East Is East and West Is West
Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.
René Descartes walks into a restaurant and sits down for dinner. The waiter comes over and asks if he’d like an appetizer.
“No thank you,” says Descartes, “I’d just like to order dinner.”
“Would you like to hear our daily specials?” asks the waiter.
“No,” says Descartes, getting impatient.
“Would you like a drink before dinner?” the waiter asks.
Descartes is insulted, since he’s a teetotaler. “I think not!” he says indignantly, and POOF! he disappears.
There are two ways to view the questions we have been considering—converse Western and Eastern perspectives on the nature of consciousness and of reality. In the Western perspective, we start with a physical world that evolves patterns of information. After a few billion years of evolution, the entities in that world have evolved sufficiently to become conscious beings. In the Eastern view, consciousness is the fundamental reality; the physical world only comes into existence through the thoughts of conscious beings. The physical world, in other words, is the thoughts of conscious beings made manifest. These are of course simplifications of complex and diverse philosophies, but they represent the principal polarities in the philosophies of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.
The East-West divide on the issue of consciousness has also found expression in opposing schools of thought in the field of subatomic physics. In quantum mechanics, particles exist as what are called probability fields. Any measurement carried out on them by a measuring device causes what is called a collapse of the wave function, meaning that the particle suddenly assumes a particular location. A popular view is that such a measurement constitutes observation by a conscious observer, because otherwise measurement would be a meaningless concept. Thus the particle assumes a particular location (as well as other properties, such as velocity) only when it is observed. Basically particles figure that if no one is bothering to look at them, they don’t need to decide where they are. I call this the Buddhist school of quantum mechanics, because in it particles essentially don’t exist until they are observed by a conscious person.
There is another interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids such anthropomorphic terminology. In this analysis, the field representing a particle is not a probability field, but rather just a function that has different values in different locations. The field, therefore, is fundamentally what the particle is. There are constraints on what the values of the field can be in different locations, because the entire field representing a particle represents only a limited amount of information. That is where the word “quantum” comes from. The so-called collapse of the wave function, this view holds, is not a collapse at all. The wave function actually never goes away. It is just that a measurement device is also made up of particles with fields, and the interaction of the particle field being measured and the particle fields of the measuring device results in a reading of the particle being in a particular location. The field, however, is still present. This is the Western interpretation of quantum mechanics, although it is interesting to note that the more popular view among physicists worldwide is what I have called the Eastern interpretation.
There was one philosopher whose work spanned this East-West divide. The Austrian British thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) studied the philosophy of language and knowledge and contemplated the question of what it is that we can really know. He pondered this subject while a soldier in World War I and took notes for what would be his only book published while he was alive, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The work had an unusual structure, and it was only through the efforts of his former instructor, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, that it found a publisher in 1921. It became the bible for a major school of philosophy known as logical positivism, which sought to define the limits of science. The book and the movement surrounding it were influential on Turing and the emergence of the theory of computation and linguistics.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus anticipates the insight that all knowledge is inherently hierarchical. The book itself is arranged in nested and numbered statements. For example, the first four statements in the book are:
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
Another significant statement in the Tractatus—and one that Turing would echo—is this:
4.0031 All philosophy is a critique of language.
Essentially both Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the logical positivism movement assert that physical reality exists separate from our perception of it, but that all we can know of that reality is what we perceive with our senses—which can be heightened through our tools—and the logical inferences we can make from these sensory impressions. Essentially Wittgenstein is attempting to describe the methods and goals of science. The final statement in the book is number 7, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” The early Wittgenstein, accordingly, considers the discussion of consciousness as circular and tautological and therefore a waste of time.
The later Wittgenstein, however, completely rejected this approach and spent all of his philosophical attention talking about matters that he had earlier argued should be passed over in silence. His writings on this revised thinking were collected and published in 1953, two years after his death, in a book called Philosophical Investigations. He criticized his earlier ideas in the Tractatus, judging them to be circular and void of meaning, and came to the view that what he had advised that we not speak about was in fact all that was worth reflecting on. These writings heavily influenced the existentialists, making Wittgenstein the only figure in modern philosophy to be a major architect of two leading and contradictory schools of thought in philosophy.
What is it that the later Wittgenstein thought was worth thinking and talking about? It was issues such as beauty and love, which he recognized exist imperfectly as ideas in the minds of men. However, he writes that such concepts do exist in a perfect and idealized realm, similar to the perfect “forms” that Plato wrote about in the Platonic dialogues, another work that illuminated apparently contradictory approaches to the nature of reality.
One thinker whose position I believe is mischaracterized is the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. His famous “I think, therefore I am” is generally interpreted to extol rational thought, in the sense that “I think, that is I can perform logical thought, therefore I am worthwhile.” Descartes is therefore considered the architect of the Western rational perspective.