IV. IN PRINCIPLE VERSUS EPISTEMIC

So we’ve decided that ‘being’ is itself an unanalysable primitive, but an enabler concept nonetheless. And we’ve decided that by kind of being we mean a closed set of causal relations. So there can really be only one kind of being we need take any interest in, namely that nexus of causal relations in which we happen to be embedded. There might be some other kind of being out there, but if I can’t be affected by it – or at least I can’t see how I can be affected by it – I needn’t, and so I don’t, give a shit about it. Talk of God is like that. God may or may not exist. But since, unlike Dickens’ ghost of Marley, He can’t even ring a bell, I’m as deaf to Him as, I suspect, He probably is to me.

Too quick. We believed in germs long before we ever had microscopes powerful enough to see them. Why? Because we abduced their existence. That is, for some people – in fact for most people – the existence of God is the best explanation for a whole lot of things we can see. In fact I am myself on record as thinking the intelligent design argument is at least grounds for pause. But what settles the issue against theism – if settled this could ever be – is Occam’s Razor. Invisible causal forces like God used to be the best explanation for all kinds of things. It’s just that now we have postulates available to us that are more – how shall I put this? – more ontologically modest. Or at least let’s go with that for now.

We saw in our first instalment that an organism responds to only some of the features in its environment. For a fish, water is just water. But not so a current. For us air is just air, but not so a breeze. That’s because a bunch of matter arranged in a particular way – in this case moving in a particular way – matters in a way that just any ol’ bunch of matter does not.

Matters to …? To the organism in question. For example, some configurations of matter are prey to some predators. Others are predators to some prey. And still others are neither to either. Prey and predators matter a great deal. That’s why we’ve evolved to pick them out of what would otherwise be just an amorphous confusion of stuff. Non-prey and non-predators matter not so much. That’s why we don’t bother to notice them.

And we also noted in that first instalment – and if not we’ll do so now – ‘mattering’ is ambiguous between an organism’s having an interest in what’s around it and its taking an interest in what’s around it. I probably do have an interest in last night’s city council meeting, but I take no interest in it. Fish and fowl and humans have an interest in the quality of what they breathe. But only humans can take an interest in it.

Too quick. As the sun moves across the sky some plants will turn their ‘face’ towards it. So what, other than behaviour, are we to count as having taken an interest? It can’t be that for other organisms, but not for us, response to its environment is just a simple algorithm. Why not? Because without an algorithm for doing so we couldn’t respond to our environment either.

Fair enough. But, counters the exceptionalist, a frog will flick its tongue at a distant airplane just as it does at a passing fly, whereas you and I can and do learn to distinguish between the two. But what is learning other than just one more fine-grained algorithm? I’m evolutionarily hardwired to crave salt, sugar, and fat. But I override these cravings because I’m concerned about my health. But again, what is this ‘overriding’ other than just a more complicated algorithm?

We’re supposed to be talking about ontology here, so why this sudden interest in cognition? Because yes, how an organism carves up the world is a function of how it needs to carve it up. But also of its ability to carve it up that way. For the purposes of triage, at the Battle of Marathon it was irrelevant which quadrant of the heart the arrow had penetrated. But when John Kennedy was brought into the ER in Dallas that day, a millimetre this way or that made all the difference in the world. So how we ontologize the world is a function of how we need to, but also of how we can. We always needed to see that the world of living things was made up of all kinds of micro-organisms, but for most of human history we couldn’t. Why not? Because we lacked the requisite perceptual apparatus.

So what I want to do now is imagine a time in which there are no such perceptual constraints. That is, for any way the world could in principle be carved up, it could epistemically be carved up that way. That we could carve it some way doesn’t entail that we would. We’d only bother if we needed to. And most of the ways the world could be carved up are useless to us, just as most of the ways the world can already be carved up are useless to us. Male and female, black and white, right-handed and left – these are distinctions we’ve found useful. But being able or unable to roll one’s tongue … not so much.

So in the entries that follow I’m going to search for the set of all possible carvings, a project I’m going to call fundamental ontology. We’ll have see, but in the meantime it’s entirely possible that what’s driving me in this is nothing more than pure abstract intellectual curiosity. Something like Wallace and Grommet going to the moon. So yes, but was it really just about the cheese?!

Categories: pure philosophy

Tags: kind of being, Occam's RZOR, ontology, unanalysable primitive