[Post at Preface to Atheism, Sept 16, 2023.]
It’s natural to assume that what we see when we open our eyes is what the world looks like, that we see it as is. Sure, there may be more to it than we see, especially on a micro level, but we see the actual world out there. This assumption is what philosophers call perceptual realism (though it has other names, such as naive realism).
Bertrand Russell, in his book, The Problems of Philosophy1, exposed a few of the problems with perceptual realism.
Consider a round dining table. Imagine that we are comfortably sitting in a chair beside the table. Looking at the table from our vantage point, it is likely that we perceive immediately that the tabletop is round. But how? From where we sit, the tabletop does not actually have a round shape.
This is the problem: how can we perceive the table as round if the image of the table coming through our eyes is not round? Sitting at the table, in fact, it appears oval. It would only appear round if our eyes were located at the ceiling directly above the table—a viewpoint we almost never actually have.
Yet we immediately register the table as round.
Presumably, roundness is one of the properties of the table. But how does our brain pick up this property from the table? How does our brain know it is round?
We can even ask, is the physical tabletop really round or is roundness something our brain is (so to speak) bringing to the table?
Or, as philosophers like to put it, is the table’s roundness real?
The Real Question
Whenever philosophers (or anyone for that matter) asks if something is real, what they are actually asking is a different question: where does something exist? The philosopher’s question, Is roundness real? is, in other words, the scientist’s question, Where does roundness exist?
There are basically only a couple of places where something might exist.
First, it might exist in the “physical” mind-independent world we see around (outside/inside of) us. Perhaps it exists in this world in a manner easy to detect, or perhaps it exists undetected or even undetectable. Something might also exist within organisms which are within this mind-independent world, perhaps even within the structure of neurons in the brains of such organisms.
Most philosophers would consider something existing in any of the above locations to be “real”.
Second, something may also exist “in our mind”—that is, in our thoughts, feelings, or imagination. If something “only” exists in our minds philosophers would say it is not “real.” Realism, to the philosopher, means believing that something exists in the firstlocation. If we believe that something only exists in the second location, it is a rejection of realism vis-a-vis that something.
Of course, something might exist in both places. And in fact this is a common position most people (including philosophers) take.
It is my position that something never exists in both places. Either it exists in the mind-independent, observer-independent physical world, or it exists in the mind of an observer. Never both.
With one caveat: Observers are organisms. And organisms exist in the mind-independent world. In this sense, naturally, the minds of organisms (which are produced by neurons in the organism’s body) necessarily also exist in the mind-independent physical world. But there is never double-existence. Something which exists within the neurobiologically-produced consciousness of an organism doesn’t also exist outside that neurbiologically-produced consciousness.
So if we are talking about something like the roundness of a tabletop, it is my contention that that property of roundness either exists out there in the table (the mind-independent world) or it exists in here in the neurobiological consciousness (mind) produced in the brains of organisms like us.
I hope this clarifies why I think the scientific question, Where does something exist? is preferable to the philosophical question, Is something real?
Where is Roundness?
So where does the roundness of our dining table exist?
Let’s recap the issue:
If roundness is out there in the physical world, how do we perceive an object’s roundness if we never see it round? How does an object so quickly convey its roundness to us?
Well, some objects don’t. The earth we stand on is round, but we don’t perceive that (okay, maybe if we are astronauts/cosmonauts out in space). Only when an object is small enough for us to see it from the proper angle, do we actually see it as round.
So roundness is not conveyed to us by the objects we see. Our brains are inferringroundness.2
And this is even more obvious when we consider that round objects are never perfectly round. We perceive oranges as round, but they are not perfectly round. Our dining table is not perfectly round. Our earth is not perfectly round. And neither are coins.
If something is not perfectly round, is it round?
Well, our brain says it is. And then, on further examination, our brain says it is not perfectly round.
So where does roundness exist?
If we approach this question as scientists, then we are going to look for a biological mechanism for collecting information from the world around us.
Let’s imagine we are sitting outside at night looking at the full moon. The information that the disk of the moon is round, how are we to pluck that from the sky?
Our retinas sample photons which have bounced off the moon from the sun. What do those photons know about the roundness of the moon? Do they carry information about the moon’s roundness with them to earth. Certainly not individually.
Collectively, we convince ourselves, at least together with the missing photons where moon is not, we assemble a picture of the moon’s roundness. But it’s a picture wecompose. Specifically, our brains compose it, and our brains create the information of the moon’s roundness in doing so. Photons know nothing about it.
What about Cameras?
Still, we might naively ask, how then can a camera (a brainless, non-digital camera, for instance) create a picture of the moon’s roundness? Where does the roundness information come from if not the photons captured by the camera?
But here, too, our brains create the roundness of the moon. This time it happens when we look at the photo from the camera.
If someone paints a full moon on canvas, it’s the same thing. When we look at the canvas our brains create the roundness of the painted moon, just as would happen if we were looking at the moon itself.
And then our brains note that the roundness is imperfect.
Our brains, of course, don’t just create roundness information about the moon. They create an entire moon object. This moon-object has properties, including hue, saturation, and brightness. It also has an edge forming the property of roundness.
The objectification of the visual field into objects with discernible properties and information seems to be an automatic activity of the human brain. I would go further and declare that all experiences—that is, all sensation created by the brain for the purpose of moving and acting within the world around us—by nature have location and meaning (so that the sensation can bring a call to action to the organism). This is why our sensations, our experiences, present us with information necessarily.3
A natural answer
Skeptical naturalism answers the question Where does roundness exist? by locating it in the simulacrum created by the brain as it produces our senses and knowledge.
This video4 which I linked to in a previous post demonstrates the point. Watch the video (before reading further)!
If you duteously tried to count the basketball throws as directed, your brain saturated your visual experience with objects needed for the task at hand: you see the basketball, you see the basketball players passing the basketball, maybe you see the players on the opposing team as well since passes from them shouldn’t count. These objects are essential to counting the basketball throws.
But you didn’t see the man in a gorilla suit object. Why not?
Your brain created the visual experience you needed for the task at hand; distractions were excluded from your vision because you had something tricky to concentrate on.
Afterwards, once you learned about the gorilla-suited man, your brain took note and “improved itself”—and I bet now your brain won’t allow you to unsee him the next time you watch the video. (Can you even fully concentrate on counting the throws once you know what’s really important about the scene?)
The question, then, is not whether the brain constructs our experiences. It absolutely constructs the objects and properties that we visualize. The question, rather, is this: are those objects and properties (such as roundness) located in one place or two places?
Are they located only in the neurobiological construction we call consciousness, or do they also have duplicates located in the mind-independent physical world?
I submit that the meta philosophy of naturalism5 is not consistent with saying objects and properties exist in both places. This is because the places—one mind-independent and one mind-dependent—are fundamentally different in type. And the meta philosophy of naturalism says that the second type is a neurobiological construction which shows up only after millions or billions of years.
Things produced by neurons in the brains of organisms can’t be equivalent to things predating the evolution of neurons—not at least under naturalism. (If you have a supernatural worldview, you will see it differently.)
I hope this gets at why I don’t think perceptual realism fits naturalism. And I believe the same will apply for scientific realism.
Footnotes
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1912.
In the future, I hope to write specifically about ideas Russell presents here—this post is not that. But my point about roundness comes directly from The Problems of Philosophy:
“The shape of the table is no better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men. But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we, move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table.” (1959 Edition, page 10)
Again, Russell in The Problems of Philosophy:
“Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?” (1959 Edition, page 11)
In The Problems of Philosophy, Russell separates “sensations” from what he terms “sense data.” Whereas, I believe the brain constructs both in the same fashion, often at the same time. Thus sensations come with meaning for the organism (it’s an important aspect of their neurological construction). Here’s Russell’s take:
“Let us give the name of ‘sense-data’ to the things that are immediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. We shall give the name ‘sensation’ to the experience of being immediately aware of these things. Thus, whenever we see a colour, we have a sensation of the colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation. The colour is that of which we are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation. It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data — brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc. — which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table. Thus a problem arises as to the relation of the sense-data to the real table, supposing there is such a thing.” (1959 Edition, page 12)
It has never been clear to me where Russell thinks sense-data exists. I maintain that like all our sensations, sense-data is constructed by the brain using much the same mechanisms which create our other neurobiological experiences.
Learn more about this at theinvisiblegorilla.com
As stated in a previous post, the “meta philosophy of naturalism” is equivalent to a “meta scientific hypothesis” that the world has a history, and that this history includes, after billions of years, the evolution of living organisms on at least one planet in at least one solar system, and that on that planet at least one species evolved to have brains which produce neurobiological consciousness. Instances of this neurobiological consciousness constitute novel entities (e.g. visual, tactile, auditory sensations but also including information, conceptsand meanings) which never existed prior. (Roundness and other object properties are examples of such.) Because these novel entities never existed prior to the evolution of consciousness, an essential aspect of the hypothesis is that they exist only in consciousness, not in the mind-independent (consciousness-independent) world beyond.
