Logos

The mystery of how we make sense of the world

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788216197
• eBook ISBN: 9781788211352
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Our sense-making capabilities and the relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the comprehensibility of the world is both remarkable and deeply mysterious. Our capacity to make sense of the world and the fact that we pass our lives steeped in knowledge and understanding, albeit incomplete, that far exceeds what we are or even experience has challenged our greatest thinkers for centuries.

In Logos, Raymond Tallis steps into the gap between mind and world to explore what is at stake in our attempts to make sense of our world and our lives. With his characteristic combination of scholarly rigour and lively humour he reveals how philosophers, theologians and scientists have sought to demystify our extraordinary capacity to understand the world by collapsing the distance between the mind that does the sense-making and the world that is made sense of. Such strategies – whether by locating the world inside the mind, or making the mind part of the world – are shown to be deeply flawed and of little help in explaining the intelligiblity of the world. Indeed, it is the distance that we need, argues Tallis, if knowledge is to count as knowledge and for there to be a distinction between the knower and the known.

Tallis brings his formidable analysis to bear on the many challenges we face when trying to make sense of our sense-making. These include the idea of cognitive progress, which presupposes a benchmark of complete understanding; cognitive completion, which unites the separate strands of our understanding (from the laws of nature to our ineluctable everyday understanding of things, incorporating the meanings we live by); and the knowing subject – us – with our partial and limited viewpoint mediated by our bodies.

The book showcases Tallis's enviable knack of making tricky philosophical arguments cogent and engaging to the non-specialist and his remarkable ability to help us see humankind more clearly. For anyone who has shared Einstein's observation that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility", the book will be fascinating and insightful reading.

CHAPTER 1

Seeing the sense-making animal

In what follows, I will trace a path from everyday observations which may generate or solve local puzzles, transitions from events that are clues to other events, against the background of already-made sense, to scientific sense, in a naive way that would make philosophers of science and historians of human cognition reach for the smelling salts. My primary aim is to make the richness, the complexity, and the multi-dimensionality of human sense-making more visible. There is no intention to retrace the actual path that humanity and individual human beings have taken in progressing from pre-scientific gawping (and reacting) to a scientific world-picture whose success may be measured in part by the extent to which it has marginalized the natural world in favour of a landscape of technologies. Nor will I give an adequate account of the collective cognitive journey from seeing patterns to seeking them by means of reliable methodologies. My aim is merely the more modest one of highlighting the scale of the long and winding intellectual journey to our present mode of comprehending the world in which we live, that Einstein celebrated. We shall be dipping our toes in deep and muddy waters.

When we try to take the measure of the extraordinary fact that we make (partial) sense of the world, we run into a thicket of connected and overlapping terms: “understanding”, “explaining”, “figuring out”, “grasping and solving”, “recognizing”, “interpreting”, “classifying”, “generalizing”, “detecting patterns”, “seeing order”, “observing structures”; various modes of a “because” that invokes causes, reasons, and other ways of registering intuitions of necessity; noting connections, observing law-like behaviour, uncovering fundamental reality (or realities) or general truths. This is just some of the foliage in the lexical shrubbery. Any exploration of the “sense-making” animal seems obliged, however, to begin with sense experience.

There are many reasons for thinking of the deliverances of our senses as “the ground floor” of our awareness, the platform of all cognitive ascent, the basic stuff out of which sense must be made. Admittedly, almost from the beginning, there is a shaping of experience into a structured world, a nexus of significance. World-building, and learning how to be in the world, are products of an iteration between sense experience and sense-making. Even so, it is reasonable to think of sense experience as basic. If, to modify Kant, experiences without ideas are blind, ideas without experiences are empty,¹ without sense experience, there would be nothing to make sense of. They are traditional starting points of philosophical theories of knowledge, particularly those influenced by the empirical tradition associated in anglophone philosophy with John Locke and David Hume. And Kant started with the assumption that all knowledge begins with experience.²

There has been an equally strong tradition – beginning in European philosophy with Parmenides and Plato – according to which sense experience was a barrier to apprehending truth and reality. The latter would be seen only when intelligence burned away the sensory mist. This was not, however, the path to the kind of sense-making that so justifiably astonished Einstein.

Our senses, after all, are our fundamental connection with that which is “out there”. Arguably, they are that in virtue of which there is an “out there”: the material world does not, of itself, have either inside or outside, here or there. Sense experience is our exposure to what we might call a “proto-epistemosphere”. They offer a revelation of a reality manifested as handy or distant, populated with the presences or absences of elements basic to our health, well-being and survival: food and predators, threats and promises, friends and adversaries, or more globally daylight or weather. The “out there”, felt on our body, experienced inside our body, revealed to seeming immediate awareness, straddles what we are and where we find ourselves.

Even this basic “outsideness” of (the) “out there” – the given into which we are pitched, our primary situation, the locus of our starting points and our destinations – is more complex and mysterious than might at first appear (and we shall return to it in Chapter 3). There is the far from simple truth that whatever we are aware of as “out there” has somehow to be inside or part of us and yet at the same time be posited as distinct from us, in-itself as well as for-us.

Contemporary theories of this basic aspect of sense-making try (vainly) to resolve the tension between our sense experiences as items that are within us and as items that are “of” something outside of us. A currently popular approach among philosophers attempts to do so by postulating that sense experiences are material effects within us (specifically our brains) of the objects we are aware of as being outside of us. The passage from Quine, quoted in the Overture, which speaks of “our meagre contacts with the physical world” and “the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill”³ beautifully encapsulates the idea that our knowledge begins with experience and that the latter is due to a causal interaction between our own bodies and those that are outside of it. The gap between the sensor and the sensed that holds open the “outside” is thus apparently bridged at the same time as it is maintained.

The reasons why this causal approach does not work are more interesting than might initially appear and will figure in the chapters to come, particularly Chapter 4. If I mention it at the outset, it is to pre-empt any suggestion that the mystery of making sense begins only at a higher level than sense experience, and that the latter is straightforward. On the contrary, that mystery pervades all our consciousness.

Moreover, sense experience is not a pure substrate upon which sense-making operates, in innocence of what happens at higher levels. As already noted, except perhaps in the very early days of life, our sensory awareness of the world is pervaded by something that goes beyond it. That characteristic is what makes awareness “of” – x, y, or z. In short, there isn’t a basic state of consciousness in which we are bathed in a sea of pure sensation. Our experiences are organized and ascribed to things in a world. The experienced world is structured; otherwise what is “out there” would be slop and the mind would be delirium. The world is not first served up as a blizzard of unprocessed sensory experiences arising from inside or without the body which is then gathered up into sense-making categories.

This is one of the fundamental truths that prompted Kant’s focus on the synthetic power of the mind.⁴ We do not piece together the objects of perception, the things we locate “out there” and engage with, out of showers of discrete sense experience, then classify them, and then see what we might do with them, and finally explain them with reference to other items similarly built up. As many philosophers have pointed out, our experiences are not atomic, sequins of uncategorized bits of sound, luminosity, tingles, and the like. They belong to a field, to a continuum of what we might call “disclosure”, and this field is not merely a network of physical spatiotemporal relations but a nexus of significations – of meaningful “whats” laid out before us connected with one another by means of visible and invisible “whys”. A blizzard of flashes and tingles, etc., would not add up to “surroundings” – to an outside. A huge literature testifies to the effort that has gone into observing how, and in what ways, sense experience relates to a world.

Our consciousness of what is “out there” – even imagined as an instantaneous time-slice – is not (just) of a sphere of material elements belonging to a succession of present moments. It is also an unfolding realm of possibility, and consequently a theatre of ongoing, past, future, or potential action. We are not, after all, merely, or even primarily, spectators. Our spectatorial self is a luxury self and, even then, is caught up in ongoing agency. Even flâneurs must continue doing all those things that are necessary to keep them alive and safe – in order to be able to be intrigued, or bored, caring or careless as they turn their supposedly disinterested gaze on the world.

A “ground floor outside”, constructed out of pure sensory experience of what is out there (or of our own bodies as the most proximate layer of out there), is therefore a myth. Sentience is impregnated from the outset with higher-order sense-making. The obverse is, however, also true: higher-order sense-making is tethered to more basic experience.

Take a paradigm case of higher-order sense-making: the scientist making a measurement. She must handle the apparatus, having seen that it is in front of her and, indeed, near to her. And she is not protected from the world accessed directly by her senses. Preoccupied by the light from distant stars, she trips over a loose cable.

Consider another case. The reader following a novel harvests light off the pages on which the story is written, pages that have other physical properties, shared by the material objects of the room in which the book is being read, and carrying many characteristics – such as creases – that are irrelevant to the sense being extracted from the written word. While we may lose ourselves in a book, in a space of abstract meanings, we never leave behind the realm of basic sense experience. The weight of the book in the hand is mingled with the sensations associated with our anxiety as to what might happen next to the character for whom we are concerned. I may be following the hero down a street in Moscow but I can still be made to jump by the cleaner suddenly appearing at the window with his cloth. We are always available for, or exposed to, the connectedness of the material world that physically surrounds us. We never entirely vacate the spaces of nature and sense experience for those of discourse and reason.

All of this can be accepted but, nevertheless, the endeavour to distinguish and unpack the many layers of sense-making can fruitfully begin with sense experience, and the no-longer and not-yet, the undisclosed and the manifestly hidden, with which our sensory fields are dappled. It is here we enact the basic modes of “sussing out”. We look to see what is around the corner, under the stone, behind a wall, beyond the visible beyond. We immediately identify or slowly realize the nature of an object we encounter, recognizing it as an instance of a type. We see, or look to see, why something happened, identifying a cause.

What discrete acts of (explicit) understanding have in common is that they are triggered by an interruption in sense or discontinuity of an encircling horizon. The interruption is typically registered by surprise, by puzzlement, by the overturning of an expectation that might only then become explicit. Sense-making takes the form of a search for local answers to “What?” that gives the clue to “Why?”. There is a dawning in a local darkness.

While, sniffing, palpating, tasting may yield answers to “What?” or even “Why?”, it is the distance senses – vision and hearing – that are most associated with the primordial search for sense prompted by an interruption in the continuum of sense. We walk round an enigmatic item to see what it is or what we might do with it, what makes it tick, or how it came to be here. We listen actively: “What is/what caused that sound?”. Active sense-making is even more apparent in the case of sight, where heightened and even trained awareness turns seeing into scrutinizing or peering or some other mode of active, disciplined, attention. Even in these rather homely instances, the resultant understanding draws on prior sense-making that itself goes beyond sense perception: the classification of items; and a sense of how items of a certain sort hang together. Elementary and advanced sense-making are mingled in moment-to-moment awareness of what is happening, of what is out there.

Making unfolding sense of the unfolding experienced world is not always active; it is sometimes just a matter of waiting – to see what happens next, what is disclosed. Or not even waiting: “this” is followed by “that” in some meaningful succession, even if the connection is naked conjunction, with “and” dominating over “therefore” and “because”, the staccato of disconnected events or the legato of process, as simultaneous happenings compete for our attention. The ringing in my ears, the tap of the keyboard, the steady chugging of the washing machine below, and the occasional cough from the next room, fill my unawaiting ears, unsurprised by the downpour of happening. Even (seemingly passive) waiting, however, can be active and attuned, shaped by expectations that may be evident only in retrospect when the unexpected surprises us. The temporal relation between waiting and sense-making may be complex or even back to front, as when I look out for another flash of lightning to confirm that the rumble I have just heard was that of thunder.

Frequently, of course, sense-making is more than just a matter of waiting. It is the product of active investigation: parting the bushes to identify what is making the rustling noise; turning an object over to see what it is; climbing to the top of a tree to find the source of an illumination. The investigations seeking the answers to local “whats” and “whys” are often solitary rather than systematic. Under such (customary) circumstances, they may be so much part of a seamless flow of individual experience that the notion of (distinct) “explanation” hardly gets a toe-hold. There are simply local realizations – “recognitions” – that are inseparable from seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing.

Ultimately, we come to more complex, purposive sense-making journeys, explorations, where we seek in order to find, where we look out for signs, or make measurements and, having made measurements, compare our findings with others, see patterns, and make calculations on the basis of them, ascending from a series of individual measurements to a perceived pattern and, descending from the pattern, anticipate, or count on, an individual outcome. The purposive search for sense, for explanation, may be driven by puzzlement (coloured by a range of feelings ranging from idle curiosity to fear) that demands relief. In saying this, I am highlighting something that is insufficiently noticed: the widening distance between informal, continuous sense experience – where solutions to puzzles are as it were in a solvent – and formal planned observations leading eventually to precise measurements in the context of scientific questions, to the production of theories, and the putting of those theories to practical use; between the continuity of fulfilled expectations that are visible only when they are unexpectedly defeated, and – via basic and less basic “sussing out” and crossword-level puzzling and proofs that seem satisfactory – the “Eureka!” moments that have echoed down the years. Such moments may still be driven by sense experience. After all, the original Eureka moment, was made possible by Archimedes going back to sensory basics and seeing the water rise as he stepped into his bath, thus enabling him to reach the solution to a problem he had failed to solve by abstract thought.⁵

Thus, aspects of the ascent from the basic connectedness of successive moments, the recognition that “what is going on now” as part of something that is ongoing, to the sense that what is going on here can be relied upon to be happening elsewhere, indeed everywhere, to ever-growing powers of prediction, ceaselessly strengthened by reflected-upon correction.

Sense-making above a very elementary level is often a shared activity, even though the cooperating partners may not be physically co-present. It begins with manifestly joined attention which in turn presupposes a complex awareness of another person, or groups of one’s fellows, as we draw on a common pool of sense and sense-making. From our earliest months, we are surrounded by explainers, classifiers and connectors – foremost among them our parents, and others responsible for our upbringing. This development of shared sense-making is an essential step in the cognitive growth of humanity away from the animal umwelt. At any rate, the joint pursuit, or confirmation, of the sense we have made ranges from puzzling together over the nature of something jointly visible, “that thing over there”, to the mighty collective enterprises of science in the research laboratory; from the child’s “Wazzat?” to CERN, where sustained, formalized, funded, regulated curiosity is directed towards an agreed set of questions.

Sense-making is simplifying. The infinitely complex reality that surrounds us is treated largely as foreground signal to background noise. Our senses are filters and that which is not filtered out is itself subject to further filtration, as the non-salient is exiled to a penumbra of relative inattention. This is evident at a very basic level: active looking (as opposed to mere gawping) involves overlooking: seeing that thing over there, my gaze overflies everything that intervenes between me and it. The most powerful and effective mode of simplification is something deeply mysterious: the generalizing ability of our consciousness – more broadly of our mind (as some classification may be unconscious or liminal). We see an individual as an instance of a type and, conversely, see types as instantiated in individuals. Very little of the observed item is registered in the process of whatever is necessary to diagnose its general nature, to allocate it to a class. To describe something as a “tree” is to overlook the millions of individual leaves, its height and location, the patterns in its bark, and so on.

It scarcely needs saying that the generalizing capacity of human consciousness is vastly extended, and its products stabilized so that they can be further built upon, by speech and writing. Language gives generality a realm of its own and relocates a world of items set out in physical space to a different kind of space that we may call “hermeneutic”, “semantic”, “discursive”, “rational” or “truth value” space. Its inhabitants are set out in a manner entirely different from the side-by-side of material objects. The boundless multi-dimensional trellis of articulated meaning does not fit into the physical world. Its elements do not map onto points in the space and time occupied b...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Also by Raymond Tallis and published by Agenda
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Overture
• 1 Seeing the sense-making animal
• 2 Logos: a brief backward glance
• 3 Deflating the mystery 1: putting the world inside the mind
• 4 Deflating the mystery 2: logos as bio-logos
• 5 The escape from subjectivity
• 6 Thatter: knowledge
• 7 Senselessness at the heart of sense
• 8 Towards a complete comprehension of the world?
• Coda
• Notes
• References