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Idealist Implications of Contemporary Science

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Abstract

Recent developments in contemporary natural science (including the evolutionary study of perception, cognitive science, and interpretations of quantum physics) incorporate central idealist positions relating to the nature of representation, the role our minds play in structuring our experience of the world, and the properties of the world behind our representations. This paper first describes what these positions are, and how they are introduced in the relevant theories in terms of precisely formulated scientific analogues. I subsequently consider how this way of looking at philosophical idealism through selected parts of contemporary science can help us to pursue new ways of developing key idealist questions in a way that is integrated with a naturalistically supported endeavour to understand central features of reality.

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Notes

  1. With a few notable exceptions: Foster (1982, 2008), von Kutschera (2006), Sprigge (1983), Taber (2020). See also Farris/Göcke (2022), parts 3–5.

  2. Anderson (2017): 5–6: “I most certainly do not want to recapitulate the realism vs. idealism and epistemic externalism vs. internalism debates […] I’ll simply assert without argument that […] any epistemology that implies internalism and its attendant skepticism has made a mistake somewhere.” Simons (2021: 76) includes idealism in his list of “metaphysical follies”, views he considers to be “bizarre, extreme and unbelievable”.

  3. Dunham et al. (2011) and Goldschmidt/Pearce (2017) provide good surveys of the diversity of idealist traditions.

  4. For some discussion of global advance of science in the late 19th and early 20th century and the contemporaneous rise of philosophical idealism in Europe, India, and China see Garfield/Bushan (2017: 178–216), Makeham (2014).

  5. My claim is not that every position in the history of philosophy ever described as idealism endorses all of these principles, but rather that they subsume a large enough subset of the family to provide sufficient content for the discussion of idealism presented below.

  6. I believe the three principles can be brought into sharper focus by considering their direct opposites, many of which are widely accepted philosophical positions. Representation contradicts various forms of direct or naïve realism which assume that our perception puts us into a direct relation with entities ‘out there’ in the world, without the need for a representational intermediary (for the popular disjunctivist variety of this view see Soteriou 2016). An antithesis of formation is the common-sense realism defended, for example, by Michael Devitt (“Tokens of most current observable common-sense and scientific physical types objectively exist independently of the mental.”, 1997: 24), while non-correspondence is directly opposed to epistemic realism, “the reigning orthodoxy among philosophers for almost a generation”, the view that “especially in the ‘mature’ and well-developed parts of the physical sciences, scientists have come very close to discerning the way the world really is.” (Laudan 1997: 138).

  7. See Hoffman et al., (2015a, b). Hoffman (2019) presents a popularized account of the theory. Hoffman also sets out to build a comprehensive theory of consciousness (“conscious realism”, the view that “the objective world […] consists entirely of conscious agents”, 2008: 103) on the basis of the interface theory. These further theoretical developments are not part of our present discussion.

  8. See Simons (2017: 32).

  9. Prakash (2021).

  10. Hoffman et al., (2015a): 1486, Prakash (2021: 326–327). This is frequently the case. Not enough water is as bad for an organism as too much; that some intake of water increases fitness does not imply that any intake will.

  11. Hoffman (2008: 112) and Prakash (2020) for the relevant technical details behind this claim. We can show that the more experiences a perceiver is able to distinguish the greater the probability that perceptual strategies aiming at fitness the perceiver might adopt will outperform strategies aiming at accurate representation.

    Prakash et al., (2020) examines a set of structures of our representation of the world (total orders, permutation groups, cyclic groups, and measurable spaces), arguing that if these structures were also instantiated in the world, it would be exceedingly unlikely that evolutionarily successful fitness functions ever mirror them.

  12. Hoffman (2015b) notes that “the fundamental dynamical properties of physics—including position, momentum, and spin—do not describe reality as it is, but are instead products of—that is, creations of—the measurement process” (1554) and that “physics is almost surely not causally complete”. (1571).

  13. Such a sharing of structure is assumed, for example, by O’Brien/Opie (2004: 15), who argue that “it is a relation of structural resemblance between mental representing vehicles and their objects that disposes cognitive subjects to behave appropriately towards the latter.”.

  14. Hoffman et al., (2015a, 2015b: 1484, 1501, 1503).

  15. Hoffman et al., (2015a, 2015b: 1496).

  16. Fields et al., (2017: 272–273). ‘Errors’ are here understood not as misrepresentations of the environment, but as actions that decrease fitness (288). See also Prakash (2020: 121) which discusses a formal development of the idea that “a conscious agent can consistently see geometric and probabilistic structures of space that are not necessarily in the world per se but are properties of the conscious agent itself”.

  17. Hoffman et al., (2015a, 2015b: 1490).

  18. Hoffman et al., (2014: 20).

  19. Hoffman et al., (2015a, 2015b: 1483).

  20. Hoffman (2015b: 1565).

  21. Hoffman (2015b: 1563).

  22. Despite the neutrality of the interface theory’s conception of the world behind the representations its proponents use it as a basis on which to build an idealist metaphysics (‘conscious agent theory’), see Hoffman et al., (2015a, 2015b: 1502). For more on conscious agent theory see Hoffman (2008), Hoffman/Prakash (2014).

  23. Helpful surveys of the prediction error minimization theory are provided by Hohwy (2013, 2020), as well as in the collection of papers available at https://predictive-mind.net.

  24. For more discussion of Markov blankets see Westerhoff (2020: 37–40), Menary/Gillett (2021), Bruineberg (2022).

  25. Hohwy (2016: 276).

  26. For further discussion of the notion of ‘directness’ relevant in this context see Snowdown (1992), Westerhoff (2020: 22–32).

  27. Hohwy (2016: 283).

  28. Wiese/Metzinger (2007: 1).

  29. For some accounts that challenge this postulate see Anderson (2017), Clark (2017), Fabry (2017a,b).

  30. Clark (2017: 17). See also Parr et al., (2022: 108–109).

  31. Hohwy (2016: 275).

  32. Fabry (2017b: 406).

  33. Hohwy (2016: 276).

  34. Clark (2017: 16).

  35. On this point see Clark (2017: 16).

  36. A point accepted by Hohwy: “the brain is itself a hidden cause” (2016: 268). See also Shand (2014: 245), note 5.

  37. Hohwy (2013: 179, 221).

  38. For the idea of equating the agent with a model see Hohwy (2017: 3).

  39. See, for example, Swanson (2016), Beni (2018), Piekarski (2017), Zahavi (2018), Gładziejewski (2016: 574), Anderson/Chemero (2013: 204). Links between predictive processing and Berkeley’s idealism are explored by Shand (2014) and Norwich (1993, chs 15, 17).

  40. Swanson (2016: 5–6).

  41. They also include some very specific assumptions, such as that light comes from above (Hohwy 2013:116).

  42. Possible examples of hyperpriors mentioned by Clark (2013:196) include the basic assumption about space that every location contains only a single object, and the basic assumption about time that we can only carry out a single action at any given moment.

  43. Hohwy (2013: 220).

  44. Hohwy (2013: 60, 81).

  45. Gładziejewski (2016: 571).

  46. Feldman (2013).

  47. Westphal (1997: 231).

  48. As for the Kantian the causal relation is to be confined exclusively to the phenomenal realm. See Rescher (1974: 178).

  49. Apart from popular classics in this genre like Capra (1975) and Zukav (1979) see, for example, Goswami (1989), Wendt (2015), Kastrup (2021).

  50. I also lack the space to discuss the work of Markus Müller, whose approach has stronger idealist implications than QBism. See, for example Ball (2017), Müller (2018, 2020).

  51. The philosophical implications of QBism are subject to extensive discussion in the literature, and not all philosophers and physicists writing on this agree about all of them. Nevertheless, I hope that the account given below faithfully represents the view of key contributors to this debate.

  52. Fuchs et al. (2014: 749). For criticism of this understanding of the wavefunction see Brown (2019).

  53. For some discussion see von Baeyer (2016: 135–137), Fuchs et al. (2014: 750).

  54. Fuchs et al. (2014: 750).

  55. Norsen (2016: 234).

  56. Fuchs (2010: 21–22).

  57. Mermin (2014b: 422–423).

  58. Fuchs (2017: 119, note 5).

  59. Glick (2021: 17–18), Fuchs (2017: 119).

  60. Glick (2021: 8).

  61. Mohrhoff (2020: 29).

  62. 2017: 121. How, according to QBism, the world manages to ‘kick’ in a way that shows up in our experience remains entirely mysterious. As Brown (2019: 81) notes, the “part of QBism which relates to “a theory of stimulation and response” between the agent and the world is not grounded in known physics.” Nor, one might add, is prediction error minimization’s theory of the interaction of entities on both sides of the Markov blanket.

  63. For further discussion of attempts trying to establish a mind-independent world by kicking see Simons (2017), Massin (2019).

  64. That QBism doesn not reduce to solipisism, understood as the position that only I myself am fundamentally real is evident once we realize that the world as we construct it from our experience contains minds other than our own. As we represent the world, distinct minds are included at the level of representation. And if QBism does not speak about the world as it is in itself it obviously cannot say that the world understood in this way only contains my mind. Since there is no third conception of the world, the world according to QBism cannot be understood along solipsist lines.

  65. 2008: 592.

  66. von Baeyer (2016: 221).

  67. Brown (2019: 80).

  68. Fuchs et al. (2014: 751).

  69. Unless we assume that this world can be accessed by pure reasoning, or by something like artistic or mystical intuition. The number of philosophers who want to rely on these when arguing against idealist accounts of the world is presumably small.

  70. Peres (1978: 746), von Baeyer (2016: 142–143), Hoffman (2105b: 1553).

  71. Glick (2021: 4).

  72. Peres (1978: 746).

  73. Mermin (2012: 8).

  74. Mermin (2014a: 20) suggests that this coordination takes place through language, though he unfortunately does not make clear how language is supposed to move across sets of subject-related experiences. See also Mermin (2014b: 422).

  75. Westerhoff (2020, chapter 3).

  76. A position we have not discussed here that might be able to combine the advantages of both noumenalism and limitationism is a view that agrees with the noumenalist that we should assert the existence of a world behind the representations, but concedes to the limitationalist that such a world can be only made sense of as one of the representations. (See Westerhoff 2016, 2020). According to this position, though we habitually refer to a ‘world out there’ and to entities behind our representations, such references do not differ in type from references to representations like tables and chairs.

  77. Brown (2019: 75, 78–81) refers to the “variant of Berkeleyian idealism which suffuses QBism”. For an attempt to link QBism with an ontology of idealist monism see Mohrhoff (2021).

  78. Hoffman et al., (2015a: 1482).

  79. Hohwy (2016: 264).

  80. Mermin (2012), von Baeyer (2016: 152–155).

  81. In this case the notion of an isomorphic representation of structure constitutes the cut between the representation and the represented, demarcating, in the words of Hermann Weyl “the self-evident insurmountable boundary of cognition” (1949: 26).

  82. For some remarks on this see Fields et al., (2017: 268).

  83. See e.g. Fields et al., (2022).

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Westerhoff, J. Idealist Implications of Contemporary Science. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00738-8

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