Scientific Realism 3: Infancy

I can only guess what it is like to awaken to this world from that pre-human state of being where the mind is first developing its consciousness. On first seeing the sky, clouds, buildings, water, grass, the forest, and the countless other things we call the world, there must be a sudden shock, or pause that grips one. Undoubtedly, the conscious life of infancy is a mystery. Researcher can only guess at 'what it is like to be' a baby. But one thing is for certain, they seem to be in awe of EVERYTHING around them.

This awe, this ever pressing passion that seizes the mind and pulls it away from numbering things, distinguishing things, and takes it all in as a sort of shock of what IS may have something more to it than merely something one may call an undeveloped mind. Maybe, as we mature, and develop our ability to communicate, we actually lose sight of this awe. Perhaps there is something in the awe that is absent in the acquisition of language, of mathematics, of what we call logic reasoning skills. It could be the case that as Jesus stated, one must be as a child to enter into His kingdom, we must exchange awe for the words we use to understand all that is around us.

Consider how we develop language. According to St. Augustine, the process involves the child observing the parent and mimicking his or her movements as to get his or her attention. But why does the infant wish to get the attention of the parent? There is much debate on this, but the simple answer is to satisfy some desire, some craving, of the child. He or she may be hungry or thirsty and this is why they are crying in pain. They recognize that their body is in pain for something and they are expressing this pain of want. However, they also notice that the parent is providing for them relief from this want, this pain, through feeding them. Therefore, the infant further notices that he or she can mimic certain sounds the parents make, usually as a cue by the parent to successively approximate a specific word such as carrot or meat, so as to avoid the pain of want which gets worse as time goes on.

Soon, the child is able to acquire a wealth of mimicked behaviors and sounds which serve as a complex of preventing the pain of want. The infant growing into the maturity of childhood, is drawn into a world of language by communicating mimicked sounds and behaviors all related to want and its prevention. He or she learns that it is an 'I' and that this 'I' does things 'for' other things. Subject and predicate are born as to be more specific on what it wants to satisfy its cravings. But the language it develops ultimately grows more and more peripheral to the original motivation of satisfying a desire to where the desires are still there but the object to satisfy the desire is proliferated into many things.

All along, we the parents are under the impression the child is 'learning' through this process. But is this really learning? Or is it adapting? For what did the child 'know' before it had to start mimicking behaviors and focusing all its energies on this (on what brings the body pain and want) and not on those things which feel 'good' to the body? We cannot say what it is since we would be using language we had developed to satisfy the want of satisfaction or rather the negation of pain and want. Ultimately, this really puts into perspective the question of what we really do know. After all, our language could be said to be nothing more than a garden of words and terms grown out of our pain, not out of our joy and happiness. Indeed, the terms joy and happiness, presumably stem from some desire we had as children to avoid pain. It is nothing more than an inspired term from the shadow of joy and happiness.

Indeed, we number things, we count them, as to see some specificity in them. I see one tree, two trees, three and so forth. But their number is only in their being trees. And trees are only those things which have some use for the prevention of pain. Mathematics is painful, not only in practice but ontologically according to this. In short, we only know the shadow of things when we speak of them with the words we have learned in this Life. The awe and wonder the infant experiences which it cannot communicate (for we residents of this world of pain we live in are unfit to give them proper names to use for joy) we see as nonsense and unlearned babblings. But maybe we are the ones babbling, groaning until as the Bible says all of creation gives birth to the joy it has hidden behind the pain of its birth.

Scientific Realism 2

While Materialism is certainly an area of concern for those embracing alternatives, such as Idealism, it is not the only problem that faces those seeking a deeper understanding of reality in a philosophical manner. For I have come to realize that the very field of Philosophy, at least in the modern sense, has isolated itself from any semblance of dialectics; favoring mathematical expositions of logical arguments. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. However, when the discipline is flooded with theses that look more like a physicist's blackboard than an earmarked copy of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' I think there is a problem. Recently, I was participating in a conversation on the topic of Idealism in a Facebook group centered on the topic of the same name. Some members would make posts in reference to this or that theory related to Idealism, some being more grounded than others.

But there was one post in particular that struck me; and quite frankly gave me a bit of a headache just glancing at it. The post was a complicated series of predicate, modal logic symbols all with technical references to specific arguments in current philosophical circles. These symbols all were related to an analytical abbreviation of recent perspectives on quantum mechanics and its relation to consciousness and mental states. The moderator of the group applauded the poster while I was still sitting there thinking, 'what the hell did I just read?' I began to consider whether I had any idea of what 'real' Philosophy was. Perhaps I had only been able to grasp popularizations or annotations of Philosophical themes. Maybe I hadn't really 'gotten it' as far as Philosophy is concerned. But as I began thinking over the whole thing more clearly, I didn't remember reading these sorts of symbolic representations in earlier works of Philosophy. And, indeed, they were only present in more recent academic philosophical publications. Not all of them, but a large part of current philosophical works embraced this mode of logical exposition and theorizing. One would not find it, however, in European Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Meta-Philosophy and some journals dedicated to Metaphysics. But in spite of this, there is an impression that when one philosophizes, one does nothing but mathematics. And certainly there is a mathematical element to logic. Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, Syllogisms and etc.

But, after reading a forward to a work by Hegel, I was reminded why I had come to love Philosophy. It was the dialectic that is missing in these modern expressions of the love of wisdom. J. N. Findley once said about Philosophy, and the idealism of Hegel, that "dialectic is a richer and more supple of thought-advance than mathematics." It is the etymologies of words, deductive propositions of ideas and literary tradition of Philosophy that really holds the true basis of wisdom, not simply the concise arithmetic nature of symbolic logic in reference to scientific theories.