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Ontology for Soylentils

In my continuing service as the resident philosopher of Solylent News, I thougth it might be good to have a discussion about "reality" This is only partly because so many Soylentils have a tenuous grasp of reality, it is more because this is one of the more philosophically difficult questions. So follow along, if you dare.

  "What is" seems to be an obvious thing. "What is" is what presents itself to us. We see, or smell or touch or hear a thing or event, because it actually exists. Fair enough, and close enough for evolutionary purposes. If I hear a leopard stalking me, it is better to just take it as a fact that one is, even if in this particular case I am wrong. We can take this as the first point: "what is?" is a question relative to what the question is meant to achieve.
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  Our second point should already be apparent, excuse the philosophical pun. Yes, ontology, the from the Greek ὄν, on (gen. ὄντος, ontos), and -λογία, -logia, i.e. "logical discourse, is intimately interwoven with epistemology, or a "theory of knowledge". Perhaps you can already see why things are going to get interesting.
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  The first conclusion, and probably practically the first of interest, is that perception via the senses is unreliable. That leopard that wasn't actually there is one thing, but the one that you thought was a black sheep? It is not the false positives you need to worry about. Soon we learn to not always trust what we see. A classic exaample is coming across a poisonous snake on a dimly lit road, only to discover on closer inspection that it is only a rope. Not nearly as surprising as a friend I knew who, in a bathroom in Lahore, came across a rope, standing on its end, and hissing as he got closer. Yes, you do not want to mistake a black cobra for a rope. But if our perceptions can be wrong, how do we know which ones to trust?

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  While fallibility may be a practical matter of some importance, regarding leopards and cobras and Nigerian princes, it is more significant as it applies to reality. If what we perceive can actually not be real, and what is real not be perceived, we have a problem. And the problem may not just be that we do not know what reality is, but that reality could be entirely different than what we percieve, or in fact not exist at all. This uncertainty about reality lead the earliest Greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaximenes, to posit some substance, gr. ὑπόστασις, a existence that remained in spite of changes in appearance and perception. This is where philosophy gets the reputation for being the differentiation of appearance and reality. For Thales, everything is water, which changes into other things, stone, air, fire, but is always the same thing. Of course, Anaximenes thought the one substance was air. And Heraclitus thought it was fire. But more about him later.
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  Now if it is the case that perception via the senses is unreliable, perhaps the approach to what is ultimately real lies by the way of pure thought? Parmenides of Ilea wrote a poem, wherein a goddess teaches him the ways of knowing: the way of truth, and the way of falsehood. Falsehood seems to be sense-knowledge, or opinion. But the other way is more interesting. What is, the goddess tells Parminides, must be what it is, or it would not. Being is self-identical. If this is so, being could never not be, since it is being. So Being is eternal. And thus being cannot change. If you see things changing, that is your problem; who you gonna believe, logic, or your lying eyes? And finally, whatever is, is one, since if one thing was different than another, it would be that "not being the other" that would make it what it was, but "not-being" cannot be. Being is truth, eternal, and one. You may be familiar with Parmenides student, Zeno, who put forth some paradoxes to prove his master's theory. Zeno's Paradoxes
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  On the other hand, we have the afore mentioned Heraclitus of Ephesus. He held that there is not being outside the realm of change, that change is all there is, that everything flows. He is famous for having said "you can never step into the same river twice". Not only has the river moved on in the interval, but you yourself are not what you were a instant before. All that remains for Heraclitus is the Logos, the logic of change. Some people like this, but it doesn't really need an objective reality, does it?

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  We will have to be brief for a lot of philosophical history here, but suffice to say that Plato thought that what actually was real was what could be comprehended by the mind, and not the particular instance of the thing in material form, so that the concept of "table" was real, but an actual physical table, that participated in the form of "table" but came into existence and left, was only a pale reflection of the realm of Ideas. Plato's star student, as is usual in philosophy, disagreed, and insisted on the reality of the perceptual world from which we extract abstract concepts like "tableness". These two positions persist throughout much of the history of western philosophy, with debates between "Realists" (Platonists) and "Nominalists" (Aristotleans) in the Middle Ages.
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      But it takes some real bone-heads to challenge all the pi-in-the-sky philosophy talk. The English have always been "down to earth", and indeed it is thinkers like Roger Bacon, Sir Issac Newton, and Sir Francis Bacon who, rather oversimplified, re-assert that seeing is believing, or British Empiricism. On the Continent, Renee Descartes was equally rebelling against the scholastic philosophy of the middle ages, but he retained a place for pure, or inate, ideas, whereas the British held that belief that all knowledge comes from experience of nature.
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    Of course, the errors of perception were still to be taken account of. Descartes thought it was the leap to judgement that caused us to err. Bacon held that our Idols may be corrupted. But it was John Locke who introduced an interesting distinction. Some things we percieve, Locke held, and that way in the objects themselves, like form, or matter. Others are things that are subjective, or in us, like color, or taste. Of course, the obvious rebuttal is, which are which, and why? This leads to the creation of the "correspondence theory of truth", which wants to say that a perception is correct insofar as it matches the object as it exists in itself. I don't now how many soylentils can see the problem with this, but imagine that you have to compare a picture to an original to be sure it is a fair copy, except the original is a picture you cannot look at. Presumptions of a naive realism.
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    Now Bishop Berkeley decided to go all the way with empiricism, which was to assert that if Locke's primary qualities of substances could not be directly percieved, they did not in fact exist. Which is reasonable from an empiricist position when you think about it. Berkeley is the one who said, "to be is to be percieved". In other words, there is no reality behind appearance, appearence is all there is. So, you may ask (and you would not be the first), why when we re-percieve things we have percieved before, do they always remain the same, if they do not independently exist? Bishop Berkeley responded, that is because someone is percieving them all the time, which is why they remain in existence. Guess who?
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  About here we should discuss Immanuel Kant, both because of his importance, and because this is about where science as an independent intellectual form begins to totally ignore philosophy, much to its own detriment. Kant, like Locke, tried to distinguish what belonged to us and what belonged to reality. His method is usually called "Transcendental", which means he tried to determine the necessary condition for the possiblity of the perception of an object. Kant put at lot under the "for us" category, in fact he ends up with a whole bunch of "categories" that are nearly Platonic. For example, Kant says that space is trancendentally necessary for phenomena to appear to a subject. But if not appearing, space is not necessary. This means that things may not be in space, that space is not independently real. Get out your Einstein if you need to. But Kant said there was one thing that had to be necessary for a perception of an object to be real, and that was a real object, even if all the categories necessary for a subject to percieve it did not apply to it: the Ding-an-sich, the "thing in itself". Of course, we can never experience this "in-itself", so we end up with Fichte and Hegel doing a Berkeley on Kant. Reality in Idealism is not a bare existence of a thing-in-itself, it is the fulfullment of the possiblities of being within a coherent system of thought. But that is too much to go into here. "Do you think that's air you're breathing?"
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    Meanwhile, back in the lab. . . Science has gotten along quite well, for the most part, with the assumption of an independently existing reality and a correspondence theory of the truth. In fact, experimental method can be seen as the perfect way to isolate and refine properties that belong to things-in-themselves. Some problems have come up. Contamination by religion or politics, Lamarkism or Lysenkoism, or Neo-classical economics. And we have debates beween "realists" who hold that things like sub-atomic particles exist, and "instrumentalists" who hold the same things are only a explanatory feature within a theory, mirroring Medieval Realist/Nominalist debates in reverse and backwards. Even some major ones, like the problem of major shifts in theory, what Thomas Kuhn termed "paradigm shifts". These are cases where the testimony of reality are not enough to distinguish the better theory. Which is disturbing.
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    But then Quantum Mechanics. In general, when ever anyone brings up quantum mechanics in the context of a philosophical discussion, I recommend excusing yourself to find a bathroom, or another drink. But this is where we are headed. We end up stuck between Parmenides and Heraclitus, only now in the context of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. Nothing moves: a particle is where it is, we can measure position. Everything moves: we can measure the velocity of a particle, but it is not where it is. Now the interesting thing about this, and what leads us back to philosophy, is that is our choice which one we measure, according to Heisenberg, which leads us to the cat. "Schoedinger's cat" is a thought experiment that attempts to explain the duality of light, as illustrated in the dual-slit experiment. The cat is in box, and it is either alive or dead, with a variety of mechanisms to distract us from the main point. Light exists as both a wave and a particle. Cat both alive and dead. But it/they are neither, until you open the box: the observation determines reality. Or, there is no reality until it is observed. Put differently, the thesis is that all reality (observation) is theory-laden. This is why it is at least as important to pay attention to your assumptions as it is to pay attention to your results.

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    It is resistance to this thesis that has prompted this short summary of ontology. The common response to any assertion the reality might be "mind-dependant" is to say that is equivalent to saying that it is all in your head, or that "reality" is subjective, or not real at all. But the point is that if we do not have access to pure experience of being as it is in itself, the claim of objectivity is itself a subjective assumption, one grounded in nothing but the idea of an objective reality. As someone in the '60's put it: "Reality, what a concept!" Once that assumption is recognized as such, the complexity of the relation between being and knowing opens up. This was basically the goal of the philosophical school of Skepticism, which was often opposed to the Stoics and others who claimed the existence of "objective reality". Skeptics sought to offer counter-arguments to claims of non-experiential reality by referring to the the relativity of perception and value. But they did not seek to substitute some other reality, some other theory of objective reality, but instead sought to achieve a suspension of judgement, or "epoche" about such questions that were not resolvable. It is interesting to note that this approach has been preserved in American Pragmatist philosophy, especially as propounded by Richard Rorty.

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    So the hobgoblin of naive realism should have been dismissed by now, except for those who cling so tightly to what they cannot know, since they cannot be wrong. But we still have problems. Science, as Hegel says, is about the right of everyone to decide on the basis of their own experience. And so science, as an objective human endeavor, is based on not just the experimental model, but its repeatability by any interested party. This is why the experimental model is central to science: it is the result of the experiment that gives us the answer to our questions, an answer from reality itself! Maybe. This is where two philosophers of science come in handy, WVO Quine, and Sir Karl Popper, both of whom tend to support some commonplace, but significant observations about science. Quine postulated an "underdetermination thesis", the idea that any theory did not necessarily specify the experimental results to the exclusion of all others. In other words, for any one theory that predicted an experimental result, there could be any number of other, different, theories that would predict the exact same results. So any experimental test of a theory could not be definitive. Popper takes this to mean that if an experiment supports a theory, it only does so by not excluding it from consideration, whereas a negative experiment means the theory is just wrong. The logical form is, if theory A necessarily entails results B from an experiment, if results B are obtained, theory A is still possible, but if results B do not obtain, theory A is wrong. Popper's position is called "Falsificationism": theories are never proven true, they are only proven false, and our best theories are only those that have not yet been proven false! This is useful if you are up against fundies who say, "But that is only a theory!" Well, in real science, everything is only a theory, there are no facts, only data and theory, and experimental tests.
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    For a closure to this admittedly too brief introduction, we may venture into recent cosmology and cosmogeny. These are, respectively, the structure of the universe (logos), and the origin of the universe (genesis). I have to say that I resent it when scientists start doing ontology without a license, or at least without the training in philosophy that would prevent them from silly mistakes. But things are what they are. Wheels has said bad things about philosophy, like

“Most of us don't worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” he said. “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”

Often times the critique is correct, but more often scientists do not realize how their "developments" have been anticipated in philosophy, often in ancient philosophy.
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes similar mistakes, but then, he killed Pluto.

dGT: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it's, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

(another) interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

dGT: Well, I'm still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you can't move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" is a pointless delay in our progress.

Gizmodo
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Maybe the separation of philosophy and science did not go all that well, but it remains to be asserted that the foundational nature of philosophy is not to be ignored. Science cannot deal with ontology. What is, is phenomena. And what is truth, is experimental results. Except that phenomena are not reality, and experimental results are under-determined. So the recent developments of physics actually change nothing, and inquiry into the basic presuppostions that determine your experimental results is never a distraction. This is why science still needs philosophy of science, epistemology, ontology, and even metaphysics. But of course they appreciate them as much as theology did in the medieval period.
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    Final point. Really. Cosmology, and quantum physics, has often of late taken a step into speculation. "What was before the Big Bang?" "Could we be living in a virtual simulation?" String theory. Many scientists rightfully reject these theories as "unscientific". And right they are. These are speculative cosmologies, which are interesting to the extent that consistency within such a theory can be demonstrated. But what makes something science, and not mere speculation, is putting it on the line: the deduction of a necessary experimental result implied by the theory, an experimental test, or in Popper's terms, a possibility of falsification. With out this, of course some reality could be real. But until we try to prove it is not, it is not better than an infinity of possible realities, and indeed several impossible ones. Science presupposes a reality it tests its theories against, but it is philosophy that keeps science from thinking that presuppostion is objective reality.
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Apologies to all for the lacunae in this essay. Questions and objections are welcome.