Does Metaphysics Reveal Reality? | Episode 908 | Closer To Truth

Metaphysics gets a bum rap. Some think it's ancient, antiquated nonsense. Others, it's the fringy, bizarre occult. Real metaphysics is none of these. Real metaphysics explores the most general features of existence, asks the most profound questions, What is the nature of concrete objects, like planets or chairs? What are abstract objects, like colors or numbers? Does anything non-physical exist? What is mind or consciousness? Does God make sense? I yearn to understand existence, so I must do metaphysics. Does metaphysics reveal reality? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. Some say experience and feelings are the clearest way to truth. Maybe, but not for me. That route, I cannot travel. I need rational analysis. That's metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that, at the same time, is hard and fun. I begin in Berkeley with an analytic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition, John Searle. John is known for his penetrating analysis and clarity of exposition. And because his interests range widely from mind and consciousness to language and social construction, he should see the broad scope of metaphysics. In general, philosophy is often concerned with questions that we have not found a way to answer by standard scientific or mathematical methods. And there's no area in which that's more common than metaphysics. So, let's take one example. Take the problem of intentionality. Now, the problem of intentionality is supposed to be a big deal, because the question is, how can this gook in my skull point to something outside itself? How can it be about anything? That's what intentionality means. It means roughly aboutness. Now, the way I like to operate when dealing with a big deal problem, like how can intentionality exist, is bring it down to actual practical cases. How is it possible that I can feel thirsty? Because that's an intentional relation. I desire water. How is it possible that I can see anything? And then you find those naturally break down into specific questions. There's a neurobiological question about, well, what's the neurobiology of thirst or visual perception? But then there is an interesting philosophical question, and that is, well, how does it work logically? And that's how I think you make progress in metaphysics. Use all the information you can get from the sciences anywhere, it doesn't matter. And then you're going to find that you have to do some philosophy, you have to do some logical analysis. And that's how I think the metaphysics functions. Take perception, where we all think I'm seeing you, I'm seeing my suit, the table. I think it's the real world. But a lot of people think that that's not what I'm doing, that this naive realism that I think is really not correct. Yeah. There is a standard view in philosophy that you never actually see the real world. All you can ever see are your own experiences of the real world. You can only see your own sense data. That is the greatest single disaster in philosophy over the past 400 years. What's wrong with it? Well, you can only make sense of the fact that you and I are communicating when I say, I see a chair, and you say, I see a chair, if we assume that we both have access to the same object. So if you're going to communicate with me in a public language, then we have to presuppose that there is a public world, and we have to suppose that we have perceptual access to that world. We can imagine a world, a Matrix-like world, where all of our peripheral nerves, our optic nerve, are fed very complicated combinations of pulses. It's logically possible that all of my experiences could have been a massive hallucination that I've never been in contact with anybody in the real world. But there's no argument to suppose that that is, in fact, the case. So we have two separate kinds of analysis, intentionality, the aboutness of things, what is perception, both of which are subjected to the techniques and ways of thinking of metaphysics to enable us to make real progress. That's right. That's what I think. Metaphysics deals with fundamental questions, many of which involve mind and consciousness. As for answers to these metaphysical questions, philosophers disagree sharply. I celebrate such differences, but I also worry about them. I hope metaphysics is more than an unending, unresolvable, massive, multiplayer game. I subscribe to John's analytic way of thinking. But, acolyte me, I'm bothered. Because John's way is not the only way. Remaining right here in Berkeley, I cross over to the other side. I speak to a leading phenomenological philosopher in the European continental tradition, Hubert Dreyfus. Bert focuses on objects of direct experience. He's an expert on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Let's just start with what phenomenology sort of inherits and has to get out of. Heidegger teaching in 1925, railing against the idea that there's a problem of the external world, there's a problem of other minds, there's a problem of whether reality depends on us or is independent of us. He thinks they're all false problems, starting from the wrong place. What's the wrong place? Well, the wrong place is Descartes. He had the idea that we were self-sufficient subjects. A subject before that was anything, a substance, and a substance was anything like a flower pot that was stable and had properties. But then he turned it around and said that we are a kind of being, what he called a thinking thing, what somebody like John Searle would now call mind, when he talks about mind to world, direction of fit and world to mind. And there's only two things in his ontology, two ways of being. You be a mind, self-contained with ideas in it and intentional content, to use this jargon. And then there's on the other side, the world, bits of extended matter, the extended thing. And the question is how you get these two things together. If all I've got access to is my inner experiences, how do I ever know that you're not just a robot, Descartes says, how do I know you've even got inner experiences? How in the world would I know what they were? And so Heidegger's saying, well, you can't get out of it. You never should have bought that ontology. Ontology means a story about being. And the story about being is there's just two kinds of being, mental being and physical, material being. And this is what Heidegger wants to destroy. Heidegger has to get out of it. Heidegger just thinks the whole thing is wrong. And Heidegger's just gonna crash it, break with it. So the first level, and the one that I like best, is Heidegger's notion of how we relate to the stuff in the world. And Heidegger says we deal with it. He says when you go out the door, you use the latch. That means you don't have to think about the latch. You don't have the goal of going out the door. You don't have to figure out that you use the latch. It's all in flow. You're trying to do things. You've got a visual experience of things. All this is still inner stuff. And then that causes you to have bodily movements. And that's physical stuff. So at the basic level, we are just dealing with things. And Heidegger calls that being in the world. And in that being in the world, you cut beneath, really. I keep telling the class, I like to give my course the hour after Searle gives his course. We've done this for years. I think it must be a mind-boggling experience. He tells them about the inner and the outer, the mind and the external world. I tell them there is no inner and outer. There is no mind and external world. There's just absorbed coping. That's being in the world with hyphens. And then the students will have to figure out who to believe. Heidegger is hard. But maybe the big secret is that Heidegger is simple. Does being in the world destroy the distinction between inner and outer worlds? I like the radicalism, but I don't buy the substance. Inner and outer worlds are both real, I think. I need a rigorous empiricist, a philosopher who relies only on sense data. I go to Princeton to meet Bas van Fraassen. Now, the metaphysician seems to be trying to find truth. So, we should say to him, okay, now when you decide to go to one theory rather than another, you're making a decision. So, the metaphysician says that he can use the methods that he sees the scientist using to extend science. For instance, that the scientist is always trying to find explanations, so the metaphysician can infer to the best explanation postulating an explanation that goes beyond science and accept that it cannot be tested anymore. So, he doesn't have to meet that criterion. And I say what he comes up with is just empty. Let's ask about the reality. Are there universals? If we see a black book cover, can we also see a black sweater? Yes. Okay, we have all those instances, but is there a something, a thing called black that's an abstract thing that exists independently? Is that not a legitimate question? It's a legitimate question, but I don't see why anybody would answer yes. What you said is you saw a sweater that's black, a book that's black. Why say that you saw something more? Well, the argument is that even to give the answer that you didn't, you are now engaged in metaphysics. You've chosen a metaphysical position by saying that there is no abstract object, but that question is an important question to understand reality. I think that's a very good argument that if I don't postulate universals, then I'm also a metaphysician. In that case, everybody is a metaphysician. I think I know what drives that kind of question, and that is that we want explanations. Yes, yes, yes. And a metaphysician, the main vehicle for metaphysics is this demand for explanation. That's a wonderful point. You've called the history of metaphysics the history of an illusion. Yes. You push these questions beyond what we can test, and you land in the illusions of reason. So then how can you account for the resurrection of metaphysics? I'm sad about that. You can try to kill it, you try to kill it, it doesn't stay dead. No, well, the illusions of reason would never stay dead. It's a wonderful game, but it's a language game that is designed to be isolated from everything else. Metaphysics, it is the art of making no sense in a language especially designed for that purpose. I was trained in science where truth is determined by experiment, so I could go with Boss and dismiss metaphysics as illusion, empty. But then I'd feel empty, worrying that I were abandoning rich caches of understanding like hidden treasures. I'd rather risk chasing glorious illusions than ignoring fundamental truths, which is why I pursue metaphysics. But some scientists disagree. They reject all philosophy as largely trouble. Worse than empty, a distraction, a hindrance, an annoyance. I visit the literate physicist and Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg. What do you think of philosophy? Well, I used to be very enthusiastic about studying philosophy, but science, particularly physics, for me, is so much more predictive and capable of having real success and real failure. In physics, you can often have the healthy experience of being found to be simply wrong about something, and I don't know how often philosophers have that healthy experience. So, there's a crispness to physics which I find lacking in philosophy. On the other hand, philosophers, I think, understand this and they would argue that that's not their job, to calculate things or to predict things or to answer questions. Their job is to ask deep questions, and I have to agree with that, but the questions they ask don't really seem to me to be helpful in physics. For instance, there's a tremendous philosophical concern about the nature of truth, the nature of reality. People in everyday life use concepts like truth and reality in a useful way. I mean, they deal with those concepts. They say, well, it's true the newspaper wasn't delivered today and the cause of it was the newspaper deliverer was overslept, and I really hope it'll be delivered tomorrow. The use of truth and reality and cause and so on in science seems to me not different in any philosophically relevant way from their use in everyday life. And since we're comfortable with these concepts in everyday life, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be comfortable with them in science. I don't mean that the scientist has a deep understanding of truth and reality, which makes philosophy unnecessary. I don't feel that I understand what is meant by truth in any profound way. I'm a principled philistine. I understand truth in science the same way I understand it in everyday life, and I don't see that any more is needed. For discerning truth, Stephen is one of my heroes, and he proceeds to tell me what I don't want to hear, that philosophy is groundless and metaphysics hopeless. My little world shakes. So, I dash to a distinguished philosopher who knows science, promotes naturalism, and defends metaphysics. No spooky stuff for Daniel Dennett, professor at Tufts, but no dissing philosophy either. Philosophers are more experts on questions than answers, and that means that philosophy is always somewhat informal. It's not structured. There's no rules exactly for how to do it. You're always sort of thrashing about trying to figure out, are these the right questions or are these the right questions? And once you get clear about what a question is, it's a good question, then you go off and try to answer it, and that's not philosophy. That's whatever it is. It's physics or psychology or history or jurisprudence. It all starts out as philosophy back in Aristotle's day, and as various questions got clear, then they shelved off like an amoeba. Now we create physics, we create mathematics. What philosophy is good at is getting clear about the questions. So, what are the kinds of questions that would steer me in the wrong direction? Well, if you start with your own experience and say, well, here I am, I know that I exist, I have my own experiences. Now, what are they made of? What are what made of exactly? Well, these experiences. Don't be sure that that's the right way of thinking about it because that sort of first-person perspective will probably take you down the primrose path, the dualism. And dualism is a mess. If you can adopt, resolutely adopt, a third-person perspective on yourself and say, well, here's this guy, puzzled, asking himself questions. How can a living body ask itself questions? And by the way, that's a good question. Why do we do this? Why do we ask ourselves questions? And the answer has to be, we're not as unified as we think we are. One part of this is asking another part of this a question. There is information exchange. There's getting things together that weren't naturally together. Our very asking of the questions tells us, the fact that we do it, tells us something about our disunity. We learn a lot by asking ourselves questions. We do learn a lot. It's no secret to you, I'm sure, that many scientists, including some famous ones, would pretty much dismiss all philosophy as, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a hindrance. Yeah, yeah, I get that all the time. But I then take all the more delight in watching the scientists when they find they have to address a philosophical question. They think, this is a piece of cake. And what do they end up doing? They end up reinventing all the mistakes of Aristotle and Plato and Hume and Kant and Descartes and Mill. And then they realize, if they reflect at all on this, that there's really no such thing as philosophy-free science. You can get your philosophy from the seat of your pants, the way a lot of them do, or you can get a little help from somebody who's specializing in this. But you're going to have a philosophical position, whether you like it or not. Philosophy is, in many regards, a history of mistakes, really tempting mistakes, really, really tempting mistakes that very smart people are apt to be tempted by. If you don't go over those and see why they're mistakes and why they're tempting, you're just going to reinvent them. So, I take a certain, perhaps, ignoble delight in watching those scientists who have sort of contempt for philosophy fall on their faces when they try to say something a bit more about, say, what consciousness is or isn't. And then they begin to realize it's not quite as easy as they thought. Scientists doing philosophy fall on their faces, Dan says. There is no such thing as philosophy-free science. Philosophy is essential for asking the right questions, Dan stresses, and for not being tempted or deluded by misleading questions, which brings Dan to consciousness and the pitfalls of first-person experience. What is it about consciousness that elicits such intense and continuing interest? I know because I feel it. Consciousness as the last bastion of a magical, mystical world. So, while metaphysics tries to explain consciousness, can consciousness justify metaphysics? Is consciousness a test case for metaphysics? I ask a philosopher of mind who spent most of his career at MIT, Ned Block. I think of philosophy as continues with science. Look, metaphysics is just a study of the fundamental nature of things. I'm interested in the fundamental nature of consciousness, but so are some scientists. I think that chemists are in part interested in the metaphysics of, say, water. What is it most fundamentally? It's important to distinguish, by the way, between metaphysics and ontology. Metaphysics is a study of the ultimate nature of things. Ontology is a part of that study, which is the study of what there is. The main question in ontology is, are there immaterial things or is everything material? Now, scientists are not in the business of answering that ontological question, but they are in the business of doing metaphysics generally in the sense of finding the ultimate essences of things. So, this is a very important distinction because the potential existence of immaterial things is obviously the core of religious beliefs. So, we're really delving deeply into the nature of reality. And science can't deal with the ontology, the nature of the being, the existence of an immaterial thing. But it can do metaphysics in helping us to understand the nature of reality. That's right. How do we articulate those two? Well, one very important relation between them is if scientists fail to tell us the nature of consciousness, then we will have reason to believe the dualist ontology. So, whether scientists succeed or fail in finding a physicalist metaphysics for consciousness is the key issue in whether we'll believe in dualism. So, are you left with only consciousness as this critical probe or litmus test of the nature of the fundamental ontology of the world? What really exists? Is it only physical or are there immaterial, non-physical parts of it? Yeah, I think consciousness is the one remaining world not challenge for science. It's the last thing that scientists have not made huge progress on and the jury is still out on whether they'll be able to explain it. Is the role of the philosopher becoming progressively less important? Oh, I think the role of the philosopher is becoming progressively more important. As philosophers learn the relevant science, so much of science has within it many philosophical issues that the scientists themselves are trying to answer, but which also needs philosophers who understand the science to deal with. I think the most exciting part of philosophy is the part of philosophy that interfaces with the sciences. I have two minds, so to speak, about metaphysics, and they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end, I see metaphysics as pre-scientific, having made almost no progress after millennia of asking the same questions. At the other end, those same questions probe the deep essence of reality, essential for true understanding. So, where do I perch myself on this metaphysics spectrum? I like metaphysics, and that, for me, tips the balance. There's another possibility, the religious approach to metaphysics. I recall what Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga told me. When I left graduate school, the thought was that philosophy would be entirely secular. The idea seemed to be that there wouldn't be any presence of theistic belief in the universities at all, say, 50 years hence. Turned out to be totally wrong, completely wrong. There's an enormous upsurge in the United States, at least, in serious religious belief from that time to the present, and the same is true in philosophy. Metaphysics may be an illusion, or empty, as its critics contend, but profound issues of God, mind, abstract objects, causation, time, and the like, are too meaningful to ignore. While I follow physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, I keep an occasional eye on metaphysics. I do not expect a breakthrough, though I do hope for something unexpected. It is not likely, but also not impossible, that metaphysics will guide us closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com.