Toomas Karmo: Part N: Philosophy of Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the  necessary points to reasonable length.


Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours. 

• 20170926T0359Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... . 
• 20170926T0234Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo polished and expanded his point-form outline. He was now ready to start converting it into coherent full-sentences prose. He was not sure how much he would finish by bedtime (20170926T0330Z or so), and how much he would be able to finish only in the upcoming morning (by 20170926T1600Z or so).
• 20170926T0002Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a moderately polished point-form outline. He hoped over the coming four hours to finish converting this into coherent full-sentences prose.

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]
 


At the end of "Part M" (from 2017-09-04 or 2017-09-05), I quoted a short passage from USA-based cultural critic John Michael Greer. Most of that passage, short though it was, I intended as a mere lead-in to a few crucial words, at the very end: "You don't experience the will." I asked as homework whether Mr Greer was right or wrong. 

I now answer that he was right.

Here we have a point at which the so-extensive parallels between Perception and Action, explored in "Part M" early this month, break down. Even if, contrary to fact, I were to exercise the kind of agency over my greening that I in fact exercise in waving a hand, the greening would not constitute an "observed, experienced, act of will". (In this counterfactual supposition, I find myself greening "just like that", even as in the actual world I find myself waving a Homo sapiens hand, or again flexing certain Homo sapiens biceps, or again firing certain Homo sapiens motor neurons, "just like that".) It would be, rather, a thing-done. The notion of "acts of will" is a philosophical chimaera, rightly dismissed by Mr Greer and Schopenhauer. It is a chimaera akin to the notion, which I have been dismissing in previous weeks even to the point of ridicule, of Vorstellungen (willing though Mr Greer and his predecessor Schopenhauer - and the long Descartes-Locke-Berkeley-Hume-Kant parade preceding Schopenhauer - have been to accept Vorstellungen).

This correct Schopenhauer-Greer point, that the will is not experienced, might be further underscored through a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Suppose per absurdum that there is not only such a thing as "my greening" but also such a thing as "my willing". Then just as "my greening" can be either passive or active - it is passive in the actual world, and active in the counterfactual world just sketched - so also can "my willing" be. My willing could merely happen to me, as in the actual world my greening, and again in the actual world my hurting and my thirsting, merely happen to me. Alternatively, my willing could be something that I do, as my greening is something I do in the just-sketched counterfactual situation. If there really are "acts of will" accompanying our doings, then under the latter alternative there would have to be an act-of-will to perform an act of will. We could once again ask in the case of this higher-order act-of-will, "Is it something happening to me, or something I do?" If a logically absurd regress, with an act-of-will to perform an act-of-will to perform an act-of-will, and an act-of-will to perform an act-of-will to perform an act-of-will to perform an act-of-will, and so on infinitely, is to be avoided, then there must eventually be a doing which is not experienced.

****

I should now make clear what I am and am not claiming regarding action. In my discussion of perception, I have affirmed the commonsense view that there really are visual cortices, optic nerves, retinas, corneas, sunlit lawns, and the like. Taking that commonsense view as a given, and combining it with my (assumed, unargued) philosophical realism regarding causation, I have outlined an inventory of the various things we perceive. I have offered no proof that visual cortices, optic nerves, retinas, corneas, and sunlit lawns do indeed exist. Rather, I would say that the supposition that some or all of these things fail to exist is like the supposition of a Two-Seconds-Old Universe, or of Merely Intermittent Parlour Furniture, or again of Perpetually Concealed Elves at the Foot of the Garden - being, although (a) logically coherent, nevertheless (b) in some sense, which I do not yet know how to articulate, irrational. 

The position for action is in all relevant respects parallel. A commonsense view of action is the following. I affirm it even as I affirm (to give still further examples of common sense) the earth to be nearly spherical; or NASA to have achieved a Moon landing in July of 1969 (admittedly, as some odd people affirm a Flat Earth, others affirm a NASA fraud):

1. I exercise agency over various things, for instance over the hands, and on occasion on artefacts remotely controlled by the hands (as when one is driving a drill bit into wood in operating an electric drill, with a hand on its grip and trigger); and at the other, inward, end of the chain over the muscles and motor-cortex neurons of one particular Homo sapiens animal. (This animal, conventionally addressed as "Toomas Karmo", is in my commonsense view a straightforward public object, not relevantly different - except for certain subtleties to be examined in an upcoming "Subjectivity" part of this long essay - from the other thousands of millions of human animals currently living.) Some of the things over which I exercise agency (notably one particular pair of human hands) would be evident even to a thinker at the Sumerian level of sophistication. Other such things, involving muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones, might require for their proper appreciation the knowledge and skill of, at minimum, a Renaissance anatomist. The electrochemical things which I do with those public objects that are the Toomas Karmo motor neurons, awkwardly buried inside that public object which is the Toomas Karmo cranium, prove still more recondite, being perhaps even now not fully mapped by neurophysiology. 
2. There are other things in the cosmos over which I exercise no agency. Consider, for example, the grass blades in a sunlit lawn a couple of metres in front of those public objects which are my corneas. As a breeze strikes the grass, the blades wave. Much though I may fantasize to myself that I am "waving the grass", even as I might be "waving the Toomas Karmo arms", my fantasy is false. (Perhaps in the first few days or months of my existence outside my mother's womb, I was unclear regarding this particular limitation on my agency, and did somehow think of myself as "waving the grass". Now, however, I have learned otherwise. The particular steps in my learning are, it must be conceded, recondite, falling within the specialized domain of developmental psychology.)

As the entire cosmos could have sprung into existence a mere two seconds ago, with all its historical records and animal-brain memory traces intact, so also my beliefs - even at their most simple, at their mere Sumerian-thinker, level - regarding the boundaries of my agency could, as a matter of coherent logical possibility, be false:

1. I could be deluded in drawing the boundaries of my agency as widely as I do. Perhaps I am in the unhappy position of the self-aware leaves being blown about in the wind, in the Gedankenexperiment of some Austrian philosopher or engineer or something, active in 1920s-through-1940s Oxford or Cambridge or something, bearing some such name as "Finkelstein". In "Finkelstein's" thought-experiment, a dry autumn leaf which is being blown about by gusts of wind says to itself, "Now I choose to fly over to THIS corner of the yard," and then "I choose next do something different, flying instead to THAT corner of the yard." "Finkelstein's" leaf, although happy enough, is bereft of the agency it supposes itself to enjoy. 
2. I could be deluded in drawing the boundaries of my agency as narrowly as I do. We have all been in the embarrassing position of doing things absent-mindedly - perhaps coming a bit too late, for instance, to some realization like the following: Oh drat, oy vey zmir, oy veh gewalt. Engrossed as I just was in the film here in the bowels of this Canadian Cineplex Odeon, I did not realize what it was that I was doing. The discarded candy bags by my feet were moving back and forth as the action on the screen hotted up, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, in their respective roles of Holmes and Watson, so resourcefully uncoupling that so-evocative Victorian railway carriage. I guess I carelessly thought some breeze was shuffling the litter back and forth on the floor before me, in the manner of Finkelstein's leaves. I now see that it was, alas, I, absent-mindedly shuffling that litter in shuffling the all-too-public feet of the Toomas Karmo animal.  

  

Who knows, for sure, how far absent-mindedness can reach? Perhaps some day some alarming discovery or reappraisal will give me reason to fear that I have been absentmindedly moving clouds across the sky, or still more radically have been absentmindedly "cloud-ing". ("I cloud, thou cloudest, he/she/it cloudeth" - as singing is the act of sustaining a song, so clouding is the act of keeping a mass of cloud in sustained existence.)

This could be taken to a logical extreme. Perhaps some alarming reappraisal will some day give me reason to fear that I have been absentmindedly not just cloud-ing, bu actually Cosmos-ing: the entire cosmos, including the Toomas Karmo animal which is among its publicly viewable objects, might prove to have been a production of mine, even as a bit of public singing (if is, alas, easy to sing absent-mindedly) might be. - There are, to be sure, delicate logical problems in this logical extreme, including a problem touching on the problem of Other Minds. I shall have to defer the problems to a later installment, once not "Perception" and "Action" alone, but also "Subjectivity", are correctly on the table.

****

The just-mentioned problem at the logical extreme aside, the alert reader will perhaps have anticipated a homework I set tonight herewith, as a topic in "Action" building on my previous "Perception" installments. I have remarked on the logical possibility that in intonimg some cunningly shamanic verse, say "Minu-isa-oli-pottsepp-ja-kandis-valge-hobusega-LIIIIIIva," in suitably scary proto-Fenno-Ugric accents, the Gentle Reader might find herself or himself able to make grass momentarily take on, for her or him, the colour appearance of tomoto ketchup, and tomato ketchup the colour appearance of grass. (This was a logical possibility which I used in dismissing the idea that our minds are a private theatre of Vorstellungen, matching or mismatching the physical world as the television screen in a private home might in its glowing pixels match or mismatch the colours, shapes, and up-down orientations of objects within the broadcasting studio. If by intoning you make grass and ketchup look like ketchup and grass, or the wooden R look like the wooden Cyrilic Ya (letter я) and the Ya look like the wooden R, there is, I was suggesting, no answer to the question which pair of supposed private "sense data" or "Representations" or Vorstellungen "correctly colour-matches" or "correctly shape-matches" grass, ketchup, R, and Ya.)

Tonight I note, further, that there is a logically coherent scenario in which the Gentle Reader finds herself or himself able to change the appearance of grass and ketchup, or again R and Ya, "just like that" (this time, say I, not through an incantation), even as in the actual world she or he can wave a human hand, and also fire motor-cortex neurons, "just like that". (Normal humans pull off the just-mentioned feats in the actual world without any levitation incantation - without, that is, any clumsy recourse to "Minu-isa-oli-pottsepp...", or even to that traditional levitating-guru monosyllable, "Om".) 

Here is the homework: In what conceptually illuminating ways might the scenario of voluntary colour-shifting (shape-shifting, or again up-down orientation-shifting) be spelled out; and what conceptual morals should be drawn, once the spelling-out is complete? 

I do not know quite how soon I will be able to give my suggested solution to tonight's homework. It will be necessary, in "Part O", either to tie up a few more loose ends on Action or to start the tricky topic of "Subjectivity". In all this anticipation of upcoming work, everyone will find it helpful to keep in view my rough work plan, as given in the three rough "philosophical fragments" back in Part B, from 2017-05-22 or 2017-05-23. Only in the context of the upcoming "Subjectivity" discussion, and indeed perhaps only toward the end of that discussion, will it be appropriate to suggest a solution. (So the solution, should I be granted life and strength, will end up being given perhaps not even in "Part O", but - for all I now know - in some "Part P", or some "Part Q", or some such.) As I am kinda-sorta blocking it out in my mind, "Subjectivity" will have first to be developed in part with reference to my 2017-05-22/2017-05-23 outline, and then in part with reference to the tricky "Private Language Argument", or "beetle-in-a-box argument", associated on university campuses in Departments of Philosophy with 1920s-through-1940s "Finkelstein".

In finishing for tonight, I have on the one hand to boast, and on the other hand abjectly to confess, (a) that my upcoming treatment of the "Private Language Argument" is the subtlest, most careful, thing anticipated for this multi-installment essay, giving it even some conceivable tint of academic respectability (could I, or someone else, carve it out into a short free-standing paper, and submit it to some professional philosophy journal, in an attempt to achieve publication?); and (b) that I was rather surprised to find myself devising it this summer - devising it some weeks, alas,  after I wrote my too-short philosophical-fragment outline of 2017-05-22 or 2017-05-23.

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]