Us from Computers (part 4) If a tree falls

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     Functionalism seems socially beneficial and relatively simple, while still being informative, and complying with expectations we derive from our understanding of the world around us.  It seems to be a good theory, which is why it is still one of the main competing theories of the Mind, even though intuitively it makes some people nervous to think of themselves as Hobbes did, biological calculators.  Not in the sense that we do math all day (4:29 and this one), but that when you press our buttons (provide a stimulus, or as Hobbes would put it introduce an object that causes fancy), you get an answer (motivation or reaction).  So, one (hunger) plus two (the smell of food) equals three (a salivating mouth). 

     What seems like commonsense today did not during the 1600’s when Hobbes did his work.  As he described it, most schools of philosophy were stuck on the concept that everything that you see sends out an aspect of itself and the act of your eyes stanching up that aspect is seeing.  It wasn’t that light was striking the object and reflecting off in a way that could be detected by our eyes.  It was more like if you close the refrigerator, there is no light inside because no one is there to see it.

     To a modern thinker, it is even a bit stranger than that.  If you understand something, they didn’t think that it was some process in your head that caused you to understand; it was that the object of the thing you understand was projecting intelligence about itself into your head.  The act of knowing was really your mind grabbing up that intelligence.  What you think you know is just objects projecting knowledge into your mind.  Be like Socrates, wear a tinfoil hat and know nothing (clearly, that is a joke, Socrates was too poor to own tin).

     If all that seems like nonsense now, it is either that Aristotle’s words aren’t projecting strongly enough, or that things do exist independent of observation.  If you ever wondered where the question, “if a tree falls in the forest, would there be any sound?” came from, well, it was from a contemporary philosopher of Hobbes, George Berkeley.  The question kept showing up in publications well into the 20^th century, and for more than 200 years the oddly popular answer is “no, sound is the act of hearing,” even in Scientific American. People still debate this today.  

     So, what does that question do in philosophy?  It shows us that even in common language there was a time, not long ago, where a good number of people did not think in the mechanical terms that we tend to today.  A paradigm shift has changed a great number of opinions about how the cosmos works.  And yet the idea that sound requires hearing is still technically, by the rules of English, the correct answer because sound, being the object of the question is a noun, and the noun definition does not include the wider verb definition that would clear this up. 

     If a physicist were to reformulate the question, instead of asking if the tree makes a sound, the questioner might ask if the tree generated sound waves.  Sound waves are not dependant on observation, but are just compression waves in a medium.  Or perhaps they should ask, who dropped the basswood? 

     What difference does that make philosophically?  It shows that Hobbes, and the Empiricists that followed him, like John Locke, were so successful in changing the thought processes of a greater portion of the society that now intuition about the tree making a sound runs in the opposite direction than the act of hearing making noises into sound (a process I call backmasking intuition).  Empiricism is another philosophy that takes us into a different realm, that of Epistemology, the study of Knowledge.  

     Sounds redundant.  The telos of study is to gain knowledge, right?  Well, in my personal experience, a strong supermajority of people only study in the colligate tradition of all-night cram sessions to pass tests.  Well, in the field of Epistemology, the philosopher is questioning the nature of knowledge itself, how we gain it and how far can we “know” any particular topic.

     Empiricists, falling under Epistemology, make the claim that the only way we can gain knowledge is from what our senses tell us about the evidence we see.  If Philosophy was television, Epistemology would be crime shows.  Empiricism would be CSI.  

     Everything in Philosophy and Science is connected at some level.  Try to imagine if modern scientists still thought that Aristotle’s idea of objects projecting intelligence into the mind of the observer.  What a chaos of misinformation that would cause, oh wait, we don’t have to imagine that at all, just crack open a history book.

     The study of knowledge shifted away from revelation and intuition based science to an actual scientific method that required questions, theories, observations, experiments and the willingness to dump old biases and reject previous theories in favor of where the evidence led us.  By the early 1900’s the scientific community was rocketing forward like never before.  No area of scientific inquiry was sacred, not one area was spared the critical eye of inquiry that Empiricists helped created, not even the study of the mind.



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