On the demand for explanation

The humanities are in something of a bind due to the fact that its works can only exist in a narrative form.  Good luck getting a grant application approved If your project does not make for a good story, with a premise, i.e. a well defined problem (not too big but not too small; relevant but also timeless), identifiable obstacles to solving the problem (the bad guys), a tidy set of solutions to the obstacles (the good guy) and a clear indication of how the solutions will advance the field (a happy ending).  Any essay, book, or talk is bound by the same rules.   But what if the world doesn’t operate on narrative principles?  That is, what if reality follows the laws of cause, effect, matter, energy, space, and time, to whose mathematical form story arcs are invisible?  If so, why should we expect narrative structure to adequately capture reality?

Consider Kahneman and Tversky’s work on hindsight bias (“creeping determinism”) which is the tendency for us to see past events as expected, predictable, or inevitable (in hindsight) all the while happily acknowledging that the future remains unpredictable. This combination is clearly hard to make coherent but a historical narrative is precisely the act of explaining notable past events, that is to say, making them seem obvious given the proper focus on the proper underlying conditions at the time.  That is, it is the following story: given the conditions and the following historical interpretation or theory, the event was bound to occur and, using this theory, one better understand current and future events. This once again fits a classic kind if story structure.

Next consider the ancient cosmological question: why is there something at all, rather than nothing?  Recently, physicists have started turning their attention this traditional piece of philosophy, for example Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe From Nothing. It is natural for astrophysics to address this question as the attempt to explain the Big Bang, at least in some fairly direct sense, amounts to the attempt to explain why there is a universe at all.  Cosmology naturally turns toward the issue.  

But explanation is constrained by the parameters of human reasoning in ways that threaten to make the cosmological question unanswerable.  For assume physicists have identified the absolute rock bottom ontological layer.  Perhaps it is 11-dimensional strings, or a quantum vacuum, or space-time loops, or what have you.  Whatever it is, imagine it turns out to explain all other physical facts, at least when combined with initial (boundary) conditions.  Now raise the cosmological question: why is there this rather than nothing?  Well, the explanation for the existence of, say, the quantum vacuum can take one of two forms: either it is explained by the existence of something else or it is self explanatory.  In the former case, the question is just pushed back and we will need to ask why there is that further being, and so on infinitely.  In the latter case, we have a circular explanation.  Neither of these satisfies.  Each is in fact a paradigm of non-explanation.  In philosophy’s long history, two of the primary means of showing a position to be problematic is to show that it leads to an infinite regress, and so fails to explain anything (e.g McTaggart’s argument agains the reality of time) or else that an argument is circular.  Along with the charge of incoherence, these are probably the three primary stopping points in philosophical and general argumentation.  

Similar points apply to other humanities as well, of course.  A historical explanation of a phenomenon that simply points to some other phenomena in need of explanation may satisfy those for whom the other phenomenon is sufficiently acceptable as a premise, but it will hardly address the cosmological question.  Nor will an explanation that casts some event as its own explainer.  

In general, explanation proceeds by appeal to something taken as given along with some kind of organizing principle to derive a conclusion that is the item to be explained.  But this process cannot go on forever.  It must reach an end point, which is something that is an unexplained explainer or else a self-explainer that can also somehow explain everything else.  But, again, the former is simply to beg off of giving an explanation and the latter is, famously, not the kind of thing that one can expect the natural sciences to turn up, given that they are designed to investigate the empirical world in all its contingency.  As philosophers have pointed out through the ages, the posit of some kind of divine entity, a necessary being that is the ground of all being, will logically do the trick: if something is a necessary being, then it’s existence is explained by its necessity; if this being is the ground of all else, then we have explained all.  It needn’t be pointed out that the natural sciences, and naturalistically inclined philosophers, are unlikely to consider such an explanatory path to be worth pursuing.

So our quest to answer the cosmological question seems to point inevitably toward theology.  Of course, this is only apparently the case because there is an alternative: not everything can be explained.  Not because the world is some kind of mystical entity but, rather, simply because our own cognitive limitations are not up for the task of explaining all that there is.  Perhaps, in other words, it is a shortfall of our cognitive architecture that we can only understand explanations in terms of boundary conditions and applicable laws/principles.  Maybe a universe could, for example, consist of an infinite series of dependencies: matter depends on energy which depends on space-time which depends on the quantum vacuum which depends on … ad infinitum.  Such a universe would be one that would seem to us to be inexplicable.  Nevertheless, it might still be.  

The point is that whenever we seek explanation we must eventually push up against the limits of the human demand for stories of a certain kind.  Given this perennial danger, the demand that all philosophical, historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, etc. theories fit into a neat narrative structure comes to seem question-begging and needlessly limiting of the possible models of reality that we might want to consider: why prejudge the outcome at the start by turning away from an explanation that lacks the standard sorts of narrative structure?  It is hard to imagine how, say, putting a string of equations on the board followed by “therefore, reality” could possibly explain anything, but perhaps the point is that while it might not explain anything to us, it nevertheless explains everything in some sense we cannot grasp.  Or, perhaps the demand for explanation itself is the result of cognitively limited beings trying to tell a story that captures a reality that extends beyond the scope of those limits.  Perhaps the demand for explanation and understanding is misguided from the start.

Are we bound to be unhappy?

David Benatar impresses me the more I learn of his work. I must confess that he is pushing me toward his brand of philosophical pessimism.  In this note I want to explore a Benatar-inspired hypothesis: that evolution through natural selection will favour dissatisfaction, fear, and pain, respectively, over satisfaction, calm, and pleasure, respectively.  In short, that we are bound for unhappiness.

Let’s start with satisfaction.  The hypothesis is that evolution will favour dissatisfaction over satisfaction because the cost of error in the direction of the latter is greater than the cost of error in the direction of the former.  If we are, say, prone to feel satisfied too early, then we will cease the activities that promote survival such as hunting, seeking, preparing, defending, and basically anything that requires serious effort.  If, on the other hand, we are prone to err on the side of dissatisfaction, even when something survival-promoting has happened, then we are simply prone to continue to engage in those activities that promote our continued existence.  Dissatisfaction is, in effect, the motivation to continue to fight for survival.  Hence, we are selected to become and remain dissatisfied more easily than to become satisfied.

Let me illustrate what I mean by way of a thought experiment (perhaps a very silly one in many ways).  Assuming the sensation of hunger pushes one to seek food, then having found something to eat, one ought not to become over-satisfied and too deeply relaxed at that point, for then one opens oneself up to all kind of risk: that someone will steal one’s food while one is taking it easy; that excess food will go bad because not preserved while one is off enjoying the feeling of satisfaction; that one will be unprepared for the next day’s hunt because one spent no time thinking of the next bout of hunger and preparing as a result; and so on.  In short, creatures who quickly get over the joy of securing food to focus on protecting what they have and preparing for future hunger will be better suited for survival. So, the feeling of satisfaction, which needs to be there to reward the effort, should be, from an evolutionary point of view, relatively fleeting and easily replaced with its opposite.

Next, let’s consider fear.  There are many things to be fearful of in this world, but to narrow things down here I will focus on fear of death.  Any creature who lacks a substantial fear of death will be less prone to fight and resist threats to its survival and hence the lack of fear will decrease the odds of making it.  It is, again, better from an evolutionary point of view to err on the side of more fear rather than less.  Evolution ought, then, to select for beings who are maximally disturbed by death, up to the point of becoming paralyzed.  We would not be well placed to survive if we froze in the face of threats, but below that level, more fear is probably an evolutionary advantage.  

Finally, as for pain, let us assume here that it is an indicator of damage.  Hence, pain can linger, and even be chronic, because damage can.  Pleasure, on the other hand, usually either: (1) indicates the cessation of pain, and hence the return to normal, in which case it will pass in favour of a feeling of normalcy; or (2) accompanies some positive good for the body or mind, in which case it will cease as soon as the good achieved its purpose.  For example, eating will give pleasure to the body because it corresponds to the inputting of nutrition, but once the nutrition is in, the body returns back to normal, and indeed needs to start thinking about its next meal.  So, there is reason for pleasures to, in general, quickly recede precisely because if they lingered they would tend toward excess satisfaction which would bring with it the risks mentioned earlier.  Pleasure has had to go down relatively quickly to ensure people will re-seek the good thing it accompanies.

So, I hypothesize that, given the evolutionary realities of our species' past, we are likely to be dissatisfied, fearful, and hurt more often than not.  If so, then Benatar’s anti-natalism seems psychologically well grounded.  Of course, it becomes counter-productive to become de-motivated by these things, as mentioned above, so we would expect people to have a built-in sense of optimism that works in opposition to dissatisfaction, fear, and pain. So I think we should expect that people profess more satisfaction than their situations might otherwise suggest, because in doing so they are more likely to continue the struggle. Moreover, natural variation will ensure that exceptions are born regularly: some will face all of the reasons for negativity with great equanimity and even happiness.  But if I am right, then unhappiness should be more widespread.

All of this is meant as speculation as to the psychology of happiness.  It isn’t intended to argue that life is objectively worthless or meaningless. Indeed, it is quite compatible with the reverse.  Life may very well be filled with objective goodness in every measure, and be more than worth fighting for in every way, yet it still be the case that human beings are more likely than not to be unhappy with their lot in life.  Indeed, given how many people report unhappiness after achieving the highest levels of success and fortune, the unhappiness-by-evoution hypothesis strikes me as likely.  Nonetheless, I remain optimistic myself in the existence of objective value, though I am unsure as to its ability to produce happiness.

The Subjectifying Impulse in Philosophy

Kant famously argued that knowledge of the general properties of reality could not be gained as a result of the mind conforming itself to the structure of the world but, rather, the other way around.  This was his ‘Copernican Turn’.  This is perhaps the most famous example of what I will call a subjectifying impulse in philosophy, the impulse to imbue the seemingly non-human aspects of the world with human qualities.  For example, Kant argued that space and time themselves borrow their formal structure from the formal features of possible human experience.

If one begins to look for it, one can find this sort of thing throughout philosophy, but there is a related maneuver that I want to mention here, which is the following: whatever the qualities of the human-independent world, they are unknowable as a result of the fact that our access to the world is necessarily mediated by representations, which are subjective so render it impossible to gain knowledge of how the world is independent of any representations or representational acts.

Knowledge of how the world is in itself, independent of human representations of it, would be what Bernard Williams called an ‘absolute conception’.  For many, the absolute conception is out of reach for our knowledge is perspectival in some way.  In Past, Space, and Self, John Campbell puts the difficulty with the absolute conception as follows:

What it demands is that one should build up a synoptic picture of the world, one that wholly abstracts from one’s own place in the throng, and then somehow identify one of the people so pictured as oneself. What is dizzying is the kind of complete objectivity, the degree of abstraction from one’s own busy concerns, that is required. A first interpretation is that what is wanted is a kind of top-down view, so that we think in terms of a kind of aerial photograph, and then one has to identify oneself as one of the people shown in the photo. But that would not be enough, for it would only give the viewpoint of the photographer, and we need a picture of the world that is objective, in that it is not from any viewpoint at all. (Campbell, p. 6)

I was reminded of the issue after reading this interesting interview with Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan.  Here is an excerpt:

I think philosophy presupposes the ability to do something that’s actually not possible for us to do’. This, she says, is to stand outside the relationship between ourselves and the world, to be able to see both ourselves and the world. We want to be able to understand the world from something like an objective point of view, to think about it with maximal detachment. ‘But unfortunately’, she continues, ‘we are a mind in the world, and not just in the world generally, but a very specific world, a particular world for each person. And so we have this regulative aspiration, but that’s at best a regulative ideal, not one that we can actually achieve

The question I want to consider here is, why is this impossible to do, rather than simply very difficult that demands careful, rigorous thought?  Here is some more from the interview:

The philosophical ambition is to tell us the way the world is independent of our representations, but that calls for us to represent the world, so we have this ambition to represent the world as it is without representation…  In trying, Srinivasan says, one runs ‘into a kind of paradox, because one is representing the world as the sort of world which cannot be represented’. The perspectivalist position – that ‘the world in itself is such that there is no world beyond our representations of it’ – exhibits a kind of ineffability

I think this does get at the heart of at least one way of expressing scepticism about the absolute conception, but I think the question remains: what exactly is it that is paradoxical or ineffable?  Sure, to represent the world we must engage in representation, that seems unobjectionable.  But to suppose that this entails that we cannot represent the world as it is independently of representation seems to me to assume that we can only represent representations, i.e. that all representations have content that includes representations.  True, all representations have content, but not all such content is itself representational.

Consider a sentence, such as “I am standing”, said by P and some time, T.  This sentence represents P as standing at T, but it is not necessary to assume that the utterance of “I am standing” is in part about itself.  The utterance may be about a person's relation to a time but it needn’t be about the representational item itself.  A person’s position at a time need have nothing to do with a sentence that expresses that content.

One of the interesting features of indexicals, such as “I”, “here”, “now”, is that they allow us to move from our local perspective to an absolute one.  “It is now noon”, said at T, is in one sense inextricably linked to its context of utterance, in that the content it expresses depends on that context.  On the other hand, there need be nothing perspectival or representational about that context.  For example, in this case the context is merely a time, T, which may well exist independent of any human perspective.  So I don’t see that representing the world via a sentence such as “It is now noon” is to represent the world as the kind of world that cannot be represented.  Rather, such sentences represent the world as it is in itself, even if in so doing we relate ourselves to a particular worldly context. 

As Heather Dyke persuasively argues (Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy) it is a mistake to suppose that features of our representations must be features of what we represent.  John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View) and William Alston (A Realist Conception of Truth) make similar points.  So I don’t see why we can’t use language, or other representational systems, to express content that does not implicate elements of those systems. 

So I, further, see no reason to assume that we each inhabit a unique, specific world.  Rather, we could very well share a common world even if we each have a unique set of representations of it.  The content of such representations can be shared in common. 

Suppose A says “B is all the way over there”, when A and B are separated by one kilometre.  Why not suppose that the content of the sentence/representation is, say: A and B are separated by 1 km?  Nothing impossible about that. 

Well, perhaps the idea is we must also add the following: And A thinks that 1 km is very far indeed.  That is, one might insist that part of what A is expressing is her evaluation of the distance.  Well, it is not hard to work that into the content.  For example, given the context, this extra content is equivalent to: A is at position P and believes that any position 1 km from P is very far away.  Then the sentence expresses the following content: A is at P, B is at Q, P and Q are separated by 1 km, and A believes any position 1 km from P to be very greatly separated.  In such a case, we are not representing the world as it is independently of representation, since we are representing A's beliefs.  But there is no reason to suppose this generalizes to all cases, so that all representations are reflexive.  Indeed, the objective distance between A and B is just such a content.