READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART

 In the last couple of days I was able to finish the remaining portion of Donald Hoffman's CASE AGAINST REALITY. One reason is that it's both an easy read and just a little over 200 pages. But the other reason is that I could skip over a lot of Hoffman's fine points about tests of perception. This sort of slow case-building is necessary in science. But it wasn't strictly necessary for me to grasp his main thesis: the idea that all human perception is seen through the matrix he calls an "interface," as opposed to the common notion that "what we see is what there is." Hoffman's main concern is to demonstrate the superiority of his interface model, and for most of the book it appears he has no interest in inquiring into whatever aspects of reality that we, as products of evolution, are not privy to.

In the next to last chapter, "Scrutiny," Hoffman repeats examples from earlier chapters regarding creatures whose evolutionary instincts, which should promote fitness, may lead them down blind alleys. One prominent example is that of the Australian jewel beetle, which came near extinction because the males kept trying to mate with beer-bottles which resembled the markings of female jewel beetles. However, in an earlier chapter this was presented as no more than a comedy of mating errors. In "Scrutiny" the author goes a little further, claiming that fitness-conditioned entities as a whole cannot help but prefer "extreme" versions of normative stimuli, termed "supernormal stimuli."

Astute readers of this blog (or, more likely, of the works of Joseph Campbell) should recognize these two words. I believe Campbell first used the term in his 1959 book PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, and he derived the phrase from ethological writings of his time. I printed a representative excerpt from said tome in my 2012 essay VERTICALLY CHALLENING. I'm not surprised that Hoffman doesn't mention Campbell, but his only footnote on the stimuli-subject is for a 2010 book that uses that very phrase for its title, SUPERNORMAL STIMULI. Maybe that book properly credits the ethologists of the 1950s. 

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous. I have no doubt that Hoffman embraces the notion because it supports his general theory regarding the limitations of fitness-based perception.

Only in the last chapter does Hoffman venture some thoughts about the excluded perceptions. I was sure that, even though he makes a brief reference to Kant, that Hoffman had no interest in either Kant's philosophical project or any of the religious systems to which Kant was somewhat indebted. What I did not expect was that his version of excluded perceptions would sound not unlike the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

The claim of conscious realism is better understood by looking in a mirror. There you see the familiar-- your eyes, hair, skin and teeth. What you don't see is infinitely richer, and equally familiar-- the world of your conscious experiences. It includes your dreams, fears, aspirations... the vibrant world of your conscious experiences that transcends three dimensions.-- p. 186.

And here's Whitehead writing about his version of "conscious experiences," almost a hundred years ago:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.-- PROCESS AND REALITY.

However, philosophy is not Hoffman's metier, and he proves it later in the same chapter, when he cites this statement by Richard Dawkins:

Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

Immediately after, Hoffman says:

I agree with Dawkins. If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry, the scientific method.

A little later, Hoffman claims that his "conscious realism" system might effect a "rapprochement" between the worlds of science and spirituality. But how could any detente be forged if science alone, even one based in Hoffman's "case against reality," is in the driver's seat? 

I understand that for scientists, religion's history of infringement upon "existence claims" like those of Galileo cast a long shadow. But if Hoffman really valued what he terms "conscious experiences," the hallmarks of a consciousness not yet explained by current science, then he might have seen that a religious "existence claim" is substantially different in nature from one of science. A story about humanity's origins in the Garden of Eden does not compete as an "existence claim" with the story of evolution. The latter is about viewing the universe as what Whitehead called "inert facts," allegedly objective evidence. The former is about the full range of subjective human feelings, extrapolated into a system of mythopoeic correlations.

And so Hoffman's case fails in the light of superior testimony by Alfred North Whitehead. But Hoffman's argument is at least less polarizing than that of science-worshipper Dawkins, and so the court of public opinion may see a better thinker come forth to forge the desired rapprochement.

THE SECRET ORIGINS OF EVOLUTION

I recently finished a 1999 book by Michael Ruse, a "philosopher of science" and academic writer attached to the Florida State University: MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES, subtitled "Is Evolution a Social Construction?" 

The short answer is, not entirely.  In the course of about 250 easily accessible pages, MYSTERY grapples with the claim, advanced by certain "science critics," that science is entirely a projection of the social attitudes of its proponents.  Ruse, in surveying the life and work of several key figures in the development of evolutionary theory, traces the way that both "epistemic values" (those dealing with 'falsifiable' scientific data/theories) and "non-epistemic values" (those stemming from the role of culture in the lives of the scientists).  His first chapter provides a strong summation of the conflict through a contrast of Karl Popper, the representative of "science as objective knowledge," and Thomas Kuhn, the representative of "science as conditioned by socially significant paradigms."

I'll admit that while I don't have a problem with Ruse's "not entirely" verdict, I bought the book hoping that it would reveal the ways in which particular objectivist scientists had allowed their personal prejudices to influence their work.  Instead, I felt Ruse let a couple of them off the hook too easily, barely examining the controversies in which notorious blockhead Richard Dawkins embroiled himself.  And once I learned that Ruse himself had collaborated with Edward O. Wilson, I wasn't surprised that sociobiology wasn't examined in depth for its cultural constructions.  In contrast, though I don't doubt that at the time of the book's writing Steven Jay Gould had been marginalized in the world of evolutionary science, I felt that Ruse didn't spend nearly that much time on the reception received by Gould's frequent opponent Dawkins in professional circles.  

Nevertheless, I found it interesting that Gould's position as stated by Ruse has a strong resemblance to the philosophy of pluralism:

"...no one level (especially not the micro-level) is to be privileged... one cannot hope to explain away everything at the upper, bigger levels by expressing them in terms of the lower, smaller level."

I also appreciate Ruse's summary of the objectivist attitude re: cultural metaphors:

"The point which should be obvious to anyone (says the objectivist) is that, although metaphor is extremely widespread in human discourse, it is not essential.  It is in a sense-- an important theoretical and perhaps practical sense-- eliminable.  We all use metaphors, but they are in the last resort short-hand for literal language."

A page later Ruse refutes this by pointing out the value of metaphors as being "absolutely vital  for their 'positive heuristic' as they push one into new fields and new forms of thinking."  I agree with this in part, but it's unfortunate that Ruse-- who is arguing that science is in part a "social construction"-- does not decisively refute the "short-hand" definition of metaphor, sticking purely to metaphor's applications to science in a practical sense.  It might have proved challenging, at least in his conclusion, to have pointed out, as did Philip Wheelwright, that "literal language" was merely one form of language as such:

Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."--  A PAGE RIGHT OF PREHISTORY.

I can appreciate Ruse's choice to hew to a narrow application of his theme, but he may have missed the boat on a greater theme, in which one might examine the role of "steno-language" in terms of scientific analysis, and of "poeto-language" in terms of cultural expression.  However, I'm not sure that anyone since Ernst Cassirer has approached these subjects in depth, so I may be expecting too much of Professor Ruse.