Cognitive Methods in Science, Philosophy, and Religion
Friday 18 August 2023
In many newsletters I have discussed some of the ways in which science might expand in the future, making scientific knowledge more comprehensive, with some of these suggestions being relatively concrete and some of them being relatively speculative. Among the more concrete possibilities for a more comprehensive science are better scientific instruments allowing us to make observations we cannot now make. For example, our observational powers have recently been augmented by the James Webb Space Telescope. With JWST we can now make observations we could not formerly make prior to the telescope being operational. JWST is like a single sensing organ, positioned far away out in space, that serves as an extra eye for the whole of humanity (or, at least, for the whole of the scientific community). A grotesque image suggests itself to me: when my sisters and I were young children we had a book of troll stories from Norway (Asbjornsen and Moe’s Norske folkeeventyr) with the kind of illustrations that are especially fascinating to children. One of the stories was of three trolls who shared a single eye, which they took turns using. We are like these trolls, with the JWST being our single shared eye.
In last week’s newsletter I tried to get more concrete about a number of ellipses in science that I have been thinking about, providing a list of eleven metrics or taxonomies that remain to be formulated. Some of these metrics and taxonomies I have tried to formulate myself, so I am groping toward a more concrete way of understanding of what is missing in our scientific knowledge. These frameworks are a little more abstract than the more comprehensive observations that we can make with more refined and sophisticated scientific instruments; indeed, expanded observations will eventually fill in the content of the taxonomies and metrics we have yet to formulate. This is a dialectical process: new observations can demonstrate the need for a new framework within which to situate them, but a new framework, even if incomplete and not yet well defined, can suggest novel forms of observation. We get a virtuous spiral of scientific discovery when observations drive the formulation of new frameworks, and new conceptual frameworks drive new observations, so that each extends the other.
There are yet more abstract possibilities for the extension of scientific knowledge, and the more abstract these possibilities become, the more difficult it is to say anything meaningful about them. Still, I try. In newsletter 239 I discussed the difficulty of studying consciousness, which is one of the great problems in expanding science. Subjectivity by its very nature slips the net of empiricism and the public accessibility of evidence that is crucial to science as we know it. Arguably, the role of consciousness finds its way into all of the social sciences, and this may be the ultimate division that separates the natural sciences (or, if you prefer, the physical sciences) from the social sciences. I’m not certain about this as of now, but it is a suspicion. I think there are other factors involved, but even if other factors differentiate the natural and social sciences, the role of consciousness could still be the fundamental differentia. This is a problem in the philosophy of science that needs systematic research.
Needless to say, I am always dissatisfied with my more speculative suggestions as to directions in which science might be expanded, as in my suggestion in newsletter 239 that a conceptual breakthrough may be necessary for the study of consciousness, and no one can predict a conceptual breakthrough. This dissatisfaction sometimes really gets under my skin and I can’t let it go. When I hit on a fruitful thought experiment I wring it for all it’s worth, hoping to squeeze some new and unexpected insight from it, returning to it time and again, trying to test to limits of my imagination by introducing new variables and taking up the effort when I am in different frames of mind, or thinking about different problems that give me a different perspective on things. Sometimes this yields more insights, but sometimes it is a barren and frustrating quest.
So last week while I was canoeing — more specifically, at the moment when I was passing under the railway trestle — I thought of a small refinement to my attempts to narrow the ways in which more abstract extensions to scientific knowledge might come about, with obvious applications to the study of consciousness. Suppose that someone develops a new kind of cognitive method — quite simply, a new way of thinking that provides insight into thinking itself. While no known technology gives us a window into subjectivity, we can, each of us, look into our own thoughts and report on this. A novel cognitive method might allow for the formulation of quantitative concepts applicable to consciousness. Again, we don’t see into other minds, but each mind in looking into itself, when trained in this cognitive method, gives the same answer.
All who master the cognitive method have novel insights into consciousness — insights that can be formulated as propositions and then tested by others who have also mastered the same method — and this shared method allows for a new baseline of knowledge about consciousness that becomes a shared knowledge resource and the basis of a new scientific research program. Not everyone who attempts to master the cognitive method will be successful; some will be excluded because they don’t get it, or they do it incorrectly, and so on. There is nothing new about this. Book 1, proposition 5 in Euclid’s Elements came to be known as the pons asinorum (the bridge of asses), and either you could cross the bridge and continue in the study of geometry, or you failed and had to stop. Some who don’t get it will deny the reality or efficacy of the cognitive method, but that a growing community of others who do find it efficacious are able to continue, and eventually their research gives practical results, would suggest that there is something going on here more than self-deception.
The analogy with Euclid’s pons asinorum suggests an obvious question: how is what I have described any different from mathematics? In the example I have given of the study of consciousness, what is different is that the practitioners of the cognitive methodology understand that they are employing the method to study consciousness. In other words, the object of their research is consciousness, while the object of research in mathematics is some mathematical object or relation. The ontological status of mathematical objects is a perennial source of disagreement among philosophers, though this disagreement has not stopped progress in mathematics. There is a familiar joke among philosophers of mathematics (yes, philosophers of mathematics have their own jokes) that the typical working mathematician is a platonist during the week and a formalist on Sundays. Some philosophers say that mathematics is “a subject with no object,” i.e., that there are no mathematical objects, a position sometimes referred to a fictionalism (though we need to differentiate between different forms of fictionalism, some of which would not endorse the idea that mathematics is a subject with no object). Again, these philosophical disagreements have not prevented mathematicians from continuing to prove theorems, though it has introduced divisions among different schools of thought as to what methodologies are acceptable.
Even though I am taking about a cognitive methodology for the study of consciousness, the existence of mathematics as a branch of knowledge (perhaps the oldest branch of knowledge) demonstrates the potential of purely cognitive methodologies. I have introduced the idea of a cognitive methodology for studying consciousness, but there might be other possible cognitive methods studying other objects, though the limitations of my imagination prevent me from seeing what these are. But suppose, as I suggested above, that consciousness is the differentia between the natural sciences and the social sciences: a science of consciousness would then become a way to reform all the social sciences from top to bottom, on a newly rigorous basis, and such a project would have implications both for scientific knowledge and for applications of this newly reformed scientific knowledge.
One could argue that the possibility of a cognitive method is a battleground strewn with philosophical carcasses. Cartesianism’s claim of clear and distinct ideas, the Husserlian phenomenological method with its reductions and bracketing of phenomena, Collingwood’s a priori historical imagination, and Freud’s psychodynamic psychology with its structures of consciousness all represent attempts at a cognitive method. I have elsewhere cited the readiness of the psychoanalytic movement to found its own institutions dedicated to the psychoanalytic method, and certainly one could argue that therapy is a practical application of this cognitive method. However, none of these methods, or proposed methods, have come close to the example of mathematics in terms of producing results with real world consequences. I might also note that these real world consequences only became important since the scientific revolution, and in the period between the origins of mathematics and the use of mathematics in science, no other cognitive method appeared (and here I am using “mathematics” as a shorthand for all the formal sciences, which also includes logic and mereology).
This may be wrong. We could count various forms of theology, divinity, mysticism, and altered states of consciousness as cognitive methods, and ones with profound consequences for society. On the one hand, theology has been divided by sects on a fundamental level in a way that has not, until recently, been seen in the formal sciences. So there appears to be less convergence on a unified body of knowledge. On the other hand, there seem to be absolutely predictable ways of generating mystical experiences, and many of these experiences are remarkably uniform. Sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, rhythmic drumming, dancing, and chanting, use of psychotropic substances, and so on are familiar religious rituals that often result in mystical experiences. Moreover, during the witchcraze it was argued that the uniformity of the testimony of witches under examination was a proof of the devil and his ways. Psychodynamic psychology and evolutionary psychology would both have answers to the uniformity of the testimony of accused witches that have nothing to do with being granted access to a supernatural realm, but these are recent — very recent — forms of scientific explanation that would have been utterly foreign to the early modern period.
Is mathematics more dependable than theology? Most individuals of a scientific bent would unhesitatingly say that it was, but would at the same time (if they were being honest with themselves) have some misgivings because of the obvious human efficacy of theological ideas. Let’s come at this from a slightly different angle: is theology more dependable than proposed philosophical cognitive methods? Here I think we would have to say that some forms of theology have proved themselves more consistent and more tied to real world results than Cartesianism or phenomenology. However, one can simply assert that the philosophical cognitive methods that have been proposed are inadequate and there is no intrinsic reason that we cannot do better. We have done better with mathematics. Here, the platonist has a definite response: mathematics is successful because it studies actual mathematical objects, and unless there is an actual object (even if not an empirically accessible object) to study, then there can be no science and no effective cognitive method.
I can even imagine (though I am guessing) that some divines might agree with this, making the claim that theology has the history and the consistency and efficacy that it has shown because the reality of the spiritual realm means that this is an inquiry with actual objects to study. I cannot see how someone who denies platonism (say, a constructivist of one sort or another, or a formalist) would respond to this. Actually, I probably could make a stab at a response from a constructivist or formalist perspective, but I can’t imagine it being as neatly satisfying as the platonist or the theologian.
Given this platonist intuition (i.e., grant it for the moment, for the sake of argument, even if you don’t share this intuition), one could argue that a cognitive method can be effective when it has an object to study, and otherwise not. Further, if we agree that consciousness is something (some philosophers deny this), then it is a potential object of knowledge, and our inability (to date) to formulate a cognitive method for the study of consciousness simply reflects our failure, not the impossibility of the task.
One more thing: there is an interesting (and elusive) problem of the philosophical logic of evidence presented by the problem of subjectivity. Subjectivity is not publicly available evidence, but it is evidence available to every thinking being who might engage in scientific inquiry. What exactly is the different between a publicly available form of evidence that is external to every cognitive agent, and a form of evidence available to every cognitive agent but not publicly available? Everyone can look into their own consciousness and confirm it to their own satisfaction, just as everyone can perform an experiment and confirm a result obtained by others. If you are a being capable of performing a scientific experiment, you are also a being capable of introspectively recognizing your consciousness. Is this a distinction without a difference? I may have answer to this puzzle, but I can’t yet pin it down with the clarity that the problem demands.
