There is no God’s Eye View of Reality

[coberst]

There is no God’s Eye View of Reality

 

Thus spake Mr. Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History.

 

Putnam speaks of metaphysical realism and objectivism, from both an externalist and an internalist point of view.

 

Objectivism is a special case of metaphysical realism. Putnam argues that metaphysical realism is incoherent from an internalist perspective. This incoherence results from the impossibility of the externalist view; one cannot place the self outside of reality in order to find a unique perspective in which to view reality.

 

Putnam shows that the externalist view is logically impossible because metaphysical realism is formulated within symbol systems. “The metaphysical realist views of meaning, reference, knowledge, and understanding all make presuppositions about symbol systems and their interpretations that are logically incoherent.” Putnam argues that there cannot be “exactly one true and complete description of the ‘the way the world is’…there can be no God’s eye view of reality”.

 

Putnam is not arguing that there is no reality, i.e. basic realism, but only that the epistemology of the externalist view is logically incoherent. The problem rests on the assumption of the availability of a “God’s eye view”, which is inherent in the externalist perspective. We can not step outside of reality, we are part of reality. What is needed is an internalist view of reality, i.e. we must develop an epistemology that recognizes that we are functioning as part of reality and that it is impossible for us to just step outside and become an observer with a God’s eye point of view.

 

In place of metaphysical realism Putnam proposes another form of realism: internalist realism wherein we take a point of view in accordance with the human functioning within the world of objects and not externally from the object. To quote Putnam:

 

“I shall refer to it as the internalist perspective, because it is characteristic of this view to hold that what objects the world consists of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory of description…‘Truth’, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability—some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system—and not correspondence with mind-independent ‘states of affairs’. There is no God’s Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve.”

[Thunderbird]

Reality is also competitive in nature.

 

Evolution could be seen as based on survival of the realist, In that any creature needs to be tuned into current real conditions that are in constant flux. The life form that engages current realities directly though adapting to them keeps a participatory relation with the whole and subsequently recreates its reality. Reality is real only when we consider it a dynamic partnership to a whole. If a creature is caught unprepared for the changes it could find its sphere of reality excluded from a new world order by deletion of its DNA map within the map of the environment.

[CraigD]

I’m stuck by the similarities between Putnam’s internalist realism and instrumentalism.

 

Although commonly described as a marginal view naive of the real-world practice of science, my personal experience leads me to believe it is more accepted than commonly thought, especially among information technology workers, a profession intermingled with but somewhat peripheral to the basic sciences.

 

Upon encyclopedic acquaintance with Putnam, I’m unsurprised, as he’s commonly described as a proponent of pragamatism and functionalism, both of which are strongly related to instrumentalism, and also because he's know for works pertaining to math and computer science.

 

Where the internalist view, as presented in this thread, argues for the adoption of an epistemology in which the observer must be considered in interaction with the observed, while implicitly accepting the existence of objective reality, instrumentalism in its extreme implies that nothing but objective reality exists, in which its semantically impossible to separate observation from the observable. For observation to occur, observable reality must change – for example, the observation of a particle in a bubble chamber exists because other particles which comprise the bubble chamber are affected by it. Human awareness of the observed and its significance is due to the objectively real, physical configuration of measurables in human eyes, nerves, and brains. In short, there is no immaterial/metaphysical reality. All that some consider metaphysical is physically real as the underlying phenomena phenomenon of someone considering it. Even incorrect beliefs are physically real as the underlying phenomena underlying the believing of them.

[coberst]

Reality is also competitive in nature.

 

Evolution could also be seen as based on survival of the realist, In that any creature needs to be tuned into current real conditions that are in constant flux. The life form that engages current realities directly though adapting to them keeps a participatory relation with the whole and subsequently recreates its reality. Reality is real only when we consider it a dynamic partnership to a whole. If a creature is caught unprepared for the changes it could find its sphere of reality excluded from a new world order by deletion of its DNA map within the map of the environment.

 

I agree.

 

That is why it is so important that we learn the fallacy of our traditional view of categorization.

 

We have been able to adequately adapt to "reality" as we normally think of it but such may no longer be the case. "Reality" as it really is, is perhaps not like tradition informs us and that difference may be crucial in a world that changes at rocket speed due to technology. When our level of intellectual sophistication changes at a snails pace we may no longer be able to adapt as Darwin informs us we must do. What happens when our changing world overwhelms our unchanging intellectual sophistication?

 

Our present financial crisis may be an omen of what is to come.

[coberst]

Craig

 

Quickie from Wiki “In the late 1980s, Putnam abandoned his adherence to functionalism and other computational theories of mind.”

 

In an effort to understand the difference between the externalist and the internalist views one might examine the two different paradigms that drive cognitive science.

 

Cognitive science began somewhere in mid-century with the metaphor ‘mind is computer’. This cognitive science thought of the computer as being able to emulate the mind because they thought of the ‘mind as machine like’ in that it was possible to bracket all aspects of the mind except its logical manipulation capability. That is to say, that in essence the mind functions in an algorithmic mode wherein it process inputs and provides a logical outputs.

 

The inputs would be data in symbolic form. The inputs could be linguistic propositions and sense data and all of this could be processed logically with desired outputs presented.

 

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) is an amalgamation of professionals who began to develop in 70s a cognitive science that considered the dichotomy of mind/body was mistaken. Their basic paradigm was an embodied mind. That is to say that humans are a gestalt, you cannot have the mind without the body, mind and body is a functioning unit and one cannot bracket the body from the functioning of the brain.

[HydrogenBond]

If you look at the Obama plan for economic recovery, the external is the same for all. But subjectively or internally, different people are reacting to the same external reality in completely different ways.

 

If comes down to looking at reality through the prism of one's belief system, which alters how we see reality. I think what Coberst is saying, one needs to look at their inner lens and make sure it doesn't distort reality. One political party uses a concave lens and the other a convex.

 

Marketing tries for bright colored lens so everything looks so good. If you can only see black and white, your reality is defined in gray scale. One of the modern lens is random and chaos. This lens is out of focus and makes reality look fuzzy. It creates an impressionist reality. The tree is still a tree, but it gives more room for the imagination. It can be an oak tree or a maple tree with it being more likely an oak tree. When one is in love, we see through rose colored glasses. The next person may have a different color lens, and see the same reality in the different light.

 

The inner reality has to do with the nature of one's inner lens. The "God eye" view of reality would need a clear lens, without spherical aberrations, it needs to be in focus and not fuzzy. You may need to compensate for the index of refraction.