10. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

Intention Isn’t Independently Varifiable 

If psychology, which is reducible to biology on down to physics, properly describes subjective intention, it does so without reference to the purposes of teleology, which is ultimately because purpose isn’t observable. Purpose like the subjective intention from which it arises isn’t measurable because it isn’t material. Both purpose and the subjective intention are eliminated by the material reduction because they are seen as something like a primitive notion of spirit or soul. Neither are proper objects of scientific knowledge because they are not “objectively” real and are thus consider illusions easily eliminated by the material reduction.  

Intention in terms of behavior is clearly observable. It is just that for the materialist, observable behaviors are causally related to material concerns and so can be reduced to them. The illusion is that the intention is a freestanding, immaterial organ like a soul, so that what may appear as a desire for something beyond merely material concerns like for the transcendent meaning of the religious impulse, is an illusion because all intentions, however elaborated and removed from their original content, are for survival and reproduction. The subjective intention’s illusion of immateriality, sometimes called “spirit,” and its twin illusion of access to degrees of freedom amidst material determinations, has been wrought, like all material things, by the principle of natural selection acting on matter-energy according to natural laws. For the modern scientist this process is materially determined and therefore admits no immaterial spirit and no degrees of freedom. 

Another way to imagine how the material reduction eliminates these twin illusions of spirit and freedom is to consider its translation from what is noncountable into discreet bits of information. This is the translation of analog to digital that Henri Bergson objected to in the scientific reduction of being, or dureé, to the spatiotemporal slices of the so called “Block Universe” in his debate with Albert Einstein. Bergson’s basic argument can be summarized as what can be quantized and measured about experience isn’t like the aboutness of lived experience. The material reduction makes a Theory of Everything hypothetically possible because digitizable, but there are those, like Bergson, who think that not everything that counts is countable. However, if whatever there is, is quantizable, then all that is, is knowable in accordance with Information Theory. And even if there are still too many bits of information left after the material reduction, then full knowledge is still hypothetically possible because countable. If some of the claims about the capacities of artificial intelligence prove true, machines may someday know all there is to know about what is if what is, is countable. So, while human beings wouldn’t be able to directly know everything all at once, they could consult with AI’s complete knowledge of the universe on an as needed basis.  

The problem that has been noted about quantized bits of information by thinkers like Bergson is that the digitization of lived experience produces a notable disjunction between lived experience and the digital description of it, which might be thought of as the difference between countable and noncountable objects. What is countable is measurable, so it is objective in a positive sense. “Positive” in scientific “Positivism” means countable because the objectis independently verifiable, which in the sciences means measurable. The perfect coincidence between analog experience and digitization is sometimes demonstrated by a filmic example. The individual frames of film are spaciotemporal slices of digitized life. However, when run at high speeds, the individual frames appears as if continuous so that digital representations of life become indistinguishable from actual lived experience. From this perspectivemodern scientists view the “vitalism” of Bergson’s claim that analog being, and its digital representations are noncoincidental as primitive and religious. 

However, Bergson was quick to point out at the time that the filmic example falls apart on closer examination because life unlike a film can’t be played backwards, and modern Chaos Theory seems to bear this out. The most common example of the irreversibility of dureé, or lived time, is cracking open an egg because it is a properly “chaotic” event, which means that the equations that govern its process can’t be played backwards to get the egg back into its shell, or at least the amount of energy required to do so is entirely incongruent. Chaos is often misunderstood to be random, but chaotic systems are deterministic. What is significant for the present discussion is that chaotic systems reflect the second law of thermodynamics, or the ineluctable “arrow of time.” Digitized representations of life are reversible, but analog life itself isn’t because it requires vast amounts of energy to reverse what entropy has accomplished. The arrow of time would seem to support Bergon’s position that when being is quantized in scientific representation, it is noncoincidental with the unbreakable continuity of being as it is experienced.   

What is noncountable is negative in the sense that it can’t be measured, or it doesn’t register on any objective instruments of measurement, so that it can’t be independently verified. For example, red can be measured on a spectrometer according to wavelength and intensity, but the experience of red, sometimes called the “redness of red” cannot. Wavelength and intensity are quantifiable but the “redness of red,” or red’s “qualia” are not. Therefore, qualia are negative objects, which for science means they don’t exist. So, they are illusions, like Steven J Gould’s “spandrels,” produced by the positive objects of scientific positivism. Most neuroscientists go even further to say that not only are qualia illusions but that the consciousness that produces them is also an illusion, so that consciousness itself is a negative object, or a sort of immaterial hallucination produced by the material mechanisms of the brain.Consciousness “just is” measurable electrochemical activity in the brain. Whatever “qualia” emerges from this electrochemical activity can be reduced to their material causes in the brain, so they are not legitimate objects of scientific inquire in themselves. 

However, there are those thinkers, like Bergon, who think that noncountable objects are real objects, even if they are negative objects, and so no knowledge of the world would be complete without some account of them. If whatever there is, is Being with a capital “B,” then science cannot explain all of what is because Being includes noncountable or negative objects like qualia and consciousness, and even more foundational is the negative object of whatever it is that grounds being itself. The materialist reduction eliminates what it considers to be non-objects like the illusions of qualia, but even if these are illusions, they are still objects for the phenomenologist to study because they are phenomena that appear on the subjective screen called the “intention” in phenomenology. The redness of red cannot be measured, but it is ontologically real for the phenomenologist because it appears in first-person experience; therefore, a purely material science cannot account for all of what is because some of what is, is the immaterial appearance of a negative object. 

Ontology is the study of being, or the study of what is. Negative objects are sometimes called “immaterial,” so they are non-objects for scientific materialism whose proper object is matter-energy and the laws that govern it. For materialism matter-energy can be measured, and what can’t, isn’t ontologically real.  Neither the “redness” of red, nor the “thereness” of an appearance, nor the “isness” of is, are countable, and therefore they are nonsensical notionsto a material science. The thereness of an appearance that is the object of phenomenological study is consciousness itself. The way that this is put in phenomenology is that the intention as awareness is both the screen and projectionof aboutness. The material sciences can only study the positive objects of aboutness and not its negative objects, nor aboutness itself because consciousness itself is immaterial.  

And this is a big obstacle to complete knowledge because consciousness isn’t just some incidental side show, but the main attraction. It is both the projection and screen upon which the foundational observations of scientific empiricism appear. An intention isn’t countable, so the materialist sees it as an illusion of some material process, so it is an immaterial projection of some sort. However, what is it projected onto? Well, that must be an illusion as well because the screen for this hallucinatory projection isn’t material either. However, there are materialist who don’t consider these negative or immeasurable objects immaterial. The most well-known of these modern materialistpositions is known as “Panpsychism,” in which consciousness (the screen) and qualia (the projection) are noncountable aspects of matter-energy itself.  

GWF Hegel wasn’t a panpsychist, but he was onto something like it when he wrote his famously enigmatic phrase “substance is subject,” which means something like the subjective intention, or consciousness, is a material spirit rather than the immaterial spirit of traditional dualism. Hegel’s notion of spirit was that it was material, which is reflected in his quip that “Spirit is a bone,” about the phrenology of his time, which he opposed. This unification of matter and spirit is sometimes called “Monism,” and there are hundreds of varieties of it, but monism generally takes two basic forms: the first, is that spirit is an immaterial illusion that “emerges” from matter-energy in particular formations of it, sometimes corresponding to integrated complexity, and the second is that spirit, usually thought of as consciousness, is a noncountable, or negative, aspect of matter-energy.  

For the panpsychist monist consciousness is not restricted to human subjects or to anything like the intentional subjectivity of phenomenology because some extremely low level of awareness is intrinsic to even the most basic material configuration. Consciousness might be present even if it can’t be detected. Our only access to consciousness is our own first-person experience of it. That others like us have it must be inferred through a concept called “Theory of Mind.” It is possible to infer that other animal species have it because they have behaviors like us, but it must be inferred from likeness because it can’t be directly observed. It is possible that other non-human animals have only what philosopher Ned Block called “Access Consciousness,” which means responsiveness to an environment. It is conceivable that this is all anyone has because only behaviors can be observed. However, what is evident to most of us from our first-person perspective is what Block called “Phenomenal Consciousness,” which is comprised of the immeasurable qualia of experience that the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “what-its-like" of experience. The Panpsychist imagines that there is something that it’s like to be an atomic particle, but that that level of consciousness is totally unimaginable to those of us with enough integrated complexity to have a brain.  

There are some in the panpsychist camp that hold out hope for some mechanism by which to detect consciousness, which would be especially useful for those who cannot self-report. Others see a very basic reason as to why consciousness detection is in principle impossible, which is that consciousness itself is noncountable and therefore a negative object, which leads to the contradiction of a negative aspect of matter that is negative only in the sense that it can’t be detected from the third-person perspective, but which is nonetheless ontologically real from the first-person perspective. We detect all other negative forces by their countable effects on matter-energy. In fact, causality itself isn’t observable except for its effects, as David Hume famously pointed out, but material effects are measurable because they can be quantized. If qualia are the immeasurable effects of material causes, it is difficult to know how this translation between an analog quality and a digitized quantity occurred without information loss.  

Can Qualia Be Counted? 

It is common to point out that we quantify qualities all the time, like on a psychological evaluation when we give a number to the level of our depression or whatever. But again, this is self-reporting and not direct observation. And when we quantify our psychological state, we sense that the translation doesn’t really work because it loses much of what our experience is like. Many neuroscientists believe that they can measure experience because it seems to correspond to certain brain activities and regions. If those brain regions are lighted up in a certain pattern, then the subject is conscious and having an experience of a particular kind. Experience is quantifiable because the electro-chemicals are measurable. But this doesn’t get around the measurement problem because these correspondences are based on third-person measurements that must be interpretated in relation to first-person self-reports, which is why establishing casual relations between experience and its electrochemical mechanisms has proven entirely elusive.  

The materialist monist asserts that whatever there is, is comprised of matter-energy, so that experience is an illusion because it can be reduced to material causes. But there is a very small minority of materialist monists, the panpsychists, that hold that experience can’t be reduced to material causes because experience is an aspect of matter. The former believe that experience has no ontological status, so that it is an illusion. The latter believe that experience is ontological real because it is irreducible. If one holds that experience is real, then no theory of everything is complete without an account of it. But even if one holds that experience isn’t real, it would still seem to be something that would require some explanation for a complete theory of everything. How does matter make this apparition appear? 

In modern neuroscience the subjective intention of phenomenology is reduced to what John Vervaeke calls “relevance realization.” The aboutness of the intention is whatever is deemed relevant to it, which is like the phenomenological notion that one’s intention as aim produces one’s intention as awareness, so that one’s aim produces the aboutness of awareness. In other words, you are aware of what matters to you. In both phenomenology and neuroscience, our awareness is comprised of what is relevant to us according to our intention. For the neuroscientist our intention as aim is to reduce uncertainty, so our intention as awareness is about the reduction of uncertainty. If we are conscious, then we are conscious of something, which is the aboutness, or contents, of awareness.  

The contents of our consciousnesses appear in such a way as to increase the accuracy of our predictions. The appearance of what I’m aware of is related to my general aim, which is to make accurate predictions, so things don’tappear as they are but as they relate to my intention for them. The materialist reduction reduces our aims, and therefore, our awareness, or aboutness, to the mechanisms of prediction processing.  Relevance realization translates a negative, or noncountable, object, which is awareness itself, into a positive, measurable one, which is Claude Shannon’s quantizable amount of surprise so central to Information Theory.  

Relevance realization is predictive processing, it reduces whatever appears on the intentional screen to its quantifiable relevance in terms of accuracy versus surprise, which is prediction processing’s “uncertainty reduction.” So, neurobiological intention is not like phenomenological intention because the latter acknowledges noncountable aspects of experience, sometimes called “qualia” as “real” aboutness, but for the neuroscientist whatever cannot be digitized is an illusion reducible to the material mechanism that produced it. Prediction processes are about material causality because the material reduction reduces aboutness to material relevance.  

This loss of information between what is quantizable to what isn’t is sometimes thought of as the problem of “Correspondence.” For example, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory quantizes information in terms of the amount of surprise. Whatever qualities surprise may contain can be reduced to whatever is countable about it. But this is strictly a formal definition of information that isn’t able to account for the full aboutness of information. Those in thematerial reductionist camp believe that the quantities of information “just are” its qualities, so that whatever “aboutness” was lost in the material reduction wasn’t really about anything in the first place, which is why most folks in this camp consider consciousness a type of hallucination because much of what appears as aboutness in the subjective intention is a sort of illusion. 

But those who see actual information loss in the translation of quality into quantity believe that what is lost in the material reduction isn't an illusion, but irreducible, or perhaps “real,” aboutness that can’t be known by scientific methodologies, particularly those based on the positivistic principle of the independent verifiability of measurement. And it is this irreducible remainder that forms the undiminishable incompletion of complete knowing about what is.But for Many in this non-reductionist group of thinkers, it is not just that the material reduction is inadequate for complete knowledge because not all aboutness is countable or digitizable, but also because what appears as if countable about the universe isn’t complete, which is to say that the measurable universe is still in process. Many in the material reductionist camp accept that the universe is in process, but that this process is determined by material principles and laws that are theoretically knowable, which is the block universe that can’t be known all at once because of the limited perspective of any given observer but would be hypothetically knowable in full to an omniscient observer with an outside, objective view because the universe is already complete. However, those thinkers that are both process-oriented and non-determinist hold that the matter-energy that constitutes the universe, isn’t entirely determined by knowable laws and principles because there is no outside, objective perspective from which to view the universe, not even a “hypothetical” one because this would be a nonsensical “view-from-no-where,” which is why there seems to be so many probabilities that can’t be reduced to determinate causes at the most basic levels of matter-energy's “scientific” description, and why the indeterminacy of interposition continues to resist the determinations of the material reduction. 

If the universe can’t be fully known because we lack the capacity, then the universe is deterministic because it is complete. The future may appear as if it hasn’t happened yet from the perspective of the present moment, but that is a kind of illusion for the determinist and doesn’t indicate any actual lack within the universe itself. This is the view that Albert Einstein championed called the “Block Universe.” The block universe appears as if it contains actual degrees of freedom from which a selector, or “intention,” could make actual choices, but this is the hallucinated intention of an impotent subjectivity that imagines its influence, but which is a “necessary” delusion that somehow evolved according to the principle of natural selection. If the universe is a materially determined process of unfolding according to physical laws, then choice is a fantasy.  

However, if the universe is an open process that includes selectors or intentions that have not been entirely predetermined by physical necessity, then it accords with the “Process Philosophy” most associated with AN Whitehead and Henri Bergson, in which physical laws are more like habits and the universe’s unfolding is somewhat underdetermined. An indeterminate view of what is, can still be materialist, and often is, but the relation of matter-energy to physical laws isn’t completely determinate because some other vector of material influence appears within intentional aboutness. When a determinist talks about a “selector,” she is not using the term literally because adetermined selector is more like a principle than something that makes a choice. For example, “natural selection” is a principle and not a selector, so it is a metaphor referring to deterministic, causal relations. Because natural selection’s “choices” are determined by the necessities of survival and reproduction, for the material determinist it is hypothetically possible to map out the “complete” history of causal relations between a given species and its environment, which is the process called “niche construction,” without any reference to an intention, neither the conscious intention of a subjectivity, nor the intention of an aim or design. Niche construction is contingent because it isresponsive to both internal bodily and external environmental variables, but they are not intentional because this responsiveness is bound by the covariable necessity of casual relations. 

So, most modern evolutionary biologists hold that niche construction is contingent not because it is open, or incomplete, but because it is completed, or determined, by a relation between contingency and necessity in which contingency is determined by necessity, and therefore, not by a free intention. The variation necessary for natural selection to have its metaphorical “choices” are produced by chance, genetic mutations, so that niche construction isbound by the causal relation (contingent but necessary) between what is given by random variation and a given environment. Genetic variations are “selected” by physical necessity without a free intention and are therefore called “blind” selections. The entire history of organisms and their relations to their environments, or the descriptions of these relations called “adaptations,” could hypothetically be mapped out according to various networks of material causes, which would be both “necessary" and “sufficient” explanations of the physical history of what is, so that what is, is reducible to the mechanisms of material causality.  

Another way to think of this relation is of that between what has already been determined, or the past, to what will be determined, or the future. The future isn’t open because the present doesn’t contain any degrees of freedom, but rather the historical, material necessity of the past plus the variation given by the past’s failure to reproduce itself. If something new comes into being, it is because material necessity metaphorically “allowed” it. If a selector has the illusion of ingression something new into being from the ground of a free choice, then what is hidden by this fantasy is material necessity. If a deluded selector imagines that it chose something for its beauty rather than for its necessity, then the scientist can clear up this delusion with the material reduction, in which what appears as beautiful can be sufficiently accounted for by necessity. These are Evolutionary Biology’s accounts of beauty in which what appears as beautiful to a given selector is what is advantageous, so that beauty is natural selection’s lure to survival and reproduction.  

Bees may find the flowers from which they obtain honey to be beautiful in some sense, but it is doubtful that this sort of beauty contains within it the illusion of a free choice. Oddly the human experience of beauty almost seems to require this illusion to appear as beautiful. Whatever appears as necessary within the human intention, appears as homely because connected to the economics of use value and therefore opposed to the extravagance of beauty.Humans historically rejected the homeliness of the strictly useful when they first began to decorate the simple with the unnecessary and the extravagant, such that what now appears as homely may appear as plain, but this plainness is decorative, even if it fails to be attractive. “Homely” is a synonym for “unattractive,” but how did what is associated with the home become connected to what is unattractive? It has to do with our ambiguous relation to necessity, whichhas been traced in art history from the production of tools bound by use to art as an open expression of a free intention. The material reduction denies the freedom that the scientifically naive notion of art’s movement away from necessity asserts, so that the impulse to make the world beautiful, or at least unnecessarily interesting, is reducible to the survival instinct of a natural selector. What appears as artistic vision is “blind” necessity in the context of modern material determinism. 

However, for some thinkers the universe, or what there is, is not entirely reducible to the history of deterministic material relations because there is an apparent immaterial, in the sense of indeterminate, remainder or irreducible ambiguity beyond necessity about human intention and possibly about the intentions of other life form, and perhaps even about the intention of the material universe itself. If one holds that there is an intention that is not completelypredetermined by physical necessity, then there must be something that exists that can’t be account for by material causality because material causality is predetermined by physical necessity. For a material determinist “indeterminate matter” is a simple contradiction in terms because matter is defined by its physical, or necessary, aspect’s determinate relation with its contingent, or flowing aspect, unusually associated with the energy side of the matter – energy relation. There is no room for any other intention in this relation, so indeterminacy is the subjective illusion wrought by the limited perspective of a local intention.