Philosophical Progress; Reality; Magnolia
11/7/2021
Author’s Note: The third post is a review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA and includes spoilers for Leos Carax’s ANNETTE.
Philosophical Progress
This is an interesting artifact: Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. You could imagine surveys like this providing real-time insight into progress in a field. Like, if you were polling economists throughout the 20th century, you would be able to trace the ripple effects of works like Keynes’ General Theory or the Hayekian response and so on. You could do a similar analysis for a field like physics and see how quickly physicists adopted the insights of an Einstein or Dirac or whoever.
One hypothesis would be that the surveys of physicists would show that papers in physics are able to generate a stronger consensus more quickly than papers in economics. Theories in physics may present as more binary (ie either obviously sound or obviously false), meaning that once they are accepted by some, they will be accepted by many, whereas in economics where things seem less binary, you would expect to see some continued ideological divides. Part of the reason for this is the ability to verify physicists’ theories against logic and reality: in a proof you can spot a deductive error and with a theory that predicts an empirical phenomenon, you can report back if you did not observe the predicted phenomenon1. Though economics is similarly empirically oriented, it seems that it is harder to say whether a theory is falsified or not given the greater level of confounding variables in human systems versus natural ones2.
If we would predict less agreement in economics than in physics because of the verifiability of the theorems, we should predict even less agreement in philosophy than economics. Economics, after all, purports to explain and predict empirical phenomena, even if these phenomena are fuzzier/messier to analyze than those in physics. Philosophy, on the other hand, makes no such claims. Philosophy deals solely in the world of a priori reasoning. We can invalidate a philosophical argument by identifying problems in deductive inference, but unlike math, there is little consensus in philosophy around what axioms to accept, meaning it is hard to prove an argument has or lacks soundness. No planes crash because of a philosophical miscalculation, and the philosopher, unlike the mathematician, always has recourse to bullet-biting when forced to defend seemingly absurd conclusions.
Though we would predict little consensus in philosophy, apparently philosophers largely agree (~88%) that their field is making progress. Of course, it’d be a funny sort of progress for a field where truths are uncovered but the field as a whole does not recognize or build upon those truths, so you would expect that philosophers think their field is converging on answers to at least some big questions. If you flip through the survey, however, I think it is mostly a story of disagreement. Philosophers are pretty evenly split on consequentialism vs Kantianism vs virtue ethics, for example. And in many of the areas were there is agreement, it seems to be on “easier” issues, like ~82% of philosophers thinking that the external world is real3.
I was thinking of ending this bit by arguing that sometimes you do get really good falsification of big important philosophical theories like you see in the sciences. Everyone believes something for hundreds or thousands of years, and then boom – progress! We are awakened from our dogmatic slumber. In biology, people believed in spontaneous generation until Louis Pasteur came along and proved them wrong. In chemistry, people believed atoms (literally Greek for “uncuttable”) were indivisible units of matter until J.J. Thomson came along and proved them wrong. And then in philosophy, for thousands of years – literally dating back to Plato and the foundations of the discipline and Western civilization – people believed that to know something was to have a justified true belief about it. And then, in 1963, Edmund Gettier came along and asked “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, concluded it was not and thereby proved a multi-millennial theory of knowledge wrong, propelling philosophy forward as Pasteur did biology or Thomson chemistry. Philosophy professors regale their students with the legend of the philosopher who in a simple three page article convincingly overturned a long-held but false theory. Except, of course, according to the survey, 23.6% of philosophers still believe knowledge is just justified true belief4. Not the ending I was hoping for…
I’m not sure whether we’ve made any progress on the problem of philosophical progress beyond progressing the view that it is a genuinely complicated philosophical (and perhaps sociological?) problem.
Reality
Eric Hoel wrote an insightful substack on what is real and what we should care about. This excerpt gives the gist of the key ideas:
To steal a term from Hinduism, we spend most of our days in Maya: “that which is not.” The illusion. Maya is your job and the email you don’t want to answer and your worry about politics and the thing you’re mad about on Twitter. The movie Rust was Maya, and it turned out the production set of Rust was also, in a sense, just as much a fantasy, just as much Maya…. The opposite of Maya is Brahman, or absolute reality. It’s not on any map, but, as Melville said, “true places never are.” For you can indeed find Brahman, or, far more likely, it finds you. Some sterile space with florescent lighting and coffee in little cardboard cups from a break room with vending machines. That’s where Life actually happens, because that’s where Death actually happens…. These Hindu terms are essentially monikers that formalize the ontological hierarchy of problems. Hospitals, medical and psychiatric problems, personal rifts and damaging decisions, and so on, are all really real, that is, Brahman, whereas at least most of the time political and cultural issues are just kind of real, or Maya. When people say things “just got real” they are speaking, I think, quite literally. They have entered Brahman. One of the biggest fallacies in modernity is the flipping of the ontological pyramid, wherein one thinks that senate bills, cultural debates, a wayward opinion you don’t like, etc, are the foundation of personal reality, when really they are its ghostly superstructure.
The examples he draws on are upsetting and thereby illuminating, but I think there’s also value in his naming and distinguishing these categories we are already aware of - the things that really matter, and the things that don’t matter in the scheme of things - but don’t necessarily have the language to describe pithily5. Those things that we spend most of our time worrying about are Maya. The things we claim were most important to us on our deathbeds are Brahman. Maya is getting stood up for a date; Brahaman is getting divorced.
How do we escape Maya? According to Hoel:
In the secular world, there are only two things that shake us from our habituation, our Maya, and reveal to us Brahman (Egyptians called this “lifting the Veil of Isis”). For the secular, art lifts the Veil of Isis, and a trip to the hospital lifts the veil as well. Yet both art and hospitals are liminal spaces we must retreat from—soon the veil starts to flutter closed again, some neurons somewhere deep in the brain lowering the amplitude of their responses, until they become quiescent and we are blind once more.
If the forces of our neurobiology are working against us escaping Maya, and the world of Brahman is filled with hospitals and profound pain and suffering, why not simply acquiesce and embrace Maya? Robert Nozick rephrases the question in terms of an imagined “experience machine”:
What matters other than how people's experiences feel "from the inside"? Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, selecting your life's experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? Nor should you refrain because of the few moments of distress between the moment you've decided and the moment you're plugged. What's a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that's what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one? [emphasis added]
Magnolia; Or, What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
Letterboxd review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA (with spoilers for Leos Carax’s ANNETTE)
Made for interesting viewing in the wake of watching ANNETTE and while reading “Les Miserables”. There’s little more evil than cruelty to the vulnerable, and conversely, “to love another person is to see the face of god” (I’ve also been listening to the LES MISERABLES movie soundtrack…).
I think the “Les Mis” comparison is especially interesting. Both are capacious epics full of a multitude of characters whose chance interactions change everyone’s lives. What else can you do to pull someone out of their self-obsession (like Adam Driver’s character in ANNETTE whose fragile ego and inability to see beyond his own needs leads him to murder) but explore a variety of people’s inner lives and show how an individual’s actions reverberate through the lives of others? “One is the loneliest number…” and all that.
Literature at its best gives us that little nudge to look up outside of ourselves and to remember to love a little more. It saves us freaks “who suspect they could never love anyone” like Marion Cotillard’s character in ANNETTE saves her audience each night at the opera. Sure, it sounds simple: nurture the weak, offer patience and forgiveness, be a little better tomorrow than you were today. And yet…
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Of course, these both only permit the proof of the falsity of a theory. Harder to prove the truth.
I know this is all pretty sketchy. I might get more into it another time, but doing so seems kinda beyond what’s relevant here.
Notably, this number is not 100%, or even like 96% taking the Lizardman constant into account.
To give philosophy a bit of credit, the flip side of this stat is that at least the vast majority of philosophers agree we have moved beyond the justified true belief theory of knowledge. Of course, then the problem is that there’s not much agreement on what theory is correct…
Indeed, clarifying concepts (“conceptual analysis”) was deemed the most useful philosophical tool in the PhilPapers survey. Like Adam naming the animals, philosophers may have some role in naming and clarifying the ineffable. It’s like Christine Korsgaard’s dictum: “philosophy is ordinary reasoning rendered persistent”. Maybe an underrated form of philosophical progress.