IN THIS SECTION Eddington goes far out of his field and gets into trouble. I think some of his trouble is based on his faith in the more than primitive psychological and neuro-physiological claims of his time. I told you, watch out for trouble when you see "neuro-" in front of something.
The first sign of that is in the next paragraph, "Our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind; but approximately enough for most purposes we may take it to be a set of electrical impulses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves." There was no "probably" about it. Being very careful with words, he doesn't go whole hog and say he's identifying the physical basis of "the mind" but " a sensation in someone's mind" as so many others might or have. One of the more common non-answers I got to my questions about how the brain made the physical structure to give an accurate idea of something external to it, how it even got started with that, wanted to use the Neo-Pygmalianist fetish that our brains are like the computers which were created to mimic what our minds do, an infinite recursion which is no more of an answer than "DNA" or "natural selection" or "random chance," . . .
Eddington gets deeper into trouble later in the passage by equating things that really are not the same thing, wanting to give a mechanical model of our minds by just jumping from the physical to the mental, a metaphor that would work - though I doubt they'll ever successfully make it to what the mind is even then - if the mind were, in fact, a material artifact. If those of us who doubt that the mind is a material entity are right, you might jump at something but you'll never reach the mind and all of our metaphoric imaging won't tell you why because all of them are based in the experience of physical reality. We have no language to do what would need to be done because all of our language is based in our address of the external world, which we experience as sensations through our senses and the other living beings whose internal minds we, as well, can only know on an articulate basis through those same senses. To reach beneath those in addressing other people and animals is based on what seems like a leap of faith and at least in what can be articulated in words and by metaphor, it is that. And that is not susceptible to scientific method or language or modeling.
Here, addressing The Concept of Structure, Eddington the mathematical physicist is showing that even that supposedly most determinedly objective of endeavors leads even the most careful of scientific thinkers to mistake what works in their address of physical reality, under the right conditions, with the right prerequisites met, done honestly and carefully AND MODESTLY is not guaranteed to work for everything, not even on a theoretical basis. If I am right that minds are not merely physical but something else, then it is just a hard fact that science and the human practice of language is not going to give it the intelligible, communicable explanation that Eddington rightly noted was the sole achievement of the mathematical address of physical experience. It was quite clear in a lecture that Eddington gave nine years earlier,* that he should have known that.
After this general synthesis of structure, we are in a position to describe any particular portion of the structure in the terms in which physical knowledge is ordinarily expressed. This will provide an alternative (physical) description of the original sensation, and this structure has been incorporated in the structure which constitutes the physical universe, we can describe them in physical terms. Our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind; but approximately enough for most purposes we may take it to be a set of electrical impuses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves.
I certainly would question this passage first because, "our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind," is putting it mildly even now, not to mention more than seventy years ago. We have no way to make the jump between the event and the experience, the sensation of it in our consciousness. No more than we have to get from "is to ought," Sam Harris pretending he has done so is a more comic version of Thomas Hobbes claiming he'd squared the circle.
What Eddington does here is common enough, describing an assumed physical mechanism of what he assumes happens in the brain, but he equates that with both the experience and the sensation when it's no more of an explanation for either than the world round transmission of a Youtube, its content as put there by its maker or for the understanding of it by the viewer by this fascinating description of the role erbium plays in that transmission.
His claims about what "approximately enough for most purposes" is not an approximation, it is an explanatory model for something that may well not be susceptible to model making. If that is true to take a "set of electrical impulses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves" to BE the conscious experience of external things is wrong.
It is important to notice that the interpretation of sensory experience, like the interpretation of a cipher, includes tow distinct problems. "Interpreting a cipher" may mean the procedure of discovering the code, or it may mean decoding a particular message with the code already known. In the same way, the procedure of interpreting our sensations as information about an external world may refer to the problem, which stands at the beginning of physics, of associating the fragments of structure in consciousness with the structure of an external universe; or it may refer to the particular information obtainable from each new sensation when we apply our accumulated physical and physiological knowledge. In regard to the initial problem a single sensation is no more informative than a single letter in a cipher of which we have not the key. But after the initial problem has been solved, we are able to interpret sensations individually as a cipher is decoded letter by letter. A sensation of noise informs me of an electrical disturbance of a particular nerve-terminal - which, of course, does not mean that it informs me that this is the correct physical description of what has occurred. The description is provided beforehand by the solution of the initial problem so that it is ready for use when the sensation informs me that an event has occurred to which it is applicable.
The disturbance at the nerve terminal is generally the result of a long chain of causation in the physical world. In familiar thought we usually leap to the far end of the chain of causation, and say that the sensation is caused by an object at some distance from the seat of the sensation. In the case of he visual sensation caused by a spiral nebula, the object is not only remote in space but may be millions of years distant in time. Causation bridges the gap in space and time, but the physical event at the seat of sensation (provisionally identified with an electrical disturbance of the nerve terminal) is not the cause of the sensation it is the sensation. More precisely, the physical event is the structural concept of which the sensation is the general concept.
Here even the very careful, precise and honest Eddington makes the typical mistake of a scientist of thinking that what works in the their modeling is as a physical description of something which, if not physical, is no more real than the explanations of the Just-so Stories, it is a bad habit in a physicist, it is the common everyday practice of the pseudo-scientific lore about minds, behavior. I really think in these last sentences Eddington was slightly guilty of the same kind of eliminative reductionism as the contemporary Behaviorist school of psychology was guilty of, dismissing things that they couldn't or didn't care to address, dismissing their importance. The logical positivists in philosophy, too, come to think of it. I think that is bound to happen when science runs up against what it can't deal with, certainly the case in modern philosophy, less so in many older ones. Modernism is wedded ideologically to what leads to dishonesty.
Sensations are not merely general concepts for plugging into an imaginary structure, they are the totality of what someone's mind can know of things external to it, even the very body of the person whose mind is the totality of their experience of everything. Including structure. Our sensations of the external world AND OUR OWN BODY is far more than what Eddington reduces it to for purposes of saying things about it and fitting it into his quite brilliant explanation of the practices of what is taken of as the hardest of physical science. He wants to make that leap because the issues that arise from the fact of it being our individual minds and, collectively, the minds of scientists turn out to be inseparable from the human activity of science. Minds started impinging on the activities of physicists in a way that couldn't be ignored early in the 20th century, exactly in physics. It certainly was not the only science that was true of but in the others the role that the human minds who were the ones doing the science didn't need to be directly addressed by scientists in their formal work, though it certainly should have been addressed in the so-called "behavioral sciences" and in all of science that relied on the creation of scenarios and stories, evolutionary science is absolutely dependent on that risky practice. I think that a good percentage of the trouble that those sciences have generated, the psudo-sciences and the real ones that have a huge amount of human ideological content such as evolutionary biology, cosmology, just about anything with "neuro-" or "cognative" in its label come from ignoring that fact, it makes them a lot less careful and immodest in their claims. In the case of natural selection, which is intrinsically a matter of made up stories, it led to genocide and the blighting of the lives of hundreds of millions and likely billions. That was coming to a head even as Eddington was giving that lecture, it was happening in just about all of the English speaking countries in a prelude to that.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as son as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
Science And The Unseen World: Swathmore Lecture 1929
I wonder if Eddington's lectures on these two occasions differed because in 1938 he was talking to his fellow scientists and in 1929 he was, I assume, speaking to an audience of his fellow Quakers. If that's the case then I think this passage from the earlier lecture is far more defensible as an honest statement of fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment