An Attitude towards a Soul – The Absurdity of Metaphysical Reductionism

 

            Although on the surface of grammar it seems possible to assert we live in a Matrix, and of course we cannot know that we do not, it is not ultimately (humanly) intelligible.  In a passage that goes to the core of this issue, Wittgenstein wrote:

 

'I believe that he is suffering.'  – Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?  It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections.  (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am I certain that he is not an automaton?  Nonsense!). . . .  'I believe that he is not an automaton', just like that, so far makes no sense.  My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

 

The implication of this passage is radical: not only, as a matter of fact, is the question “Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?” absurd in the sense that it uses a particular language in nonsensical ways; the implication is that it must be absurd in any possible human language, just as impossible for us to imagine as a round square. If I have understood the passage correctly, Wittgenstein's thoughts show that the idea that our conscious life is a shadow of the really REAL conceived as physical events that can be investigated by science is as unintelligible as a round square.

            Of course, if our inner life is nothing but a shadow of physical processes obeying physical laws, then we must imagine ourselves to be automata.  If someone's grief over the loss or a loved one or remorse over a wrong done to some loved one are nothing but insubstantial shadows cast by (what source of light?) the Real physical events taking place in those people's brains and bodies, then what else could they be?  The conscious experience of grief or remorse would then be like a computer screen where what appears is a function of the programming, which itself is determined by physical laws.  The shadow “remorse” (with all the language of remorse: “Oh my God, what have I done”) seduces us into thinking thoughts like “The person who was wronged was unique,” “I could have acted otherwise,” “I can make and keep promises,” and the like – shadows so dark they prevent us from seeing the reality that we are nothing more than automata carrying our physical programs, more complex than the orbit of the planets, perhaps, but just as mechanical.

            People's behavior (at least in science fiction – the Body Snatchers! and perhaps some bureaucrats!) could conceivably make one wonder whether they are automata. Given certain contexts it might indeed make sense to ask the question of a particular person.  But just so? Wittgenstein's point is that robot-like behavior could count as evidence of being an automaton only against the background that no one could seriously doubt that you have real thoughts and feelings.  And if one can't seriously doubt this, then one can't intelligibly entertain the notion our inner lives are nothing but physiological states. This “primitive” response to others as sentient (“attitude towards a soul”) is not an assumption, conjecture, hypothesis, or bit of knowledge concerning the reality of thoughts and feelings; assumptions, conjectures, hypotheses, and knowledge invite questions about whether they are justified. That you are a sentient being is not something we can seriously doubt because sentience happens prior to all thinking and asking questions:  thus it is not something we can sanely question or “have an opinion about.”  It is, in fact, the precondition (like being alive) of doubting, asking questions, and having opinions in the first place.  Grammatically you can ask whether I have an opinion on the question of whether the rest of the people in the class are automata; logically, the question is meaningless.

            The notion that our inner life is a shadow is so obviously flawed, I am tempted to coin the new name for this (actually quite ancient) logical fallacy in its honor – the Matrix fallacy.  This occurs whenever one wants to abandon the difficult job of critically and honestly reflecting on experience, and tries to underwrite one's own particular attitude with – and merely deduce it from – a hypothesis concerning ultimate Reality. All metaphysically reductive hypotheses are like this: Love is nothing but . . . physical events, conditioned behavior, the play of signifiers, discourse masking the will-to-power, a bourgeois ideology, subconscious libidinal forces, and so on – the list of the candidates for the really Real is (embarrassingly) quite long.   One could define the Matrix fallacy so:  one starts off by wanting to account for something meaningful and ends up explaining away the reality of what one began by wanting to account for.  One saws off the very branch one is sitting on.

The Fly in the Bottle – On the Absurdity of the Attempted Escape from Language and Experience in Thought 

            The desire to leap to a reality outside of language and experience is the attempt to see the world as if from no place within it – as we perhaps imagine God sees it, infallibly. Wittgenstein compared it to the attempt of the fly to get out of the bottle. But what comes clear from my argument is that the whole idea of getting out of the bottle seems unintelligible, since without the bottle of language and experience there would be no intellectual space at all.  To illustrate this we can examine one particular attempt to make the leap: call it the Matrix argument, the notion that the complex of our language and lived experience is the shadow of what is ultimately Real – the physical processes of the sort investigated by natural science.  For example, Romeo's love for Juliet is claimed to be really only the shadow of certain scientifically describable physical events in Romeo's body.  But the leap turns out not so much to be false as a leap into empty space.

            Of course, we are liable to error about love.  Romeo was sure he loved Rosalind, but later realized that it was not so much love but youthful infatuation.  He really loved Juliet.  And who knows, without the drama of circumstances he may have come to realize that, too, was a fairly superficial matter.  But that is not the Matrix argument's problem; that is a problem of language-and-experience which per hypothesis is to count as Unreal, as a shadow of the Real.  The Matrix argument claims a priori that experience is always and necessarily a shadow of ultimate Reality, which consists of physical events: a mathematician constructing a complex proof, a composer at work on a sonata, the astrophysicist trying to figure out the riddle of dark matter, the experience of beauty, grief or despair – these are to count as only the shadows of the real biochemical events.  

            But to know whether our language-mediated experiences of love, beauty, or constructing a mathematical proof are only shadows, one would have to have a clear and distinct experience of certain knowledge into the truth: we can't know x is a shadow unless we know the reality (X) that x is a shadow of.  Clearly, we only know that our particular experience of the sun rising is distorted only by finding a way to look at it truly, from a more comprehensive perspective.  But to conjecture that all experience is always a shadow – to know our conscious experience of life in the world is like the Matrix – we would need not a more comprehensive perspective within experience, but a perspective outside of experience itself as we know it, a view of the inner life “as if from nowhere in it.”  Yet we can only step outside of one experience into another. 

            To illustrate the point: Assume Romeo is a budding scientist. Romeo as a scientist must step outside of his experience of love as Romeo the lover of Juliet, and can map the brain-body states which seem to correspond to his being in love.  He concludes that brain state x correlates to his love for Juliet – and then believes that his love is just brain state x. (Would he still love Juliet?)  But the thinking about and mapping of  his bodily states are also ways of experiencing, just as is testing to see whether the sun rises – science is also experience, a human practice with its own concepts.  So now “Tybalt” – another scientist – comes along and maps the brain states of Romeo in the act of doing science, and concludes that his new belief about his love for Juliet being nothing but brain state x itself is only brain state y.  And then another scientist appears and maps Tybalt's brain state z, and so on, ad infinitum.  As C. S. Lewis commented on this infinite regress: “Where is the rot to end?”          

            In fact, in the Matrix argument we have come upon a hypothesis that we cannot actually seriously imagine.   Of course, this argument doesn't “prove” that our inner lives our real any more than the Matrix argument proves they are unreal.  It does prove that this way of thinking leads to a dead end – or, to return to the original metaphor, to an empty universe in which the concept of space itself signifies nothing.