Truth and belief in truth

[Guitar's Cry]

How pervasive is the error of confusing "truth" with the effects of "believing something to be true"? Can you think of examples of this error?

This appears to happen all the time in science as well as religion and morality. Evidences for particular observations are taught by learned men, read out of scholarly books, and proclaimed true. Thus, the scientific observation becomes fact because of the faith we put in the mediums through which we learn of them. The pleasurable feelings are produced by logic, peer consensus, and empiricism--the scientific virtues.

(This isn't meant to be a tirade against science, by the way, just an observation. )

How about the confusion of the "state of of consciousness" with its causes?

There is necessary bias in a hypothesis before the experimentation even begins. And with experimentation, there is still biased observation.

 

[doppelganger]

This appears to happen all the time in science as well as religion and morality. Evidences for particular observations are taught by learned men, read out of scholarly books, and proclaimed true. Thus, the scientific observation becomes fact because of the faith we put in the mediums through which we learn of them. The pleasurable feelings are produced by logic, peer consensus, and empiricism--the scientific virtues.

(This isn't meant to be a tirade against science, by the way, just an observation. )

I think an appropriate one. What is scientific knowledge then, if not "truth"?

 

[Guitar's Cry]

I think an appropriate one. What is scientific knowledge then, if not "truth"?

I would say belief. And it doesn't become a question of the accuracy of the belief behind science and religion, it is a question of how and why those beliefs are there and where they come from. Which is really what Nietzsche was all about, eh? We study the cause after observing the effect, and proclaim that the cause came first. We study the Bible and proclaim that the interpretation came before the words.

 

[doppelganger]

I would say belief. And it doesn't become a question of the accuracy of the belief behind science and religion, it is a question of how and why those beliefs are there and where they come from. Which is really what Nietzsche was all about, eh? We study the cause after observing the effect, and proclaim that the cause came first. We study the Bible and proclaim that the interpretation came before the words.

Right, which is why Nietzsche's insight that there is rudimentary psychology even in the atom is so powerful to people who perceive that reality is the manipulation of symbols. Even "scientific" reality is the manipulation of symbols.

What scientific method does is test the certainty of certain probabilities to arrive at more useful predictive models for reality. But "useful" isn't "true" in the hands of a careful scientific thinker. Indeed, scientific innovation depends on retaining a very high level of perspectival uncertainty - the sense of wonder that drives religion, art and science.

And "usefulness" is a judgment determined by one's perspective and perceived purposes as well . . .

 

[Guitar's Cry]

Right, which is why Nietzsche's insight that there is rudimentary psychology even in the atom is so powerful to people who perceive that reality is the manipulation of symbols. Even "scientific" reality is the manipulation of symbols.

The awareness of the "where, how, and why" of beliefs is in my opinion more powerful than the validity of that belief. And that is determined by an awareness of how symbols work.

What scientific method does is test the certainty of certain probabilities to arrive at more useful predictive models for reality. But "useful" isn't "true" in the hands of a careful scientific thinker. Indeed, scientific innovation depends on retaining a very high level of perspectival uncertainty - the sense of wonder that drives religion, art and science.

Yes! The model we have for the atom echoes the meaning behind using the word "God," or creating the Mona Lisa.

 

[Ozzie]

Right, which is why Nietzsche's insight that there is rudimentary psychology even in the atom is so powerful to people who perceive that reality is the manipulation of symbols. Even "scientific" reality is the manipulation of symbols.

What scientific method does is test the certainty of certain probabilities to arrive at more useful predictive models for reality. But "useful" isn't "true" in the hands of a careful scientific thinker. Indeed, scientific innovation depends on retaining a very high level of perspectival uncertainty - the sense of wonder that drives religion, art and science.

Do you think it is possible to formulate a scientific theory of consciousness if the psychology of error were to be abandonned. Wouldn't that involve radically rethinking what consciousness is? Does Nietsche abandon consciousness?

 

[Ozzie]

The awareness of the "where, how, and why" of beliefs is in my opinion more powerful than the validity of that belief. And that is determined by an awareness of how symbols work.



Yes! The model we have for the atom echoes the meaning behind using the word "God," or creating the Mona Lisa.

You still have a problem in describing meaning as being behind something else. That is a niggling Cartesian inference IMO. Much of psychology falls apart on the problem of meaning.

 

[doppelganger]

Do you think it is possible to formulate a scientific theory of consciousness if the psychology of error were to be abandonned. Wouldn't that involve radically rethinking what consciousness is? Does Nietsche abandon consciousness?

In Will to Power (Book Three), he argues that a tool cannot measure or understand itself when it has only itself as the measure. In Twilight (the subject of this thread), he says something similar:

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.

Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived?

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. "Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

 

[Ozzie]

In Will to Power (Book Three), he argues that a tool cannot measure or understand itself when it has only itself as the measure. In Twilight (the subject of this thread), he says something similar:

This is exactly the problem faced when using certain methods of meditation to introspect on the mind ie those that involve generating an image, mantra etc. Even focussing on a burning candle would involve some use of the mind in order to observe itself.

It is an insight into what creates the homunculus problem in psychology.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

You still have a problem in describing meaning as being behind something else. That is a niggling Cartesian inference IMO. Much of psychology falls apart on the problem of meaning.

Interesting, Ozzie! I'm not so sure that meaning requires Cartesian dualism, though, which assumes a mind/body split. Meaning can simply be the experience of associations made within the brain. We experience the model of the atom due to neural connections that are created through scientific education.

Even assuming a mind/body split, though, how does psychology fall apart through the problem of meaning? What is the problem of meaning?

 

[Guitar's Cry]

It is an insight into what creates the homunculus problem in psychology.

I wouldn't have thought of that! Essentially, the problem has nothing to do with a "little man in the brain," but with our false assumption that our senses are empirical. Is that what you were getting at?

Hm...I'm going to have to think on this more...

 

[Guitar's Cry]

I wouldn't have thought of that! Essentially, the problem has nothing to do with a "little man in the brain," but with our false assumption that our senses are empirical. Is that what you were getting at?

Hm...I'm going to have to think on this more...

Could it be that because we experience things that have already happened (it takes time for the brain to process and interpret data), there is no need for a "little man"? All the brain needs to do is experience the symbols it has produced for what has already happened.

The homunculus argument assumes that an experience occurs in real-time, when it is possible that it does not. Right? Or am I missing something?

 

[Ozzie]

Interesting, Ozzie! I'm not so sure that meaning requires Cartesian dualism, though, which assumes a mind/body split. Meaning can simply be the experience of associations made within the brain. We experience the model of the atom due to neural connections that are created through scientific education.

Even assuming a mind/body split, though, how does psychology fall apart through the problem of meaning? What is the problem of meaning?

One aspect of the problem of meaning is that the homunculus is required for semantics. Something or someone has to do the extracting of meaning from binary syntax. This requires an outside perspective/understanding. Clearly it is unsatisfactory to propose a little man in the head does the understanding. Because then it would have be argued that he had a little man in his head and so on leading to infinite regress.

Another aspect of the problem is that all psychological terms are definable only in terms of other psychological terms. . Attempting to define psychological terms also leads to infinite regress.

Infinite regress is a real problem because it renders psychological terms and mental states they describe meaningless.

Ordinary language philosopher Ryle had an interesting theory that the notion of self was a category error. I won't go further into that here. But the failure of any comprehensible definition available for mental states bugs me. I prefer to think in ordinary language terms that self is indeed a category error described only in psychological mumbo-jumbo.

Psychological theories are primarily based on an implicit assumption that Cartesian dualism is real, even if they purport to be materialist. They assume there is a separation of body and mind. All cognitive psych assumes this separation. IMO they are fundamentally flawed.

 

[Ozzie]

Could it be that because we experience things that have already happened (it takes time for the brain to process and interpret data), there is no need for a "little man"? All the brain needs to do is experience the symbols it has produced for what has already happened.

The homunculus argument assumes that an experience occurs in real-time, when it is possible that it does not. Right? Or am I missing something?

An homunculus is assumed if we use our brain as a tool to examine itself. We put our own brain at once in the position of subject (homunculus) and object (brain). The timing of processing and interpretation is irrelevant. It is the assumption of dual positions as subject and object that creates the illusion and is the fallacy.

I don't think the time delay argument is very convincing. The idea that we falsely and naturally view our senses as empirical is though, especially the aspect that we should naturally accept it. Truth is it all does seem natural.

 

[Willamena]

A homunculus is created when we "use our brain," whether or not it is ourselves we "examine." Every object has a subject, as long as we are conscious to think that - even the homunculus.

 

[doppelganger]

Truth is it all does seem natural.

But of course language presumes this seeming natural-ness. So you can't analyze the "subject" through the tools of thought without being the subject doing the analyzing. If things are related by neurological connections in the brain in a constantly changing biochemical process, then sensory data and memory is given ever-shifting meaning without the presence of a homonculus. The difficulty is that language presumes an actor/doer as a static thing. Indeed, language presumes a world of static things, which has been until recently a highly useful way for modeling reality. Nietzsche demonstrated its limitations, and quantum mechanics altered the model from a reality of things to a reality of perception of things and opened the door to an even more useful model.

So keeping in mind Nietzsche's statement that every atom contains rudimentary psychology, quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf's explanation of the role of thought in reality "creation" (from his book Taking the Quantum Leap) makes a lot more sense:

The reason for this paradoxical appearance of reality - at least, atomic reality as observed by physicists - is that no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we observe to exist outside ourselves. Instead, reality depends upon our choice of what and how we choose to observe. These choices, in turn, depend upon our minds or, more specifically, the content of our thoughts. And our thoughts, in turn, depend upon our expectations, our desire for continuity. Both the wave and particle descriptions of nature are remnants of our desire for continuity. They represent our best attempts to understand physical reality in terms of pictures, mechanical constructs of thought based upon continuity. When we observe anything on the atomic scale we disrupt that continuity. . . These concerns regarding observation I call the construction of reality by mental acts. These are the acts of creation . . . If we choose to regard everything we see and do within the framework of the new physics, then we can say that, to some extent, reality construction is what we do every instant of our conscious lives.​

This thinglyness "created" in thought even applies to "I am" - my own being as the subject!

This is reflected in the excerpt from Will To Power that I referred to earlier:

"There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true à priori" our belief in the concept of substance-- that when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate--Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.

If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon--that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself. The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, "the subject," the precondition for "substance" in general disappears.

One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being . . . The degree to which we feel life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of "being", "reality", not appearance.

The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one cause--we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine "truth", "reality", substantiality in general.-- "The subject" is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the "similarity" of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (--which ought rather to be denied--).

One would have to know what being is, in order to decide whether this or that is real (e. g., "the facts of consciousness"); in the same way, what certainty is, what knowledge is, and the like.-- But since we do not know this, a critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself when it can use only itself for the critique? It cannot even define itself!

Must all philosophy not ultimately bring to light the preconditions upon which the process of reason depends?--our belief in the "ego" as a substance, as the sole reality from which we ascribe reality to things in general?

The oldest "realism" at last comes to light: at the same time that the entire religious history of mankind is recognized as the history of the soul superstition. Here we come to a limit: our thinking itself involves this belief (with its distinction of substance, accident; deed, doer, etc.); to let it go means: being no longer able to think. But that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth, one knows from the fact that, e. g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality.​

In other words:

Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

 

[Ozzie]

A homunculus is created when we "use our brain," whether or not it is ourselves we "examine." Every object has a subject, as long as we are conscious to think that - even the homunculus.

I would say every object has definition, not subject.

 

[Ozzie]

But of course language presumes this seeming natural-ness. So you can't analyze the "subject" through the tools of thought without being the subject doing the analyzing. If things are related by neurological connections in the brain in a constantly changing biochemical process, then sensory data and memory is given ever-shifting meaning without the presence of a homonculus. The difficulty is that language presumes an actor/doer as a static thing. Indeed, language presumes a world of static things, which has been until recently a highly useful way for modeling reality. Nietzsche demonstrated its limitations, and quantum mechanics altered the model from a reality of things to a reality of perception of things and opened the door to an even more useful model.

So keeping in mind Nietzsche's statement that every atom contains rudimentary psychology, quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf's explanation of the role of thought in reality "creation" (from his book Taking the Quantum Leap) makes a lot more sense:

The reason for this paradoxical appearance of reality - at least, atomic reality as observed by physicists - is that no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we observe to exist outside ourselves. Instead, reality depends upon our choice of what and how we choose to observe. These choices, in turn, depend upon our minds or, more specifically, the content of our thoughts. And our thoughts, in turn, depend upon our expectations, our desire for continuity. Both the wave and particle descriptions of nature are remnants of our desire for continuity. They represent our best attempts to understand physical reality in terms of pictures, mechanical constructs of thought based upon continuity. When we observe anything on the atomic scale we disrupt that continuity. . . These concerns regarding observation I call the construction of reality by mental acts. These are the acts of creation . . . If we choose to regard everything we see and do within the framework of the new physics, then we can say that, to some extent, reality construction is what we do every instant of our conscious lives.​

This thinglyness "created" in thought even applies to "I am" - my own being as the subject!

This is reflected in the excerpt from Will To Power that I referred to earlier:

"There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true à priori" our belief in the concept of substance-- that when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate--Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.

If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon--that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself. The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, "the subject," the precondition for "substance" in general disappears.

One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being . . . The degree to which we feel life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of "being", "reality", not appearance.

The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one cause--we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine "truth", "reality", substantiality in general.-- "The subject" is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the "similarity" of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (--which ought rather to be denied--).

One would have to know what being is, in order to decide whether this or that is real (e. g., "the facts of consciousness"); in the same way, what certainty is, what knowledge is, and the like.-- But since we do not know this, a critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself when it can use only itself for the critique? It cannot even define itself!

Must all philosophy not ultimately bring to light the preconditions upon which the process of reason depends?--our belief in the "ego" as a substance, as the sole reality from which we ascribe reality to things in general?

The oldest "realism" at last comes to light: at the same time that the entire religious history of mankind is recognized as the history of the soul superstition. Here we come to a limit: our thinking itself involves this belief (with its distinction of substance, accident; deed, doer, etc.); to let it go means: being no longer able to think. But that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth, one knows from the fact that, e. g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality.​

In other words:

Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

I suppose the only two ways to deny Nietsche victory here are to deny outright that identity between third party and first person awareness is impossible as Dennet does, or to look for a method of introspection which avoids using the mind as in dual roles of subject/object.

Nietsche doesn't offer a solution. Is there one?

If you believe that every thought has a shadow, then you can never be like Alice in Wonderland.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

An homunculus is assumed if we use our brain as a tool to examine itself. We put our own brain at once in the position of subject (homunculus) and object (brain). The timing of processing and interpretation is irrelevant. It is the assumption of dual positions as subject and object that creates the illusion and is the fallacy.

How is this a fallacy, though? When the brain examines itself, it does so by creating a model. The brain as an object is only a virtual model, not the actual brain, in the same way that the word "brain" is not the brain.

Cartesian dualism is simply a useful model. Psychology uses it in much the same way a doctor may use a diagram of the heart; neither are what they depict, but are useful in attempting to describe what appears to be there.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

I suppose the only two ways to deny Nietsche victory here are to deny outright that identity between third party and first person awareness is impossible as Dennet does, or to look for a method of introspection which avoids using the mind as in dual roles of subject/object.

Nietsche doesn't offer a solution. Is there one?

If you believe that every thought has a shadow, then you can never be like Alice in Wonderland.

The problem is, our perceived reality is composed of the subject/object duality. In order for there to be a "dog," there must be a "not-dog."