Truth, realism and the miserable state of western philosophy

[UndercoverElephant]

OK...I am going to attempt to explain what I think has gone wrong with western philosophy.

I define “truth” in terms of the correspondence theory. I have a mind, I reject solipsism, therefore there is something external to mind. “Truth” is when an idea, sentence or mathematical construction corresponds to something outside of my mind. That correspondence does not have to be perfect – either linguistically or mathematically (so it can be tending towards true, or partially true). I hold the pursuit and defence of truth to be a moral imperative. I think ethics must start with a commitment to at least attempt to start by establishing the truth, or facts about reality.

The modern schism in philosophy dates back to Kant. Kant was responding to the scientific revolution -- he was trying to answer the question of to what extent we can apply the principles of science and reason to philosophy. He started by rejecting the mind/matter distinction and splitting things into phenomena ("the world as we experience it") and noumena ("the world as it is in itself"). I equate the contents of my mind to “phenomena” and whatever is external to mind (ie reality) to “noumena”.

Western philosophy is currently split into two broad streams (analytic and “continental”) which are antagonistic towards each other, largely because of their very different attitudes to science and reason. Since Kant, the stream that led to modern analytic philosophy (Moore, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Carnap and more recently Dennett) has been fully signed up to a materialistic realism which the continentals dismiss as “scientism”. In other words it considers the material world to be noumenal. It has bumped up against two serious problems in recent times – the first being the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the second being the hard problem of consciousness – but there's no sign of either mainstream science or the majority of analytic philosophers abandoning their materialistic realism or their naturalism. To do so would be “dualism” or “idealism” (or worse: supernaturalism) and that stuff must be resisted, because it looks like going backwards. In other words, God remains dead, and it was science and logic that killed him. The world is disenchanted and we'd better get used to that.

Nietzsche (who announced the death of both God and truth) belongs to the other stream (along with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, etc..), which completely rejects the epistemic authority of science and as a result has disappeared down a post-modern rabbit hole where it has lost contact with reality entirely. Truth is dead, so we can redefine language however we like, produce endless reams of intentionally incomprehensible gibberish and claim it is all in the interest of “emancipation”. Never mind that “Critical Theory” has made no progress whatsoever in actually emancipating people from the capitalist system that's destroying the Earth's ecosystem. All it appears to have done is to fracture the opposition to the status quo into a million pieces which cannot agree on anything at all, since everybody has a right to define their own reality according to their lived experience and anyone who defers to scientific reality is a patriarchal imperialist oppressor.

The only recent big name philosopher to make some sort of attempt to bring these two streams back together in recent times was Rorty, but he was absolutely opposed to a correspondence theory of truth. There's a real world out there, says Rorty, but no truth. From which I can only presume that Rorty thinks science doesn't deliver any truth. Truth is whatever it is best for us to believe. For somebody who cares about science and realism, Rorty seems to be the perfect example of which direction not to go in. His attack on truth was an attack on the foundations of scientific knowledge that I consider deeply damaging.

If anything like this assessment is correct then something has gone horribly wrong somewhere. The world we live in is facing an extreme crisis, and it is not clear whether civilisation as we know it will survive for much longer. One might hope that philosophy had something to offer in response to this epic crisis, but in fact the whole situation seems to be one of stalemate and paralysis.

I believe the current situation is theoretically resolvable, but in the real world the solution is resisted because of the way academia works and the way the two sides are so entrenched. Basically, both sides have made at least one fundamental mistake, but the way forwards is a sort of compromise which is unacceptable to both. The problem, in a nutshell, is that their entrenched positions are descended from an intellectual battle that was fought before the implications of quantum mechanics started to become clearer in the 1960s. The argument only makes sense if determinist, naturalistic classical physics is true. And it's not true. QM has -- or at least should have -- fundamentally changed the scientific conception of reality. A conscious observer is required to collapse the wave function. Reality and truth do exist, but reality is not deterministic and naturalistic -- at least not necessarily. Kant was wrong to say we can know nothing at all about noumena, but right to say that the noumenal world is very unlike the phenomenal world. The only way to "fix" this situation is for both sides to back down. The continentals would have to admit that reality and truth do exist, after all, and that post-modernism and critical theory are ideological dead-ends well past their sell by date. And the analyticals would have to admit that materialism is false and that we can't be sure that naturalism is true either. The probabilistic nature of QM utterly transforms the situation.

This may all seem very arcane and of little consequence to what is happening in the real world, but I beg to differ. I believe this problem in philosophy is directly linked to the total inability of western civilisation to escape from its current mode of thinking.

[johnny]

This may all seem very arcane and of little consequence to what is happening in the real world, but I beg to differ. I believe this problem in philosophy is directly linked to the total inability of western civilisation to escape from its current mode of thinking.

Arcane isn't the word I would use. My answer is still 4 angels. And with the length of that post you didn't refute it, or provide your own. Have you already defined the usefulness of philosophy somewhere else? Why 5 angels and the 200,000 words to prove it is better than 4 decided upon in a second with no words even necessary? Doesn't the amount of effort wasted? needed? to provide an infinitely variable and irrefutable answer matter? The number of angels based upon years of talking and writing and navel contemplation, versus the same years accomplishing....doing...something? Anything?

[Vortex2]

So you are saying that people who ponder really big ideas can't agree on what's true or real?
One group is keen on science and believes everything is made of stuff you can touch, but they're stumped by some scientific puzzles.
Another group reckons we can't truly know what's real, and they've gone down a rabbit hole with their own ideas.
You reckon both sides need to get clued up on new scientific discoveries, like how tiny particles behave, to better understand the world.
You also think that if they don't sort it out, it could make it difficult for everyone to tackle major problems we're facing.

Err, OK.

[Default0ptions]

Maybe this is not quite what you had in mind with your post but it is a huge problem that I have found with materialism.

The problem is that when hard core physicists try to really drill down to the most fundamental particles - it turns out that those particles don’t really exist ‘in the wild’ at all except as vaguely defined probability waves.

So it seems that all attempts to pin everything down to materialistic certainties falls apart at the most fundamental level because there are no fundamental material certainties to pin anything on to.

I do, however, totally agree with you UE that western philosophy (I’m using ‘western’ not in the sense of UK/US vs Russian) is in a miserable state.

I tend to lean towards process philosophy as an area that has some potential to drag our thinking towards a more useful understanding of the world.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

[UndercoverElephant]

And with the length of that post you didn't refute it, or provide your own.

My mind exists. I see other beings like myself, I assume they have minds too, so rejection of solipsism. I equate my mind to Kant's “phenomena” and I label everything outside my mind as “noumena”. Here I include in “noumena” not just the “things in themselves” that correspond to my/our phenomenal world, but everything else that exists (other minds, other universes, gods, etc...). At this point the concept of “material world” can be joined to either phenomenal or noumenal to come up with two compound concepts – phenomenal-material refers to the material world we are directly aware of, and noumenal-material refers to a mind-independent material world that some people believe exists.

I adopt a correspondence theory of truth. Sentences, ideas, mathematical structures are true if they correspond to something in noumenal reality. That correspondence does not have to be perfect, and can be purely structural. So things can be partially or nearly true.
“Material world” is a pre-philosophical concept. It refers to a world of planets, people, etc... moving around in three dimensions as time passes (or appears to pass). This works on a small scale down to the case of atoms, which unproblematically belong to that material world – or at least they have since Einstein's 1905 paper on brownian motion. Anybody can look down a microscope and observe atoms randomly bombarding suspended particles. We can't get any smaller without running into quantum theory.

Hilary Putman's defence of scientific realism looks irrefutable to me. Science works. Since this cannot be an ongoing miracle, so we must assume scientific realism is true. There must be a noumenal reality which corresponds to the phenomenal-material world and the explanation for the effectiveness of science is that our best scientific theories accurately reflect something in that noumenal reality. What is noumenal reality made of? This is a pointless question, because it makes no difference to us what it is “made of”, or whether it is made of anything at all. We might as well just think of it as (non-local) information. So science delivers truth, given two qualifications. 1: some scientific theories may yet turn out to be false, or partially false, and 2: even though science investigates “the material world”, noumenal reality may not actually be “made of material”.
Note: at this point what is known as “the hard problem of consciousness” has disappeared, because materialism has disappeared. Materialism is the belief that noumenal reality is material and that nothing else exists. If noumenal reality is information (or other non-material) then the question becomes something like “how does the information in a noumenal brain become my phenomenal reality?”

Quantum mechanics suggests an answer. Quantum theory is as true as a scientific theory gets (though it is incomplete). However neither science nor reason can tell us which metaphysical interpretation is true. It is the measurement problem that matters here: what collapses the wave function? What turns a set of quantum probabilities into a single observed outcome? Quantum mechanics is missing an observer.

There are only so many possible answers to this question.

1: The Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't really answer the question at all, which is why the other intepretations exist. It says measurements or observations cause the collapse, but then runs into serious trouble explaining what a measurement or observation actually is or why it plays such a pivotal role in reality. This theory implies reality has an objectively random component along with naturalistic determinism.
2: Many Worlds Interpretation. There is no collapse, so no observer is needed. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities continually branching off (into noumenal reality, since we can have no knowledge of them). MWI is completely deterministic, though it has the subjective impression of being random.
3: Hidden variable interpretations. Some hidden element (eg Bohm's pilot waves) is involved. The pilot wave somehow informs the wave function how to collapse, so no observer is required (though pilot waves are very strange ad-hoc creations with very strange properties). Hidden variable theories are deterministic.
There are other, more obscure, interpretations, but all of which are either completely deterministic or deterministic+random, apart from...
4: The Von Neumann/Wigner/Stapp interpretation says consciousness (or a participating observer outside of the physical system) collapses the wave function. Under this view the uncollapsed wave function belongs to noumenal reality and there is a participating observer that turns this set of quantum probabilities into a single observed outcome in phenomenal reality. This allows for what we might term “probabilistic supernaturalism” or maybe “naturalistic teleology” as in the case of Nagel's teleological explanation for the evolution of consciousness. (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False: DODGY TAX AVOIDERS.co.uk: Nagel, Thomas: 8601404707896: Books) It could involve all sorts of other things that might be “loading the quantum dice”, including libertarian free will or the will of god(s).

Please point out anywhere you think the above analysis is wrong.

And a question:

Why would anybody choose to believe in a completely deterministic or deterministic/random interpretation when they could alternatively choose to re-enchant the world? Why believe human existence is meaningless – that we are nothing but slaves to deterministic laws and randomness – when instead we could choose to believe in libertarian free will?

[Vortex2]

I reduced that screed using ChatGPT. I'm tired and still don't understand it.

1. **Your Mind**: Your mind is like your own personal video game screen. It shows you stuff you can see and touch.

2. **Big Game**: Imagine there's a bigger, hidden video game that you can't see but might be real.

3. **Truth**: If something in your game matches the hidden game, it's true.

4. **Science**: Science is like a cheat sheet that helps us understand our game and maybe the hidden game too.

5. **What's the Hidden Game Made Of?**: It's like asking what a video game is made of; it doesn't matter to us players.

6. **Being Aware**: It's like your game knows you're playing it. How does that happen?

7. **Dice Roll**: In science, there's a rule like rolling a many-sided dice but you only see one result.

### Choices:

1. **Look and See**: Some say the dice roll only when you look at them.

2. **Many Games**: Every dice roll starts a new game you can't see.

3. **Hidden Cheat Code**: Something we can't see decides the dice roll.

4. **Your Choices Matter**: This says your choices or wishes might affect the dice roll.


1. **Right or Wrong?**: Is this a good way to think about these big questions?

2. **Why Choose a Boring Game?**: Why believe in a game that plays itself or is random when you could think your choices matter?

[UndercoverElephant]

So you are saying that people who ponder really big ideas can't agree on what's true or real?

Yes, but it is more than that. There is a profound academic failing here. Academia is malfunctioning, in my opinion. I suspect not just in philosophy either. There is a game you have to play to survive in that world.

Err, OK.

That is why it needs 200,000 words. I shouldn't have posted that opening post.

[UndercoverElephant]

Maybe this is not quite what you had in mind with your post but it is a huge problem that I have found with materialism.

The problem is that when hard core physicists try to really drill down to the most fundamental particles - it turns out that those particles don’t really exist ‘in the wild’ at all except as vaguely defined probability waves.

So it seems that all attempts to pin everything down to materialistic certainties falls apart at the most fundamental level because there are no fundamental material certainties to pin anything on to.

Please see the post I made a few minutes ago.

I tend to lean towards process philosophy as an area that has some potential to drag our thinking towards a more useful understanding of the world.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

Yes.

[Default0ptions]

And with the length of that post you didn't refute it, or provide your own.

My mind exists. I see other beings like myself, I assume they have minds too, so rejection of solipsism. I equate my mind to Kant's “phenomena” and I label everything outside my mind as “noumena”. Here I include in “noumena” not just the “things in themselves” that correspond to my/our phenomenal world, but everything else that exists (other minds, other universes, gods, etc...). At this point the concept of “material world” can be joined to either phenomenal or noumenal to come up with two compound concepts – phenomenal-material refers to the material world we are directly aware of, and noumenal-material refers to a mind-independent material world that some people believe exists.

I adopt a correspondence theory of truth. Sentences, ideas, mathematical structures are true if they correspond to something in noumenal reality. That correspondence does not have to be perfect, and can be purely structural. So things can be partially or nearly true.
“Material world” is a pre-philosophical concept. It refers to a world of planets, people, etc... moving around in three dimensions as time passes (or appears to pass). This works on a small scale down to the case of atoms, which unproblematically belong to that material world – or at least they have since Einstein's 1905 paper on brownian motion. Anybody can look down a microscope and observe atoms randomly bombarding suspended particles. We can't get any smaller without running into quantum theory.

Hilary Putman's defence of scientific realism looks irrefutable to me. Science works. Since this cannot be an ongoing miracle, so we must assume scientific realism is true. There must be a noumenal reality which corresponds to the phenomenal-material world and the explanation for the effectiveness of science is that our best scientific theories accurately reflect something in that noumenal reality. What is noumenal reality made of? This is a pointless question, because it makes no difference to us what it is “made of”, or whether it is made of anything at all. We might as well just think of it as (non-local) information. So science delivers truth, given two qualifications. 1: some scientific theories may yet turn out to be false, or partially false, and 2: even though science investigates “the material world”, noumenal reality may not actually be “made of material”.
Note: at this point what is known as “the hard problem of consciousness” has disappeared, because materialism has disappeared. Materialism is the belief that noumenal reality is material and that nothing else exists. If noumenal reality is information (or other non-material) then the question becomes something like “how does the information in a noumenal brain become my phenomenal reality?”

Quantum mechanics suggests an answer. Quantum theory is as true as a scientific theory gets (though it is incomplete). However neither science nor reason can tell us which metaphysical interpretation is true. It is the measurement problem that matters here: what collapses the wave function? What turns a set of quantum probabilities into a single observed outcome? Quantum mechanics is missing an observer.

There are only so many possible answers to this question.

1: The Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't really answer the question at all, which is why the other intepretations exist. It says measurements or observations cause the collapse, but then runs into serious trouble explaining what a measurement or observation actually is or why it plays such a pivotal role in reality. This theory implies reality has an objectively random component along with naturalistic determinism.
2: Many Worlds Interpretation. There is no collapse, so no observer is needed. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities continually branching off (into noumenal reality, since we can have no knowledge of them). MWI is completely deterministic, though it has the subjective impression of being random.
3: Hidden variable interpretations. Some hidden element (eg Bohm's pilot waves) is involved. The pilot wave somehow informs the wave function how to collapse, so no observer is required (though pilot waves are very strange ad-hoc creations with very strange properties). Hidden variable theories are deterministic.
There are other, more obscure, interpretations, but all of which are either completely deterministic or deterministic+random, apart from...
4: The Von Neumann/Wigner/Stapp interpretation says consciousness (or a participating observer outside of the physical system) collapses the wave function. Under this view the uncollapsed wave function belongs to noumenal reality and there is a participating observer that turns this set of quantum probabilities into a single observed outcome in phenomenal reality. This allows for what we might term “probabilistic supernaturalism” or maybe “naturalistic teleology” as in the case of Nagel's teleological explanation for the evolution of consciousness. (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False: DODGY TAX AVOIDERS.co.uk: Nagel, Thomas: 8601404707896: Books) It could involve all sorts of other things that might be “loading the quantum dice”, including libertarian free will or the will of god(s).

Please point out anywhere you think the above analysis is wrong.

And a question:

Why would anybody choose to believe in a completely deterministic or deterministic/random interpretation when they could alternatively choose to re-enchant the world? Why believe human existence is meaningless – that we are nothing but slaves to deterministic laws and randomness – when instead we could choose to believe in libertarian free will?

/me quotes an absolutely massive post.

UE - I’m actually quite interested in giving you a properly considered reply and I’ll read through your posts on this as soon as I have the time to do them justice.

Thank you. It’s a good subject.

[UndercoverElephant]

I reduced that screed using ChatGPT. I'm tired and still don't understand it.

1. **Your Mind**: Your mind is like your own personal video game screen. It shows you stuff you can see and touch.

2. **Big Game**: Imagine there's a bigger, hidden video game that you can't see but might be real.

3. **Truth**: If something in your game matches the hidden game, it's true.

4. **Science**: Science is like a cheat sheet that helps us understand our game and maybe the hidden game too.

5. **What's the Hidden Game Made Of?**: It's like asking what a video game is made of; it doesn't matter to us players.

6. **Being Aware**: It's like your game knows you're playing it. How does that happen?

7. **Dice Roll**: In science, there's a rule like rolling a many-sided dice but you only see one result.

### Choices:

1. **Look and See**: Some say the dice roll only when you look at them.

2. **Many Games**: Every dice roll starts a new game you can't see.

3. **Hidden Cheat Code**: Something we can't see decides the dice roll.

4. **Your Choices Matter**: This says your choices or wishes might affect the dice roll.


1. **Right or Wrong?**: Is this a good way to think about these big questions?

2. **Why Choose a Boring Game?**: Why believe in a game that plays itself or is random when you could think your choices matter?

That's actually pretty good!

Although the last bit lacks the proper context. Yes, here I am saying why choose a meaningless game when you could choose a meaningful one, but there are potentially wider societal consequences of many people making the same choice. The point I am trying to make is that a collective move in that direction, especially if it involves the scientific community, could be a game-changer in other respects (especially political ones).

[Default0ptions]

Here’s a couple of thoughts.

I don’t believe we’re embedded in some kind of space time. Our perceptions of being embedded in such a reality are just like how we perceive ourselves to be embedded in, for example, Minecraft.

In Minecraft you’re embedded in an infinite world that actually only exists as a procedurally generated world in your phone or laptop.

I think that just like that, our experience of being in the world is just procedurally generated on the fly by collapsing probability waves. There is no space and time ‘out there’ that we are in.

Things like the speed of light limit and time distortion in differing gravity fields or velocity approaching the speed of light are artefacts of a limitation in processing speed in the substrate that we experience as the world, the universe, life, - etc

Sometimes it’s well worth throwing Kant etc out of the window and taking a good look at Socrates again.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/

[johnny]

So you are saying that people who ponder really big ideas can't agree on what's true or real?

I think those who ponder big ideas can certainly agree on what's true or real, generally. I know scientists who did it with peak oil, seemed to come naturally to most. The internet on the other hand....honest arguers can discuss and agree, as I discovered over the years. But during the ol' peak oil days, it was just faith based nonsense most of the time...with references to even scientists who should have (and maybe did?) known better.

One group is keen on science and believes everything is made of stuff you can touch, but they're stumped by some scientific puzzles.
Another group reckons we can't truly know what's real, and they've gone down a rabbit hole with their own ideas.

No need to bring those old school peak oilers into it. As least some of them ended up thinking on their own and digging out of the hole they had dug themselves into. As far as the stuff you can't touch, that sounds too much like equating quantum mechanics with philosophy. Philosophy might allow an infinite number of answers to all be irrefutable, but quantum mechanics doesn't appear to have that level of flexibility.

My answer is 4 angels, and it is so correct, that no one has dared attempt to refute it. That's philosophy for you.

[johnny]

Please point out anywhere you think the above analysis is wrong.

All of that was argument...the beauty of philosophy and yet for all that length...I didn't see the answer of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

And a question:
Why would anybody choose to believe in a completely deterministic or deterministic/random interpretation when they could alternatively choose to re-enchant the world? Why believe human existence is meaningless – that we are nothing but slaves to deterministic laws and randomness – when instead we could choose to believe in libertarian free will?

I don't even know what you mean by "re-enchant the world"? More Disneylands for Europeans?

And I can believe in human existence in its entirety being meaningless (the Sun is getting lighter, so sayonara amigo) just as I can that we all have libertarian free will. Are false choices based on philosophy so easy to work around? Strikes me that math and whatnot aren't so instantly malleable.

[UndercoverElephant]

Here’s a couple of thoughts.

I don’t believe we’re embedded in some kind of space time. Our perceptions of being embedded in such a reality are just like how we perceive ourselves to be embedded in, for example, Minecraft.

In Minecraft you’re embedded in an infinite world that actually only exists as a procedurally generated world in your phone or laptop.

I think that just like that, our experience of being in the world is just procedurally generated on the fly by collapsing probability waves. There is no space and time ‘out there’ that we are in.

All of that should have been obvious since Bell's theorem, but the implications have not impacted on the mainstream scientific community. Local realism is false.

Things like the speed of light limit and time distortion in differing gravity fields or velocity approaching the speed of light are artefacts of a limitation in processing speed in the substrate that we experience as the world, the universe, life, - etc

Maybe. That's too close to theoretical physics for me to bother holding an opinion, and I don't think it makes any difference to my agenda. Gravity is certainly a major mystery, but unlike consciousness it does not have social-spiritual implications. It doesn't appear that way, anyway.

[UndercoverElephant]

I don't even know what you mean by "re-enchant the world"? .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment