Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The other thing I would say, or actually there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.
And we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being. Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel.
They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that There really is a reality. Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns that we're not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.
Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. but they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example, has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later. Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that.
So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things.
right it's just that if i happen to encounter dead rotting things then certain chemicals will be laughing and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality. And that takes you down the skeptical road versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.
Right, versus saying that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive. And that thing is all of the... the empiricists are saying. Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set, I came to the slab with a background set, you came with a different background set.
And we start to say, what all goes into that background set?
Well, I think that's where philosophy is important. And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on. You know, I have a body and it's all worked out. And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties, but I think at a very general level.
And I think the philosophers have to work hand in hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists because and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy is it's not a very strong complaint but that they uh they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.
So it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way. But the other thing, though, I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.
So to say, for example, you know, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens or there's something moves low to the ground and there's a direct automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about connection to the spine and your body reacts in a certain way.
I want to say that's a good thing that has happened to human beings, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice or a bad thing.
And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality and so forth. Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive.
They certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life. And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.
So emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, have said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things. The enemy of reason. That's right. So they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.
So this is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins sense. Yeah, yeah.
That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it.
No, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that is... I think that's a dangerous formulation. I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says. It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there. And that I have to go through this narrative to get to reality. Like a screen. That's right.
And it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. But also, what this narrative is, it's got a huge amount of stuff built into it. All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery terms and so forth. What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality. If... the narrative is true. So sometimes narratives get reality right.
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