10

the limits of understanding

 

 

If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we could not.

Emerson Pugh

Comparing our brains with bird brains or dolphin brains is almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by one of the innovations that has invaded our brains and no others: language.

Daniel Dennett

I’d be as surprised if humans could understand all things as I would if a dog could.

Noam Chomsky

The philosophical canon is not short of attempts to explain our difficulty in tackling profound problems. To Plato, our understanding was limited by the second-rate world in which we found ourselves, and to Kant the limits were the boundaries of our imagination, while for Wittgenstein they were found in the language that defined those boundaries. But each of these thinkers also had a constructive message. With Plato we could use the physical world to gain hints about the true world beyond it; with Kant we could investigate space and time by examining our mental faculties; and with Wittgenstein we could take a step further back and elucidate our grammar. Given the failure that constitutes a large part of all these methods, it is surprising that it has taken so long for someone to propose an error theory without a happy ending. Enter Colin McGinn: a philosopher and former punk rock drummer from the rainy English mining town of West Hartlepool.

McGinn teaches in the same department as Jerry Fodor at Rutgers and also lives in Manhattan. When I met him he had just finished writing his autobiography, The Making of a Philosopher.1 The book tells the story of a rebel, but there was little anger visible in McGinn, a small, taut, talented gymnast with platinum blond hair and pale blue eyes. I think he smiled when his cat chewed up my microphone, but I could not be sure as he has the demeanour of a Zen Buddhist. He was once introduced to the actress Jennifer Aniston at a party. Although Aniston was impressed to meet a professional philosopher, the encounter ended in embarrassment when she proved never to have heard of Kant, Descartes or Bertrand Russell. McGinn subsequently agonized over what he describes as the ‘interpersonal discomfort’ caused to the poor multimillionaire movie star. Jennifer Aniston is not the only luminary he has made uncomfortable. One of the grand old men of British philosophy, michael Dummett, once subjected him to an angry tirade during a seminar, and Daniel Dennett has dismissed his claims as ‘embarrassing’. The claims to which Dennett was referring are at once bold and modest: most philosophical problems, McGinn believes, will never be solved because of our intellectual shortcomings. McGinn’s early underachievement in the classroom may have influenced him in adopting this view. He failed his eleven-plus exam, and was sent to a secondary modern school in Blackpool but still made it to Manchester University, where his heroes were John Lennon and Bertrand Russell – a difficult pair to imitate at the same time. Opting for the latter, McGinn began smoking Russell’s favourite brand of pipe tobacco in the hope that it would make him as clever as the man himself. Finding that it did not, he moved on to Noam Chomsky, who was to become his greatest influence. McGinn was struck by the dark flipside of Noam Chomsky’s nativist philosophy – the thought that with innate knowledge comes innate ignorance. If there are things which it is in our nature to know, then our constitution might also bar us from apprehending certain other truths.

McGinn founded the philosophical school known as the ‘mysterians’, or the ‘new mysterians’, to differentiate them from the old, dualist mysterians as well as the punk rock pioneers ‘? and the Mysterians’ of 96 Tears fame (McGinn is often mistaken for a band member). His classic statement of mysterian doctrine, Problems in Philosophy,2 was provisionally named ‘The Hardness of Philosophy’ until the publisher convinced him that a book with such a title would never sell. McGinn writes that there are two sorts of questions: problems and mysteries. Problems are those questions it is within our capacity to answer, whereas a mystery is a question that falls outside our cognitive space: ‘it is analogous to the idea of items that lie outside of a creature’s phenomenal or perceptual or affective space – sensations it cannot feel, properties it cannot perceive, emotions it cannot experience. If we suppose that the creature possesses “organs” that define these spaces, then mysteries are questions for which the given creature lacks the requisite intellectual organ(s).’³ We make so little progress in philosophy ‘for the same reason that we make so little progress in unassisted flying – that is, we lack the requisite equipment. We have gaps in our cognitive skills as we have gaps in our motor skills – though in both cases we can see what we are missing and feel the resulting frustrations.’⁴ So philosophy’s difficulty is not due to the ambiguities in our conceptual scheme or the intricacy of its questions, nor is it a result of the meaninglessness of those questions – it is a simple matter of physiology. It is not what the subject matter is like intrinsically that makes it mysterious (or obvious). The world itself is flatly neutral, but due to the limits of our particular cognitive architecture we do not perceive or understand it as such. McGinn contends that our experience of profundity when we examine philosophical problems comes from a tendency to project our shortcomings on to the mysteries in question, so raising the spectre of occult ontology. The subject matter of mysteries has no special ontological status: ‘Steam engines do not turn occult when the possible world in which they exist happens to lack any creatures with the mental capacity to understand their workings.’5 Many thinkers have imagined a world beyond our grasp, but few have expected it to be quite so mundane.

If there are intelligent beings on other worlds, the questions they regard as problems and mysteries may differ from our own. The answer to a question that to us seems insoluble might be quite obvious to a creature possessing radically different faculties of understanding. McGinn describes these imaginary beings as moving in a different ‘cognitive space’, just as birds and fish move in different motor spaces according to their physical constructions. However, questions that we find simple, such as learning the basic properties of space and matter, might seem to them impossible tasks. McGinn suggests the possibility of beings that are incapable of conceiving of negative numbers. We can also imagine the perplexity with which the inhabitants of a two-dimensional universe would greet the idea of three-dimensional objects, or how difficult it would be for someone born without a visual cortex to imagine the power of sight. As thinking beings we do have to have some kind of cognitive architecture, but the possession of one variety might exclude another. As Noam Chomsky put it to me:

We are part of the organic world and not angels. That means that we have fixed capacities. These capacities are highly structured. If they weren’t then we couldn’t achieve anything. What enables them to produce a complicated output also puts a constraint on that output. So for any creatures there will be a difference between problems and mysteries – between things that are within the reach of our cognitive capacities and those that are too hard for us to explore.

In other words, to be capable of one form of knowledge you have to be incapable of another:

To be capable of becoming a human you have to be incapable of becoming a bee. Of course, if you have no internal structure at all then you’re not capable of becoming anything. If you have internal instructions that enable a certain course of development to take place to produce a complex output, then that very set of instructions is going to prohibit other outputs. Then comes the question of how much the range of our cognitive faculties overlaps with the interesting truths about the world.

Perhaps we could alter ourselves to acquire the requisite faculties so that we could solve our mysteries, a suggestion which McGinn cautions against:

It might be that we are so constituted that, in order to have the philosophical knowledge we desire, we would have to be totally different sorts of psychological being: we might have to sacrifice all that is distinctive in human nature, our very mode of sensibility, in order to possess the kinds of faculties that would smoothly deliver philosophical knowledge. And this might be a type of being we would prefer, on balance, not to be…philosophical aptitude might be a trait we would rather do without.6

McGinn believes that humans have a natural method of understanding phenomena. This he calls the ‘CALM conjecture’ – standing for ‘Combinatorial Atomism with Law-like Mappings’, although a simpler epithet might be ‘reductionism’. To understand an object is to be familiar with its component parts and the ways in which they interact over time. It is to be able to take something apart and put it back together again. To understand physical substances such as water, we must be aware of the atomic elements that combine to give them their macroscopic qualities. In the case of human organs such as the heart and liver we need to know their constitution and role in the body. Geometric figures require us to know the lines, points and angles from which a square or triangle is composed. McGinn’s point is that philosophical subject matter tends to defy decomposition. For example, our conscious thoughts are made possible by electrochemical activity in the neurons of the brain. But when I am aware of a grey cat, my experience is not literally made up of neurons. If it were made up of anything it would be phenomenal qualities such as shape, colour and furriness.

The physical processes inside one’s skull can be analysed in reductive terms, with the cellular structures and chemical reactions elucidated, nerve impulses tracked and an overall picture of brain activity correlated with speech and perception. However, it remains a mystery as to why all this activity should produce conscious experience. And, according to McGinn, no amount of further investigation of that activity will yield an answer. Linguists famously have a difficult time explaining the workings of the innate language faculty we all possess, even though they themselves are in full possession of this faculty. There is nothing strange about this because we should not expect the component of mind that yields ordinary linguistic knowledge to be penetrable by that which seeks reflective theoretical knowledge. So, in attempting to analyse concepts from commonsense psychology such as ‘intention’ and ‘belief’ we are ‘bringing one mental organ to bear on another, but this may be as futile as trying to pump blood with the kidneys’.7 There is no reason why we should succeed since consciousness was designed as a vehicle of mental representation rather than an object of it. But to creatures differently constituted, the connection between the mental and the physical may be as uncontroversial as the workings of the heart and lungs.

While McGinn wonders what these strange beings might be like, several of them seem to be walking the Earth in the form of philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland. These optimists believe that the mysterians have sold reductionism short. Churchland told me that the problem with McGinn’s theory is that one can never know when it applies. A problem may seem insurmountable, but a breakthrough might be just around the corner, and we will never find out if we start dismissing problems as mysteries. An impasse is no evidence for a mysterian barrier. Mysterian philosophy may amount to mere defeatism prompted by the vast expanses of time that are sometimes required to solve a problem. For example, hand axes were around for 30,000 years before someone thought of fastening an axehead to a shaft, even though human cranial capacity did not change appreciably in that timescale. One would think that a caveman chipping away with the same tools that had been used for 29,000 years would have reason enough to believe that no better technology would be conceived, but we know that he would have been wrong. As Churchland once wrote, ‘Now suppose we do find some phenomenon really mysterious. This is a psychological fact about us – not a metaphysical fact about the nature of the world. It is a fact about what we do and do not know, about where science has and has not reached.’8 Though mysterianism is a theory about our mental faculties, these, as physiological facts, are in the domain of nature and as such cannot be determined from our instinctive perplexity.

Mysterianism may stand as a piece of speculative psychology, but it must also fall as one. There are no unchallenged candidates for mystery. McGinn himself picks the problems of the self, free will and knowledge among them – three questions which philosophers have given a pretty good account of in recent years. As for the problem of the mental arising from the physical, Dennett even named one of his books on the subject Consciousness Explained. If there are things we are constitutionally incapable of understanding, then where to draw the line will clearly be one of them, as this would seem to require our being able to stand on both sides of it. That is to say, a paradox would be involved in knowing enough about the issue to say why we can never comprehend it. If there is anything we are incapable of knowing, it is whether or not mysterianism is correct.

There are two ways in which parts of the world may be beyond our comprehension: either a phenomenon within our experience is ineffable, or we might be incapable of noticing its existence. The question is whether we can comprehend all that we can apprehend, and there is reason to suspect that the answer is yes. Presumably, cats and dogs do not wonder what the strange inscriptions of human writing are all about. They do not realize that there is such a thing as writing at all, and presumably this is why cats see nothing wrong in settling down to sleep on the newspaper you are reading. As Bernard Williams remarked of moral values, as soon as we come into contact with an alien culture and recognize one of its practices as representing ethical thought, it ceases to be incommensurable with our own value system. We would never think of truly incommensurable values as values at all, if the idea of such values even makes sense. The sonar sense, or echolocation, employed by bats is often cited as something that precludes our knowing what it is like to be such a creature. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel writes that: ‘Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like,’ which leads him to argue that ‘there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language’.9 However, sonar is a mode of representing data rather than a source of data in itself (in the sense relevant here, that is – since we have data that it exists and also know reasonably well how it works). Being excluded from representing things in a particular way is different from being unable to represent them in any way.

One could argue that our inability to experience echolocation is not a philosophical problem at all, but an unmysterious physical problem, much like not possessing a car. The English philosopher D. H. Mellor deals with the problem of selfhood in a similar way. I might wonder why I am me, rather than someone else, such as Bill Clinton or Britney Spears or my next-door neighbour, and seek facts in the world that caused Me (my ego) to be me (Nicholas Fearn). Because there can be no such facts, my own existence can seem mystifying – I might wonder whether someone else could have been Nicholas Fearn, or whether I could have been someone else, or no one at all. Mellor explains that such enquiries are like asking why it is Tuesday today: ‘Once we know what a self is, there need be no more mystery about that than there is about what it takes to be this room when we know what a room is.’10

We can ask whether it is our abilities or the abilities of our tools that are supposedly insufficient for understanding bat experiences. If it is our own physical, intellectual faculties, then we are capable of very little once all our tools – our vocabularies, scientific methods, mathematics – are taken away. But if our tools are allowed then things look brighter, since there is potentially no limit to what tools we might develop and use. For example, our lack of a sense of echolocation has not stopped anyone from using high-frequency microphones and scanners to research theses on bat sonar. Neither would anyone suggest that there are multiplication sums we cannot understand because the number of digits involved precludes even the greatest mathematical genius from working out the answer without the aid of a computer. Some tools, such as logic and adjectives, seem so close as to be a part of us, whereas others, such as supercomputers, seem to provide us with an understanding at one remove. Physicists often explain phenomena with highly counter-intuitive theories. These solutions may be difficult for most of us to comprehend – and, as with quantum theory, perhaps no one can understand them completely – yet they are the answers nonetheless. They are the answers because if you do the maths, they are what you get, even if you have difficulty translating the calculations into a physical process that one can imagine.

The Christian philosopher Peter Van Inwagen sympathizes with the mysterians, but suggests another possibility:

Individual achievement in philosophical knowledge is possible, even though we can’t pass on this philosophical knowledge in a reliable way, at this stage of history, whereas scientific knowledge (though maybe not the creative process) can reliably be passed on to others simply by teaching and textbooks. Maybe you can have knowledge, or at least justified true belief, in philosophy, but the grounds of your certainty are inarticulable.

I asked him if he himself knew anything incommunicable. ‘I hope so,’ he replied, ‘though this probably has more to do with God than me. If there were no incommunicable reasons for beliefs then we’d believe a lot less than we do. You might consider people’s political beliefs, for example. They come up with communicable reasons for them, but they don’t convince anybody else.’ The brothers Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus have propounded a quasi-mysterian account of this view. The aim of philosophers from Socrates to Kant was to divine the nature of universals such as Good, Truth and Beauty. If we knew their intrinsic nature we would be better equipped to act in accordance with them – to behave properly, judge propitiously and reason wisely. We imagine that we stumble our way towards knowledge, first noticing particular cases of a truth before realizing the rule or principle that unites all facts of the given kind and then applying it to divine new insights. It seems, then, that we get so used to employing this rule that we forget we are doing so, and when asked about the rules we are using we are unable to reply.

Socrates found this to be true of many experts in ancient Athens, and spent his time trying to extract the rules from those forgetful individuals. In Plato’s early dialogue Euthyphro, the father of philosophy interrogates the eponymous prophet as to the nature of piety. Like the experts of Plato’s other dialogues, the best Euthyphro can do is to give examples of pious acts, recounting mythological tales of gods and men behaving in a way that everyone agrees is pious. But when Socrates lost his patience, demanding to know the rules by which the prophet could recognize these as cases of the virtue, Euthyphro was lost for words. The same story is repeated in many other dialogues, in which Socrates’s hapless guest is able to make confident judgements within his area of expertise yet cannot articulate how he generates them. Their tormentor concluded that these supposed authorities were in fact as ignorant as he professed himself to be, but, as the Dreyfus brothers explain:

Plato admired Socrates and saw his problem. So he developed an account of what caused the difficulty. Experts, at least in areas involving non-empirical knowledge such as morality and mathematics, had, in another life, Plato said, learned the principles involved, but they had forgotten them. The role of the philosopher was to help such moral and mathematical experts recollect the principles on which they act.11

However, the brothers claim that Socrates got learning entirely the wrong way round. They contend that rules are only for beginners and that the greatest expertise is the ability to discern endless special cases without recourse to rules. For example, we all know how to tie our shoelaces, but we cannot say how to do it. Yet there was probably a time for each of us when we could do a better job of explaining – at the stage when we had to think very carefully in order to perform this task. Now that we are used to it, we have forgotten the explicit steps involved as we no longer need to cognize them explicitly in order to get the job done – ‘Normally an expert does not calculate. He does not solve problems. He does not even think. He just does what normally works and, of course, it normally works.’12 Thus to ask an expert for the rules he is using is to force him to regress to the level of a beginner and state the principles he learned in school, and with the awkwardness of remembering comes the awkwardness of his early career. A beginner behaves like a particularly inefficient, heuristically programmed computer, whereas an expert acts intuitively.

Colin McGinn has come to terms with what he regards as the insolubility of philosophical problems. He told me that he was as comfortable as ever with his mysterian views. As he wrote in a footnote, ‘I take wry pleasure in the thought that [my theory] will probably be the orthodox opinion in the dying stages of the sun’s heat.’¹³ If the Dreyfus brothers are right, then some of the questions deemed unanswerable by the mysterians were settled long before philosophers got to work.