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Limits, Perspectives, and Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2009

John Shand
John Shand
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

Imagine a universe without human beings. Now imagine a universe devoid of any creatures like human beings, beings who could think about the universe and in so doing consider it as divided up into different kinds of things that could be objects of understanding. Now imagine – this is harder – your not being there, or anyone else, to imagine such a universe. Next think about setting about describing in physical laws such a universe in line with a completist physicalist program: that all the facts about the world are physical facts. But where would one begin? Why would one begin? Remember there is no-one around to take more interest in any part of the universe than any other. This contrasts with what we do now. What we do now is take chunks of the universe – stars, planets, water, trees, air, particles – and demarcate the physical laws in such a way as to explain how these objects behave against a background of other objects and ultimately the universe as a whole. But what if we were not around? Why would we there be any reason to demarcate groups of physical laws in this or any other way? My suggestion is that there would be none. The grouping of the physical laws to form complex classes and layers of explanations (how trees and water are related; how planets move as part of a solar system) is parasitic upon creatures having particular interests giving them a perspective (‘perspective’ is being used here in a somewhat technical sense) upon the universe or world, which in turn derives from the kind of limited creatures they happen to be. But the perspective itself is not a physical fact about the universe. Rather it is a way of coming to form a system of facts about the universe. Further, not only might the perspective have been otherwise, there might be none at all. In which case the demarcation of physical laws, given meaning by their application to entities picked out as having a certain significance to us, would not get off the ground. At best there might be a random bunching of laws covering regions of the universe. But such random bunchings would have no meaning; they would be unintelligible; they wouldn't really be about anything. For laws to be about things you have to have limited creatures who differentiate between parts of the universe, and for whom different parts have a variable significance and value. Things stand out for them; they literally exist. Without such creatures, things we take for granted would, in the literal sense, not exist. It is the very limitedness of our perspective and capabilities, such that things are problems for us, and wherefore we literally or metaphorically bump into things, that brings objects into existence for us. Otherwise the universe would be utterly ‘flat’ and undifferentiated. A limitation of perspective is required for there to be objects of thought, and thus for thought itself. Thus, the intelligibility of the laws of physics is logically parasitic upon our having varying interests in different segments of the universe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 429 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

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References

1 The literal sense deriving from the Latin exsistere to stand out.

2 This, it seems to me, may be obliquely connected to Hume's famous phrase that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” Treatise II.3.3 415. For it applies not only to ethics, but to our thinking about the world in general: some things need to in fact matter to us more than others. So we might make Hume's dictum stronger: ‘Reason is, and has to be, the slave of the passions.’ Reason alone would never give a motivation to start thinking about anything at all, nor in fact stop thinking and build limits to that thinking. This in turn is connected to the so-called ‘frame problem’ in artificial intelligence. See de Sousa, Robert, The Rationality of Emotions (Cambridge MA and London: The MIT Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Why Think? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). There are of course also deep connections with the tradition of existential phenomenology here, as found in Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, which I don't have the space to explore here.

3 I say this, as they are not the usual examples of what gets called ‘medium-sized dry goods’.

4 To adapt the phrase ‘Life is just one damned thing after another’ by the American author Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915). The phrase is taken to mean the way that we shape our lives in a meaningful sequence of events. Some think this may be done to excess with grand theories of history, as found in say Hegel or Marx, and counter by saying, at least as a corrective to extravagance, that history is just one damned thing after another.

5 It may indeed be claimed that God thinking about anything is a contradiction, for if thinking about things requires a limited perspective, then God thinking about the world would involve placing limits on him – there would be points of view and ways of understanding about the world that were not available to Him – which stands in clear contradiction to what is usually regarded as His omniscient nature. So either, one might argue, God can't think – what could possibly motivate an all-powerful being for which nothing was an obstacle or problem, creating no differential of interest? – or there is no God in the usually unlimited sense. We are left with either an unthinking God or a limited God. Neither horn of this is attractive, and so either could stand as a refutation of the existence of God as usually defined.

6 By ‘empirical idealist’ I am of course referring to what has been taken to be the view of Berkeley. I shall not enter into the controversy over the historical accuracy of this position, but rather pursue it for its philosophical interest regardless.

7 See Berkeley Principles, para. 23.

8 It gets a forceful and succinct presentation in Urmson, J. O., Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 45Google Scholar.