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Agency and naturalism

I don’t imagine this will come as any big surprise to anybody who’s thought about these very much, but it comes up enough in dealing with students — especially in intro philosophy classes — that I’ll write it down.

There’s a mutually reinforcing chain of connections that I think plays a pretty significant role for a lot of students in terms of entrenching them in a world view that many of them come to college (and my courses) with.

At one end of the links is a belief in some kind of God-like supernatural force or being in the universe. For some (but certainly not all) this takes the form of pretty traditional monotheistic deity; but for others, it’s a much more amorphous and maybe even quasi-pantheistic notion (more on that another time). They probably initially got this from family/breeding, and is likely supported further by links to how they think about death, and morality. I, of course, am not so sympathetic with this view, to put it mildly.

But at the other end of the chain is a view about human existence that seems to me both valuable and also nearly impossible to actually give up. This is the view of ourselves as in control of our actions and commitments, in some way responsible for our actions, both moral and creative, and in some at least partial way, the authors of our moment to moment paths through life.

I think that they — like me, and maybe you — take this latter conception of human existence to be one that they can’t really imagine rejecting. Furthermore, if they did reject it, they’d be leaving behind at least some of the most important and valuable (and experientially inescapable?) things about human existence.

And you don’t have to mix this all up with capital “M” “Moral Responsibility” to get this sense of value. Even people who might be willing to pay lip service to some kind of moral relativism are, I think, typically less likely to be completely indifferent to something like aesthetic responsibility: A poem or a song I write seems like an expression of my own feelings and experience, and as such requires some pretty robust notion of my activities as resulting from my personal experiencing of the world. I am in that way responsible for its content, even if there’s no objective facts about its worth, and in a way that I’m not responsible just by causing it to come about (as I would be if the poem or song were generated by an algorithm which used dice throws of mine as random number seeds).

So although this view comes to the surface most obviously in talking about free will and moral responsibility, I think it’s far more pervasive and central that that problem suggests. I might, for example, completely reject any notion of morality and moral responsibility, while holding tightly to this conception of myself as agent, and as “author of” or “in control of” at least certain sorts of my actions.

I’m fairly convinced that this notion of agency is deeper and more pervasive than almost anything about our experiential sense of ourselves and our relationship to the world — our “phenomenology of self”, if you like. But I think that this commitment is, unsurprisingly, linked up with ones that I find far less attractive, reasonable, and inescapable.

So here’s how I think it often goes, for at least a good chunk of smart and thoughtful intro student (and sure some others as well): Without some supernatural deity-like force in the universe, there’s only matter, biology, physics, or whatever left. But if these are all that’s left, we can’t make sense of how it is that our character or our experiences can be truly responsible for the apparently creative activities of our bodies — the writing of that poem, say. So without God-like supernaturalism, we have to give up something we not only really don’t want to give up, but something we can’t imagine how to give up — our commitment to the potency of our own experiences, and the fundamental idea of our conscious agency.

Or to put it the other way around, so as to make clear how much of the preconceptions are shared with a vaguely popular quasi-materialistic view held by some academic philosophers: True potency for the character of experience seems to require something more than biological and physical selves; so we have a dilemma: Either (the quasi-materialistic philosophers’ view) give up on true experiential potency (whatever that means), or they embrace something more than the bio-physical world in order to make room for that — a “something more” that seems to require something supernatural.

Of course, It’s exactly this that I think is just a false dilemma, grounded in the antecedent I’ve made explicit here: That true experiential potency and conscious agency requires a world-view that adds extra fundamental causal ingredients that non-physical and non-biological.

I have more to say about the noted philosopher’s side of this — some might be said here, and much in a less “lite” context. But for now, I just want to note how these two views which are seemingly almost diametrically opposed — that of a certain kind of naturalistic quasi-materialist philosopher, and that of a theistic semi-neophyte — are playing off the same central assumption. It’s hard to see how each side couldn’t take the other as strengthening they’re own hand: If the option is really rejecting true agency, then of course I should hold to my supernaturalism (or theism), the newbie thinks — even if that means accepting a theism that seems to have very serious flaws. And from the other side: If the option is really accepting some supernaturalism or theism, then surely I should keep to my quasi-materialism — even if that means accepting a rejection of the potency of experience and the agency of consciousness.

But if you can undermine the shared assumption, then both dilemmas fail, and you can have your agency and your naturalism too. (Which, of course, is the right view).

I’ll show why another time. Today, I just wanted to note how the dilemmas here naturally work to reinforce a kind of view that comes up in intro classes a lot.

What parts does experience have?

Here’s a kind of naturalistic mistake about what’s “really” in experience that seems to turn up in a lot of places: It’s the idea that some thing like 2-D “frames” of vision are “present” (and maybe all that’s really present) in visual phenomena. (This seems to show up not only in “naive” assessments, but in some parts of pretty serious writing on the phenomenological structure of experience.) But in the end, it seems like a pretty basic and fundamental mistake, where theorizing about the production of experiences gets run together with analyzing their character or content as experiences.

This mistake comes in two forms — both the “there are only frames as real parts of experience” form and the “frames are real parts of the experience (along with other things)”. Both are wrong; and it’s more interesting to take on the latter (weaker) version, since if you nail that, you nail the whole thing.

The most straightforward attack on this is really a phenomenological one. Consider carefully the perceptual presentation of a rectangular surface which is oriented in some way in space other than directly perpendicular to the line of sight of the subject — a table top, or the cover of a book resting on a flat surface, for example, where the subject is standing some small distance away. This is, of course, a common and natural situation that we encounter in everyday life.

And although this is definitely a bit of visual presentation that’s much more vivid and compelling in the real world, a picture here will at least help us talk about it. So, here’s a couple of simple real-world tables.

What shape does the top of the table in the foreground appear to be? Surely, at first glance, there’s no doubt that it appears to be rectangular, with the rectangle having an obvious oblique orientation in 3-D space — its closest edge is lower in the visual field, and the visible surface is facing upwards.

Of course, since I know a few utterly mundane things about geometry, optics, perspective, and projection (ones most everyone knows), I realize that what is literally projected to the eye at any given instant is some 2-D projection or image of the current scene, and in that 2-D projection, the part of the image that corresponds to the rectangular surface in the world is some odd not-quite-parallelogram quadrilateral.

This shape’s bottom edge is longer than its top edge; and none of the angles at the corners of the figure are identical with any other, or very close to right angles.

It takes a special act of focusing to bring out this shape, and to answer the most mundane of questions about it (e.g., which angle sharper — the one at the top of the figure, or the one at the bottom?). And often — especially in the real world case — it’s pretty close to impossible for most of us. People learn to do it better when they learn to draw well; but for most of us ordinary folks, the 2-D shapes optically projected by the 3-D layout onto, say, the retinal image, are pretty deeply unavailable to conscious introspection.

Given that, what possible reason is there to think that these shapes are “really” part of the stream of experience? Unless you think that all synthesis of incoming data must be done in experience, even a naturalistic assessment that somewhere in the perceptual system, this 2-D quadrilateral must be represented (and in my more radical moods, I’ll even question that) shouldn’t lead you to thinking that this representation is in any way a part of our conscious experience.

Other examples aren’t hard to find. Here’s a mundane one: Lightness (and color) constancy across different apparent illuminations is a very robust visual phenomenon. Again, the real world is best; but here’s a decent picture for illustration. The two squares with red dots are actually the same local shade, but look very difference because of some implicit information about their illumination. But there’s no reason to think that there’s any part of our experience such that the two squares are really experienced as the same, even though we might believe they shine the same level of light on the eyes.

Or in speech perception, think about the kind of refocus of attention from our normal listening to speech as meaningful utterance, to something like the focus on the stream of phonemes that we do when we try to do phonological transcription of utterances in our own native tongue. That fact that we can (with practice and training) do the refocus doesn’t mean that the phonological stream is “already there” at all, and especially doesn’t entail that it was already there as a part of the content of the experience. Whether that stream is there or not in pre-conscious processing is an empirical matter of human psycholinguistics. But the idea that it’s not there already in experience seems, if not conclusively proven, at least pretty strongly argued by the sort of considerations raised above.

As Merleau-Ponty famously points out, conscious analysis of the structure of experience should not be expected to retrace a path by which it was consciously synthesized. As we think about the structure of the experience and analyze, alter (by tracing shapes, intentionally blurring, or the like), and attempt to explain it, we shouldn’t expect that we’re necessarily unearthing the real already-present experiential structure, but more likely conjecturing aspects of what might go into a naturalistic and explanatory account of the mechanisms by which we — or better, our brains and sensory apparatuses — manage to cause such experiences to occur.

Playing existential detective

I finally got around to seeing I ♥ Huckabees. It was mostly just kind of silly, with a few good moments (my favorite is noted below). But it was a reminder of the kind of thoughts and concerns that students bring to philosophy classes that we mainstream teachers of philosophy don’t address so much.

There are probably two of these that are the most central and straightforward in the movie; the first we essentially ignore, and the second we talk about only in a roundabout way.

The first is the search for meaning in coincidence, and more generally the idea that we might find purpose and unifying meaning behind the events of our human lives. Few mainstream philosophers seem to take seriously at all the idea that the apparently contingent events of our ordinary lives — like who we fall in love with, what opportunities for action we face, and the like — are the way they are because some cosmic force is enforcing a fate or purpose on our lives. Even the religiously inclined (a small minority) don’t tend to assign to God such a role (for understandable reasons that I’ll talk about some other time). And for me (and, I think, many others) the idea of anything like fate is one of those ideas that just seems crazy, and the less said about it the better. (OK, I say a little about “fatalism” in order to contrast it with determinism in teaching the free will problem; but even there it’s used as a kind of wacky possibility used to map the terrain rather than a real possibility that somebody might actually believe.)

But like the characters in Huckabees, I think many students come in not only tempted by or even believing such a view, but also inclined to think that such a view is exactly the sort of thing that a “philosophical” view would provide them with or make sense of.

The second is the idea of seeing the “real” or “deep” nature of “reality” or “the universe” as opposed to seeing just the “surface” that we normally focus on. In Huckabees, the views that compete as candidates for the “real” view of “deep reality” are, on the one hand, a suggestion that everything is a connected and unified whole, and so there are no “real” divisions between me, you, chairs, and cheese balls; and on the other, the view that there is no unity at all, so that everything — including our selves — is a cloud of chaos, and no “human-level” descriptions “really” apply to anything. Roughly, it’s holism vs. nihilism.

Of course, standard intro-level philosophy will typically cover appearance ‘n reality issues, but overwhelmingly it’s in the guise of talking about skepticism and the possibility of having any knowledge at all. And it seems the concerns that students bring are often less that we can’t have any knowledge, but rather that we can have some real “deep” knowledge, but our ordinary “real world” apparent knowledge both (a) isn’t such at thing, and (b) is really somehow mistaken in some way, especially when we see it in contrast to the “real” and “deep” knowledge we “might” somehow get. In the end, I’m not sure we (or I, anyway) very directly address that inclination (perhaps because it seems to rely on some kind of “magical” thinking).

I also think both of those inclinations contribute to a real resistance to their taking anti-skeptical arguments (like some version of transcendental argument) very seriously. After all, if you hold onto the “true, deep, real knowledge” as contrasted with the knowledge of reality, skepticism seems almost trivially true.

Anyway, it also seems that the two themes in the movie (looking for underlying fate or purpose behind life, and looking for the “hidden real structure” of the world) share (not necessarily, but in practice) a suggestion that finding these hidden aspects of the world not only sheds light on existence, but that they in some way invalidate or conflict with the facts of ordinary human experience. But even if these were legitimate in themselves, why should they invalidate the other? Is it just the “call of The One” — the idea that there should be one fundamental set of truths about the world? And if not, then what is it?

OK, enough. I’ll end with my favorite bit in the movie: Jason Schwartzman and “Marky Mark” Wahlberg are smacking each other in the face with a big inflatable ball, and noticing that for a second, it silences the reflective anxiety and brings you to a pure and unreflective awareness. Marky Mark says “So we just need to do the ball thing all the time.” The “existential” mentor says “Don’t call it ‘the ball thing’; call it ‘pure being’.”

I think I’m gonna call it “the ball thing” from now on.