Substance, Material, and the Enduring Self

One of the most important ideas in A.N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World is the recognition of the limitations of scientific materialism. Critics have often held that materialism is self-defeating since it struggles to account for non-materialist events such as thoughts, ideas, consciousness and the self. However, what Whitehead offers is a different critique, mainly that what appears to be solid, material stuff is merely the enduring pattern of events. In this way Whitehead gives a more satisfactory explanation for ideas and, more importantly, the self. The challenge for the scientific materialist is considerable when it comes to providing an explanation for beliefs, ideas and subjective experiences. Alvin Plantinga makes this point in his Against Materialism, asking just what, exactly, a belief is for a materialist (here). For most materialists, all that exist are physical, material processes and interactions. On that view, a belief would have to be something material. In other words, there would have to be a spot in the brain, perhaps, wherein one finds the belief that, say, p is true. Whitehead’s claim is not entirely different, but deals with the very fundamental question at the heart of the distinction between science and philosophy.

The questions which science and philosophy seek to answer are often the same, but the very nature of the two approaches limits and directs the way in which the questions are answered. Whitehead explains that one’s answer to the subject-object distinction is central to one’s ability to account for ultimate reality (Whitehead, 145-148). In this way Descartes’ rationalism proved untenable since it reduced all material things (objects) to essentially mental constructs of the subject. The problem for philosophers of this persuasion was explaining the uniformity of mental constructs once they had undermined the reality of the objects. The empiricists, of course, upheld the reality of the object by means of the experience with those objects by individuals. This epistemological debate is well-known, but Whitehead’s point is that neither side can adequately ground their position since rationalism ignores the regularity of experience and empiricism undermines reason and rationality.

Part of the reason that the debate no longer runs on the quite the same lines is because of the merging of science and philosophy. One of the most troubling questions for both camps was the recognition of the self. How a purely mechanical being could experience self-awareness or how a purely rational mind could believe in the questionable existence of a body and a self situated in the world needed answering. Whitehead’s explanation of the body can be understood at least partially as the detection of the chemistry and biology working together to express a totality and report to the being as a single being (Whitehead, 148). The body, he says, is not the mere collection of its parts, it is an entity all its own. It is also not separate from the universe of events which Whitehead elaborates upon elsewhere. Crucially, the body is able to reference itself in relation to the world because “it knows the world as a system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself mirrored in other things” (Whitehead, 148-149).

Whitehead clarifies further that there is a distinction to be made between what he calls bodily patterns and bodily events (Whitehead, 149). The event is simply that which is expressed or uniquely existing, but is a part of the pattern which endures. This is essentially his explanation for a person’s being able to understand the self and for the self to endure from one moment to another, which is a requisite for meaningful experience. In other words, on the materialist view, bodies are made of material, and that material is unthinking and does not endure. However, experience tells us that we comprehend our bodies and maintain our notion of self, even as it relates to different space-time scenarios.

In Plantinga’s paper, he deals with the idea of having specific body parts, or organs, or cells replaced, while experiencing the enduring self no less. A prosthetic leg, or a even a new heart, it seems, does not change who a person is, or how the person endures. It is logically possible, then, that every cell could be replaced in a sufficiently fast manner so as to not lose functionality, and yet the self should endure. On Whitehead’s account, this is no surprise. Fundamental particles are events, which adapt as they become parts of patters, so that an electron may behave one way in one scenario, and another in a different scenario. That is, at the particle level, there is not a sense of specificity until the particles or events are attached or joined to a pattern, where they then enter into the pattern and become part of the enduring pattern, even as they are an event unto themselves.

What Whitehead is able to do is show the inadequacy of the materialist view from a position of process, where Plantinga and others have done so from a position of immaterialism. The disagreements therein are beyond the scope of discussion here, but it is important to see where Whitehead’s ideas fit into the notion of ideas, the mind and the enduring self. Although Whitehead does not here elaborate on the implications for consciousness, subjective mental states, qualia or the soul, one can employ the process ideas in filling the explanatory gaps left by a materialist position which leads to both the untenable rationalism and naive empiricism of modern philosophy and science. The interaction between parts and whole, events and patterns is, even if found wanting in other areas of analogy, particularly apt in addressing the problems of material, substance and the enduring self.

On the possiblity of an actual infinite

[S]ome have argued that it may be impossible to count to infinity, but it is possible to count down from infinity. But this objection seems patently absurd. For one thing, the number of members in both series is the same. Why would one be easier to cross than the other? Second, assume that someone had been counting toward zero from negative infinity from eternity past. If a person goes back in time form the present moment, he will never reach a point when he is finishing his count or even engaging in the count itself. This is because at every point, he will have already had an infinity to conduct the count.

J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, p. 31

Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Epistemology

One often finds epistemological questions that can be best answered with common sense. In other words, it seems common sense to most people that it is sight which tells us that, say, the sun is shining, that it is day rather than night, that we are inside instead of out, and so on. In Death by Black Hole, Neil DeGrasse Tyson generally acknowledges such experience as giving us a type of knowledge about the world. But for him, it is not just our senses which give us most of our knowledge, but our senses in conjunction with advanced scientific hardware and mathematics that tells us what the world is really like.

Seen this way, Tyson’s epistemology is essentially classical empiricism updated to acknowledge those mechanisms which expand our senses and clarify what our senses see vaguely (or not at all). One thinks of bacteria, sound waves, the light spectrum, and so on. However, even without denying that microscopes and telescopes give us knowledge about the world around us not accessible by our senses, one might wonder if Tyson has left something vital out of the equation. That is, the epistemological statement that knowledge is gained only by the senses is self-defeating, since that very claim to truth is not known by the senses. Tyson fails to mention the role of reason in answering how we know what we know, but his admission that we use mathematics presupposes reason, given the nature of mathematics. Historically those who believe mathematics gives us truth about the world have been divided, and this is where Tyson’s epistemology stands or falls. A look at the nature of mathematics and reason will help clarify Tyson’s epistemological claims.

Attacks against the empiricist position have traditionally turned on the claim that our senses are misleading and do not give us an accurate representation of what the world is really like. Examples such as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Descartes ball of wax illuminate this position. The claim is that our senses tell us something about the world, but that they are mistaken quite often. We can think of Berkeley’s example of a person who sticks a warm hand and a cold hand into the same tub of water. The person will judge the temperature of the water in two different ways, but surely the water is not actually two different temperatures. Likewise, Tyson explains that the history of science is full of examples of reality being quite different than our observation of it. Our errors about the size, shape and rotation of Earth, its place in the universe, and the movement of stars and other celestial bodies have all been based on empirical observations (for example Tyson, chapter 3).

This is the reason Tyson has amended his epistemology to include “the direct application of sense-transcendent mathematics and hardware” (Tyson, 29). The hardware, then, is what tells us the chemical makeup of substances, the empirically verifiable nature of the universe and so on. The really interesting part of his claim is the part about “sense-transcendent mathematics.” How do we know mathematics gives us truth about the world? The answer is far from obvious, and is of course hotly debated by philosophers and mathematicians. But for an empiricist such as David Hume, mathematics gives us truth, but that truth is vacuous. It is only true by definition because we make up the rules. For him, there was no transcendent or abstract realm where mathematical truths existed, and therefore math gave us no real truth about the world.

While Tyson does not directly address the ontology of numbers and mathematical concepts, his work as an astrophysicist is a testimony to the usefulness of mathematics, and he does, in fact, include them in his epistemology. Without entering into the highly technical discussion of the philosophy of mathematics, it is sufficient to note that if one holds that mathematics gives us truth about the universe, what is really being affirmed is the usefulness and applicability of human reason. For example, if one understands the concepts of “2”, “4”, “addition”, and “equals”, the sum of 2 and 2 being 4 is unavoidable. Likewise, our ability to understand mathematical concepts from geometry, like the sum of the interior angles always being 180 degrees is not discovered by measuring every triangle in existence, but only by our use of reason. In this way, our knowledge of triangles is not from our senses, but from our reason.

For one to use mathematics on the level of an astrophysicist one must have a certain level of faith in the reliability of numbers. The launch of a space-shuttle is planned using mathematics that are known here on the earth and elsewhere in the universe. Physical constants such as gravity and the speed of light, as well as the laws of conservation can all be expressed mathematically, but what this shows is that, regardless of the ontological status of mathematical concepts, we use our reason to understand mathematics. That is just the type of thing mathematics is. And this is ultimately what Tyson has failed to include in his claim about how we know what we know.

The presupposition of human reason is made, but the implicitness of the claim is rather suspicious. To include “sense-transcendent mathematics” without including reason would be like including the sense-expanding hardware without including the senses. Indeed, microscopes work, but they are only useful to one with good vision. Likewise, mathematics work, but only to one with the ability to use reason. So what is the problem with the explicit omission of reason if it is understood?

When one accepts human reason as an avenue for knowledge, as one must to allow for our understanding of mathematics, one must also allow for truths known a priori. In other words, there are things we can know without the need of experience at all. They are know prior to our experiences. We can make claims about triangles we have never seen. We can know things about parts of the universe we have never visited. These are truths known a priori. Even if a claim arises from some previous experience, it can be known without a specific experience. For example, what we know about one star might arise from what we know about other stars, but it need not be from our experience of that specific star. In this way, the definition of knowledge changes from simply those things we know from science and mathematics to something like justified true belief. In other words, the claim that we can only know things available to our senses with the help of hardware and mathematics remains self-defeating because the claim itself cannot be verified by its own standards of senses, hardware or mathematics.

We can supply numerous other examples of truth claims for which we do not have empirical data, but which are nonetheless reasonable to hold. It is important for any epistemology to admit that there are things we can know that are outside of what Tyson has given us. The important distinction might be that, for things we know scientifically we may have more rigid standards. Because science is a methodology, such methodological constraints may be necessary, but even the acceptance of mathematics betrays the need for reason and truth known a priori. Tyson is not always clear about what we can know, strictly speaking, since he says that “after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion” (Tyson, 37). Of course Tyson believes we can and do have truth; it is likely that he is being clear to hedge his bets in light of the great number of claims that have been shown to be false throughout the history of science. But nevertheless, human reason and its use in our apprehension of truth in the universe cannot logically or consistently be denied, as Tyson himself implicitly affirms, omissions notwithstanding.