Scientific realism vs instrumentalism
A long standing debate in the philosophy of science is about what our best scientific theories tell us. Some argue that they reveal true reality, that is, they are real. Others that scientific theories are only useful prediction frameworks, instruments useful in the creation of technology, but that taking any further implications from them is misguided.
In practice, most people are a mix, taking a realist attitude toward theories whose implications they like, and an antireal or instrumentalist one toward those they dislike. For example, it’s pretty common for people to take an antireal stance toward the quantum wave function, while being realist toward much of the rest of science.
The most common argument for instrumentalism is the pessimistic meta-induction, the observation that a theory can be predictive of current observations yet later still turn out to be very wrong, with the Ptolemaic earth centered model of the cosmos being the most famous example. For centuries it predicted naked eye astronomical observations, yet its view of reality was completely overturned by the post-Copernican models.
The most common realist response is the no miracles argument, that if our best successive theories aren’t giving us at least an increasingly closer approximation of reality, it amounts to a miracle.
Theory scope
As someone whose take on reality is that the real is what leads to more accurate predictions, I’ve long thought the above description misses the core difference between these stances, which is the scope of current theories. Instrumentalists tend to regard the scope as only pertaining to current observables. Scientific realists tend to view it as broader.
Maybe the biggest practical difference is a realist expects our best theories to eventually converge and reconcile. Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous realist, made a lot of progress just figuring out ways to reconcile different successful theories. Although he was the first person to struggle to do that with quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Structural realism
Structural realism somewhat straddles the fence between instrumentalism and traditional scientific realism, with the observation that what does get preserved across theory change, at least approximately, is the core structure and relations of the old theory. Ptolemy’s mathematical structure still works, just in a much narrower scope than he might have imagined. And Isaac Newton’s model of motion and gravity remain very useful for many purposes (including most NASA missions), even though general relativity has to be used for more exotic scenarios.
Structural realism seems to get the instrumentalist benefit of minimizing assumptions while accepting that scientific theories are telling us something about reality. It’s worth noting that the difference between structural realism and traditional scientific realism is most prominent in fundamental physics. It’s easier to be a straight realist for much of the rest of science. Although structural realism seems useful in evaluating psychophysical theories. Maybe another way of putting this, structuralism seems most useful at the current boundaries of knowledge.
Epistemic vs ontic structural realism
Epistemic structural realism (ESR) is the stance that while science can tell us about the structure and relations of entities in the world, as well as what they do (relations across time), it doesn’t tell us what they are. In other words, science can’t tell us about their intrinsic nature. Ontic structural realism (OSR) rejects this distinction, arguing that all of the structure and relations of an entity amount to its full nature.
Some variations of ESR resonate with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism philosophy, that while we can know phenomena, there remains a reality beyond our observations, the noumena. Noumena may or may not be related to the notion of “things in themselves”, considered unknowable by Kantians. It’s commonly noted that with this move, Kant seems to make room for concepts that seemed threatened by the enlightenment of his day: God, the soul, free will, moral realism, etc.
Why ontic structural realism?
When I first discovered the structural realist view, the epistemic option seemed plausible. It seemed like a responsible acknowledgement on the limits of what we can know. But I now realize I was making a very common mistake. It’s completely rational to assume that the structures and relations we know about aren’t the final story, that there remain underlying structures we haven’t discovered yet.
For example, when scientists discovered atoms, they gave them the ancient Greek name for the ultimate building blocks of matter. However, they didn’t know about subatomic particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons. And of course it was later discovered that protons and neutrons are themselves composed of quarks and gluons. It seems entirely appropriate to be cautious about accepting that these entities, which we currently call “elemental particles”, are the final story.
However, these possible hidden underlying components are not the intrinsic nature that ESR is arguing for. They are just more structure, relations, and functions. What then does ESR mean? The only example of an intrinsic nature I’ve seen presented are the quiddities of Russellian monism, which are often taken in panpsychism as the proto-phenomenal properties that make up the phenomenal properties of conscious experience.
But it’s not clear to me what an intrinsic nature might amount to. Whenever I attempt to imagine it, I always end up with something having some kind of structure and relations. Even conscious experience to me seems structural. People often argue that phenomenal properties, like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain, aren’t structural, even if they serve as elements in the overall structures of experience.
But to me this just brings us back to the point above, that it makes sense to be cautious in assuming there aren’t underlying structures and relations. The idea that there aren’t is an assumption of fundamental consciousness, which I argued against a few posts back. Interestingly, the notion that phenomenal properties are composed of proto-phenomenal properties seems to imply an underlying structure, albeit one separate from the normal structure accessible to science.
So my issue with ESR is I don’t know what it could mean by an intrinsic non-relational non-structural nature. Of course, my inability to conceive it doesn’t mean it isn’t reality (see quantum spin, for instance). But then without some kind of evidence for that reality, it leaves me with no reason to assume they exist. Leaving OSR as the only option. At least for now.
What do you think?
- Are there issues with ontic structural realism I’m overlooking?
- Is the concept of intrinsic nature more coherent than I’m currently seeing?
- Or is the whole structural realist view defective in some sense?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Re “In practice, most people are a mix, taking a realist attitude toward theories whose implications they like, and an antireal or instrumentalist one toward those they dislike. For example, it’s pretty common for people to take an antireal stance toward the quantum wave function, while being realist toward much of the rest of science.”
Arguing whether something is real or not does not make a label. One may prefer realism and dislike QM because it doesn’t seem real, but those positions do not categorize anyone.
Re “Epistemic structural realism (ESR) is the stance that while science can tell us about the structure and relations of entities in the world, as well as what they do (relations across time), it doesn’t tell us what they are. In other words, science can’t tell us about their intrinsic nature.”
Uh, sure, claim that things have an intrinsic nature and then dis any approach which doesn’t tell you exactly what that is. A rock can be a projectile and physics can describe many aspects of its “projectile nature.” But as to its composition a mineralogist can tell what minerals make up that rock and in what proportions, even to the point of describing how and where the rock was constituted. A chemist can describe the chemical constituents of the minerals down to how the atoms are arranged in crystals and what flaws exist it those arrangements,. etc, etc. None of the individual sciences can say what the “intrinsic nature” of that rock is because its “intrinsic nature” is a philosophical abstract which does not exist.
So I am with you. Sciences are of value because they work, bitches, is the most profound philosophical statement made recently. I am a scientist, but also a philosophy buff and philosophers invent things unseen, unreal as absolutes to use in various discussions. The problem comes when they start think them as being real (with no evidence). (Comedians are cautioned that believing their own jokes leads to trips to the looney bin–ask Jonathan Winters. Maybe philosophers and scientists need also to be so warned.) Unfortunately scientists are falling prey to such practices, arguing that QM wave equations are real things, that space-time can expand and contract, and speculations needed to keep the Big Bang Theory upright are real things.
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I was with much of what you said until the final sentence. Whatever we want to say about QM wave mechanics, they are extremely predictive. If two states interfere with each other, canceling each other out, we’ll never get them in a measurement. And that holds for the predicted evolution of those states. Quantum computing seems to leave little doubt about it. Someone can deny the reality of those waves, but if so, they seem to have divorced their stance on reality from prediction.
On space-time, I wonder what you’d say is happening when LIGO detects gravitational waves and infers events that can be correlated with radio astronomy. I realize there are alternate explanations for just about every individual piece of evidence, but they seem to vary. We end up with a whole bunch of concepts vs one concept that explain all of them.
Of course, in either case, there could be new evidence tomorrow that changes everything. But it would still have to be compatible with all the other observations these theories are based on.
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So, you are in orbit and feeling weightless in the ISS. Did Newton’s law of gravity collapse? What happened to it? How can an equation representing attributes of a system collapse? It is not a mterial thing, but rather a description of the relations between various aspects of a system.
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Actually, Newton’s laws predict exactly what will happen in the ISS.
I do agree that the idea of a physical quantum collapse is dubious. But that just means we have to deal with the implications of whatever is having causal effects seeming to disappear. The good news is that the equations actually predict what we see. Of course, the controversy is that they predict a lot more, but those further predictions can’t currently be tested and so, in my view, until they can, shouldn’t be included in a scientific assessment one way or the other.
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On the other hand . . . :o) . . . this is what Schrodinger’s cat addressed. The equation gives probabilities of 50% alive/50% dead not that the cat is half dead, half alive. That is it does not have enough information to determine which. It is merely a prediction. When to box is opened, the cat is either alive or dead. The equation didn’t collapse to 100% alive or 100% dead, it still doesn’t have enough information to ascertain which outcome occurred. The fallacy here is of fundamentalism, believing that the equation represents reality when it only represents a description from which probabilities may be calculated.
And all kinds of wrong scientific theories gave good calculated results, only to be proven wrong later. Physics has gone down a rabbit hole of using math to discern what is and isn’t real. It is nice the calculations work, but until there is some conceptual understanding to go along with it, I assume it is just a useful calculational framework.
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Actually the equation does predict the outcome. We just have to keep following it. It predicts that when two or more quantum systems interact, their superpositions become correlated, entangled. Their combined states are now in a combined superposition.
So in Schrodinger’s cat, the radioactive element goes into a superposition of being decayed and not being decayed. The atoms in the Geiger counter become entangled with the radioactive atom. Then the poisoning mechanism becomes entangled with the atom-Geiger-counter system. And finally the cat becomes entangled with all of them, resulting in it being in a superposition of being alive and being dead.
Now what does the equation say happen when we open the box? You’re right, it doesn’t say anything about a collapse. Instead it predicts we, as physical beings subject to the same laws of physics, become entangled with the cat and everything in the box. Which means that for every version of us the system will appear to have collapsed to a definite state. Put another way, collapse is what entanglement looks like for a participant.
Of course, if you want to assume something prevents or eliminates all the other versions, the evidence isn’t there yet to contradict it. But strictly speaking, we don’t need that assumption to explain the data. We only need it to make us feel better.
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“But it’s not clear to me what an intrinsic nature might amount to. Whenever I attempt to imagine it, I always end up with something having some kind of structure and relations”
I don’t think ESR implies fundamental entities have no structure, only that that’s all we can know about them. OSR claims there is nothing but structure (Tegmark).
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Right, I agree ESR doesn’t imply that fundamental entities have no structure, but it does seem to imply that they have something more than structure. (Otherwise there wouldn’t seem to be any difference between ESR and OSR.) It’s that something more I’m struggling to make sense of.
I think OSR is compatible with the MUH (mathematical universe hypothesis / Tegmark) but makes a narrower claim. The MUH says that all math is reality in a supercharged mathematical platonist fashion. OSR just claims that structure is all there is, but doesn’t claim that all structures exist. In other words, to claim that all real entities are structure and relations is not to claim that all structure and relations are entities, if that makes sense.
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—Right, I agree ESR doesn’t imply that fundamental entities have no structure, but it does seem to imply that they have something more than structure. (Otherwise there wouldn’t seem to be any difference between ESR and OSR.)
Yes, okay we’re on the same page here.
—It’s that something more I’m struggling to make sense of.
I would think something like entity-ness, thing-ness is the ‘something more’, at least if we’re talking about things in themselves. This is what I meant in a previous conversation by saying it’s a placeholder of Substance or Matter (in the traditional sense).
—OSR just claims that structure is all there is, but doesn’t claim that all structures exist.
Interesting. What accounts for the difference between structures that exist and structures that don’t exist, then?
—In other words, to claim that all real entities are structure and relations is not to claim that all structure and relations are entities, if that makes sense.
I didn’t think real entities were allowed in OSR? It’s all structure and relations?
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“I would think something like entity-ness, thing-ness is the ‘something more’, at least if we’re talking about things in themselves.”
My issue is I don’t know what “entity-ness” or “thing-ness” are, at least separated from every relation. Anytime I try to imagine something that might fill the role, I end up with something that is structural, relational, and/or causal.
The point about substance is interesting, because it seems like everyday substances we can think about: wood, metal, plastic, etc, eventually are revealed to be placeholder terms for complex underlying processes and structures. I’m open to the idea that the final brute layer of reality could be substance of some type, but can’t see that it wouldn’t at least be relational (and may amount to nothing but points in those relations).
“What accounts for the difference between structures that exist and structures that don’t exist, then?”
This looks similar to Stephen Hawking’s question: “What breathes fire into the equations?” I won’t claim to have an answer. It seems like all we can say is that some structures exist but most don’t. (Even for Tegmarkians, there’s still a distinction between the structures that exist in this universe vs ones that only exist outside it.)
“I didn’t think real entities were allowed in OSR? It’s all structure and relations?”
Remember, OSR is ontic structural realism. I think under OSR what real entities are is fully exhausted by their structure and relations. (Always remembering that there are almost certainly structures within those entities we don’t know about yet.)
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“But it’s not clear to me what an intrinsic nature might amount to. Whenever I attempt to imagine it, I always end up with something having some kind of structure and relations. ”
Mike Levin at “Forms of life, forms of mind” has just today posted a transcript of a conversation between Tim Jackson and Robert Prentner that I think bears on this question. Levin is interested in the idea of a”Platonic space,” and as far as I can tell Tim Jackson is casting some light on it. My take-away (which could be all wet) is that it amounts to a non-physical space of affordances (the laws of mathematics, for example) which determine possibilities for physical space. Structure and relations arise in physical space, but their development is governed by the laws of the Platonic space, and more to the point, by whatever acts or behaves according to these laws. This “whatever” is prior to the structures and relations (it seems to me), but is nevertheless capable of having relationships and forming structures, within the limitations imposed by the affordances of the Platonic space. From this situation, the relations and structures we recognize as our reality arise.
The “whatever” is a candidate for an intrinsic nature. Whether or not you find this way of thinking plausible, at least it gives some idea of what an intrinsic nature might amount to.
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Thanks. I saw Levin’s post in my feeds this morning, but haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. I’ll have to see what he says. I still think of abstract objects as having structure, just an abstract one. And whatever might operate on them (which to my mind makes them not platonic in the contemporary sense) seems hard to imagine without itself being composed of structure and relations. But maybe I’ll think different after reading him.
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I was initially thinking I’d be on the ESR side of things, but as I read along I realized that I’m probably in the same OSR boat as you. There are plenty of things science cannot currently explain, but that does not mean those things are intrinsically unexplainable. My go-to example is that it was once claimed we’ll never be able to know the composition of the Sun, because even if we could somehow fly to the Sun, it would be too hot to conduct any kind of science experiments on the Sun’s surface. This was before the invention of the spectroscope.
And my biggest frustration with all sorts of pseudoscience today is that people keep pointing to the real gaps in our current scientific knowledge, asserting that science will never be able to explain those gaps, and then trying to fill in the gaps themselves with, basically, their own imaginations. I’m not sure if that’s exactly the same as what ESR tries to argue, but it sounds similar enough that I wouldn’t want to join team ESR.
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I think it was August Comte who said we would likely never know what the composition of the stars. What’s interesting is that spectroscopy already existed when he made that claim. It’s just that people didn’t do it with starlight until a few years later. Comte was a pretty smart guy. It makes me very reluctant to rule out what innovations scientists might come up with in the future.
Right, that projection into the gaps, including one we just reason into existence, was a big concern for me as well. But rejecting ESR just for that made me uncomfortable. It was only when I realized that I’m not sure what it’s positing is even coherent that I felt comfortable explicitly denying it.
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Comte! That was the guy! I couldn’t think of the name.
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“As someone whose take on reality is that the real is what leads to more accurate predictions”
Wouldn’t that collapse any distinction between realism and instrumentalism for you? It also seems problematic because either you’re attempting to predict actual reality beyond your experience, in which case you need another definition of reality in order to avoid circularity, or you are only attempting to predict your own future experiences, in which case everything that does not bear on your future experiences is by definition unreal. E.g. you could conclude that aliens living more than 100 light years away are not real just because they wouldn’t be able to reach us in your lifetime. My own working definition of reality is it’s everything that is beyond my control, although this does have the weird implication that what’s real differs for different people (e.g. your future acts are a reality for me but not for you, since they are in your control).
That aside, I think OSR is great, although more as a metaphysics than as a philosophy of science. I struggle to see what structure is actually preserved between Ptolemy and Copernicus really.
Re phenomenal experience, I think the question of whether or not it’s structural (i.e. we could decompose its structure) is irrelevant to OSR. What matters is whether or not it’s relational, and it seems clear to me that it is. Redness is not something that I perceive, it’s how I perceive something else i.e. the way that that thing is related to me visually. It could be that redness is one of the most basic forms of relations, or it could be a structure composed of other relations.
I also recently came across the objection that OSR as a philosophy of science ends up as just scientific realism, since the structure is both what it claims is real in science and what it claims is the whole of reality. That seems accurate to me, but OSR need not position itself as a middle position in the philosophy of science.
One of the best advantages of OSR in my opinion is that it allows a great deal of freedom and flexibility in one’s ontology. You don’t have to constantly ask ‘is the phenomenon at this scale real, or just an effect of the real stuff going on at a different level?’ It’s all overlapping structures and meta structures.
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“Wouldn’t that collapse any distinction between realism and instrumentalism for you?”
It could but I think the real difference is the one I discuss about scope. An instrumentalist generally takes a much narrower scope. So it’s really more of a spectrum, a matter of degree, than a binary choice. (Even aside from the fact that everyone tends to instrumentalist toward successful theories whose implications they consider dubious and realist toward ones they consider plausible.)
“in which case everything that does not bear on your future experiences is by definition unreal.”
I’d say that one of my predictions is the external world, and that if I don’t track it carefully enough it can and will affect my experiences. So aliens 100 light years could conceivably affect us since they’re in our light cone. Aliens 100 billion light years away, on the other hand, are completely outside of our light cone, at least except for possible shared causal history from cosmic inflation. Short of an FTL drive being invented, their reality for us seems hopelessly speculative at best.
I’d also note that your definition, which is interesting and I think has overlap with mine, seems subject to the same criticism.
“That aside, I think OSR is great”
Yes!
“I struggle to see what structure is actually preserved between Ptolemy and Copernicus really.”
It was pointed out to me some years ago that Ptolemaic concepts remain useful for a lot of casual backyard astronomy. For example, you see discussions of when Mars is “in retrograde”, which I understand to be a Ptolemaic (or at least pre-Copernican) concept. But the model breaks down pretty quickly as we get more intensive.
“I think the question of whether or not it’s structural (i.e. we could decompose its structure) is irrelevant to OSR. What matters is whether or not it’s relational,”
What is structure but a cluster of relations? I admit I confuse the issue by saying “structure and relations” a lot, but structure seems built on relations. Unless I’m missing something?
“I also recently came across the objection that OSR as a philosophy of science ends up as just scientific realism”
I think it’s definitely a form of scientific realism, but more on the minimalist side. As I noted above, the difference between realism and antirealism can be seen as how broad or narrow the scope is of a particular scientific theory.
I agree on the advantages of OSR. And it fits with the ideas behind my blog’s name: self aware patterns.
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Wouldn’t aliens 100 light years away be outside of our light cone too? Their past >100 years would be inside, but their present wouldn’t be for another 100 years. My definition probably does have issues, although I’m not seeing it having the aliens issue.
“What is structure but a cluster of relations?”
Right, but my point is that a single “qualia” could conceivably be a simple relation that cannot be broken down any further. There have to be some primordial relations that cannot be reduced any further (I think), and the stuff of phenomenal experience could hypothetically be an example.
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Right, the 100 ly aliens “right now” would be outside of our cone but not their civilization or species overall. (Unless their civilization and species is less than 100 years old, which seems implausible.) We might be able to detect the light from their planet and infer life. We may be able to detect industrial waste in their atmosphere, their radio signals, or megastructures, if they have any.
On your definition, sorry, looking at it again, I take it back. Your definition is negative, what is out of your control, so it would include them. My definition is really epistemic, about what we can say is real, rather than ontological. And right now it doesn’t seem like we can anything about that prospective civilization, but that could change at any time.
On phenomenal experience being fundamental, right. That’s fundamental consciousness. The question is, what reasons do we have for reaching that conclusion? It’s a common assumption, but one I’ve never been able to find justification for. (I know the most common reasons stated: zombies, qualia inversion, Mary’s room, etc, but it seems to me like those all have question begging premises.)
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Thinking about it again, it’s not that crazy to say that everything outside of our past light cone is unreal/doesn’t exist. Whether it’s past, present or future is just a matter of choice of reference frame, and it can have zero causal influence here/now, so it’s not straightforwardly “real” in the normal sense. It’s more like the future than the past or the present as we normally experience them, and future stuff is not exactly real (some is under my definition, but that’s probably not best suited for metaphysics in any case).
Taking your definition as epistemic, would it be more of a definition of knowledge?
I suppose it is fundamental consciousness, albeit a structuralist variety. I think the strongest motivation for it is that our qualitative experiences _feel_ irreducible. It’s difficult to perceive any structure within a particular shade of red for example. Although that said, I think my phenomenal experience of different colours *might* actually include some sense of the energy level/frequency of the light. Red light feels less frenetic than violet to me. But, I already know too much so I could just be imagining this feeling. That said, there’s something similar with sound qualia of different pitches and there it’s so clear I can hardly doubt it.
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“Taking your definition as epistemic, would it be more of a definition of knowledge?”
Good point. My more ontological criteria would be that the real is what participates in the causal chain, even if it’s only having spatiotemporal extent. Although I’m also sympathetic to the mind independence criteria, which your view seems like an example of.
“I think the strongest motivation for it is that our qualitative experiences feel irreducible.”
I can see that. The only reason it doesn’t have much weight with me are all the things in the history of science where our feelings weren’t reliable: geocentrism, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.
“Although that said, I think my phenomenal experience of different colours might actually include some sense of the energy level/frequency of the light”
I’ve felt the pull of that myself. But while wavelengths generally cause color perceptions, why we perceive the colors we do seem like more than just about wavelength. Consider how close red and green are to each other on the spectrum.
I think red has the nature it does, high salience and distinctiveness, due to our evolutionary affordances. Perceiving red made ripe fruit easier for our primate ancestors to notice, a survival advantage. It’s worth noting that most mammals can’t perceive red, likely because for non-primates it wasn’t adaptive.
So one way of viewing manifest qualia is as the result of pre-conscious evaluations our perceptual systems construct for the deliberative aspect of our minds. It’s not adaptive for us to have access to the underlying steps leading to that result, so we don’t. The result is something that seems simple and irreducible.
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I think, we should distinguish hard, precise science (like physics) from soft, descriptional science (like philosophy).
With precise sciences, it is possible to assess how accurate our science models are in explaining whatever they are trying to explain. With descriptional sciences, such assessments are not possible.
The theories you discuss in this post are philosophical; therefore, we do not have precise tools to assess which philosophical theory is “closer” to “reality.”
The other point is about precise sciences.
Whatever we observe, we observe some particular states of objects in space-time, and those states were not the same back or forward in space-time. Therefore, any precise scientific conclusions about “reality” are conclusions about models of reality, not the richer reality itself.
Models are always just some approximations of the objects they model. The limits of those approximations can be different depending on a model description, space-time locality, and so on. Therefore, we can not make any generalized, even approximately, conclusions of how close models are, or can be, to “reality with its full manifestations in all possible space-time conditions.”
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If the models you’re saying that are philosophical are realism, instrumentalism, structuralism, Russellian monism, and panpsychism, then I agree. Much of science can be done no matter what our stance is on those views. Although as I noted, Einstein’s approach was an inherently realist one. Some of his chief opponents: Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, came at it from what was arguable a more instrumentalist perspective, although many people insist Bohr was actually a Kantian or neo-Kantian. In any case, their stances made a difference in how they evaluate theories.
I agree that models are always approximations to some degree. But some are much more precise than others. And I think science progresses by gradually increasing the precision of those approximations.
I do think we can reach conclusions about how close they might be due to the range and accuracy of their predictions. But, at least so far, it’s always possible to cut the pie in smaller chunks, and so there could be behavior in those smaller parts that is missed in the bigger parts. Although it does have to stay compatible with the broader observations.
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I’m wondering if considering the simulation hypothesis could shed light on the issue. Let’s assume we are in a cellular automata like the game of life, where the bottom reality that we can get to is cells and the rules of transition. In one sense, those cells are just structures, so …, structurally ontic? But there may (must?) be some underlying reality generating the operations that follow those structural rules, but we can never get there even in principal. So OS realists are saying the cells and rules are all there is, and ES realists saying there’s more but we can’t get there so can’t say anything about it. Do I have this right?
*
[can’t we all just get along?]
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I noted in the post that there’s nothing in OSR that rules out an underlying reality. It’s just that that reality with OSR is going to be structural. Could there be structure we can never reach? Sure, conceivably. (Although I’m suspicious of attempts to declare we’ve reached that boundary. It doesn’t seem productive to ever assume we have.) I don’t think OSR rules that out. It only rules out some kind of intrinsic non-relational non-structural natural essence, whatever that’s supposed to be.
[Hey, we can disagree here while getting along. I hope?]
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I think along much the same lines. Every property and relation that object O bears, that we know of, exhibits itself in interaction with other objects P, Q, etc. If it didn’t, it could never reach us, to register on us. This applies to events and processes within us, too, like sensations. If you know about a sensation, it registered on your memory.
It seems that if there are any non-structural properties, we can never know about them.
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Good point. I didn’t get into the possible epiphenomenal aspects in this post. There is some talk about the intrinsic properties having a role in the causal powers of an object, sort of the thing that “breathes fire” into the equations. But it seems like extra assumptions just to make the idea work, not anything driven by the data.
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It’s funny how difficult ‘reality’ can be!
There probably are a lot of deep evolutionary associations with different colours, but to me they just don’t feel sufficient to account for redness as such. They’re there, but I think there’d be something left even if we could remove those associations. I mean, the first creatures to experience colour would have had no evolutionary associations but must have still experienced something.
Red and green light aren’t so close on the spectrum, although the peaks for the red and green cones are. But looking at that image, it also makes sense that red would feel lower energy since it involves the least response from all the cones and rods. It also makes sense why yellow, green and cyan would feel inherently bright and energetic, since the lines are all pretty high for them.
But there does still seem to be some recognition of wavelength, I think. Evolution managed to recognise the differences in wavelengths in order to order the spectrum for us, so that info must be present. From a little searching, it also seems much more common when colouring musical notes for both to increase in frequency together (so, Do-Red, Re-Orange, Mi-Yellow, etc) rather than the reverse, going back at least to Isaac Newton.
Switching to audio, there’s the interesting structure that we experience musical notes as repeating (ie A comes after G). What’s happening is that we perceive sound in such a way that each octave doubles the frequency of the last one, which means the waves as we perceive them are alway working on different enough scales that they don’t interfere, and each note is twice it’s frequency at the lower octave.
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“They’re there, but I think there’d be something left even if we could remove those associations.”
I should note that I don’t take what I described as a complete account. Colors are also all the learned associations we pick up over time. So red stimuli tend to evoke an undercurrent of nuanced affects from memories of blood, roses, ripe strawberries, heated iron, and many other things, all of which add to the impression of a rich experience. Even then, I doubt we’ve discovered all the causal roles of colors.
But even if we had, it’s impossible to really remember all of that when subjectively evaluating our experience of color. So it would still feel like something was missing. That, I think, comes down to the limitations on how useful introspection is for learning about the way the mind works. It evolved for particular purposes, but understanding the mechanics of the mind itself doesn’t appear to have been one of them.
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I find myself thinking about this much the same way I think about theories of truth, and being pulled toward instrumentalism over realism in the same way that I am pulled toward pragmatism over correspondence. If I try to say what it means that a concept corresponds to reality, I conclude that proper correspondence should ultimately reduce to some level of isomorphism (perhaps only in the sense of structures and relations), and it seems unlikely that our evolved cognition is isomorphic with the external world. My gut says that it’s more likely that our cognition evolved to be pretty good at predicting reality, rather than evolving to produce some kind of isomorphism. And science is just our evolved cognition translated into formal language (a translation that introduces another opportunity for error). That said, the remarkably consistent success of mathematical formalism to predict observations also pulls me toward thinking there could be some level of correspondence, so I could potentially be persuaded to ESR if I spent more time looking at the arguments, but ESR still feels safer (less likely to be wrong) than OSR from an evolutionary perspective.
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I’ve gone through similar lines of reasoning over the years. I don’t think we ever know correspondence / isomorphism with complete certainty. But if a certain model of reality consistently leads to more accurate predictions, in many different scenarios and from many different perspectives, then I think we can say it’s probable there’s a correspondence there.
Remember that OSR doesn’t rule out undiscovered structures under or beyond the ones we currently know about. It just rules out quiddities, intrinsic essences that are non-structural and non-relational. So if you’re just concerned with acknowledging the limits of what we currently know, then OSR can still be a viable option. On the other hand, if quiddities seem plausible, then ESR makes sense.
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So you would say A is more probable than B, where:
A: our cognitive architecture evolved to adopt relations that are isomorphic with relations in the external world
B: our cognitive architecture evolved to be good at predicting the external world and imposes itself (the architecture) onto our modeling of the external world
I’m inclined toward B. Assuming you agree with A, how would you attempt to clarify the scope and nature of that isomorphism, and how the isomorphic elements of the external world are translated into their cognitive counterparts?
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I think A and B are two puzzle pieces that fit together. We accomplish A with B. B’s success is in how well it accomplishes A. So to your final question, I think the answer is we do B.
My question would be, if you say they’re unrelated to each other, then what accounts for the success (or failure) of B?
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Yes, there was an unstated premise in my dichotomy that the result in B was not isomorphic. It would be the same as A in that case.
The success of B (in this clarified sense where there is no isomorphism) comes from the cognition getting pretty dang close in the ways that matter. It’s the old “The map is not the territory” idea. The map does a good job of allowing us to navigate, but we shouldn’t assume it is thus isomorphic with the territory.
That said, perhaps we can think of isomorphism as operating on different levels of granularity, and perhaps there is some kind of correspondence at less granular levels? That’s a new consideration for me and opens up the reductionism vs holism can of worms.
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–> Leaving OSR as the only option. At least for now.
These final sentences seem to me to either be an argument from ignorance or an admission of ESR.
I guess I don’t really see the point of declaring OSR (there will never be evidence this position is wrong) instead of ESR (nothing changes for now, but hey, sure, we seemingly can never know everything we don’t know). ESR seems to be just another way of saying “OSR, for now”. I personally like the way Donald Campbell (the psychologist who coined the term evolutionary epistemology) called his position “hypothetical realism”. That seems to capture this well. Our best hypothesis, so far not disproven, is OSR, but it’s a 3rd rail to ever touch the “I’m certain” line.
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“These final sentences seem to me to either be an argument from ignorance or an admission of ESR.”
That’s what I get for being too polite. It’s meant to convey that I can’t find anything coherent in the intrinsic nature / things in themselves / quiddities concept. And as far as I can tell that concept is what ESR has that OSR doesn’t. Honestly, I think the intrinsic nature concept is applying intuitions we form at higher levels of explanation to more fundamental layers, where it seems like a category mistake.
I agree that the distinction is utterly metaphysical and somewhat academic. However, it makes a difference for panpsychist views who see quiddities as the proto-phenomenal building blocks of consciousness. (Which of course are themselves utterly metaphysical positions.)
Definitely OSR is a theory, or meta-theory. And like any theory, it could be disproven at any time.
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