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To Susan: Stones, Sticks, and Snakes
I suppose many of us who are tired of intellectuals’ claptrap are either already fond of the following anecdote, or will be fond of it once we’ve read it:
Real, lived experience should always trump fancy mental models, amirite? Pity, then, that our real, lived experience is fancy mental models. What we experience isn’t raw data, but something already heavily processed by our unconscious mental models before we’re even aware of it. We can compare the tale of the stone to the tale of the stick and the snake:
Yes. It’s a TEDx excerpt. Snicker if you want. But the anecdote takes about five minutes. A jolly Australian walks through the bush. He feels a stick scratch his leg. Then he nearly dies. Six months later, he’s walking through the bush again, he feels a venomous snake bite his leg, and yet he’s completely fine. Why?
Because raw sensation isn’t.
During the first walk, before our jolly Australian is even aware of it, his brain decides to ignore the irritated nerve endings frantically signalling to it that they’ve been envenomated in favor of the (completely unconscious) hypothesis that he’s likely just scratched his leg on a stick. During the second walk, his brain, remembering what the snake bite felt like (a stick scratching his leg), receives a similar sensation (really getting his leg scratched by a stick this time) and goes nuts: Help! Snake! We’re dying!
His brain’s second interpretation results in excruciating pain, and not because the guy’s just a wimp. (Yeah, yeah, I hear some of you mutter, “He gives TEDx talks – how could he not be a wimp?”) Whether we’re wimpy or tough, even a “raw experience” as primal as pain is not raw at all but an experience constructed by our brain’s subconscious models, whether we like it or not.
From a biological perspective, our brains don’t have to model reality correctly. They only have to model reality well enough for us to survive. There’d be no reason to suppose we could survive without perceptions “good enough” at perceiving what’s really there, but if an untruthful heuristic was close enough to the truth to help keep us alive in our ancestral environment, we can’t blame our brains for using that heuristic today – and entirely without our permission, too! Even so, we’re spirited beings. We can insist on being more than our biology, on using our brains for inquiry rather than just survival. Moreover, our heuristics may not be as bad as they’re sometimes painted:
Some researchers of cognitive bias, like Kahneman and Tversky, disbelieve that humans reason in a Bayesian way. Others, like ET Jaynes, point out that the problem with flesh-and-blood humans is that they’re capable of much more sophisticated Bayesian reasoning than researchers may have in mind, and that researchers’ failure to see this and account for the fact that their subjects may not share all the same information or pursue the same goals as the researchers explains many instances of supposed “cognitive bias”. (p 162)
When @susanquinn said in Bridging the Abyss, “The first reality to acknowledge is there’s no objective reality,” she, as @madpoet said, got our hackles up. None of us would actually throw stones at Susan and ask, “Feel real enough to you?” but we might be tempted to invite her to find a stone to kick while we asked her the same question. Susan said of her own assertion, “Yes, I see the conflict already in my statement.” Later on in the comments she agreed that objective reality exists, though our knowledge of it does not. But because our knowledge of reality (whether it comes from exalted cogitations or mundane experience) is … our only knowledge of reality – the only experience of reality we have – it’s not surprising that we often treat our knowledge as if it were reality itself. Being human means being prone to the mind projection fallacy:
The mind projection fallacy is a logical fallacy first described by physicist and Bayesian philosopher E.T. Jaynes. It occurs when someone thinks that the way they see the world reflects the way the world really is, going as far as assuming the real existence of imagined objects.[1] That is, someone’s subjective judgments are “projected” to be inherent properties of an object, rather than being related to personal perception. One consequence is that others may be assumed to share the same perception, or that they are irrational or misinformed if they do not.
To make things worse, even if we were perfect little Coxbots (inference machines capable of perfectly reasoning even in the face of uncertainty), we could, given sufficiently different prior information, still disagree with one another. In a case like this, otherwise-perfect reasoning, if marred by the mind projection fallacy, would have us warring over differing “realities” (perceptions of reality) even though no “reality” (perception of reality) was wrong.
Susan’s quip, “The first reality to acknowledge is there’s no objective reality,” is thus a punchy exaggeration acknowledging how humans really behave – acknowledging that all our knowledge, including the realest of our “raw experience” (which our brain already cooks the book on), is subjective; that we’re so good at the mind projection fallacy we reflexively believe our perceptions are reality; and that we consequently find it easy to demand that “Everyone has to share our perceptions and agree with them.”
Reflexively supposing our perceptions are reality is not wrong. Often, this supposition is quite sensible and very necessary: when a truck’s about to run you over is not the time to doubt your perception of the truck if you want to live! It’s not wrong, but it is incomplete, a reflex we must sometimes override in order to be more realistic – more honest, more truthful.
It’s a reflex we find ourselves overriding less, though, when we’re among those whose perceptions overlap with ours, those with whom we share a history of common experience. That’s one reason to prefer “our own kind”: second-guessing our trust in our own perceptions is distressing, especially when we already feel threatened, because it means second-guessing a reflex that not only simplifies life, but safeguards it.
Much of what’s called “being healthy” amounts to having perceptions that are socially normal. When we’re “healthy,” our perceptions – our five senses, our pain-sense, even our moral sense – seem to work much as others’ seem to work. It’s not surprising, then, when conservatives assert a “healthy society” is one that sets standards declaring which perceptions are normal and therefore “healthy”: without those standards, how would we even tell what “healthy” is? Everyone second-guessing everyone’s perceptions is paralyzing. If we can agree to a standard of normalcy for “enough” perceptions, on the other hand, we can get on with life.
When we agree to that, we’re agreeing, not to avoid the mind projection fallacy (since that’s impossible in daily life: none of us has enough time or energy to always avoid it), but to share a mind projection fallacy, to agree that the world really is a certain way just because we all agree to see it the same way.
No wonder tensions can run high when we discover not all of us do see something the same way. No wonder we start wondering whether those disagreeing with us are “sick,” “a menace to their own kind,” or “not even interested in our survival.” Second-guessing our own individual perceptions is distressing enough. Second-guessing the perceptions we thought we had in common is even worse. At that point, it’s tempting to throw stones at the “sickos,” demanding, “Feel real enough to you, punk?” But then, the stick and the snake felt real enough, too, despite each being an illusion of the other.
Yet almost all humans are “wrong” about certain optical illusions – in the sense that it’s neurologically normal to perceive the illusion rather than what’s really there.
Shared expectations about what we perceive seem to be good for cultural cohesiveness, as I mention in the OP. It’s reasonable to expect, also, that more people perceiving something usually makes it more likely to be really there. But there are already enough (non-political) exceptions to this rule of thumb that it casts into doubt the hope that the exceptions are statistically negligible.
My sense is that optical illusions do not very strongly imply that all or most reality is merely perception. As with any means of measurement, determinate errors occur. The mammalian visual system is a massively parallel pattern recognizer and, as such, has likely evolved some determinate errors (vis-à-vis an external reality infrastructure which we perceive – correctly or not through our senses – which I continue to argue does exist). For whatever reason, those erroneous perceptions had survival value and can account for optical illusions. My line of thought – rightly or wrongly – is that there are almost always simpler explanations for mis-perceptions of reality than invoking overarching epistemological factors. Some evidence of a proposition (an optical illusion) is very different from clear and convincing (and rationally justified) evidence shared by the proverbial Frenchmen. That line of thinking, for what it is worth, is how I got to the notion of then “Heisenberg Uncertainty Theory of Epistemology.”
Well, the optical illusion is much like the snake bite. If you have more information, it lessens.
Again, Susan’s OP on the other thread was about different ideas on complex systems. There, we cannot really know what is going on because it is beyond us. However, that does not mean in smaller areas we can figure it out. In the Face/Vase illusion, reality is there is neither a set of faces or a vase, and no one says there are. It looks like a drawing or image of a Face or Vases.
I agree that reality is not merely perception. Nothing I’ve said has contradicted that.
What optical illusions point out, though, is that our senses are more complicated than we often suppose. Sight is an emergent property of the eyes and the brain together, and so on.
I stopped where he said, “I want to convince you pain is an illusion.” That is total crap. Even if he felt pain because his nervous system generated it because it misread a signal, he still felt pain. The experience, “pain”, is direct and axiomatic, just as the experience of existence is direct and axiomatic. If it makes sense to doubt the direct reality of pain, it makes sense to doubt your own existence.
Now, I’ll listen to the rest and see if he can convince me that my angry outburst was premature.
OK. So, I got all bent out of shape because he used a word sloppily; incorrectly. My point is still important: pain is not an illusion. But, it can be mistaken, and everything else he said was fascinating and true.
Hey, speaking of Berkeley, I made the cartoon version:
Summarizing what Berkeley himself thought? Neat.
Was that little white-and-orange blob which never moved in there a cat?
Yeah, “pain is an illusion” is an overstatement, just like “sight is an illusion” would be. Pain and sight are both constructs of the brain, though, that depend on unconscious inference from all the signals coming to it. That we can create optical illusions, auditory illusions, and pain illusions don’t show us that these senses are illusory, but that they’re more integrated with each other, and with our prior beliefs, than we commonly assume.
To relieve or at least manage chronic pain, knowing that pain doesn’t always tell the truth about what’s happening in the tissues is important. Not because the knowledge can suddenly make pain go away, but because it gives people permission to treat pain as less distressing if there seems to be no other evidence of tissue damage, and the habit of treating a certain kind of pain as less distressing can eventually become part of the prior knowledge our brains unconsciously draw on when constructing pain.
Yes. To be precise, summarizing his book Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.
Yeah, I think it was.
I realize only now that this mention of @madpoet didn’t format for some reason when I wrote the OP. So let’s see if it does now.
Wow.
Lots more where that came from: Plato cartoons, Descartes cartoons, Augustine cartoons, Tales of the Philosophers, dozens of forthcoming lessons on various topics, articles, and books in philosophy!
It’s almost as if communication between imperfect subjective interpreters of reality might lead us to the best understanding of objective reality, and that there might be an optimal balance between shared fantasy and actually listening to people who are receiving different information. :)
Bartender, this man needs another drink.
Yeah, he’s entirely too sober! Too sober and sensible – we can’t have that ;-P
Improperly inebriated for a philosophical discussion.
Yeah, this is the real point of the post. That there is a point to sharing the same projections of our minds onto the outside world, but also a point to acknowledging what may be projections.
Sharing a culture is sharing projections – sharing assumptions. Honestly, I think that’s one reason shared culture is so important.
Actually, I approach them caffeinated.
I’ll come back in 12 hours then.
Either way, drugs seem to be involved ;-P
Thank you, Midge. I love learning new words and being wonderfully entertained. It’s powerfully unsettling, amusing and miraculous, this oh-so-human mind, with which we try to determine and cope with objective truth.
Whatever the heck that is… ;)
I didn’t have time to watch the whole Ted video, but I did watch the first couple of minutes. If the point is that there is no objective reality, then everybody should notice that the speaker was contradicting himself.
In the first event, he’s bitten by a snake, but his mind ignores it and concludes that it was a twig. Wrongo! He almost dies from the poison.
In the second event, he’s scratched by a twig, but his mind thinks it’s a near-fatal snakebite and causes him to experience great pain.
If the point is that there is no objective reality, then how can he say that, the first time, he was bitten by a snake? That he almost died from the venom? That, too, is just his subjective experience with no relationship to reality. In fact, reality — in this theory — doesn’t exist.
I think that in order to function in the world at all, we need to assume that objective reality exists. It is perfectly legitimate to point out that sometimes our senses, or our minds, may perceive reality incorrectly. But even this assumes that there is an objective reality that we are perceiving erroneously.
This is not a small point. People who decide that there is no objective reality are doing so for a reason. The obvious reason is that they wish to avoid objective reality, because it is inconsistent with something else that they want to believe is true.
In my opinion, the objective reality that they are typically trying to avoid is the existence of God.
I also want to point out how morally inferior I am to Johnson. He just kicks a rock. My fantasy, in the situation in which someone really insists on denying objective reality, is to (threaten to) whack the idiot in the face with a baseball bat.
Kinda like Captain Pike and the Talosian.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t “there’s no objective reality”, the point was
There is no knowing without mental models, even for knowledge as primal as pain. That is, there is no direct experience of reality, no experience unmediated by some model. Which, judging by the rest of your comment, I think agrees with your assessment of things.
Perhaps our disagreement, if any, is about the extent to which we can trust our perceptions of reality. I’m open to the possibility that my perceptions can occasionally be incorrect, but I think that this is very rarely the case. I don’t see how I could function in the world if I seriously doubted the accuracy of a substantial proportion of my perceptions of reality.
I mean, when I go home tonight and see my daughters and my dogs, do I really have to worry about whether they are really a couple of meth-head strangers and a trio of coyotes, which I erroneously think are my daughters and dogs because I expected to see them at my house?
I continue to worry about the political, philosophical, and theological agenda behind what seems, to me, to be an unnecessary focus on theoretical doubts about our ability to accurately perceive the world around us. I mean, if there is a world around us.
I circle back to my baseball bat analogy. Or better still, the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. The scene is funny precisely because everybody knows that the Black Knight’s repeated insistence that “it’s just a flesh wound” is nonsense. It’s really, really funny because the Monty Python guys were mocking the philosophers who deny objective reality.
Oh boy. I’ve lost muscle in my left arm and hand ’cause of this business. I won’t even think about surgery. Nuh-uh. I just miss being able to look straight up in order to identify birds flying overhead.
If I may jump in, AP, I think you’re not thinking about the fact that you have hundreds if not thousands of perceptions per day. Most of them are inconsequential, so whether we see them entirely accurately doesn’t matter. Is that flower red or pink? Is it mostly cloudy or mostly sunny? We hope, of courses, that our perceptions on important things are pretty accurate, or we’d be in big trouble most of the time!
Well, we have different bodies, and if you’re in good health and reasonably young, you may have better reasons to trust your perceptions than I have to trust mine.
It can be possible to function under these circumstances. Not as well as you could have, certainly. But well enough, at least, to kinda, sorta get by.
Unlikely to be that. More common would be something like lost or distorted sensation in your pedal leg while you’re driving – not a big distortion of reality in the larger scheme of things, but serious enough to be quite dangerous. The same thing could be said of getting a migraine with scotoma while driving. An asthmatic riding a bike might not know a tire was going flat because the sign of his extra effort, labored breathing, seems just like another asthma attack to him. There are a lot of subtle ways our perceptions can fool us which, while not trippy, are nonetheless destructive and dnagerous.
In particular, Dr Moseley points out that, in chronic pain, which is not an uncommon problem, incorrect perception of tissue damage can make things very much worse.
Worse, because chronic pain often doesn’t correlate well with tissue damage, individuals are often told that, if no tissue damage can be found, they are lying about feeling chronic pain. That can also be very destructive to those who aren’t lying. Some people do malinger, of course. Others, though, don’t, but may be told that they are malingering when they report pain when no obvious evidence of tissue damage is present.
At times, there are signs of tissue alteration present, but they’re not obvious. Other times, as Moseley reports, chronic pain seems to have nothing to do with the state of tissues, but appears to be a construct of the brain itself: “neurons that fire together, wire together” and so on.