Ontology

No, I don't really know what ontology means, either.

While I was running the other day - an early start to protect the hair old dog from the heat - I was kept going by an interesting discussion between Daniel Kaufman and Crispin Sartwell on Blogging Heads TV.

Had I been particularly concerned with metaphysics, I'd have realised I need to read Quine and Davidson and Sellars. Fortunately, Kaufman and Sartwell are public philosophers and educators and were well able to explain a lot of the ideas clearly enough for me to have a handle on the conversation. They brought up an interesting distinction which I seem to understand was originally posited by Sellars between the scientific and the manifest image.

So, the manifest image is how we see the world. In 3D and in colour, with tables and rocks and dogs and herbal tea. The table, as far as we are concerned, is a solid thing that exists phenomenologically. It also, as far as I was able to discern, includes mental representations - like ideas and stories and memories.

The scientific image is all maths and laws of nature and particle physics. What seems to be a table is not a solid thing, but atoms and space. Ideas and stories and memories do not exist at all. Unless, in a materialistic way, they could be the energy of active neurons, perhaps. Though I don't think they spoke of this in the podcast, so I'm not sure. Still, it's a handy distinction.

Are these two views of reality commensurable? Contrasting? Alternative? Kaufman's theory, which I found pretty persuasive, goes something like this: imagine 3D glasses. There's a right side showing something and a left side allowing access to something else. You only get the full picture if you draw together both. The whole picture incorporates both images.

Sartwell had some arguments with that. I think he wanted, not a kind of enmeshed dualism, but a strict monism.

Still, for Kaufman this idea allows the reality of ideas and beliefs and representations, tables and rocks and herbal tea, formulae and laws and particles.

So, that's cool.

But then I thought, 'Is he privileging human consciousness too much?' Sartwell had suggested this, claiming he doesn't like to consider us 'special', we are mammals, part of nature. Kaufman, though, was stating that language and concepts operate with a different 'grammar' to that of physics and thus are a break with what is deterministic and material. The exceptionalism of human consciousness. Did something entirely new enter existence with the flowering of the first fully conscious human? Or whatever-being with similar faculties in some other corner of the vast universe? Or are we the only ones? A blink of an eye ago on cosmic time and reality fractured from it-ness into me-ness?

I started considering values, and what Donald Crosby said about there being values throughout the natural world: anything that lives places (not consciously) a value on what secures its continued existence. Water for trees, pollen for bees, pollinators for farmers.* And I thought, for a star or a planet, could the gravity that holds it together be a value not just in the mathematical sense, but also in the sense of allowing its continued existence? Not to be a panpsychist about this, I am not attributing consciousness to all things, but maybe 'value' is a universal... a universal something. The numeric edges into the evaluative... via the activity it generates...

Inherent in values is a 'kind of' telos. So, the values of the forces in the natural laws lead to the expansion of the universe. The creation of stars and their destruction. The value of water for a tree leads to it sending down longer roots in dry times. The value of pollen for a bee leads to it flying around and finding flowers and doing bee dances. The value of pollinators to farmers leads to them killing them with DDTs in the 70s. No, wait, that's wrong. But you get where I am going with this.

Then I thought of the idea of images. Consider a spider's web. Like the one I somewhat sorrowfully destroyed as I made my way to the table in the garden. The spider does not have an image of the web. Nor does a swarm of bees have the image of a hive with all those hexagonal cells and yet the image is, in a sense, carried in genes and activated as instincts and such structures come into existence.

And then I thought of the image of reality for a bee. I'm not saying the bee 'knows' what it sees. The bee's eyesight is 20/2000 - that's pretty shit - but it can see many more colours than we can. For the bee, what has value is this 'image' - held in genes and instincts, one assumes, rather than in minds - of a collection of specific colours that represent the place where pollen is - the precise hues of a mature honeysuckle bloom, say.

For my dog, smells make up a far larger part of his reality than they do for me. The particles of whatever disgusting thing he sniffs have a value that, thankfully, I cannot and do not recognise.

Salmon sense the precise salination of water; birds the precise hours of daylight in spring that trigger mating; bats the ultra-sonic echoes. The value of these indices effect behaviour. They 'matter' to the creatures. They are held, somehow, in the activity of neurons.

Should not a reality have all these lenses in place? Is an image held only in consciousness or also in potentiality, given the web and the hive? Given, even, the precise structure of a crystalline form? The orbit patterns of atoms and planets? Does the 'reality' of π have a plethora of potential images inherent in its infinite number stream, in its numerical value? Is image welded into the universe before consciousness? Part of the weft and weave of reality. Do those values, water to tree, pollen to bee, and the resultant telos, also carry the germ of story?

And what of the consciousness-type-experience of an alien being? Or an AI? Might that be qualitatively as well and quantitatively different from ours? Is a transcendent experience of oneness or expansion a variation or an entirely novel and different phenomenon?

How many dimensions, too, when one considers individual variables - reality to an autistic person like Temple Grandin? Reality to a schizophrenic? I mean, I see a mirage. It is an illusion. It can be explained by heat and sunlight and eyes and so on. Say I do not know it is an illusion and I walk toward it because I believe it is water. The image has a reality in that it exists as a real concept in my mind, and a value, that leads to action. When I reach the place and find no water, the illusion is revealed to be an illusion - but I 'really' saw something. My brain really acted on something. The mirage existed. The concept of water existed. The water did not. Now imagine I have a psychotic episode, I see a man with an axe. I hide. Here, there is no external reality. But the reality of the concept exists as a representation. It has value and I seek to escape it. It is real and not real. Now, I am a writer and I imagine a woman writing in her garden. I know this is an act of imagination. It is not reflected in reality and I do not believe it is. And yet it is real in my mind, as actions of neurons at the very least. It may have enough value for me to spend hours writing about it. My behaviour may be directed by something unreal that I know to be unreal for many months and years. What about the thoughts imagined by my character, the woman in the garden, who is writing a story of a man in an office who in turn is thinking about a child in a school who for her part is imagining a dog at home which is smelling the fragrances of cooking? The fractal form of values and images infinitely recurring and dividing.

I'm rather off-track - that whole last paragraph is maybe not relevant to my argument - but the earlier sections stand. There are not two lenses: there are a multiplicity. There is more in heaven and earth than dreamed of even in Dan Kaufman's fascinating approach to metaphysics.

* On that, Toby Ord in his book on existential threats, Precipice, says that the value of bees and other pollinators for crop pollination is exaggerated - the loss of all of them, though a tragedy, would lead to only a 3-6% decline in yields.