So, metaphysics

January 9, 2007 in books, friends, links, science, thought

A little while ago I posted here the question of what existence and physical instantiation have in common, and recently the Times ran a piece about emergence and free will (now behind a paywall, grumble grumble), which got me (and Jue, too) thinking about this stuff some more. I think I’m sort of ready to address the question of existence a little more directly now, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that very soon I will not agree anymore with what I’m about to say.

Cutting to the chase, I think that the phenomenon of emergence indicates pretty strongly that the notion of objective existence is a sort of fallacy. If something like a mind can be said to exist, a mind that is, as far as we can tell just the very complex interaction between the brain, body and environment, who’s to say where the cutoff point for existence is, in terms of complexity? Any possible answer is going to be at worst arbitrary, and at best based on some relevant but still subjective benchmark, and this fuzziness seems to me to suggest a sort of Darwinistic pragmatism inherent in our notion of existence. What makes a thing a thing is not some sort of inherent “object-ness” that it possesses, but rather that the sort of categorical segmentation that it is a part of is relevant in some way to helping us go about our daily business. The illusion of the universality of these conceptual divisions might come from to homogenizing influence of culture and socialization, or perhaps from that same source that gives us our feeling of free will. The important thing is that, when we talk about things those things are always always conceptual, and concepts are inherently subjective, not symbols referring to some distinct object that exists independently of the thinker.

Of course at this point I really need to point out how wrong this account is starting to feel, maybe because it’s a sort of circular argument (using the emergence of things from the complex interactions of things to disprove the possibility of any distinct things actually existing!) or maybe because it gives me the willies to imagine that I’m just this disembodied mind floating in the void making up stories. The sort of world-coming-apart-at-the-seams feeling that trying to put this down on paper also strongly suggests that I’m either headed in some manner of productive direction or just completely and utterly misled.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the peculiar role of emergent phenomena in the things we count as existent objects is a pretty good indicator that making the division between trying to understand things holistically (strong emergence) or reductionistically (no real emergence at all) isn’t going to give us any analytical leverage. It took me a few years, but I think that that is one of the central points that Hofstadter is making in GEB: underlying the distinction between holism and reductionism is this sneaking suspicion that that distinction is not a meaningful one, and that we need to utter the magic word of “mu,” un-ask the question, and try to figure out what prompted us to ask the question in the first place.

Anyway! That’s about all of that I can take right now, so I’m throwing up my hands and throwing this question out again: what role does the notion of concepts as symbols referring to objects that exist independently of the symbols have in an understanding of reality?