I am hesitant to hijack your thread but I can only say that I heartily agree with your epistemological observations and I’ll reproduce here the most finished chapter of my new article as a response. Hopefully, we get some good discussion going.
Awareness and Final Knowledge
The problem of morality – what is right and what is wrong – is also a problem of knowledge. How do we know what is right and what is wrong? For that matter, how do we know anything? What does it mean to know?
Conscious awareness[1] (or awareness, for short) is the sole body of knowledge. That is not to say that I cannot analyze the objects of my awareness or divide knowledge into a taxonomy or organize particular objects or relations into universals. But it is to say that there is no standard outside of myself to which I can appeal to check or verify my knowledge. All forms of knowledge are merely sub-headings within the only book of knowledge I have – my awareness. Awareness is the final – that is, only – criterion of truth.
… this item of knowledge—I am thinking, so I exist—is the first and most certain thing to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way
René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Section 7
Note Descartes’s use of the phrase “most certain”. Stated differently to emphasize his meaning: “I am thinking so, I exist is the … least uncertain thing.” I may doubt whatever I please but I cannot doubt anything less than my awareness – both the simple fact that I am aware and the specific content of my awareness.
Final knowledge is knowledge that is less uncertain than any other knowledge. Note that final knowledge is not to be confused with absolute knowledge*.* We have no access to absolute knowledge, that is, knowledge in which there is no uncertainty at all. Final knowledge, on the other hand, is simply that knowledge which is less uncertain than any other knowledge.
For the sake of analysis, I have chosen to break up the problem of the soul[2] into three pieces: perception, cognition and desire or appetite. This separation is based on my own introspection and is different from that employed in neuroscience, psychology or even the philosophy of cognition. This division is as arbitrary as the divisions employed in other fields and, therefore, cannot possibly conflict with them.
Perception can be further divided into two pieces: sense perception and memory perception. Sense perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the present. Memory perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the past.
Cognition is the “inner voice” that is capable of reasoning through difficult problems, drawing conclusions, constructing hypotheses based on perception, predicting the future and identifying patterns in the past, among other things.
Desire or appetite is the hunger pang that motivates action. If the soul was comprised solely of perception and cognition, the human being would be no different than a calculating device that idly waits for instructions and programming. It is the urge to act – our appetite - which compels us to move and interact with the world.
In this division, I have not overlooked the will. However, the will is not properly a piece or component of the soul. Rather, when we speak of the “the will” we are employing a hypostatic metaphor, as when we speak of “Time itself.” The will is not a thing. The will is the motion of the soul.
My awareness as it relates to memory perception is final. It is conceivable that I am misremembering the past and that the world has, as a matter of fact, unfolded differently than I remember it unfolding. However, if this were the case, there is still nothing outside of my own awareness with which to correct the mistake. Hence, any argument against the general reliability of my memory must be more uncertain than my awareness itself.
My awareness as it relates to sense perception is final. The thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” illustrates this problem. What if I am not what I think I am but, instead, I am a brain in a vat of warm saline water connected to a mad scientist’s supercomputer that is simulating the world around me? This is a logically possible situation. However, if this were the case, I would still have no other senses outside of those which are part of my awareness to which to compare. No philosophical argument could possibly imbue me with greater certainty in the reliability of my sense perceptions than the perceptions themselves already possess because I could make such arguments even if I were a brain in a vat.
My awareness as it relates to cognition is final. It is conceivable that my brain is unreliable and deduces false conclusions from true premises or fails to perceive the glaring inconsistencies in the axioms with which it operates. However, if this were the case, I could not perceive the mistake since the sole means I have to diagnose it – my reasoning – is the very thing that is compromised. Every argument by which I am convinced is cognized to be true only insofar as I comprehend it and I believe that its axioms are consistent and its deductions are valid. Since there is no external cognitive reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the faults in my own cognitive abilities, I have no choice but to simply accept the fact that it is possible that I may be mistaken or deluded about my true nature and the true nature of the world.
Whatever its origin, every belief I may have about theology or neurology or mathematics or cosmology or quantum physics must stand judgment before the throne of my awareness. I cannot have certainty through proxy, which is the fallacy of any appeal to authority. Certainty or even confidence is a state of mind not a fact residing within a physical object or within an abstract idea or within the mind of someone else. My beliefs in the unanalyzed arguments and claims of scientific authorities are more uncertain in my mind than those arguments and claims which I have analyzed and which have the assent of my cognitive faculty.
Finally, my awareness as it relates to desire or appetite is final. This is a sub-species of the brain-in-a-vat problem. It is conceivable that I am the subject of a grand hoax and that my values and desires come from a source external to myself or are really aligned against my own true interests. Nevertheless, I could never perceive the mistake since I only come to know my desires and appetites through their immediate effect on my state of mind. There is no external reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the mistakes in my valuations. Hence, any argument regarding what my appetites ought to be must be less certain than my own immediate awareness of them.
It is conceivable that I am expected or required by a deity or the Universe to act according to the desires and wishes of all mankind or all living things or the Universe or the deity himself, instead of acting according to my own desires. However, no matter how fervently I try to shrug off my appetites and adopt the desires and wishes of something or someone outside myself, I can only do so as a fulfillment of my desire to act according to the wishes of that thing outside myself. That is, when I act on behalf of others, I act by virtue of my desire to fulfill the desires of others. Even if I obey God’s command to stop desiring some sinful experience, it is only because I more strongly desire the peace of mind that comes from being in good standing with God than I desire the forbidden pleasures of the sinful experience.
If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
Mix Stirner – The Ego and Its Own**[3]**
I detect errors by recognizing inconsistencies within my own awareness, not by comparing my awareness to something outside myself, which is impossible.
But if the brain be out of order and the man says “Twice four are two,” instead of “Twice four are eight,” or else “I must go to the coal to buy the wharf,” instead of “I must go to the wharf to buy the coal,” instantly there arises a consciousness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless condemned,-condemned as contradicting the inner law-the law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain should act, whether it do so or not.
William James – Principles of Psychology, Chapter 1
None of this is to suggest that I am infallible. It must be admitted that I make mistakes. The man in ancient times walking through the desert who believes he sees a shimmering ocean of water just near the horizon has made a mistake. But note how he detects his mistake – by approaching closer to the mirage until the shimmering is revealed not to be water, regardless of its superficial resemblance to water from the distance. The poor man dying of thirst in the desert does not need to understand the thermodynamics of convection and how thermoclines in the air alter the refractive index and create a mirage in order to realize that the mirage is not water. Upon approaching the mirage and finding only more sand he will realize his mistake, no matter how puzzled he may be by the propensity of dry land to appear, from a distance, like water when it is hot and brightly lit.
The man who has forgotten the date of his dentist appointment does not undergo an existential crisis regarding the reliability of all his memories. Rather, he consults the present state of the world to reconstruct the past, that is, he looks in his day-planner and finds what its present state is. There, he expects to find a mark – which hopes or suspects that he made in the past – “Dentist appointment: May 13, 2:30pm”. Using this evidence of the past, he is able to reconstruct the events as they happened on the day the appointment was made well enough to get to his appointment on time.
The man who reminisces about the good times with a friend and finds they each have a contradictory account of what happened on one particular night of carousing performs the same action as the man who has forgotten an appointment. He consults another friend to see where the balance of testimony lies. When he finds that two or three others remember things unfolding differently than he himself remembers them, he thereby detects a contradiction between his own memory and the facts of history as they are. In this case, instead of a day-planner, the evidence is the brains of his companions (or, at least, their reports of what is in their brains).
In the case of sense perception, there are a wide variety of different errors which we can experience. If you look up in the clear, blue sky, you will see small, faint dots and shadows slowly swirling around[4]. Do you, for a moment, believe those artifacts are actually there in the blue sky itself? Of course not, because when you move your eye, the artifacts themselves move with the eye. That is, you perceive that there is a correlation between the artifacts and the direction you are looking, not between the artifacts and the arch of the sky itself. It is by comparing these facts of awareness with those facts of awareness that you detect errors in the presentation that awareness gives of the facts of the objects of awareness.
A more extreme example is hallucination. In the circumstances where hallucination occurs (consuming hallucinogens, high fever, etc.) the individual is not in full possession of his cognitive faculty and is, therefore, in no position to compare this fact of awareness with that fact of awareness. However, at the conclusion of the hallucination, the individual might wonder whether the hallucination itself was “real” while what is supposedly “real” is itself a hallucination. Despite the apparent difference, this problem is solved no differently than the visual artifacts in a clear, blue sky – the internal consistency of the facts of non-hallucinatory sense perception is what gives them “reality”.
In the case of cognition, we detect errors by the presence of pure contradiction in our basic beliefs and conclusions. The science of logic tells us that there are only two possibilities when contradiction arises – either we must revise our basic beliefs or we must eliminate as invalid one of the contradictory conclusions. If both our conclusions are equally valid on the basis of our basic beliefs, then we are left with the choice to either revise our basic beliefs or proceed in a state of quasi-delusion.
Because I can detect mistakes in my awareness, I know that I make mistakes and I can conceive of the possibility of avoiding making mistakes in the first place. In the case of the man in the desert who saw a mirage, if he survives and sees a mirage again in the future, he is aware of the possibility that he can be mistaken about the presence of water by virtue of his memory of his past mistake. In the case of the man who has forgotten something, he is aware of the possibility that his memory may fail him and he might insure himself against this eventuality by leaving physical evidence of past events so that they can be reconstructed at a later time without the direct aid of specific memory of those events.
The story of Hansel and Gretel illustrates the importance of choosing wisely in how to aid one’s memory. Hansel and Gretel have been led deep into the forest by the witch when.
… they fell asleep and evening passed, but no one came to the poor children. They did not awake until it was dark night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said: “Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.” When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – Grimm’s Fairy Tales
We perceive errors in the facts of awareness by detecting contradictions or inconsistencies between them. Hence, it follows that what we deem to be non-erroneous facts of awareness are all and only those facts of awareness which are consistent with each other. Awareness itself is experienced as an indivisible whole so the facts of all the faculties into which I have divided awareness for the sake of analysis – memory, sense-perception, cognition and appetite – are all liable to be compared with one another as well as with themselves and to either reinforce the “picture” of awareness or, else, to contradict it.
If the facts of awareness contradict each other, this either forces a revision of the picture of awareness or the detection of an error in the respective faculty. Of course, it must be the case that this process is almost always happening without the slightest thought or effort on my part, that is, this “picture-building” process through error-detection and picture-revision is something that my brain is designed to do automatically.
The comparison of facts of awareness between two or more individuals is simply multiple instances of this same process of picture-building based on the facts of awareness. The much vaunted superiority of objective knowledge over subjective knowledge is often exaggerated or, at least, over-simplified. In the same way that you become more intimately familiar with the appearance of an object by looking at it many times in succession than by looking at it only once, so the same phenomenon when perceived by many people at once is more intimately familiar to those people, as a group, than it is to any one of them. The difference is that the faculties of your awareness permit your past and present selves to converse, unmediated, among each other regarding their many observations of the same phenomenon whereas if different individuals independently observe the same phenomenon, they must communicate through external means with each other in order to compare their observations.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of each individual, the knowledge in the group is still less certain than his own awareness until he is able to fit the group’s knowledge with his own in a self-consistent manner. But when ranking the knowledge of others, the individual should have more confidence in the knowledge of a large group than in the knowledge of a small group, ceteris paribus, for the same reason he should be more confident in his own observations of a phenomenon the more often he has observed it.
Socrates discusses this topic when he probes Theaetetus on the nature of knowledge and then proceeds to provide an account of Protagoras’ views on knowledge:
‘Once more then, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question – “What is knowledge?” Take courage, and by the help of God you will discover an answer.’
‘My answer is that knowledge is perception.’
‘That is the theory of Protagoras, who has another way of expressing the same thing when he says, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him. In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold. How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is cold, cold to him who is hot. And “is” means “appears,” and when you say “appears to him,” that means “he feels.” Thus feeling, appearance, perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only a “facon de parler,” by which he imposed on the common herd like you and me; he told “the truth” (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called “The Truth”) in secret to his disciples. For he was really a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not “being,” as we ignorantly affirm, but “becoming.”’ [Emphasis added]
Plato - Theaetetus
Socrates relates that Protagoras said man is the measure of all things. Stated differently, no proposition can be more certain than that my soul is the measure and judge of all things. The truth of any other proposition can only be judged by virtue of the fact that this proposition is true. The compromise of conviction of belief in this proposition cripples my ability to think about myself, about my peers and about the natural world. It is always the result of fear. That is, acceptance of your standing in the world is not a matter of arguments, evidence and debate; it is a matter of maturity and self-development.
The finality of conscious awareness should not be confused with the Absolute. Nor should it be taken as a license to attempt to impose belief or assent to facts on others.
… some philosophers were ready to overrate the power of human reason. They believed that man can discover by ratiocination the final causes of cosmic events, the inherent ends the prime mover aims at in creating the universe and determining the course of its evolution. They expatiated on the “Absolute” as if it were their pocket watch. They did not shrink from announcing eternal absolute values and from establishing moral codes unconditionally binding on all men.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, chapter 3.1
The fact that I do not converse with the Absolute, that is, that my every belief is always and necessarily less than absolutely certain does not alter in the slightest the fact that my awareness is the sole body of knowledge to which I have access. The knowledge I have by virtue of my awareness is final knowledge, that is, it is the least uncertain knowledge. All other knowledge – even, or especially, knowledge of the Absolute – is more uncertain and, therefore, must be held more tentatively.
[1] I mean by this subjective experience, including all the respective faculties which constitute subjective experience, not merely the senses.
[2] I am using this term advisedly and nearly synonymously with “mind” or “self”
[3] Accessed from http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enee.html July 2012
[4] These are called “floaters” and are bubbles or other impurities in the gel within the eyeball.