Dear Mat,
The strict naturalist says that everything is made of quarks and there is no independent physical existence for concepts: they are either instantiated in matter or not. Of course, this naturalist (me) doesn’t struggle with explaining things at higher levels, trying to reduce them to sub-atomic particles. But even though, as you say in your last letter, “while you [me] believe only matter exists, I’m thinking all that matters exists.” The world is everything that is the case…
Again, the map is certainly very useful, we can’t navigate without it and the map itself exists. Yet we know that if we go to the spot on the map with a symbol for a train station we’ll find an actual building not something that looks like the train icon. I belabour this point because although it’s impossible to live without using abstractions as shorthands for the clumps of atoms they describe, some abstractions are more fake than others. I refer, obviously, to the old bearded abstraction in the sky, god. He’s useful, he matters more to more people than almost anything else and yet he’s one of the least existent things I can think of.
Along the continuum of how much abstractions map onto the real world, there are others that are almost as dodgy as god. That’s why we have to continually remind ourselves not to reify the abstractions we use, lest they get taken too seriously. And of course human history is mainly the violent story of this happening.
Deutsch — whom I’ve finished reading and we’ve now discussed him in person — might be adapted here. A passage in his book we both hit upon was where he discusses how flowers are able to communicate across a massive divide, across not only species but a whole kingdom, in order to attract bees. He says they do this by hitting on some objective feature of beauty, one which is not parochial to either flowers, bees, or indeed humans. For all three species to be attracted to it, the best strategy is to appeal to some universal, objectively attractive design. Quite a claim and I don’t quite go as far as to call that beauty, because I think that’s a bit misleading. But the idea of being able to bridge an incredible divide by relaying off the shared, real world is a very important insight. In fact, to bring it back to my preoccupation (covered in some earlier letters) with meaning, I think this is the key to how it works in human communication too. Our words, symbols, equations, fictions, theories, whatever, have meaning by dint of the way they leverage the real world. Philosophers are always worrying that we don’t have “direct access” to the world, even though we’re obviously made of the world and in it. Well, I think the fact of the world’s existence and our mutual placement in it is what allows us to stumble onto shared ideas about it, much the way the flower does.
But the gods are different. We can check our other ideas by “bouncing” them off the world. But the only place in the world where we find the gods are in people’s brains. It’s even easier to say things about the as yet mysterious dark matter than it is about gods. Dark matter is a concept, but it stands for some stuff that is perceived indirectly by certain instruments. That could be a metaphor for how we get all our scientific knowledge. But when we try and detect the gods we get no signal. They’re a part of the map with no correlate on the terrain, like the dragons of medieval maps. To save us from fearing dragons, I think we should continually remind ourselves that the whole of the map is a fiction, with different features being more or less correspondent to the terrain.
Actually not in Brisbane but in god’s country (Wollongong),
Jamie.