Chapter 4                                   

Foundations For A Moral Code: Rationalism And Its Flaws  

Part A

       In Western Philosophy, the main alternative to Empiricism, for describing the human mind and understanding what knowing is, is called "Rationalism". It is the way of Plato in Classical Greek times and of Descartes in the Enlightenment. What they say is that the human mind can only build a system for knowing and understanding itself, and how it knows its universe, if that system is, first of all, grounded in the human mind by itself, before any sensory experiences or memories of them enter the system.

       Descartes, for example, points out that our senses tell us information that can easily be faulty. As was noted above, the stick in the pond looks bent at the water line; if we remove it, then we see it is straight; the hand that was on the pocket warmer and the hand that was in the snow are both immersed in the water in the sink; to one hand, the sink water is cold and to the other, it is warm. And these are the simple examples. Life contains many much more difficult ones. Therefore, the rationalists say, we must try to construct a system for modeling human thinking by beginning from some concepts that are built into the mind itself before any sensory information even enters.

               

         Plato says we come into the world at birth already dimly knowing some perfect "forms" that we then use to organize our thoughts, and the only conclusion to draw is that these very useful forms, that enable us to make sense of our world, are imperfect copies of the perfect forms which exist in a perfect dimension of pure thought, before birth, beyond matter, space, and time – a dimension of pure ideas. The material world and the things in it are only poor copies of that other world of pure forms ultimately derived from the pure "Good". The whole point of our existence, for Plato, is to discipline the mind by study, until we learn to more and more clearly recall, understand, and live by, the perfect forms. 

               

        Descartes has a similar kind of system of thought which begins from the truth that the mind finds inside itself when it carefully and quietly contemplates just itself. During this quiet and totally concentrated self-contemplation, the thing that is most deeply you, namely your mind, realizes that whatever else you may be mistaken about, you can't be mistaken about the fact that you exist; you'd have to exist in some way in some dimension in order for you even to be thinking about whether you exist. For Descartes, this is enough of a starting point to enable him to build a whole system of thinking and knowing that sets up two realms: a realm of things that the mind deals with through the physical body that it is attached to, and another realm that the mind can deal with by pure thinking, a realm built on the "clear and distinct ideas" that the mind knows before it ever takes in, in any way, the impressions that the senses see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.

               

         These two rationalists have had millions of followers, in Descartes' case for four hundred years and in Plato's case for well over two thousand. They have attacked Empiricism for as long as Empiricism has been around (since the 1700's, or in a simpler form, some argue, since the time of Aristotle, who was Plato's pupil, but who disagreed diametrically with Plato on several matters). Rationalists, as was said above, criticize Empiricism's inability to specify what that human mind that does the perceiving of sensory impressions is, and how it could possibly build up a system for thinking and knowing beginning from things as unreliable as sensory impressions.

               

         The debate between the Rationalists and the Empiricists has not let up, even in our own time, but in our quest to find a universal moral code, we are going to find that we have to write Rationalism off as fully as we did Empiricism. Rationalism contains a flaw worse than any of Empiricism’s flaws.  

               

        The Empiricists do not provide an epistemological base solid enough to support a moral system. Their system of reasoning (based on categorical logic backed up by material evidence), when applied to itself, indicates that Empiricism will probably never be able to establish a base for itself. Empiricism has been our route to many effective scientific theories and laws in all branches of Science, but so far it has been unable to provide a compelling case for Empiricism. Both theoretical considerations and practical evidence, in fact, seem to indicate that a sound, empiricist model of how we should think about our own thinking can’t be made. 

    

        On the other hand, it turns out that Rationalism has major problems as well. The science of Psychology, in particular, has cast a harsh spotlight on the inconsistencies of Rationalism.

         The moral philosophers’ hope of finding an Empiricist foundation for a moral system was broken by thinkers like Quine and Godel.  However, Rationalism’s flaws were just as clearly shown up by social psychologists such as Aronson and Festinger.

                                     Leon Feistinger 

                 Elliot Aronson 

Chapter 3.    Part F

   Empiricism, it appears at present anyway, can’t provide a rationale for itself in theoretical terms and can’t demonstrate the reliability of its methods in material ways. Could it be another set of interlocking, partially effective illusions, only larger and subtler than medieval Christianity, Communism, or Nazism once were? Personally, I don’t think so. The number of the achievements of Science and their profound effects on our society’s way of life argue powerfully that Science is a way of thinking and living that works in the real world, even though its theories and models are constantly being replaced and even though the way of thinking on which it is based can’t logically justify itself.

  However, it is true that sometimes models of reality given to us in some of our once most widely believed and trusted scientific theories – for example, Newton’s Laws of Motion – have turned out to be largely inadequate for explaining more detailed data drawn from more advanced observations of our universe. The views of the universe that better technologies and bigger telescopes gave us by the mid-nineteenth century led astronomers past Newton’s Laws and eventually onward to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Newton’s picture turned out to be a simplistic picture of the universe. 

  Thus, when we consider how revered Newton’s model of the cosmos once was, realizing that it gives only a partial and inadequate picture of the universe can cause philosophers and even ordinary folk to doubt the way of thought that is basic to Science. One can’t help but begin to question whether Empiricism is trustworthy enough to be used as a base for a thing so desperately important as a new moral code for the human race. Our survival is at stake here. Science can’t even provide a rationale under which we can explain Science itself?      

   

  As we attempt to build a moral system that we are all going to try to live by, we need to look for a way of thinking about thinking and knowing that is deeper, is based on stronger logic: a way of thinking about thinking that we can believe in profoundly. We need a new model of human thinking, one built up from a base philosophy that is different, not just in degree but in kind, from Empiricism.    

  Empiricism’s disciples have achieved some impressive results in the practical sphere, but then again, for a while, in their times, so did the followers of medieval Christianity, Communism, Nazism, and several other giant world views/theories. They even had their own “sciences”. They dictated in detail what their scientists should study and what they should conclude from their studies. 

    Perhaps the most disturbing examples are the Nazis. They claimed Empiricism and Science for their own. In their propaganda films, and in all academic and public discourse, they preached a warped form of Darwinian evolution that enjoined and exhorted all nations, Germans or non-German, to go to war, seize territory, and exterminate or enslave all competitors.

Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler

 "In eternal warfare, mankind has become great; in eternal peace, mankind would be ruined."                                                                                                      (Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”)

Such a view of human existence, they claimed, was not cruel or cynical. It was simply built on a mature and realistic acceptance of one of the truths of Science. Adults, if they calmly and clearly look at the evidence of history, see that war always comes. Mature, realistic adults learn and practice the arts of war, assiduously in times of peace, and ruthlessly in times of war. This was, according to the Nazis, just a logical consequence of one’s accepting the “survival of the fittest” rule that governs our existence. 

    Hitler’s ideas of “race”, and thus his ideas about how the model of Darwinian evolution could be applied to humans, were, from the viewpoint of the real science of Genetics, largely unsupported. But in the Third Reich, this was never acknowledged.

Werner Heisenberg

    The disturbing thing about physicists like Heisenberg, chemists like Hahn, and biologists like Lehmann becoming willing tools of Nazism is not so much that they became the tools that they did, but that their whole life philosophy as scientists did not equip them to slip past or break free of the Nazi distortion of that life philosophy. Their religions failed them, but clearly, in moral terms, Science failed them too.

    Otto Hahn 

     Thus, there is certainly evidence in history to support the view that the consequences of science and thus of empiricism, misunderstood and misapplied, can be horrifying. Nazism became humanity’s nightmare. Some of its worst atrocities were committed in the name of advancing Science. (13) For practical, historical-evidence-based reasons, then, as well as for theoretical reasons, millions of people around the world today have become deeply skeptical about all “systems”, and in moral matters, about scientific ones in particular.

     At deep, primal levels we are driven to wonder: should we trust something as critical as the survival of our culture, our knowledge, our children and grand-children, and even our Science itself to a way of thinking that, in the first place, can’t theoretically explain itself, and in the second place, has had some large and dismal practical failures in the past?    

     In the meantime, we must get on with trying to build a base for a universal moral code. Reality requires that we do so. It will not let us procrastinate. It forces us to think, choose, and act every day. Empiricism as base for the moral code project just does not inspire confidence.

     Is there something else to which we might turn? 

Notes 

13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Human_Experimentation

Chapter 3    Part E 

             As an acceptable alternative to brain structure and chemistry, scientists interested in thought also study patterns of behavior in organisms like rats, pigeons, and people that are being stimulated in controlled, replicable ways. We can, for example, try to train rats to work for wages. This kind of study is the focus of Behavioral Psychology. (See Baum’s 2004 book “Understanding Behaviorism”.) (7)

               

        As a third alternative, we can even try to program computers to do things very similar to the things that humans do. Then if the computers do behave in human-like ways, we should be able to infer some tentative, testable conclusions about what human thinking and knowing are from the programs that enabled these computers to behave like humans. This kind of research is done in a branch of Computing Science called "Artificial Intelligence" or A.I.

     To many empiricist philosophers and scientists, A.I. seems to offer them their best hope of defining once and for all a base for their way of thinking, a base that can explain all of human thinking’s so-called “abstract processes” and that is also materially observable. A program either runs or it doesn’t. One that made computers imitate humans so well that we couldn’t tell which was the computer answering us and which was the human would arguably have encoded what thinking is. At last, a beginning point beyond the challenges of the critics of Empiricism and their endless counter-examples. (A layman’s view on how A.I. is doing is in Meltzer’s article in The Guardian, 17/4/2012.) (8)   

               

         Testability and replicability of the tests, I repeat, are the characteristics of modern Empiricism and of all Science. All else, to modern empiricists, has as much reality and as much reliability to it as fantasy creatures in a fantasy novel ... amusing daydreams, nothing more.

     Kurt Godel   

             

          The most optimistic of the Empiricists for years were looking to A.I. for models of thinking that would work in the real world. Their position has been cut down in several ways since those eager, early days. What exploded it for many was the proof found by Kurt Godel, Einstein’s companion during his lunch hour walks at Princeton. Godel showed that no rigorous system of symbols for expressing some of the most basic of human thinking routines can be a complete system. (In Godel's proof, the ideas that he analyzed were basic axioms in Arithmetic.) Godel's proof is difficult for laymen to follow, but non-mathematicians don't need to be able to do that formal logic in order to grasp what Godel’s proof implies about everyday thinking. (See Hofstader for an accessible critique of Godel.) (9.)

     Douglas Hofstadter           

          If we take what it says about Arithmetic and extend that finding to all kinds of human thinking, then what Godel's proof says is that there is no symbol system for expressing our thoughts that will ever be good enough to express and discuss all of the new ideas that the human mind can dream up. Furthermore, in principle – in other words at the roots of human thinking itself – there can’t be any such system of expression. (O.W. Holmes said: “No generalization is worth a damn, including this one.” If this statement is true, it makes itself false. If false, it makes itself true. Our problem occurs because the statement is self-referencing. It is a rough example in ordinary English of what Godel is talking about.)  

               

            What Godel's proof implies is that no way of modeling what the human mind does will ever adequately model or explain that very thing. Not in English, Logic, French, Russian, Chinese, Java, C++, music, or Martian. We will always be able to generate thoughts, questions, and statements that we can't express in any one symbol system. If we find a system that can be used to encode some of our favorite ideas really well, we will only discover that no matter how well the system is designed, no matter how large or subtle it is, we will have other thoughts that, in that system, we can't express at all. Yet we have to make statements that at least attempt, however inadequately, to communicate our ideas. Science, like almost all activities of human life, is communal. It has to be shared in order to advance.   

               

           The further conclusion to be drawn from Godel is that researchers in sciences like Physiological Psychology, Behavioral Psychology, Computer Science, Sociology, etc., may all study what thinking and knowing are, with each discipline approaching the phenomena from its perspective, but no single one of them, and no set of them taken together will ever completely define what human thinking and knowing are. No system for representing and expressing the thoughts generated in the mind will ever be capable of fully defining or describing the mind or what it is doing as it does that generating.

               

        Other theorems in Computing Science seem to offer fascinating support to Godel's theorem. For example, in the early days of the development of computers, programmers over and over were creating programs with loops in them. After a program had been written, it would be run and then, sometimes, the program would get stuck in a sub-routine that kept going over one sequence of steps from, say, line 193 to line 511 then back to line 193, again and again. Whenever a program contained this kind of flaw, a human being had to stop the computer, go over the program, find why the loop was occurring, then either re-write the loop or write around it. The work was frustrating and very time consuming.

               

           Soon, a few programmers got the idea of writing a kind of meta-program that they were hoping would act as a "check" program. It would scan other programs, find their loops, and fix them, or at least point them out to the programmer so that she could fix them. The programmers knew that writing such a program would be difficult, but once it was written, it would save so many people so much time.

     However, progress on the writing of this "check" program seemed to be running into difficulty after difficulty. Eventually, someone really good with computer languages (Alan Turing) published a proof which showed that writing a check program was, in principle, not possible. A foolproof algorithm for checking other algorithms is, in principle, not possible. (See “Halting Problem” in Wikipedia.) (10) 

               

         This finding in Computing Science, the science which many people see as the bridge between the abstractness of thinking and the concreteness of material reality, is, I believe, Godel all over again. In another kind of proof, it confirms our deepest feelings about Empiricism. It is doomed to remain incomplete. No completely effective check program has ever been found. Some check programs which are able to catch the simpler mistakes that beginning programmers make have been written, but no foolproof one has ever been created in any of the many programming languages that have evolved in the field over the years.  

               

           There are some computer scientists who believe that by using math theorems not even known yet, one day it may be possible for programmers to write computer programs that keep iterating closer to doing what human programmers do, even checking other programs. But they admit that no program so far can do what a human programmer does when she fixes a faulty program … or writes a song.    

               

          The possibilities are fascinating, but for our purposes in trying to find a base for a philosophical system and a moral code, the conclusion is much simpler. The more we study both the theoretical points and the real world evidence, including evidence from Science itself, the more we are driven to conclude that the Empiricist way of seeing or understanding what thinking and knowing are will probably never be able to explain itself. If Godel's proof is right, and nearly everyone in Math and Computing Science thinks it is, and if it is extended to human thinking in general, Empiricism's own methods have ruled out the possibility of an unshakable Empiricist beginning point for epistemology.

     If I think that I have found a way to describe what thinking is, then I will have to express what I want to say about the matter in a language of some kind … English, Russian, C++ or some other sort of language for encoding thoughts. But there is not, nor can there be, a code that is capable of capturing and communicating what the thinker is doing as she is thinking about her own thinking. It is a mental conundrum with no solution. (What is the meaning of the word “meaning”?)

           

 Diagram of the human brain

      A single neuron, showing its branching structure

   

           Of course, the last few paragraphs are only describing the dead ends that have been hit in A.I., but other sciences searching for this same holy grail – a clear, evidence-backed model of human thinking – haven’t fared any better. Neurophysiology and Behavioral Psychology also keep striking out.

     If a neurophysiologist could set up an MRI or some other similar imaging device, then predict in advance which networks of neurons in his own brain would be active when he turned the device on and watched the machine give its information on his own brain activities as he was studying them himself, in real time, then he and his science could say that they had formulated a model of what consciousness is. But on both the theoretical and practical sides, neuroscience is not even close to being so complete.

    Patterns of neuron firings that are mapped on one occasion when a subject is performing even a very simple task unfortunately can’t be counted on. We find different patterns of firings, apparently, depending on what we assume consciousness is and different researchers’ definitions differ widely. A human brain contains one hundred billion neurons, each one capable of connecting to as many as ten thousand others. Philosophers looking for a solid base for Empiricism are disappointed if they go to neuro-physiology for that base. (11)  

  Similar problems beset Behavioral Psychology. The researchers can condition rats and predict what they will do in controlled experimental situations, but endless ad hoc add-ons and exceptions have to be made to their explanations of what humans in everyday life do.

     In a simple example, alcoholics who say that they truly want to get sober for good can be given a drug that makes them violently, physically ill if they imbibe even very small amounts of alcohol, but that does not affect them as long as they do not drink alcohol. This would seem to be a behaviorist’s solution to alcoholism, one of society’s most intractable problems. But alas it doesn’t work. Thousands of alcoholics have kept on with their self-destructive ways while on disulfiram. (12) What is going on in these cases is obviously much more complex than any explanation given by behaviorism’s best theories can account for. And this is but one simple example.

     I, for one, am not disappointed to learn that the human animal turns out to be an enormously complex piece of work, no matter the model under which we analyze it.


Notes 

7. Baum, William; “Understanding Behaviorism: Behavior, Culture, and Evolution”; Blackwell Publ.; 2005

8. Meltzer, Thomas; “Alan Turing’s Legacy: “How Close Are We To Thinking Machines?”; The Guardian, June 17, 2012.

9. Hofstader, Douglas; “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”; Basic Books; 1999.

10. “Halting Problem”; Wikipedia; 2012.

11. Noe, Alva and Evan Thompson; “Are There Neural Correlates Of Consciousness?”; available online at http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ccs/NoeThompson2004AreThereNccs.pdf  

     12. Fuller, Richard K.; “Does Disulfiram Have A Role In Alcoholism Treatment Today?”; Addiction; Dec. 

     Chapter 3.   Part D 

      Various further attempts to nail down what scientific thinking does, and to prove that it is a truly reliable way of knowing, have been made in the last hundred years, but they have all come to insoluble conundrums of their own.

               

      The logical positivists, for example, tried to bypass Hume’s problems with the terms in scientific laws and to put the burden of meaning and proof onto whole propositions instead. A key point in the logical positivists’ case is that all meaningful statements are either analytic or synthetic.  Any statement that does not fit into one of these two categories, the positivists say, is irrelevant noise.

   Analytic statements are statements whose truth or falsity is determined by the definitions of the terms that they contain. For example, “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an analytic statement. If we understand the terms in the sentence we can immediately verify, by thinking it through, whether or not the statement is true.

   Synthetic statements are ones whose truth or falsity we must work out by referring to evidence found in the real world, not in the statement itself. In Science, the needed evidence is found in human observations of the real world. “All substances contract when cooled” is a synthetic statement (not quite a true one, as observations of water/ice can show). So is “If a creature is a whale, then it is a mammal”.

    The logical positivists aimed to show that the talk that goes on between scientists in all branches of Science can be made rigorously logical and, therefore, can gradually lead us closer and closer to true knowledge. They intended to apply their analytic-synthetic distinction to all statements in such a rigorous way that any statement made by anyone in any field could be judged by this standard. If the truth or falsity of a statement had to be checked by observations made in the real, material world, then it was clearly a synthetic statement. If the statement’s truth value could be assessed by careful analysis of its internal logic, without reference to observations and measurements made in the material world, then the statement was clearly an analytic statement. All other statements were to be regarded as meaningless. 

   The logical positivists argued that following these prescriptions was all that was needed to make the scientific talk that scientists engage in with each other, as they explain their research and size up the research of their fellow scientists, logically sound and so to lead scientists by gradual steps on to true, reliable knowledge of the real world. All other communications by humans were to be regarded as forms of emotional venting, empty of any real content or meaning.

Rudolph Carnap 

  

  Carnap, especially, set out prove that these prescriptions were all that Science needed in order for it to work and to progress in a rigorously logical way toward making more and more accurate statements about the real world – generalizations that could, in time, be seen as universal truths. (1.)

Willard V. O. Quine

 But the theories of Carnap and the other logical positivists were taken apart logically by later philosophers such as Quine, who showed that the crucial positivist distinction between analytic and synthetic statements was not logically defensible. Explaining what makes an analytic statement (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried men”) analytic requires that we first understand what “synonymous” terms (like “bachelors” and “unmarried men”) are. But if we go into the logic very carefully, we find that explaining what makes two terms “synonymous” presupposes that we first understand what “analytic” means. Trying to lay down precise rules for defining the difference between analytic statements and synthetic ones only leads us to reason in circles. (2.)

   Quine’s reasoning, in turn, was further critiqued and refined by still later philosophers like Hilary Putnam. As Putnam eventually put the matter:     

“… positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that conception.”

“… the whole system of knowledge is justified as a whole by its utility in predicting observations.” (3.)

   In other words, logical positivism’s rigid way of talking about thinking, knowing, and expressing ends up in a logically unsolvable paradox. It creates new problems for all our systems of expressing our ideas and doesn’t help with solving any of the old problems.

  We can see that most of the laws that have been formulated by scientists really do work. They guide us toward ways of living that get results. Why they work is a lot trickier to explain.      

         Now the problems described so far bother philosophers of Science a great deal, but such problems are of little or no interest to the majority of scientists. They see the law-like statements that they and their colleagues try to formulate as being testable in only one meaningful way, namely by the results shown in experiments done in the lab or in the field. Thus, when scientists want to talk about what knowing is, they look for models not in Philosophy, but in the branches of Science that study human thinking. However, in the realm of material proof of Empiricism, i.e. in brain science, Empiricism also runs into problems.           

   In his writings, the early Empiricist, John Locke, basically dodged the problem when he defined the human mind as a “blank slate” and saw its abilities to perceive and reason as being due to its two “fountains of knowledge”, Sensation and Reflection. The first, he says, is made up of stores of sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences. The second is made up of the “ideas … the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself”. How these “operations” got into human consciousness and what it is that is doing the “reflecting” on these “operations” he doesn’t say. (4.)

               

      Modern empiricists, both philosophers of Science and scientists themselves, don't care for their forbears giving in to this kind of mystery-making. Scientists, especially, aim to figure out what the mind is and how it thinks about things by studying physical things, such as the human genome, and what it makes, namely the neurons of the brain. That is the modern empiricist way, the scientific way.

    For today's scientists, talk about what knowing is, no matter how clever the talk, is not getting us any closer to understanding what knowing is. In fact, scientists don't respect talk about anything that we may want to study unless that talk is backed up with scientific theories or models of the thing being studied, and the theories are further backed up with research done on real things in the real world. 

    Scientific research, to qualify as scientific, also must be designed so that it can be replicated by any researcher in any land or era. Otherwise, it’s not credible; it could be a coincidence, a mistake, wishful thinking taking over, or simply a lie. Thus, for modern scientists, the analysis of material evidence offers the only route by which a researcher can come to understand anything, even in this case in which the thing that she is studying is what is happening inside of her as she is studying.

    She sees a phenomenon in reality, gets an idea about how it works, designs an experiment, tests her theory, then records the results and interprets them. The aim of the statements she then makes is to guide future research onto more and more fruitful paths and to build technologies that are more and more effective at predicting and/or manipulating events in the real world. Electro-chemical pathways among the neurons of the brain, for example – individual paths and whole patterns of such paths – can be studied in labs and correlated with subjects’ perceptions. (The state of research in this field is described by Delany in a 2011 article available online and also in several articles, notably Revonsuo’s, in a book edited in 2000 by Metzinger, also available online.) (5.) (6.) 

    Material things are the things that Science cares about. The philosophers’ talk about what thinking and knowing are is just talk.   

Notes 

1. Carnap, Rudolph; “The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy”; Carus Publishing; 2003.

2. Quine, W.V.O.; “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”; reprinted in

 “Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches”; 

  Oxford University Press; 1995; p. 255.

3. Putnam, Hilary; “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized”; 

   ibid; p. 436.

4.Locke, John; “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”;           William Collins Sons and Co.; 1964; p. 90.

5.Delany, Donelson E.; “What Should Be The Roles Of Conscious       States And Brain States In Theories of    Mental Activity”;      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115306/

6.Revonsuo, Antti; “Prospects For A Scientific Research Program     On Consciousness” on p. 57 to p. 76 of “Neural Correlates Of    Consciousness: Empirical And Conceptual Questions”, edited by    Metzinger, T.; available online at: http://books.google.ca