The world after reality | Hilary Lawson

foreign thank you so I'm going to begin by taking you back 140 years to 1882. and uh Bismarck is the chancellor of Germany and he's reunited it just 10 years earlier and Gladstone is on the is prime minister in Britain in the states the Civil War is still a recent memory and a relatively insignificant uh academic called Frederick Nietzsche published a book called what was it was first translated as the joyful wisdom we now know it as the gay science and um at the time things weren't that great for for Nietzsche certainly wasn't very joyful he'd uh he'd had to abandon his uh post he no longer had an academic post uh nobody was really reading his books um the uh the gay science actually sold uh the miraculous number of 100 copies in the next 10 years and soon he will be publishing his own own books because no one was reading them but uh nevertheless the philosophy that he outlined in this book had Echoes throughout the intellectual history of the 20th century and one of the claims that he made in uh in the book in actually what he called the third third book but it's they're really chapters in length um with the claim God is dead and uh of course at the time it didn't really have any impact because nobody was reading it but uh it was remarkably prophetic because at the time in in Europe 90 of people were baptized when when Nietzsche was writing this and now the figure is something around 10 percent so uh the decline in religion was almost continuous from uh Nietzsche's nietz's remark and he went on to say God is dead and we have killed him and uh of course what he's understood to have meant by that is that human knowledge the unfurling of the Enlightenment gradually undermined the belief in a in a knowledge which came from a higher authority and uh and uh so it has developed now what I want to really talk about today is well what has replaced God and it seemed to me what we've replaced god with is reality and for those of you who've taken leave of God um reality probably feels pleasantly down to earth it may not be very um magical in the way that some people see God as being and and have the mystery of the universe to it but it's got a pleasantly down to earth practical exercise and we can make progress in terms of uncovering reality there's something rather strange about this idea of reality because the more we explore it the more it seems to have characteristics which are rather similar to those that previously applied to God so well we'll start with the one which I'm sure you can all go along with it's uh it's everywhere and everything isn't it reality but it's all it's all unnerable and unattainable and evasive and he might not be quite so convinced of those things and I'm a I'm a uh philosopher who has argued against philosophical realism which is the idea that we can describe reality so you might expect me to say that reality is uh unattailable and unknowable and so forth but in the last 10 years or so a whole slew of uh neuroscientists have have come to a similar view so for example Donald Hoffman he's at University of California Irving and he says whatever reality is it's not what you see what you see is just an Adaptive fiction and David Eagleman at Stanford University says reality is an Illusion perpetuated by our brains that leading neuroscientists investigators in the in perception and they're not alone there are others and I'll set uh bo Lotto um a whole load of neuroscientists now are questioning uh whether reality is an illusion and of course it's not just neuroscience physics as well has uncovered The elusive character of reality you know we started on the idea that reality was made of lots of small bits which we understood to be atoms and uh well we've opened the Chinese boxes haven't we we have protons and neutrons and we had quarks and leptons and bosons and so forth and then you examine what those particles are and um the actual material stuff of them gradually seems to disappear and we're left with um fields and energy so from some people even say uh we're just left with the mathematics so we seem to have lost the stuff of the universe uh as far as physics is concerned and some of the biggest physicists of the last century I mean Werner Heisenberg he won the Nobel Prize for creating uh quantum mechanics and his interpretation is the one that is widely used and he came to the conclusion in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics objective reality has evaporated and furthermore and he was a philosopher too he wrote a rather excellent book called physics and philosophy he he went on to say we have learned that exact science is possible without the basis of metaphysical realism and more recently Stephen Hawking man who originally initiated The Theory of Everything abundance 2010 he concluded there is no mortal independent test of reality it follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own so we've got no way of looking through to see how reality is independently of our of our models so you can see that the questioning of reality is now coming from all sides and what is a root underlying this questioning is the idea that we can't find a God's eye view a position to look down at where we are and see oh that's how it is because we come from our perspective we come from a perspective which is a function of our physiology a function of our our society and history a function of our language and so we can't somehow Escape that perspective to see down to see how reality is in itself now this puzzle about reality is even more puzzling than it first appears because one of the things about saying that reality is an illusion is that it looks as if we we might be able to overcome the illusion we might be able to you know fill up a curtain and look behind and see see what's really going on and of course the point is because of the perspective or character of our of our thought we can't do that because any anything that we peer through to is going to be perspectival as well people have had a go you know a few hundred years ago people have suggested that everything in our in our heads Consciousness was reality or were part of a universal consciousness more more recently there's been a Temptation amongst some philosophers to be attracted by the idea of pan psychism the idea that out there um material things are also a bit conscious but these these accounts of what's what's ultimately out there suffer from the same problem they're words in our in our language they're they're a function of our framework they're we can't break through to to an alternative story which is going to somehow replace our accounts of of reality with with with something else and so they're implausible Solutions uh we've just got to give up on the idea that we're going to arrive at a solution that the the puzzle there's a further twist to the way in which it is it is tricky so some people faced with this situation have come to the view where the right thing to do is to say nothing about the relationship between ourselves and the world nothing at all and the most obvious example of this because he was very explicit about it was um wittgenstein's later work he'd given up on the idea of describing the relationship between language and the world he essentially for the sort of outlines that I've I've given you here and sequence to that he he avoided making any overall claims about the nature of that relationship hiding strategy as it were in relation to reality is not satisfactory either and the reason that it's not satisfactory is because in order to understand uh wittgenstein's later work you have in a way to give him a metaphysical story and maybe the metaphysical story that you might give him we might people would might give him different ones but something along the lines of we are at play in a language game but if we can say we're playing a language game then well we've cracked it haven't we we know what's going on and and so the way that we have to understand the later Victory he said oh we you just have to read my aphorisms and you'll catch on but the problem is the way we catch on is to impute to him an overall view which he is avoiding stating so quite a tricky game this uh problem with reality and our recognition that we cannot describe the world and yet what do we then do about it now back in the 18th century the great philosopher Emmanuel Kant started from the position that we have knowledge and he thought we've got to work out how thought Works in order for us to uh have knowledge in the end and he used that build a structure of the necessary structure of how we think in order to be able to um have knowledge and it seems to me that the Contemporary situation is in fact exactly the reverse we have to start from the point of view of recognizing that there is no knowledge that we are unable to see how the world is and the challenge that we have is to explain how it is that even though we don't have knowledge of reality and even though our theories don't describe reality we are nevertheless able to achieve all sorts of things we can talk about what seems to be a shared reality which seems pretty fixed that we can get all things done we can uh make sense of the world and so forth how can we do that if we aren't able to actually describe it and it seems to me that is the central uh question that uh philosophy needs to address and it's certainly some something that I've spent some time uh seeking to make some progress with so how might we escape this ozarkas initially it looks impossible how can we do anything if our if our accounts of the world have got nothing to do and I do take the view it has nothing to do with what's out there how are they so how are they so effective so as a as a help I think we can just start off by thinking well there are plenty of things that language can't describe I mean aren't they I mean it can't describe if you've never had it the taste of an orange doesn't matter how much you try and tell people someone what the taste of orange is your favorite you're never going to succeed you can't describe to someone who's never seen color what the color blue is okay so why is that what why can't we describe it so I think one one sort of indication of why is because you can't divide it up so if you take the color blue you can't somehow divide it into bits and then describe the relationships between the bits and there's nothing that you can easily compare it with that it's like it you you're you're somehow stuck with just this thing and there's no no way that language can reach through to that thing that it seems to me is what's going on in our relationship to reality we can't reach through we can't we can't describe it so what are we doing how how can we think about what's going on here and I think a starting point is to think well think of the world as a not thing it's not anything in particular and it's not differentiated you might initially have a go at thinking well it's a sort of undifferentiated flux but of course that would be to be a description it would give you a sense of oh I've got a sense of what it is but at the moment just think of it well it's not a thing and it's not divided into things and it's language and thought that close this potential into individual things and it's on the basis of those things that we then intervene in the world and how it's the detail of that how does that work well I'm going to give you a metaphor think of uh our senses as being like Flags in the wind imagine for a moment you're in an underground bunker and you've never experienced the wind and what you've got is a screen in front of you see these flags waving now you could uh build all sorts of stories about these flags you could identify patterns in the way the flags are moving you could use them to predict how the flags might work in future you might notice that oh if it starts waving over there it tends to move over here you might build a ever more sophisticated account of how those flags are working which enable you to predict really quite accurately how they're going to predict in the function in the future but you're not going to understand what the wind is are you you're nowhere near the wind it's got the wind's something else altogether but it doesn't stop your your account of the flags enabling you to have an account of what they might be how they might be and how that how they could be predicted to be in the future and uh that's I think exactly what we should how we should think of our senses functioning so to use the uh parallel of the scientific Story the scientific Narrative of how our sensation is working and I choose the scientific story because I'm saying oh this is how it is but it is the ones that we've got we have to operate within the Frameworks the narratives we've got within what I would call the closures that we use to make sense of the world and within the context of that scientific story each neuron and we have two billion of them two billion of sensory neurons each neuron responds to the openness of the world and unlike the flags and this is a important and key factor unlike the flags it has only two responses it either fires or it doesn't fire that's all what's going on either fires or it doesn't matter and indeed there's a scientific law the all or none law which is it doesn't make any difference how you increase the input you only get a firing out at the end there's no halfway house it doesn't there's no it fires a bit or it fares a lot it just fires or it doesn't fire it's only two two two spaces for it and what the neuron is doing in that situation is it taking the whole the whole of the openness of the world and it's turning it into one thing the firing of a neuron and we don't think the firing of the neuron is a description of the world do we we don't think somehow out there there's a description of the firing of an era no it's a response our our experience is a response to the world not a description of the world and what we do is we take those responses and we then build an account of them which enables us to intervene so having had all of these initial closures as it were of of the way that the neurons are generating something in particular we then we then have another layer so we might take a million of these uh neurons firing as a patch of blue but that patch of blue just like the firing of the neuron is not out there it's how we hold all of those million neurons as one thing not as a million different things as one thing and that gives us something blue and we do that with all of our inputs so all of our inputs we turn into uh the things as it were which are the the sensations that we experience and they're not descriptions of the world they've got nothing to do with the world they're ways of holding it looking at our response no of course our sense is good held a world differently couldn't they I mean there are plenty of animals that don't have the same physiology as we do who uh have different inputs if you're dogs for example have 40 times as many Sensory neurons for smell that we do 40 times that's double the number that we have for site sites the most important for us but they have double the number for smell that we have a site so their world their sensory world is utterly different from ours and they intervene on the basis of that way of closing the world and there's no right way is there there's no right way of close it's not as if the senses are somehow discovering the right way to close it there's an indefinite number of flags that we could have to the world and if you look across the animal kingdom that's why you do all sorts of different ways of of responding now the closures of thought and language are just the same thing we often think of thought as being quite different from Sensation actually uh in some sense I don't think it is that what's going on is that we thought we are just holding doing the same thing we're holding a lot of different things as one thing only with with thought we hold Sensations as one thing so I might pick this up and I I have a sensation it's a bit bit cold it's sort of hard and um it's different where I hold on to it so I get lots of different Sensations and Visually there's an indefinite number of visual Sensations for whether I see it from this perspective or that you know in fact there are you know millions of them and we hold all of those different things as one and the same glass but that thing the Glass isn't out there any more than the the sensory neuron firing or the feel of the hardness uh or whatever it's just a way of holding the world and of course we could have hold them differently and that's the key thing about thought is that with physiology we've got no damn choice we've just inherited millions of years of evolution it responding in the way it is we look up at the sky on a sunny day it is blue we can't hold it as orange we've got no control over that and that's a function of our evolutionary process it might have been different had we evolved differently but we thought we can change how we hold the world I mean we could say okay think of this as a container think of it as a collection of of uh silicon atoms think of it as a drink think of it as a weapon you can hop from one of those closures to another can't you you can just hop one after the other and we choose through thought which one we'll go with and there's no no right one there's no underlying thing oh it really is a glass rather than it really is a weapon that ways of holding the world which enable us to intervene now many people I think when first coming across this thought have a concern that this feels as if we can make up any old thing uh that Anything Goes that's not right we've got lots of constraint I've explained the the constraint of our physiology we've got no no room for maneuver there and in terms of our thought we inherit all sorts of stories and closures about the world from our our parents from our friends from our culture from the the whole environment that we're in and we can't abandon all of that like overnight we can abandon little bits of it we can we can to some extent think of some things a little bit different we can choose as I say to see this as a weapon rather than a glass but we can't abandon it all at once we we have to stick roughly to the sort of things that everyone else is doing because otherwise we can't communicate with them and actually as children we're corrected all the time we use the wrong word we say it in the wrong way no no no no it's like this but it's not like that it has to be like that it's just that that's the way we do it in order to uh communicate and there are many sort of characteristics of this structure of openness and closure which affect the way we then think we can see some radically different ways here in the sense that computers close the world in terms of naughts and ones I mean they don't have experience I'm not suggesting that but we've created machines which divide the world into naught and one it's immensely powerful isn't it we the result of doing that we've got machines that can think and calculate much faster than we can that can play chess better than we can that can translate languages and all sorts of things like that well sort of but uh it's all from Norton one and in the same way the same is the case with our firing of the neurons we've got everything from firing or not firing that's all and it's just built in a giant series of patterns and closures that we've made to try and make sense of uh where we are and how we can intervene but every closure that we have every idea that we have that closes in the world a certain way does not succeed in describing the world it holds the world as something it doesn't describe the one it holds it as something and it's never going to succeed because the world's always something entirely different so there's an embrigible Gap between our idea and how the world is and that's true whatever framework we come up with so we shouldn't be surprised then that no scientific theory is safe from revision well of course it isn't it can't ever arrive they're always going to be issues with our patterning however good we get at it and not just little things at the edge they're always going to be fundamental at some level and that's why when we put forward a new bit to our Theory we can always ask other questions to it so you know we've created you know Dark Matter term Dark Energy recently to to patch up our our overall account of the universe which was not working very well in the process we we invented 95 of it but no matter um uh but that's not the end of it we can ask then questions about that we're never going to get to the bottom of those questions you sort of knew that didn't you you sort of knew we were never going to get to the bottom because if we did we could just pack up our universities we could all go home and it will be over and wouldn't life be dull so we sort of know this but this is us an explanation of you know why that's the case no theory is safe and all of our theories are going to fail so what does this mean what do we what should we do well I think that we have to rethink what it is to believe something we can't first of all it can't arrive it can't be an absolute story of the world but secondly it can't attempt to be an absolute story of the world and we have to think about that uh uh claim in a different sort of way it's a claim that it might enable us to achieve something now you might feel well I don't really like this I don't I've I've been you know I've learned all about reality at school I've grown up I've had a I've had a lifetime of understanding I've got some sense of where I am and now you're telling me you know we've got to give all of this away and I'm going to be lost and uh and uh and it sounds very scary well it's not very scary we've got these Frameworks which have enabled us to do all sorts of things which have enabled us to understand the world in ways which are in some ways immensely successful in some ways rather less successful but we don't have to give them all up we in fact we can't give them all up we couldn't we we we couldn't even begin to imagine what it would be to do that so we've just got this stuff of where we are and and that uh we can operate within and we need to try and improve it and make it better and more effective but at the same time we can keep as it were the the um magic of being alive the idea that there is something that we are never going to get to the bottom of that we can explore that we can have new potential to do things that we can't do at the moment we can hold the world differently if it's gone wrong instead of thinking well we're just trapped you know this is this we just no no let's just think about whether we can whether we can hold it differently and make it make the world a little bit better in some in in some ways now the tools of the Enlightenment were observation and reason and um they were of course immensely successful they've also run into trouble haven't they a lot lots of things that we've developed with the enlightenment which have generated their own problems but the tools in terms of enabling us to improve the models will be very successful and they have misled us though as a result of their success into thinking we are uncovering that reality and we just have to give up on that bit of it now some people understandably in the light of this have tended to think well I'm a bit nervous about this observation and reason I I don't like it seems to be a monolithic story of the world I don't want to buy that story well that's quite right because of course those tools were used to pursue certain ends and uh the the goals of a culture and the people who are running that culture but we don't need to give up the process of looking to see where there are closures are successful and whether they conflict with other ways that we want to hold the world so I think we need to double down on observation and reason we just have to give up thinking that we might arrive at the truth so I think you going to encourage you to think of reality is a theological notion it's a superstition and that's why those characteristics in the outset of everything and everywhere and unattainable and unavailable and Elusive feel rather familiar it's a theological notion and it's time to give up on our Superstition in favor of an alternative perspective where we see the potential we have to intervene in the World and Achieve things and to express ways of holding it that enable us to do things we can't do at the moment but not to imagine that we have arrived or that we can ever arrive now I just want one brief PostScript to the story that I I've given you which is of course this account of openness and closure um doesn't claim to be the truth either because like all other theories it's a way of closing the world but that doesn't mean to say that I don't think it has value it just means this is a way of holding it I think it's got a lot of things going for it surprisingly enough you know one of the one of the things about it is that it enables us to I mean we live in a very divided world don't we and it seems to be coming ever more divisive and I think it's just possible that giving up on the idea that any of us are ever right might be might be a preferable space it doesn't mean to say we can't pursue things that we want to pursue but it does mean that we can think that we aren't right and we don't are less tempted to somehow impose them on everybody else doesn't stop there being disagreement we've got different things we want to do with our accounts of the world and our closures but it does mean perhaps that we have just a little bit more humility about our own accounts and and uh it seems to me that the the account of openness of closure that I've provided you with here enables us to have all of the strengths of the Enlightenment tradition in one sense have that Science and Technology have those things that have helped our our lives like anesthetics and so forth that have undeniably good things we can have all of that and at the same time have the um wonder and the imagination of the Arts we can have the down-to-earth practical stuff and we can have the mystery of what it is to be alive and uh that seems to me a pretty exciting uh place to be just one final thought which is that what I'm offering you here therefore is in a way a way to hold the world which has the appearance of holding it fast when the world cannot be held at all thank you [Applause] for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to The Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, what is reality, hilary lawson closure, hilary lawson, post truth, closure theory, fake news, post truth philosophy, objective truth, philosophy of reality, the trouble with truth, philosophy, reality is dead, radical alternative to reality, realism, post realism, knowledge and philosophy, postmodernism, reality vs absolutism, post truth era, the truth about reality, is there a reality, multiple realities

Id: sTdKTy-P2xM

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023