Let’s suppose that in the year 2115 neurologists tell us that they’ve figured out how the brain actually understands things. What would that mean? Precisely that they can explain it in terms of components that do not themselves understand.
Perhaps they tell us:
Here’s how the mind understands. The mind is composed of three components, the blistis, the morosum, and the hyborebus. The blistis and the morosum have nothing to do with understanding; the part that understands is the hyborebus.
We don’t have to know what these things are to know that they’ve failed. This cannot be an explanation of understanding, because it simply transfers the problem from the “mind” to the “hyborebus”. It’s like explaining vision by saying that the optic nerve brings the image from the eye to the brain, where it’s projected on a screen that’s watched by a homunculus. How does the homunculus’s vision work?
This will be the first of a series of six or seven articles, aimed at explaining things that are fundamental to human experience (or so we think) and which boggle the mind when we try to analyse them: meaning, consciousness, knowledge, the self, free will, morality. The trouble, I believe, is not that these things have no explanation, nor even that we can’t comprehend the explanation. The trouble is drawn out by the quote above. We don’t have a problem applying it to most things: we can all accept that a car doesn’t have a smaller car under its bonnet driving on a little treadmill to make the big car go, and that if it did it wouldn’t explain anything because you’d still have to ask what makes the little car go.
But with the Imponderables, as I shall call them, our intuitions run the wrong way.
(Originally published 23 March, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.)
Will the sun rise tomorrow? Will electricity still work? Will the next piece of bread I eat be any good as food? Are there such things as laws of physics, or is the universe just winging it? Since 1758 the answer to these philosophical questions has been "We can never know" -- as explained by David Hume, in what has come to be known as the Problem of Induction.
If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have formerly eat, be presented to us, we make no scruple of repeating the experiment, and foresee, with certainty, like nourishment and support. Now this is a process of the mind or thought, of which I would willingly know the foundation... As to past Experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognizance: but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar; this is the main question on which I would insist. The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary.
Formally, we can express inductive reasoning as follows:
- Bread nourished me on Monday.
- Bread nourished me on Tuesday.
- Bread nourished me on Wednesday.
- Bread nourished me on Thursday.
- Bread nourished me on Friday.
- Therefore, bread will nourish me tomorrow.
The conclusion is not a necessary consequence of the premises. Hence, inductive reasoning is invalid.
Since not only all of science, but every move we make in our daily lives, is based on inductive reasoning, this is a bit of a worry. Naturally, a number of people have proposed solutions, or at least workarounds. To date, none have been entirely satisfactory. The best is a position called "probabilism", which basically replaces the conclusion to the above with
- Therefore, bread will probably nourish me tomorrow.
...which is not too bad, considering. We have a very large historical statistical sample of incidences of people eating bread, and it correlates very strongly with nutrition; so that gives us pretty good confidence in there being a connection between the two.
Provided, that is, that we know there is some kind of underlying order which we just have to find. If there isn't, then the probabilist is in the position of the superstitious gambler who has yet to figure out that "winning streaks" end randomly and without warning; that no matter how many times in a row a coin comes up heads, the chance of its coming up heads next time remains precisely 0.5.
I don't want to make grandiose claims... but I think I have solved this 253-year-old problem. Not all on my lonesome, obviously; shoulders of giants, and all that. There are three critical mental tools, all taken from much greater thinkers than myself, without which I couldn't have come near it.
