The Meaning of Thought

Markus Gabriel, Alex Englander

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509538379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as 'fake news' to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do and they can do it much faster, what's so special about human thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very nature of human thought. He conceives of human thinking as a 'sixth sense', a kind of sense organ that is closely tied our biological reality as human beings. Our thinking is not a form of data processing but rather the linking together of images and imaginary ideas which we process in different sensory modalities. Our time frame expands far beyond the present moment, as our ideas and beliefs stretch far beyond the here and now. We are living beings and the whole of evolution is built into our life story. In contrast to some of the exaggerated claims made by proponents of AI, Gabriel argues that our thinking is a complex structure and organic process that is not easily replicated and very far from being superseded by computers. With his usual wit and intellectual verve, Gabriel combines philosophical insight with pop culture to set out a bold defence of the human and a plea for an enlightened humanism for the 21st century. This timely book will be of great value to anyone interested in the nature of human thought and the relations between human beings and machines in an age of rapid technological change.

1
The Truth about Thought

Complexity without end

As a first step towards understanding thought, it’s useful to see it as having something or other to do with complexity reduction. When we engage in thinking, we process raw data into information: we take what is given to us and separate out the essential from the inessential. This enables us to grasp patterns in reality. Indeed, it’s only thanks to this kind of complexity reduction that we can deploy our powers of thought to orient ourselves in reality.

In fact, thinking is a kind of journey through infinity. It’s precisely because we’re continually exposed to the infinite that we have to simplify reality through thinking. If you doubt that we really do find ourselves faced with the infinite, consider the following rather mundane scenario.

Cologne Central Station is usually pretty overcrowded by German standards. Imagine that one Monday morning you find yourself heading towards platform 9 to catch your connection. Making your way there, you try to steer clear of other passengers. Perhaps you still have a little spare time, are hungry, and so start to scout out something to eat. Maybe you also decide to buy a small gift for somebody.

As you’re dodging passers-by, surveying the gastronomic situation and scanning for potential gifts, certain objects and events catch your attention. If you want to avoid colliding with the passers-by, you have to have them in view and predict their next movements at lightning speed; if you’re looking for something to eat, you’ll notice the station supermarket and the currywurst stand; if you’re keeping an eye out for a present, you’ll likely be expecting to find a florist or, depending on the intended recipient, a toy shop. You pay attention to various events as they play out in the station. After all, you’ll also have to be wary of pickpockets and swerve out of the way of passengers who are in a particular hurry. All of this presupposes that you recognize the scene as, say, a Monday morning in Cologne Central Station and embed the various individual events within the overall scene.

Scene change 1: Now imagine that a physicist and an engineer have positioned themselves at a suitably safe distance from the station. They want to know how much energy the system ‘Cologne Central Station’ consumes in a certain amount of time. In setting about their calculations, they take into account the energy balance of the commuters, as they too belong to the system, but they ignore their various interests and experiences. Perhaps the physicist even pieces together a picture of the situation that does without the concept of a human being altogether: for his estimates, he uses only concepts that map the material-energetic reality of the universe. If he’s up to speed on his subject, he’ll concentrate not only on electromagnetic radiation but also on so-called baryonic matter, the matter composed of atoms. As their names suggest, however, we don’t know enough about dark energy and dark matter for them to be included in such calculations. The physicist will therefore take into account neither absolutely everything in the highly complex system called ‘the universe’ nor absolutely everything that goes on in the observable scene. In short, this scene change involves complexity reduction across a number of dimensions.

Scene change 2: Making use of some (to us) unknown technology, a group of extra-terrestrials surveys the area of planet Earth that we know as Cologne Central Station. They don’t realize that humans live in the (deluded and even dangerous) belief that everything on Earth revolves around them. Not being humans themselves, however, they don’t share our interests or fears. And, consequently, they don’t know that the humans at Cologne Central Station attend to and orient themselves primarily in terms of the behaviour of their fellow humans. They investigate neither humans nor the purchasable goods in the station, nor the energy balance as controlled by humans; instead, they focus on objects and events that exist on an entirely different scale.

Perhaps their instruments operate at such high resolution that they’re effective on a smaller scale than anything currently accessible to our human researchers. Perhaps these extra-terrestrials are so small (considered relative to our dimensions) that they operate below the Planck scale – that is, on a scale where the laws of physics as we know them no longer apply in any straightforward sense. It’s quite possible that the extra-terrestrials go about their business by using completely different units of measurement. Who knows, perhaps the scale on which they operate is that of the reality observable to insects, so that what counts in their eyes is the number of insects per cubic metre?

At this point, we could keep on introducing scene change after scene change; certainly, more than you’d care to read about and more than I’ve the energy to come up with. For there are infinitely many possible ways of grasping any single scene, such as the scene that plays out at Cologne Central Station on a typical Monday morning. Corresponding to each of these possibilities is a reality with its given laws and sequences of events.

I call each of these infinitely many realities a field of sense.¹ A field of sense is an arrangement of objects where these objects hang together in a particular manner. I call the manner in which they hang together a sense.

Our senses (for example: sight, taste, hearing, etc.) belong to reality (see pp. 138ff.). Our senses (our sense modalities) too are ways for objects to hang together, such as in our subjective visual field. What I see in front of me right now involves my sense modalities, which together constitute my perspective. A seen scene is essentially related to sight. Our sight is the sense of such a scene. The same goes for something that we hear. When I hear that there’s a knock at the door, my hearing belongs to reality just as much as the knocking does. Our senses don’t peer into reality, as though through a keyhole; they are themselves fully paid up members of reality and thus participants in determining how things really are. Sensing is as real as it gets.

There are, of course, fields of sense that no thinker ever does or can know about. At any rate, we’ve no reason to rule out such fields. Only if there were an omniscient God would it be the case that all fields of sense are knowable. Yet even an omniscient God would have difficulties with the infinite proliferation of fields of sense: he would have to know not only all the fields of sense located outside of his own field of sense but his own field of sense too – else he wouldn’t really know everything. This raises a host of difficulties, which, since they’re a matter for philosophical theology, will not concern us any further, or not in this book at least.

(But just entertain the following little thought experiment: if God knows everything that is not God, and, moreover, knows himself too, then there is an overall domain that he knows: the domain whose members are God and the world (everything that is not God). But if God continually attends to both God and the world, does he also attend to how he continually attends to both God and the world – and thus to how he attends to how he attends to how he continually attends to both God and the world? Can God reflect on God and the world and, in doing so, reflect simultaneously on his reflection on God and the world? A bottomless barrel.)

The point of this whole exercise and of introducing the possibility of infinite scene changes is to draw your attention to how there is no privileged reality, no field of sense on the basis of which you could have a meaningful grasp and comprehension of all fields of sense. You cannot get totality in view, as getting anything at all in view presupposes some complexity reduction. There is no point of view to which absolutely everything is given. Even if you could solve the theological puzzle I just sketched, this would have little bearing on our human predicament, because we’re not God and thus not omniscient. In general, my philosophical approach recommends that we replace the notion that there is one world or one reality with the idea of an infinity of fields of sense, where these hang together in endlessly many ways. There is no such thing as ‘reality’ in the singular; rather, what there really is turns out to be an irreducible complexity that can never be captured by any allencompassing theory. Moreover, we cannot master this complexity by simply deploying a singular term such as reality or complexity.

This little introductory argument is designed to show how no investigation of even a single scene, however familiar it might be, can grasp everything that belongs to it. Every science contains within itself the possibility of a further scene change. And nobody can grasp a scene like our Monday morning at Cologne Central Station, together with all of its possible scene changes. Reality necessarily escapes our grasp to some extent – but, as I’ll be insisting, this in no way means that we cannot grasp true thoughts about a particular scene.

What is thinking?

Meet the protagonist of this book: thought. As a first approximation, we can already say that thought is a journey through fields of sense and that the aim of this journey is to provide us with an orientation within the infinite. This all depends on our capacity to grasp local facts, facts which obtain in a given field of sense concerning some range of objects or other. To unpack this a little: thinking is the grasping of thoughts. A thought is a content of thinking. It is that which one grasps. A given content of thinking is concerned with what occurs in a field of sense – for example, with what is presented in a scene involving a swimming pool. Thought contents have a form. They see to it that an object – say, someone who’s just dived into a pool – appears in a certain manner. Philosophers usually express this by saying that something is grasped as something. For example, I grasp someone who has just dived into a pool as a swimmer. Hence, I don’t try to rescue this person, but observe the scene in a more or less disinterested manner. Thoughts therefore have an object. The object of a thought is that which the thought is about. The content of a thought, by contrast, is the way in which the thought is about its object (how its object appears to a thinker, or what its object appears to a thinker as).

As I’ll explain later on (see pp. 216ff.), we cannot produce thoughts, but only receive them. Thoughts occur to us. We can only be receivers of thoughts, by tuning our thinking to the right frequency. In a similar vein, the American philosopher Mark Johnston (b. 1954) points out that we are not ‘producers of presen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Truth about Thought
• 2 Thought Engineering
• 3 The Digital Transformation of Society
• 4 Why Only Animals Think
• 5 Reality and Simulation
• The End of the Book – a Pathos-Laden Final Remark
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement