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Some popular systems of metaphysics (click on
These systems have a common premise: inherent conformity between
reality and experience. Each system declares
that reality is governed by laws that we can discover
and follow.
Each system condemns
deviations from conformity, using such names as sin,
illusion, meaninglessness, superstition or perversity.
All of these systems fail to deal with the full reality of human
existence. Although each system has been a vehicle for intellectual advancement, none
actually arrives at a satisfactory destination.
All are blind to the freedom we exercise continually in
ordinary work and daily life, such as using imprecise directions to reach
a destination in a strange city or writing a paper
by selecting and arranging ideas drawn from a mass.
In these pages, I propose a new metaphysics. Its premise
declares that experience and reality do not conform
of their own nature: Experience is inherently structured, but reality is not
inherently structured. Laws and rules
are human inventions that sometimes approximate
reality closely, but sometimes not. The appearance of
exact conformity is established in artificial, constrained
environments, such as laboratories, courts, society and the marketplace.
This metaphysics of nonconformity says that
there is confusion at the interface of experience and reality.
We perceive this confusion as disorder.We experience confusion and
disorder when events shake the structures of our
experience.
We also experience them
during ordinary work and daily
life when we must deal
with unstructured reality . For some of us, they
seem to emerge from the depths of the self.
Confusion and disorder
are an irreducible fact of life.
We are not able to resolve them in a general way,
but we can do so on specific occasions through an exercise of freedom.
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for reference and context):
(with a response)
Establishing new structures and revising old ones is the labor of freedom. Through an exercise of freedom, we can impose order, our order, on what we perceive as disorder and confusion.
Some parts of reality can be ordered by different kinds of structures and reality divides for us into parts or domains according to the kinds of structures we use.
A structure serves as a vehicle for experiments, in a home, laboratory, marketplace, courtroom or other practical setting. Successes and failures define the domain of appropriate application. In some domains, it seems that we can squeeze out disorder almost to the vanishing point. In other domains, disorder is clearly incorrigible.
When we look at reality, we see the structures we have built. They have a hypnotic effect: we come to believe that reality is structured and that particular structures extend throughout the whole of reality. A desire to believe that we can comprehend reality predisposes us to being hypnotized by our structures.
Reality breaks through the hypnotic effect when actual experience is contrary to the structured expectation.
Reality also breaks through when different persons live through opposing structures. Trials in court present a forum for the opposition of structures: each side has a version of reality competing for the consciousness of the judge or jury -- and the judge or jury may return with yet another version.
Reality also breaks through when structures based on different domains do not fit together. This condition is sometimes called cognitive dissonance. Artists create beauty by crafting harmonious unities out of disparate elements.
We are bewildered by hypnotic structures in cultures different from our own or in other times. We cannot understand the medieval social, religious and intellectual order that resulted in philosopher Giordano Bruno being burnt at the stake in 1600. The Holocaust that wiped out European Jewry in this century is incomprehensible, although based on a structure of racist ideas that appeared sensible to perpetrators whose personalities were otherwise unexceptionable, even "banal". (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem).
Fighters for freedom break the hynosis of social and political structures. Even if new hypnotic structures are erected in place of the old, history records the growth of freedom as our structures change and grow.
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Ambiguity structures are built out of elements. Some elements are definite and mechanical. Other elements, "ambiguities," are indefinite and call upon us to exercise freedom. In ambiguity structures, ambiguities are components that can be parts of other elements, including ambiguities within ambiguities.
I originally encountered ambiguity structures in the practice of law. (Example: O. J. Simpson civil trial). Here, however, there is only minor reference to law or legal practice. Instead, the website is built around engineered ambiguity structures, constructed as examples.
Electronic devices interpret some ambiguity structures and serve as a vehicle for their development.
The first device is a rudimentary, flat, and quasi-static associative memory of a traditional kind. Later devices involve re-organization, extension and planned dynamical activation. Each device incorporates its predecessors. The devices are applied to successively more difficult problems, thereby reaching toward the reality of disorder that defies comprehension by mechanical analogs.
The final form, as presently conceived, is a device where stabilities and instabilities interact. These are interpreted as interactions of ordering structures and disorder involved in ambiguity structures. I suggest that the interactions resemble the interplay of perception, memory and consciousness in human intelligence and that such interplay is freedom.
Robert Kovsky
Post Office Box 240
Oakland, CA 94604
The author welcomes comments and criticism.
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It seems strange that we should apparently be able to know some truths
in advance about particular things of which we have as yet no
experience; but it cannot easily be doubted that logic and
arithmetic will apply to such things. We do not know who
will be inhabitants of London a hundred years hence; but we
know that any two of them and any other two them will make
four of them. This apparent power of anticipating things of which
we have no experience is certainly surprising. Kant's solution
of the problem, though not valid in my opinion, is interesting. ...
Apart from minor grounds on which
Kant's philosophy may be criticized, there is one main objection which seems fatal
to any attempt to deal with the problem of a priori knowledge by his
method. The thing to be accounted for is our certainty that facts must always
conform to logic and arithmetic. To say that logic and arithmetic are contributed
by us does not account for this. Our nature is as much a fact of the existing world
as anything, and there can be no certainty that it will remain constant. It might
happen, if Kant is right, that to-morrow our nature would so change as to make
two and two become five. This possiblility seems never to have occured to him,
yet it is one which utterly destroys the certainty and universality which he is
anxious to vindicate for arithmetical propositions."
Many scientists look on chemistry and physics as ideal models
of what psychology should be like. After all, the atoms in the brain
are subject to the same all-inclusive physical laws that
govern every other form of matter. "
There is no room on either side for any third alternative. Whatever actions
we may 'choose,' they cannot make the slightest change in what otherwise
might have been -- because those rigid, natural laws already caused the states
of mind that caused us to decide that way. And if that choice was in part
made by chance -- it still leaves nothing for us to decide. ...
To save our belief in the freedom of will from the fateful grasps of Cause and
Chance, people simply postulate an empty, third alternative. We imagine that
somewhere in each person's mind, there lies a Spirit, Will, or Soul, so well
concealed that it can elude the reach of any law -- or lawless accident.
I've drawn the box for Will so small because we're always taking things
out of it -- and scarcely ever putting things in! This is because whenever
we find some scrap of order in the world, we have to attribute it to Cause -- and
whenever things seem to obey no law at all, we attribute it to Chance. This means
that the dominion controlled by Will can only hold what, up to now, we don't
yet understand."
Response to the metaphysics of physics
Return to quotations of metaphysical systems
(The "other ... less rationalist view" is based on
"certain rules of conduct which any social organization must contain
if it is to be viable.")
It poses a series of questions.
Clear, even mechanical, consequences follow from the answers, but
the questions themselves are indefinite,
and there is a general grant of freedom to the jury to make decisions.
The imprecise language is partially explained to provide guidance.
For example, the judge instructed the jury as follows:
" 'Preponderance of the evidence' means evidence that has
more convincing force than that opposed to it. If the evidence is so evenly
balanced that you're unable to say that the evidence on either side of an
issue preponderates, your finding on that issue must be against the party
who had the burden of proving it."
" 'Clear and convincing evidence' means evidence of such
convincing force that it demonstrates, in contrast to the opposing
evidence, a high probability of the truth of the fact for which it is
offered as proof. Such evidence requires a higher standard of proof than
proof by a preponderance of the evidence."
We, the jury of the above-entitled action, find the following special
verdict on the questions submitted to us:
Question No. 1: Do you find by a preponderance of the evidence that
defendant Simpson wilfully and wrongfully caused the death of Ronald
Goldman?
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If your answer to Question No. 1 is "no," do not answer Question Nos. 2, 3,
and 4, and instead proceed to Question No. 5. If your answer to Question
No. 1 is "yes," proceed to Question No. 2.
Question No. 2: Do you find by a preponderance of the evidence that
defendant Simpson committed battery against Ronald Goldman?
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If your answer to Question No. 2 is "yes," proceed to Question No. 3.
If your answer to Question No. 2 is "no," do not answer Question Nos. 3 and
4, and instead proceed to Question No. 5.
Question No. 3: Do you find by clear and convincing evidence that defendant
Simpson committed oppression in the conduct upon which you base your
finding of liability for battery against Ronald Goldman.
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If you answered "yes" to Question No. 2, proceed to Question No. 4.
Question No. 4: Do you find by clear and convincing evidence that defendant
Simpson committed malice in the conduct upon which you base your finding of
liability for battery against Ronald Goldman.
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
Proceed to Question No. 5.
Question No. 5: Do you find by a preponderance of the evidence that
defendant Simpson committed battery against Nicole Brown Simpson?
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If your answer to Question No. 5 is "yes," proceed to Question No. 6.
If your answers to Question Nos. 1 and 5 are "no," proceed to date, sign,
and return the verdict form.
Question No. 6: Do you find by clear and convincing evidence that defendant
Simpson committed oppression in the conduct upon which you base your
finding of liability for battery against Nicole Brown Simpson?
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If you answered "yes" to Question No. 5, proceed to Question No. 7.
Question No. 7: Do you find by clear and convincing evidence that defendant
Simpson committed malice in the conduct upon which you base your finding of
liability for battery against Nicole Brown Simpson?
Write the answer "yes" or "no" below.
Yes No
Answer: _____ _____
If you answered "yes" to Question No. 1, answer Question No. 8.
Question No. 8: We award damages against defendant Simpson and in favor of
plaintiffs Goldman and Rufo, in the aggregate, as follows:
Amount
Answer: $_______
Date, sign, and return the verdict form.
DATED: _____, 1997 ________________ FOREPERSON
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The view of limit and approximation
in physical science has been
argued by British mathematician and philosopher
E. W. Hobson.
It resembles the philosophy
of science of Karl
Popper.
Return to reference accompanying quotation from Marvin Minsky
Return to quotations from metaphysical systems
Through the admission of errors, it is possible to account for mysteries that have
perplexed humankind since we first began to question. We know we are free, but
we cannot find a place for freedom in our systems of ideas. Our knowledge,
particularly science, has many successes; but there are places where it is
powerless. Successes are not final, but create new problems. Conclusive answers
are never found, and claims to have found them -- by religious leaders,
Marxists, behavioral psychologists and computer logicians -- lead to disappointment
and even disaster.
Because experience is filled with errors, our lives are sometimes disordered and
confused. Disorder often seems to boil up within one's self and frequently appears
in the reality that exists
outside the self. Between the two regions of disorder stands a structured shell of
order that each of us constructs. We want to use the shell to order the self and
reality too, but disorder is obstinate and irreducible. When the shell is
threatened,we feel anger and fear. People with conflicting structures compete for
dominance. Accordingly, I argue, intellectual cognition, principled
disputes and feelings are all involved in building, changing and maintaining
structured order in the face of disorder. We exercise freedom when engaged
in these tasks.
This work develops these ideas and presents them in a hypertext form that suits
their nature. There is a systematic portrayal of a form of disorder -- ambiguity and
the analysis of ambiguity -- as well as reference to disorder that cannot be
analyzed. It is important that the visitor directly encounter disorder, buoyed by
belief in ultimate sources of order, even though those sources are beyond our comprehension.
Because experience is infected with error, we can never figure things out; hence
we are free.
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Karl Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959, 1992).
I am especially fond of
an address Prof. Popper gave in 1952 that has been reprinted in Conjectures and
Refutations (1963) as "The Nature of Philosophical Problems and
Their Roots in Science," especially the discussion of Kant's
philosophy of science:
...
Thus arose the central problem of the Critique: 'How is pure natural science
possible?' By 'pure natural science' -- scientia, episteme -- Kant
simply meant Newton's theory.
...
Although the Critique is badly written, although bad grammar abounds
in it, this problem is not a linquistic puzzle. Here was knowledge. How could
Newton ever attain it? The question was inescapable. But it was also
insoluble. For the apparent fact of the attainment of episteme was no
fact. As we now know, or believe we know, Newton's theory is no more than a
marvellous conjecture, an astonishingly good approximation; unique
indeed, but not as divine truth, only as a unique invention of a human genius;
not episteme, but belonging to the realm of doxa.
Kant's proposed solution of his insoluble problem consisted of what he
proudly called his 'Copernican Revolution' of the problem of knowledge.
Knowledge -- episteme -- was possible because we are
not passive receptors of sense data, but their active digestors.
...
According to Kant's theory, 'pure natural science' is not only possible;
although he does not always realize this, it becomes, contrary to his intention, the
necessary result of our mental outfit. ... Thus the problem is no longer
how Newton could make his discovery
but how everybody else could have failed to make it. How is it that our
digestive mechanism did not work much earlier?
And our answer, in the spirit of his Copernican Revolution, might, I suggest
be something like this: Because, as you said, we are not passive
receptors of sense data, but active organisms. Because we react to
our environment not always merely instinctively, but sometimes consciously
and freely. Because we can invent
myths, stories, theories; because we have a thirst for explanation,
an insatiable curiosity, a wish to know.
Because we can not only invent stories and theories,
but try them out and see whether they work
and how they work.
Because
by a great effort, by trying hard and making mistakes, we may sometimes,
if we are lucky, succeed in hitting upon a story, an explanation, which 'saves the
phenomena'; perhaps by making up a myth about 'invisibles', such as
atoms or gravitational forces, which explain the visible. Because knowledge
is an adventure of ideas. These ideas, it is true, are produced by us, and not
by the world around us; they are not merely the traces of repeated sensations
or stimuli or what not; here you were right. But we are more active and
free than even you believed..."
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Royce Gordon Gruenler, Meaning and Understanding: the
Philosophical Framework for Biblical Interpretation at 64 and 68 (Zondervan
Publishing House 1991):
"A comprehensive
Christian philosophy that works from God's authoritative disclosure of himself in
creation and in Scripture will lay claim to the positive role of rational thinking,
sensory experience, and spiritual communion with God. ... Idealism is therefore
not only a valid but an inescapable function of the human mind. Being made in the
image of God means thinking his thoughts after him and conforming one's actions
to those thoughts. But precisely here the substantial difference between biblical
idealism and humanistic idealism can be discerned. Biblical idealism is grounded in
the belief that truthful ideas have their origin in the primordial ideas of God, not in
the human mind. Accordingly, they are ultimately referential to the creative
thoughts and acts of God. God's universe therefore has real existence, and
because of his presence in framing creation, this reality communicates its noumenal
(real), not just its phenomenal (apparent) meaning to the human mind through the
empirical senses."Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the 2nd ed. ("B") at
xvi (Kemp Smith trans.)
"The examples of mathematics and natural science, which by a single
and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently
remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features
in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefited. ... Hitherto
it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all
attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to
them a priori, by means of concepts, have on this assumption ended in
failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in
the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our
knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should
be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something
in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding
precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory
progress in explaining the movements of heavenly bodies on the supposition that
they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better
success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars at rest. A similar
experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects.
If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could
know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the
senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no
difficulty in conceiving such a possibility."Bertrand Russell The
Problems of Philosophy at 77, 85, 86-87 (Oxford University Press paperback published
in 1959 and based
on first publication, 1912)
"All pure mathematics is a priori, like logic. ...Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1985)
Section 2.2,
"Novelists and Reductionists"
"
...The science of physics can now explain virtually
everything we see, at least in principle, in terms
of how a very few kinds of particles and force-fields interact.
Over the past few centuries reductionism has been remarkably
successful. What makes it possible to describe so much
of the world in terms of so few basic rules? No one knows.
Sections 30.6 ("Freedom of Will") and 30.7 ("The Myth of the Third Alternative")
"According to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for 'freedom
of the human will.' Everything that happens in our universe is either completely
determined by what's already happened in the past or else depends, in part, on random
chance. Everything, including what's happening in our brains, depends on these and
only on these: A set of fixed deterministic laws
A purely random set of accidents
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961), Chapter IX ("Law and Morals"),
Section 1., ("Natural Law and Legal Positivism"):
"Here we shall take Legal Positivism to mean the simple contention that
it is in no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands
of morality, though in fact they have often done. so. But just because those who
have taken this view have either been silent or differed very much concerning
the nature of morality, it is necessary to consider two very different forms
in which Legal Positivism has been rejected. One of these is expressed most
clearly in the classical theories of Natural Law: that there are certain principles
of human conduct, awaiting discovery by human reason, with which man-made law
must conform if it is to be valid. The other takes a different, less rationalist view
of morality, and offers a different account of the ways in which legal validity is
connnected with moral value. "Civil Trial Jury Verdict Form for Rufo v. Simpson
This was the document the jury took into the jury room and used to decide the case.
(The O. J. Simpson Civil Trial)
Civil Trial Jury Verdict Form
SPECIAL VERDICT
Return to the text where the O. J. Simpson reference appearsResponse to the Metaphysics of Physics
Physicists have investigated properties of matter and
formulated "mathematical laws" based on their investigations.
The investigations have always involved conditions of isolation,
constraint and simplicity, whether occurring naturally (as in
space relatively devoid of matter or in isolated stars)
or in the laboratory. A hypothesis that
the results of the investigations can be made as close as desired
to the "mathematical laws"
by imposing sufficiently strict conditions of isolation,
constraint and simplicity is consistent with the evidence. Also
consistent with the evidence is the hypothesis that, as those conditions are relaxed,
the "mathematical laws" are approximations only, becoming progressively
less exact as those conditions cease to apply. These hypotheses
cannot be tested experimentally against the hypothesis
(maintained by those who believe in a rationally comprehensible universe) that
the "mathematical laws" constitute exact statements of reality
universally applicable.What it's all about
This website explores the hypothesis that
errors are built into all experience -- pervasive, systematic errors.
We cannot escape the errors, but we can identify some of them and use knowledge
about them to advantage, even embody some of that knowledge on electronic devices.
"It is perhaps hard for intellectuals of our own day, spolit and blasé as
we are by the spectacle of scientific success, to realize what Newton's theory meant,
not just for Kant but for any eighteenth-century thinker. ... Newton had discovered
the long sought secret. ... In a time like ours, when theories come and go like buses
in Picadilly, and when every schoolboy has heard that Newton has long been superseded
by Einstein, it is hard to recapture the sense of conviction which Newton's theory
inspired, or the sense of elation, and of liberation. A unique event had
happened in the history of thought, one which could never be repeated: the first
and final discovery of the absolute truth about the universe. An age-old dream had
come true. Mankind had obtained knowledge, real, certain, indubitable,
and demonstrated knowledge -- divine scientia or episteme,
and not merely doxa, human opinion.
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All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.
