Here’s another philosophical essay! Just keep checking up on my future posts here and you will see how this is all ultimately related to libertarian principles, trust me! Oh, I should probably mention just as a disclaimer that you should not conclude from this essay that I don’t believe in science. I totally do! It’s just that I haven’t got around to explaining how to justify it by the end. That’ll be part 2.
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Abstraction and Generalization
Our experience is particular, but our understanding is general. We must continually search our experience for ways of abstracting from it. From the disjointed expanse of signals constantly disequilibrating our minds, we synthesize an abstract, unified, and meaningful picture of the world. Without this ability, we would be lost in our own experience and nothing would have any meaning to us because we would have no ability to draw out the implications of anything.
In order to form an abstraction, we must have the ability to recognize similarity between two individuals, and this ability is the essence of general knowledge. With this ability we search endlessly for new abstractions. The search goes on both deliberately and instinctively, from the application of science to the nature of the universe down to the most primitive functions of our brains.
Abstraction begins with the processing of our senses into the form that enters our consciousness. With each step from the excitation of our retinas to the conscious apprehension of the visual image, the signals from our eyes are abstracted again and again and classified according to more and more general concepts. Vision begins as simply a series of signals in our eyes, excited by the interactions of our cells with light. Soon, the signals become colors, and upon the boundaries of different colors, we identify curves and angles. Regions of different colors are then identified and mentally separated from one another into distinct shapes. The shapes are interpreted as recognizable things: symbols, faces, textures, and three-dimensional geometric objects. Signals over different times are abstracted as persistent objects. What we see one moment may be interpreted as the same thing that we see another moment. It is impossible to see what we really see; by the time our vision has become conscious, the signals that have entered our eyes have been replaced by a very different representation. Our other senses must be similarly processed before we are able to experience them.
We make further abstractions about the objects of our experience when we classify things according to concepts of how they interact with one another—some objects are inanimate, some alive. Some act with volition, and some do not. To some objects we ascribe intentionality and even rationality. In our fellow humans we ascribe much more than simply the motion we see in their bodies, but goals, beliefs, and emotions. In the sounds that come from their mouths we interpret words and meaning behind them. At the highest level of abstraction, we unify all our experience of a person by ascribing in them a coherent, persistent personality.
The same process goes on introspectively within ourselves. Emotions and thoughts constitute a part of experience as much as our senses, and from them we abstract the concept of ourselves as a coherent and persistent personality with its own individual traits. This is not to say that our personalities are illusory or that we somehow do not really exist, but only that our knowledge of ourselves is not immediate or innate and is as prone to error as the rest of our learning. We experience specific emotions under specific circumstances, and our knowledge of ourselves is another kind of abstraction.
Our knowledge of how to see, form emotional reactions, and otherwise synthesize experience from our senses and mental processes is instinctive. It is therefore implicit and cannot be consciously articulated. Consequently the question of how the mind works has only begun to be answered even though we use our minds every day.
Founded upon on the powerful apparatus of instinctive knowledge is our reason, which enables us to make far broader abstractions. With it we can discover new general principles with which to interpret experience. The more general the theory, the deeper is our understanding and the more potential there is for technological progress. The application of general knowledge to our experience means that our actions can become more powerful and our experience more meaningful. A deeper understanding of causes and effects enables us to build machines, organizations, and other contrivances that enable us to be vastly more effective, and also to see much more clearly the connectedness of things. As our knowledge declines in generality, experience becomes more and more discontinuous and less and less meaningful.
Only with general knowledge, that is, the ability to form abstractions, is it possible to learn from experience. In order to recognize that an event has implications for the future, we must apply our general knowledge of cause and effect so as to imagine the future. A boulder tumbling toward us is of no concern without some general knowledge of the behavior of boulders and their effect on the human body. Without general theories, our experience would be truly meaningless; we would be unable to believe in any connection between any events or any similarities between one thing and another.
Knowledge can be instinctive or learned, and implicit or conscious, but it is always abstract. If there were ever something in our experience that was wholly individual, which could not be subsumed under any general concept, we would be incapable of experiencing it. It would be neither painful or pleasurable. It would not have colors or textures, and could not be described in terms of any other sense. No laws would apply to it. It could not be expressed in terms of concepts. It could not be thought about. It would be meaningless, unnoticeable, unthinkable, and indeed, nothing to us.
General knowledge is therefore indispensable to us. It is the aim of science and the necessary precursor to all technology. Without it we could have no purposeful interactions with the world or our own selves. It is the foundation of thought and experience. Generalities of various degrees are involved in all knowledge; recognizing another person from day to day, for example, involves abstracting a continuous identity from our fragmentary, changing experience of him. Without some sort of general knowledge, there could be no justification to any thought process whatsoever because all experience, including our own thought, would be impenetrably and ineffably individual.
The Problem of Induction
I have tried to show that all knowledge is abstract, and it is in light of our knowledge’s abstract qualities that it has meaning for us. We interpret our experience by identifying things as examples of more general categories, and it is only after we make such interpretations that our experience suggests anything about the nature of the world or about our own choices in it. It is easy, of course, to form abstractions; we do so ceaselessly and so effortlessly that we may not even be aware of it even after considerable introspection. And yet, abstractions are not at all easy to justify. How can we know that our method of forming abstractions makes sense in the first place? This is known as the problem of induction.
Without some initial ability to form abstractions, learning would be impossible. The information from our senses come to us as merely a series of signals with no necessary logical connection between them, so they cannot tell us how to abstract. Experience alone cannot inform our choices in the world; it is only when our experience is interpreted in terms of our general knowledge that it may have meaning to us. Any empirical method, therefore, must assume that some knowledge of abstraction is immediately given to us. We can assume that this knowledge cannot be learned from experience because if it could, this would just imply the existence of some prior knowledge that was used to learn it. In the case of an instinctive method, this knowledge is not immediately expressible, but is implicit in the method itself, whereas a conscious, rational method requires that this knowledge be explicitly stated or people will not be able to follow the method.
We shall now apply these general considerations to the method of experimental science, which is often believed to be entirely empirical. Experimental science purports to find the cause-and-effect relationship between different kinds of events using the controlled experiment.
To perform a controlled experiment, a physical system is isolated from outside causes and allowed to interact with itself. The experiment is repeated several times with a single feature of the initial state—the control variable—being changed. Whatever changes in the result of the experiment is concluded to have been caused by the change in the controlled variable.
There are two assumptions that I can see which must be made about the world in order for this conclusion to make sense, neither of which can be concluded from observations about the world. The first is separability. It must be possible to separate an experiment from the influence of the rest of the world. If this could not be done, then the results might have nothing to do with the control variable. It certainly seems obvious that we are able to separate an experiment from the rest of the world, but we can never know this for certain because we can never know that we have enumerated all causes affecting any given event. There may always be unseen causes involved in anything we observe.
The second assumption is naturalism. This means that causes and effects obey laws that can be discovered and understood by the rational beings rather than being miraculous and following no laws. If this were not the case, then there would be no reason to believe that a controlled experiment would reveal any underlying causal relationship between the controlled variable and the outcome. If it were not assumed that there are indeed underlying laws that determine effect from cause, then the effects might simply be seen as miracles. An experiment would therefore not tell us about the workings of the universe in general, but just a divine will for that particular moment. Naturalism cannot be concluded from observations any more than can separability. No matter how seemingly mundane is a given event, one may believe it to be miraculous, and no matter how seemingly inexplicable, one may persist in believing in natural causes and ultimately discover them. There is no way to differentiate between a truly miraculous event and a natural event with particularly obscure causes.
To make these ideas more concrete consider the classic example of a billiard ball striking another. We observe one ball strike another, whereupon the second ball begins to move. Ordinarily, we would infer a cause-and-effect relationship between these two things, but this is not a necessary conclusion. There is no logical contradiction in believing in different causal relationships, for example that both balls are puppets, each being moved by some different unseen force rather than that the one transfers momentum to the other, or that events take place for no reason at all and the balls’ movement has no particular explanation.
We often discuss cause and effect and infer it in our experience but never do we actually observe it; all we ever see is a succession of events, and it is our minds that tells us what their causal connection is. Although it is often said that any theory of science must be testable, it is rarely noted that the validity of the scientific method itself is not testable at all.
