In various conversations after my last series of posts, I was surprised to find that that my friends and interlocutors reject ideas much more basic than the religious arguments I was espousing. Rather, the primary disagreements seemed to have much more to do with philosophical questions about the nature of Truth and existence. Specifically:
- Is there an objective reality?
- Can our experience be explained purely in reductionist terms?
- Do symbols have meaning absent anyone to interpret them?
In this post, I’d like to address the first of these questions. I’ll then go on to explore the second two in subsequent posts.
I commented in a previous post that, “I believe that there exists a reality external to myself and that my senses give me some ability to experience that external reality as it actually is. I believe these things not because I have been convinced that they are true, but rather, because I cannot think of any way to make sense of my experience if they are not.” To this, a friend asked, “Isn’t it possible to understand the world purely in terms of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity?”
As I understand my friend’s argument, it is as follows: We can know for certain that we exist because we cannot doubt our own subjective experience. As Descartes put it, “Cogito ergo sum.” One part of our subjective experience is that we seem to encounter other subjective beings. Because we have an experience of subjectivity ourselves, it is reasonable to assume that these seemingly subjective beings are, in fact, also subjective beings. Once one makes this assumption, we can understand our shared “inter-subjective” experience purely in terms of the narratives we tell one another — without needing to invoke any metaphysical claim about whether or not those narratives are grounded in anything at all.
If I have grasped the argument properly, I think there are two fundamental flaws with it. First, I don’t think there is any way to conceive of another subjective being without first assuming the existence of an objective reality. To define anything else as “other” implies an ability to distinguish it from one’s self. It implies a sort of epistemological measurement that is only coherent if there is some context that allows us to discriminate between “my subjective experience” and “an experience that is not my own.” In more mathematical terms, we are talking about a classification problem. Like any classification problem, it only makes sense if there is a hypothesis space, defined by a feature set, that we can somehow partition. This all happens prior to the admitted assumption that these other seemingly subjective beings truly have their own subjectivity. As soon as one believes that there is something other than one’s self, one must believe that there is some distance between one’s self and that other being; the notion of distance is degenerate without a pre-established set of axes.
Now, one might posit that the axes of the “me vs. them” problem are themselves a construct of our own subjective experience and that that construct need not have any sort of connection to an independent “reality”. However, this is a philosophical dead end that doesn’t really lead to the “inter-subjectivity” that my friend was positing. If the totality of our experience, even the very means by which we delineate the world, is merely our own mental construct, then there is absolutely no reason to make the “me vs. them” distinction at all. Put another way, if “them” just means, “the part of my subjective experience that I distinguish from ‘myself’ according to some metrics that I’ve defined”, one hasn’t really isolated an independent subjective being — one has posited figments of one’s own imagination. At its core, this is no different from saying, “Man is the prisoner of his own mind.” This could be true, but if it is, it immediately ends any discussion, as there is no basis for reaching outside one’s self.
To argue for independent subjectivities in the absence of an objective reality seems to me an attempt to turn to “democracy” to solve a problem that is fundamentally undemocratic. The idea, I think, is to “solve” the “I’m a prisoner of my own mind” problem by speculating that, if we can can at least partially agree on what the prison looks like, then “philosophy” can become an exploration of the nature of prison life. And yet, it’s impossible to express the very idea without invoking a concept of “we”, which itself is a product of “me vs. them”. The argument is entirely circular and underscores the fact that skepticism itself has to be based on a philosophical tradition that takes an objective reality for granted — at least if that skepticism isn’t going to lead to total isolation.
This brings me to my second point. Even if there is some way to conceive of intersubjective existence that escapes the problem I’ve outlined above, there is an additional question about why it is somehow more “reasonable” to assume the existence of independent subjectivities than it is to assume the existence of an objective reality. The superficial answer is that, since one has an experience of one’s own subjectivity, we know that subjectivity exists. Therefore, to assume that other beings have subjectivity is merely to extend a known reality to others, as opposed to fabricating a totally new construct whole cloth. It is a more “conservative” assumption.
The problem here is that partial truths are often totally misleading. A scientist who forgets a key variable in his experiment is no more likely to come to a sound conclusion than some other person who models the world erroneously though factors well correlated with the phenomena under study. If fact, he may be much further off the mark. There is nothing “conservative” about minimizing the number of assumptions that one makes if, in doing so, one establishes a system of thought more convoluted than some alternative that is simpler, but based on one or two more axioms. This is especially the case when, as with skepticism, the “simpler” axioms defy our common sense experience.
Nobody starts out doubting whether or not there is an objective reality. Take a toy away from a child, and the child does not console himself by wondering whether or not the toy was ever “really” there in the first place. It is only after we’ve developed the formal language of philosophy that we can even begin to ask, “How do I know that I know what I know?” The question is unanswerable because it’s recursive, but if we allow or own philosophical constructs to undermine themselves, then we have not come nearer to actual “knowledge”. The skeptic may think of doubt as what remains after one has thrown out everything about which one cannot be certain, but in fact, this gets things backwards. The perceived need to disregard the uncertain arises out of a commitment to a proposition that is itself rather dubious — namely that it is somehow reasonable to doubt everything. And once again, we’ve run into the problem of recursion.
As any computer programmer will tell you, recursion simply doesn’t compute if you don’t have a base case that eventually grounds a function. I argue that we see the same thing in philosophy. At the end of the day, there has to be some foundation that we take as self-evident. That foundation cannot be our own subjectivity because, if we stop there, we are left with the question, “How did I come to be a subjective being in the first place?” I don’t think this question is answerable within our own limited mental context, and that’s precisely the point. The fact that we don’t and can’t have all the answers points us beyond ourselves to something greater — that is, some objective reality that is not contingent on us.
