know everything that people know about color. “Blue is not yellow” is not a mathematical statement, and it is something that we know about color. So we already know from the beginning that not all the knowledge that can be had about color is mathematical. Dennett might want to insist that it is “physical,” and surely blue and yellow are properties of physical things. If that is all he intends to say, namely that the properties she knows are properties of physical things, there is no problem here, but it does look like he intends to push further, to the point of possibly asserting something that would be evidently false.

Sense and Intellect

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In the last two posts, I distinguished between the way a thing is, and the way a thing is known. We can formulate analogous distinctions between different ways of knowing. For example, there will be a distinction between “the way a thing is known by the senses,” and “the way a thing is known by the mind.” Or to give a more particular case, “the way this looks to the eyes,” is necessarily distinct from “the way this is understood.”

Similar consequences will follow. I pointed out in the last post that “it is the way it seems” will be necessarily false if it intends to identify the ways of being and seeming as such. In a similar way, “I understand exactly the way this thing looks to me,” will be necessarily false, if one intends to identify the way one understands with the way one sees with the eyes. Likewise, we saw previously that it does not follow that there is something (“the way it is”) that cannot be known, and in a similar way, it does not follow that there is something (“the way it looks”) that cannot be understood. But when one understands the way it is, one understands with one’s way of understanding, not with the thing’s way of being. And likewise, when one understands the way a thing looks, one understands with one’s way of understanding, not with the way it looks.

Failure to understand these distinctions or at least to apply them in practice is responsible for the confusion surrounding many philosophical problems. As a useful exercise, the reader might wish to consider how they apply to the thought experiment of Mary’s Room.

It Is The Way It Seems To Be

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As another approach to the issues in the last post, we might consider the meaning of the above phrase, “It is the way it seems to be.” What does “the way” modify in “it seems to be”?

If it modifies “seems,” then the meaning is: “In some way of seeming, something seems to be. In that way of seeming, it is.” And this is false, since it attributes a way of seeming directly to the being of things in themselves. “It is not the way it seems to be,” in this particular way, is the Kantian truth in the previous post, and Kant rightly said that it would be a contradiction for things to be the way they seem in this sense.

If it modifies “to be,” then the meaning is: “Something seems to be in some way of being. In that way of being, it is.” And this is quite often true, although not in every case, since people can be misled. “It is not the way it seems to be,” in this particular way, is the Kantian error in the previous post.

As I said there, Kant may not have clearly understood the distinction, or he may have accepted both the truth and the error. But his opinion is not important in any case. Nonetheless, we can see why even the Kantian truth is disconcerting to some people. Consider the above applied to an example. “The banana seems to be yellow.” In the natural understanding of this, “yellow” belongs with “to be,” so that the banana seems to actually be yellow, and there is nothing from preventing things from being the way they seem here: the banana seems to be yellow, and it is in fact yellow.

But we could reinterpret the sentence to discuss the way of seeming as such. Perhaps we should also rephrase the sentence, saying something like, “The banana seems yellowishly to be something,” where now “yellowishly” refers to something specific about the way of seeming, along the lines of qualia. In this case, it is quite impossible for the banana to be yellowishly, because this would mean that a way of seeming would be in itself a way of being — the situation Kant described as asserting that experience itself exists independently from experience.

Why might one still find the above disconcerting? Perhaps it is because if we ask “why does the banana seem to be yellow?”, one wishes to respond, “Because it is in fact yellow,” and the answer is quite appropriate. But if we ask, “Why does the banana seem yellowishly to be something?”, we cannot respond, “Because the banana is yellowishly,” because this is false, and likewise if we respond, “because the banana is yellow,” the response will seem inadequate. It does not fully explain why it appears yellowishly.

But this is quite correct, and in this respect Kant saw the truth. A yellow banana would not appear “yellowishly” to every animal, and thus “because it is yellow,” is in fact an inadequate explanation for its appearance, even if it is part of the explanation. Part of the explanation must refer to the animal as well. And Kant is quite right that we can make no distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities here. If we ask why a body appears to be extended, “because it is extended,” is a quite appropriate answer. But if we ask why a body appears extendedly to us, “because it is extended,” is part of the answer, but insufficient. Another part of the answer might be that we are extended ourselves, and the parts of our organs can receive parts of an image. Things might well seem extended to a partless intellect, but they would not seem extendedly.

Thing In Itself

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The last two posts might feel uncomfortably close to total skepticism. “Wait,” you might say, “doesn’t this seem to imply that we don’t know anything about the real world, but only about our experiences?”

We can consider a similar claim with a similar argument, taken from Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (§52c):

If I speak of objects in time and space, I am not speaking of things in themselves (since I know nothing of them), but only of things in appearance, i.e. of experience as a distinct way of cognizing objects that is granted to human beings alone. I must not say of that which I think in space or time: that it is in itself in space and time, independent of this thought of mine; for then I would contradict myself, since space and time, together with the appearances in them, are nothing existing in themselves and outside my representations, but are themselves only ways of representing, and it is patently contradictory to say of a mere way of presenting that it also exists outside our representation. The objects of the senses therefore exist only in experience; by contrast, to grant them a self-subsistent existence of their own, without experience or prior to it, is as much as to imagine that experience is also real without experience or prior to it.

There could be a way of understanding this to say something true, but it is more easily understood as asserting something deeply erroneous. Kant may in fact have both the truth and the error in mind, or perhaps he is ambivalent concerning the correct interpretation.

Consider the distinction between the way things are known by us and the way things are in themselves. It is possible to fall into error by asserting that since things are known by us in a certain way, they must be that way in themselves. Thus we know things in a general way, and thus some Platonists might conclude that things exist in themselves in a general way, but this is an error.

But another way to fall into error would be to admit that our way of knowing is distinct from the way of being, and then to conclude from the fact that our way of knowing does not correspond precisely to the way of being, that our knowledge is false, or that we do not know at all. This is the deeply erroneous claim that Kant seems to be making above.

Consider the meaning of the statement: “We know things as they are in themselves.” If we take the phrase, “as they are in themselves,” as expressing our mode of knowing adverbially, just as we might say “We know things in general terms,” and then intend to assert that our mode of knowing is the same as the mode of the being of the thing, then the statement that we know things as they are in themselves is surely false. For the meaning would be that the things exist in our knowledge in exactly the same way as they exist in themselves — thus for example it would be implied that our knowledge is not general but particular. But more precisely, it would imply that there is no distinction whatsoever between our knowledge and the thing. In other words, if we know a horse, our knowledge is actually a horse, physically and literally. And this is manifestly false.

From this we can see both the truth and the error. The truth is that we do not know things as they are in themselves in the above sense, precisely because our knowledge is distinct from the thing known. And the error would be the conclusion that therefore we do not know things at all. Kant seems most clearly to assert the error when he says, “I am not speaking of things in themselves (since I know nothing of them), but only of things in appearance.” The Kantian may insist that this follows necessarily from the truth that we do not know things as they are in themselves in the above sense.

But it is easy to see why this is wrong. We do not know things “as they are in themselves” by having a mode of knowledge identical to the mode of their being. But this does not mean that there is anything that we do not know; in fact, having an identical mode of knowing and being would precisely mean not knowing at all, but being the thing instead. In other words, it does not follow that there is any knowledge that we are missing out on; on the contrary, knowing requires a specific mode of knowing which is different from the mode of being of the thing. It is not that the difference between mode of knowing and being implies that we do not know, but rather this difference is the very condition for knowledge to exist at all. Ayn Rand rightly said of this matter:

Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

Again, the Kantian may insist that perhaps we know the things. But again, we are just admitting we know the things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. So even if we know all things, we do not know their mode of being. The response is that we can know both the things and their mode of being, but we know both according to our mode of knowing, not according to their mode of being. This is similar to knowing someone else’s mode of knowing; when you do this, you do not therefore know with their mode of knowing, but with your own. Likewise, when you know the mode of the being of things, you know not with their mode of being, but with your own mode of knowing.

How does this answer our original question? Okay, you might say, there is no proof that there is anything that we cannot know in principle. But in practice it seems clear that our knowledge is entirely superficial, and thus hardly seems to be knowledge at all.

There is a large difference, however, between the assertion, “Most of our actual knowledge is rather superficial,” and the skeptical assertion, “Our knowledge is superficial in principle, and it is therefore impossible to know things as they truly are.” The first assertion is largely correct, and the second is quite wrong. It is true that the understanding of things that we attain “automatically,” as it were, from common experience, is a superficial knowledge, and thus ordinary language about ordinary things expresses such a superficial knowledge. It does not follow that a deep knowledge of things is impossible. However, if someone does not actually have such a deep knowledge, they may also misunderstand what it would even be like to have such a knowledge; and thus for example they might suppose that it would be necessary to have a knowledge of “things in themselves” in the Kantian sense, which of course is impossible, since it would eliminate the distinction between the mode of knowing and the mode of being.

In fact, not only is it not a contradiction to assert that we can know things as they are, but it would be a contradiction to assert, “There is something which we cannot know in any way, even in principle.” For “there is something” purports to refer to the thing and assert its existence, and such reference and assertion, if true, would be a kind of knowledge. Ludwig Wittgenstein makes the similar point, “We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.”

It is not, however, a contradiction to say that there are some things that we cannot know in some ways. And this is surely true.

Truth in Ordinary Language

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After the incident with the tall man, I make plans to meet my companion the following day. “Let us meet at sunrise tomorrow,” I say. They ask in response, “How will I know when the sun has risen?”

When it is true to say that the sun will rise, or that the sun has risen? And what it would take for such statements to be false?

Virtually no one finds themselves uncomfortable with this language despite the fact that the sun has no physical motion called “rising,” but rather the earth is rotating, giving the appearance of movement to the sun. I will ignore issues of relativity, precisely because they are evidently irrelevant. It is not just that the sun is not moving, but that we know that the physical motion of the sun one way or another is irrelevant. The rising of the sun has nothing to do with a deep physical or metaphysical account of the sun as such. Instead, it is about that thing that happens every morning. What would it take for it to be false that the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, if the earth is destroyed today, then presumably the sun will not rise tomorrow. Or if tomorrow it is dark at noon and everyone on Twitter is on an uproar about the fact that the sun is visible at the height of the sky at midnight in their part of the world, then it will have been false that the sun was going to rise in the morning. In other words, the only possible thing that could falsify the claim about the sun would be a falsification of our expectations about our experience of the sun.

As in the last post, however, this does not mean that the statement about the sun is about our expectations. It is about the sun. But the only thing it says about the sun is something like, “The sun will be and do whatever it needs to, including in relative terms, in order for our ordinary experience of a sunrise to be as it usually is.” I said something similar here about the truth of attributions of sensible qualities, such as when we say that “the banana is yellow.”

All of this will apply in general to all of our ordinary language about ourselves, our lives, and the world.

Truth and Expectation

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Suppose I see a man approaching from a long way off. “That man is pretty tall,” I say to a companion. The man approaches, and we meet him. Now I can see how tall he is. Suppose my companion asks, “Were you right that the man is pretty tall, or were you mistaken?”

“Pretty tall,” of course, is itself “pretty vague,” and there surely is not some specific height in inches that would be needed in order for me to say that I was right. What then determines my answer? Again, I might just respond, “It’s hard to say.” But in some situations I would say, “yes, I was definitely right,” or “no, I was definitely wrong.” What are those situations?

Psychologically, I am likely to determine the answer by how I feel about what I know about the man’s height now, compared to what I knew in advance. If I am surprised at how short he is, I am likely to say that I was wrong. And if I am not surprised at all by his height, or if I am surprised at how tall he is, then I am likely to say that I was right. So my original pretty vague statement ends up being made somewhat more precise by being placed in relationship with my expectations. Saying that he is pretty tall implies that I have certain expectations about his height, and if those expectations are verified, then I will say that I was right, and if those expectations are falsified, at least in a certain direction, then I will say that I was wrong.

This might suggest a theory like logical positivism. The meaning of a statement seems to be defined by the expectations that it implies. But it seems easy to find a decisive refutation of this idea. “There are stars outside my past and future light cones,” for example, is undeniably meaningful, and we know what it means, but it does not seem to imply any particular expectations about what is going to happen to me.

But perhaps we should simply somewhat relax the claim about the relationship between meaning and expectations, rather than entirely retracting it. Consider the original example. Obviously, when I say, “that man is pretty tall,” the statement is a statement about the man. It is not a statement about what is going to happen to me. So it is incorrect to say that the meaning of the statement is the same as my expectations. Nonetheless, the meaning in the example receives something, at the least some of its precision, from my expectations. Different people will be surprised by different heights in such a case, and it will be appropriate to say that they disagree somewhat about the meaning of “pretty tall.” But not because they had some logical definition in their minds which disagreed with the definition in someone’s else’s mind. Instead, the difference of meaning is based on the different expectations themselves.

But does a statement always receive some precision in its meaning from expectation, or are there cases where nothing at all is received from one’s expectations? Consider the general claim that “X is true.” This in fact implies some expectations: I do not expect “someone omniscient will tell me that X is false.” I do not expect that “someone who finds out the truth about X will tell me that X is false.” I do not expect that “I will discover the truth about X and it will turn out that it was false.” Note that these expectations are implied even in cases like the claim about the stars and my future light cone. Now the hopeful logical positivist might jump in at this point and say, “Great. So why can’t we go back to the idea that meaning is entirely defined by expectations?” But returning to that theory would be cheating, so to speak, because these expectations include the abstract idea of X being true, so this must be somehow meaningful apart from these particular expectations.

These expectations do, however, give the vaguest possible framework in which to make a claim at all. And people do, sometimes, make claims with little expectation of anything besides these things, and even with little or no additional understanding of what they are talking about. For example, in the cases that Robin Hanson describes as “babbling,” the person understands little of the implications of what he is saying except the idea that “someone who understood this topic would say something like this.” Thus it seems reasonable to say that expectations do always contribute something to making meaning more precise, even if they do not wholly constitute one’s meaning. And this consequence seems pretty natural if it is true that expectation is itself one of the most fundamental activities of a mind.

Nonetheless, the precision that can be contributed in this way will never be an infinite precision, because one’s expectations themselves cannot be defined with infinite precision. So whether or not I am surprised by the man’s height in the original example, may depend in borderline cases on what exactly happens during the time between my original assessment and the arrival of the man. “I will be surprised” or “I will not be surprised” are in themselves contingent facts which could depend on many factors, not only on the man’s height. Likewise, whether or not my state actually constitutes surprise will itself be something that has borderline cases.