And Fire by Fire

Superstitious Nonsense asks about the last post:

So the answer here is that -some- of the form is present in the mind, but always an insufficient amount or accuracy that the knowledge will not be “physical”? You seem to be implying the part of the form that involves us in the self-reference paradox is precisely the part of the form that gives objects their separate, “physical” character. Is this fair? Certainly, knowing progressively more about an object does not imply the mental copy is becoming closer and closer to having a discrete physicality.

I’m not sure this is the best way to think about it. The self-reference paradox arises because we are trying to copy ourselves into ourselves, and thus we are adding something into ourselves, making the copy incomplete. The problem is not that there is some particular “part of the form” that we cannot copy, but that it is in principle impossible to copy it perfectly. This is different from saying that there is some specific “part” that cannot be copied.

Consider what happens when we make “non-physical” copies of something without involving a mind. Consider the image of a gold coin. There are certain relationships common to the image and to a gold coin in the physical world. So you could say we have a physical gold coin, and a non-physical one.

But wait. If the image of the coin is on paper, isn’t that a physical object? Or if the image is on your computer screen, isn’t your screen a physical object? And the image is just the colors on the screen, which are apparently just as “physical” (or non-physical) as the color of the actual coin. So why we would say that “this is not a physical coin?”

Again, as in the last post, the obvious answer is that the image is not made out of gold, while the physical coin is. But why not? Is it that the image is not accurate enough? If we made it more accurate, would it be made out of gold, or become closer to being made out of gold? Obviously not. This is like noting that a mental copy does not become closer and closer to being a physical one.

In a sense it is true that the reason the image of the coin is not physical is that it is not accurate enough. But that is because it cannot be accurate enough: the fact that it is an image positively excludes the copying of certain relationships. Some aspects can be copied, but others cannot be copied at all, as long as it is an image. On the other hand, you can look at this from the opposite direction: if you did copy those aspects, the image would no longer be an image, but a physical coin.

As a similar example, consider the copying of a colored scene into black and white. We can copy some aspects of the scene by using various shades of gray, but we cannot copy every aspect of the scene. There are simply not enough differences in a black and white image to reflect every aspect of a colored scene. The black and white image, as you make it more accurate, does not become closer to being colored, but this is simply because there are aspects of the colored scene that you never copy. If you do insist on copying those aspects, you will indeed make the black and white image into a colored image, and thus it will no longer be black and white.

The situation becomes significantly more complicated when we talk about a mind. In one way, there is an important similarity. When we say that the copy in the mind is “not physical,” that simply means that it is a copy in the mind, just as when we say that the image of the coin is not physical, it means that it is an image, made out of the stuff that images are made of. But just as the image is physical anyway, in another sense, so it is perfectly possible that the mind is physical in a similar sense. However, this is where things begin to become confusing.

Elsewhere, I discussed Aristotle’s argument that the mind is immaterial. Considering the cases above, we could put his argument in this way: the human brain is a limited physical object. So as long as the brain remains a brain, there are simply not enough potential differences in it to model all possible differences in the world, just as you cannot completely model a colored scene using black and white. But anything at all can be understood. Therefore we cannot be understanding by using the brain.

I have claimed myself that anything that can be, can be understood. But this needs to be understood generically, rather than as claiming that it is possible to understand reality in every detail simultaneously. The self-reference paradox shows that it is impossible in principle for a knower that copies forms into itself to understand itself in every aspect at once. But even apart from this, it is very obvious that we as human beings cannot understand every aspect of reality at once. This does not even need to be argued: you cannot even keep everything in mind at once, let alone understand every detail of everything. This directly suggests a problem with Aristotle’s argument: if being able to know all things suggests that the mind is immaterial, the obvious fact that we cannot know all things suggests that it is not.

Nonetheless, let us see what happens if we advance the argument on Aristotle’s behalf. Admittedly, we cannot understand everything at once. But in the case of the colored scene, there are aspects that cannot be copied at all into the black and white copy. And in the case of the physical coin, there are aspects that cannot be copied at all into the image. So if we are copying things into the brain, doesn’t that mean that there should be aspects of reality that cannot be copied at all into the mind? But this is false, since it would not only mean that we can’t understand everything, but it would also mean that there would be things that we cannot think about at all, and if it is so, then it is not so, because in that case we are right now talking about things that we supposedly cannot talk about.

Copying into the mind is certainly different from copying into a black and white scene or copying into a picture, and this does get at one of the differences. But the difference here is that the method of copying in the case of the mind is flexible, while the method of copying in the case of the pictures is rigid. In other words, we have a pre-defined method of copying in the case of the pictures that, from the beginning, only allows certain aspects to be copied. In the case of the mind, we determine the method differently from case to case, depending on our particular situation and the thing being copied. The result is that there is no particular aspect of things that cannot be copied, but you cannot copy every aspect at once.

In answer to the original question, then, the reason that the “mental copy” always remains mental is that you never violate the constraints of the mind, just as a black and white copy never violates the constraints of being black and white. But if you did violate the constraints of the black and white copy by copying every aspect of the scene, the image would become colored. And similarly, if you did violate the constraints of the mind in order to copy every aspect of reality, your mind would cease to be, and it would instead become the thing itself. But there is no particular aspect of “physicality” that you fail to copy: rather, you just ensure that one way or another you do not violate the constraints of the mind that you have.

Unfortunately, the explanation here for why the mind can copy any particular aspect of reality, although not every aspect at once, is rather vague. Perhaps a clearer explanation is possible? In fact, someone could use the vagueness to argue for Aristotle’s position and against mine. Perhaps my account is vague because it is wrong, and there is actually no way for a physical object to receive copied forms in this way.

Earth By Earth

In an earlier post I quoted Empedocles:

For ’tis by Earth we see Earth, by Water Water,

By Ether Ether divine, by Fire destructive Fire,

By Love Love, and Hate by cruel Hate.

I argued in that post that the mind does have something in common with what is known, and that this common thing is the form of the thing known. However, I took for granted that Empedocles is mistaken in assuming that the thing itself must be in common in order to be known.

I did not directly say why he is mistaken. If form makes a thing what it is, and the form of a thing known is in the mind, why does the mind not become that thing? If the form of earth is in your mind, then why is your mind not literally earth?

We will naturally be inclined to say that the form in your mind is apart from its proper matter, and that you need both form and matter to make a thing. And there is nothing wrong with this answer, as far as it goes, but it seems insufficient. Suppose you have a gold coin: what is its matter? The gold coin is presumably made out of atoms of gold, and since these atoms are not in your head, you do not see gold by gold. The problem is that atoms of gold also have some form, since this is just to say there is an answer when we ask, “What is this?”, and this will be true of anything whatever that you call matter. And there is nothing to prevent you from knowing that thing as well. There is nothing to prevent you from knowing the nature of gold atoms. And thus it seems that the matter will be present, and thus there should be actual gold in your mind.

Perhaps an Aristotelian will suggest that it is prime matter that is missing. But this answer will not work, because humans have this sort of matter in common with other things. And in any case, nothing is meant by “matter” in this sense except the ability to have the form. And since the knower can have the form, they have the ability to have the form, and thus matter. So nothing is missing, and the thing known should be literally in the knower.

Thus it appears that we have a reductio. Either my account of knowledge is mistaken, or earth should actually by known by earth, which it obviously is not.

The conclusion is only apparent, however. We can resolve it by going back to what I said about form in that post and the following one. Form is a network of relationships apt to make something one. But being one not only includes internal unity, but also separation from other things. For example, suppose we now have three gold coins, instead of one: each coin is one coin, and this depends on its parts being together, rather than in a loose heap of gold dust. But the fact that the coins are three depends on their separation from one another, and thus also the fact that each coin is “one” depends on that separation.

In other words, the form of a thing includes not only internal relationships, but also external relationships. This implies that to know the nature of a thing, one must know its external relationships. And to know a thing perfectly would require knowing both its internal and external relationships perfectly.

Now one of the things to which it is related is the very one who knows it. Thus, if the knower is to know the thing perfectly, they must perfectly understand the relationships between themselves and the thing. But this is not possible, for reasons explained in the post on self-reference. The person who attempts to know something perfectly is in the situation of someone attempting to draw a picture of themselves drawing a picture: to make a perfect copy of the gold coin, it is necessary to copy its context, which includes the knower. But this cannot be done; therefore perfect knowledge of the coin is impossible.

A different way to state the same analysis: “perfect copy” is a contradiction in terms, because such perfection would imply identity with the original, and thus not being a copy at all. In other words, perfect knowledge of a thing is impossible because perfect knowledge would imply, as in the argument of Empedocles, that one’s knowledge would literally be the thing known, and thus not knowledge at all.

Necessary Connection

In Chapter 7 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume says about the idea of “necessary connection”:

We have looked at every possible source for an idea of power or necessary connection, and have found nothing. However hard we look at an isolated physical episode, it seems, we can never discover discover anything but one event following another; we never find any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connection between it and its supposed effect. The same holds for the influence of mind on body: the mind wills, and then the body moves, and we observe both events; but we don’t observe– and can’t even conceive– the tie that binds the volition to the motion, i.e. the energy by which the mind causes the body to move. And the power of the will over its own faculties and ideas– i.e. over the mind, as distinct from the body– is no more comprehensible. Summing up, then: throughout the whole of nature there seems not to be a single instance of connection that is conceivable by us. All events seem to be entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem associated, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of anything that never appeared as an impression to our outward sense or inward feeling, we are forced to conclude that we have no idea of ‘connection’ or ‘power’ at all, and that those words– as used in philosophical reasonings or in common life– have absolutely no meaning.

This is not Hume’s final word on the matter, as we will see below, so this has to be taken with a grain of salt, even as a representation of his opinion. Nonetheless, consider this caricature of what he just said:

We have looked at every possible source for an idea of mduvvqi or pdnfhvdkdddd, and have found nothing. However hard we look at an isolated physical episode, it seems, we can never discover anything but events that can be described by perfectly ordinary words; we never find any mduvvqi involved, nor any pdnfhvkdddd.

We could take this to be making the point that “mduvvqi” and “pdnfhvdkdddd” are not words. Other than that, however, the paragraph itself is meaningless, precisely because those “words” are meaningless. It certainly does not make any deep (or shallow for that matter) metaphysical or physical point, nor any special point about the human mind. But Hume’s text is different, and the difference in question is a warning sign of Kantian confusion. If those words had “absolutely no meaning,” in fact, there would be no difference between Hume’s passage and our caricature. Those words are not meaningless, but meaningful, and Hume is even analyzing their meaning in order to supposedly determine that the words are meaningless.

Hume’s analysis in fact proceeds more or less in the following way. We know what it means to say that something is necessary, and it is not the same as saying that the thing always happens. Every human being we have ever seen was less than 20 feet tall. But is it necessary that human beings be less than 20 feet tall? This is a different question, and while we can easily experience someone’s being less than 20 feet tall, it is very difficult to see how we could possibly experience the necessity of this fact, if it is necessary. Hume concludes: we cannot possibly experience the necessity of it. Therefore we can have no idea of such necessity.

But Hume has just contradicted himself: it was precisely by understanding the concept of necessity that he was able to see the difficulty in the idea of experiencing necessity.

Nonetheless, as I said, this is not his final conclusion. A little later he gives a more nuanced account:

The source of this idea of a necessary connection among events seems to be a number of similar instances of the regular pairing of events of these two kinds; and the idea cannot be prompted by any one of these instances on its own, however comprehensively we examine it. But what can a number of instances contain that is different from any single instance that is supposed to be exactly like them? Only that when the mind experiences many similar instances, it acquires a habit of expectation: the repetition of the pattern affects it in such a way that when it observes an event of one of the two kinds it expects an event of the other kind to follow. So the feeling or impression from which we derive our idea of power or necessary connection is a feeling of connection in the mind– a feeling that accompanies the imagination’s habitual move from observing one event to expecting another of the kind that usually follows it. That’s all there is to it. Study the topic from all angles; you will never find any other origin for that idea.

Before we say more, we should concede that this is far more sensible than the claim that the idea of necessity “has absolutely no meaning.” Hume is now conceding that it does have meaning, but claiming that the meaning is about us, not about the thing. When we see someone knock a glass off a table, we perhaps feel a certainty that it will fall and hit the floor. Experiencing that feeling of certainty, he says, is the source of the idea of “necessity.” This is not an unreasonable hypothesis.

However, Hume is also implicitly making a metaphysical argument here which is somewhat less sensible. Our feelings of certainty and uncertainty are subjective qualities of our minds, he suggests, not objective features of the things. Therefore necessity as an objective feature does not and cannot exist. This is not unrelated to his mistaken claim that we cannot know that the future will be similar to the past, even with probability.

What is the correct account here? In fact we already know, from the beginning of the conversation, that “necessary” and “possible” are meaningful words. We also know that in fact we use them to describe objective features of the world. But which features? Attempting to answer this question is where Hume’s approach is pretty sensible. Hume is not mistaken that all of our knowledge is from experience, and ultimately from the senses. He seems to identify experience with sense experience too simplistically, but he is not mistaken that all experience is at least somewhat similar to sense experience; feeling sure that two and two make four is not utterly unlike seeing something red. We want to say that there is something in common there, “something it is like,” to experience one or the other. But if this is the case, it would be reasonable to extend what we said about the senses to intellectual experiences. “The way red looks” cannot, as such, be an objective feature of a thing, but a thing can be objectively red, in such a way that “being red,” together with the nature of the senses, explains why a thing looks red. In a similar way, certainty and uncertainty, insofar as they are ways we experience the world, cannot be objective features of the world as such. Nonetheless, something can be objectively necessary or uncertain, in such a way that “being necessary” or otherwise, together with the nature of our minds, explains why it seems certain or uncertain to us.

There will be a similarity, however. The true nature of red might be quite strange in comparison to the experience of seeing red, as for example it might consist of surface reflectance properties. In a similar way, the true nature of necessity, once it is explained, might be quite strange to us compared to the experience of being certain or uncertain. But that it can be explained is quite certain itself, since the opposite claim would fall into Hume’s original absurdity. There are no hidden essences.

Being and Unity II

Content warning: very obscure.

This post follows up on an earlier post on this topic, as well on what was recently said about real distinction. In the latter post, we applied the distinction between the way a thing is and the way it is known in order to better understand distinction itself. We can obtain a better understanding of unity in a similar way.

As was said in the earlier post on unity, to say that something is “one” does not add anything real to the being of the thing, but it adds the denial of the division between distinct things. The single apple is not “an apple and an orange,” which are divided insofar as they are distinct from one another.

But being distinct from divided things is itself a certain way of being distinct, and consequently all that was said about distinction in general will apply to this way of being distinct as well. In particular, since being distinct means not being something, which is a way that things are understood rather than a way that they are (considered precisely as a way of being), the same thing applies to unity. To say that something is one does not add something to the way that it is, but it adds something to the way that it is understood. This way of being understood is founded, we argued, on existing relationships.

We should avoid two errors here, both of which would be expressions of the Kantian error:

First, the argument here does not mean that a thing is not truly one thing, just as the earlier discussion does not imply that it is false that a chair is not a desk. On the contrary, a chair is in fact not a desk, and a chair is in fact one chair. But when we say or think, “a chair is not a desk,” or “a chair is one chair,” we are saying these things in some way of saying, and thinking them in some way of thinking, and these ways of saying and thinking are not ways of being as such. This in no way implies that the statements themselves are false, just as “the apple seems to be red,” does not imply that the apple is not red. Arguing that the fact of a specific way of understanding implies that the thing is falsely understood would be the position described by Ayn Rand as asserting, “man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.”

Second, the argument does not imply that the way things really are is unknown and inaccessible to us. One might suppose that this follows, since distinction cannot exist apart from someone’s way of understanding, and at the same time no one can understand without making distinctions. Consequently, someone might argue, there must be some “way things really are in themselves,” which does not include distinction or unity, but which cannot be understood. But this is just a different way of falling into the first error above. There is indeed a way things are, and it is generally not inaccessible to us. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, it would be a contradiction to assert the existence of anything entirely unknowable to us.

Our discussion, being in human language and human thought, naturally uses the proper modes of language and thought. And just as in Mary’s room, where her former knowledge of color is a way of knowing and not a way of sensing, so our discussion advances by ways of discussion, not by ways of being as such. This does not prevent the way things are from being an object of discussion, just as color can be an object of knowledge.

Having avoided these errors, someone might say that nothing of consequence follows from this account. But this would be a mistake. It follows from the present account that when we ask questions like, “How many things are here?”, we are not asking a question purely about how things are, but to some extent about how we should understand them. And even when there is a single way that things are, there is usually not only one way to understand them correctly, but many ways.

Consider some particular question of this kind: “How many things are in this room?” People might answer this question in various ways. John Nerst, in a previous discussion on this blog, seemed to suggest that the answer should be found by counting fundamental particles. Alexander Pruss would give a more complicated answer, since he suggests that large objects like humans and animals should be counted as wholes (while also wishing to deny the existence of parts, which would actually eliminate the notion of a whole), while in other cases he might agree to counting particles. Thus a human being and an armchair might be counted, more or less, as 1 + 10^28 things, namely counting the human being as one thing and the chair as a number of particles.

But if we understand that the question is not, and cannot be, purely about how things are, but is also a question about how things should be understood, then both of the above responses seem unreasonable: they are both relatively bad ways of understanding the things in the room, even if they both have some truth as well. And on the other hand, it is easy to see that “it depends on how you count,” is part of the answer. There is not one true answer to the question, but many true answers that touch on different aspects of the reality in the room.

From the discussion with John Nerst, consider this comment:

My central contention is that the rules that define the universe runs by themselves, and must therefore be self-contained, i.e not need any interpretation or operationalization from outside the system. As I think I said in one of the parts of “Erisology of Self and Will” that the universe must be an automaton, or controlled by an automaton, etc. Formal rules at the bottom.

This is isn’t convincing to you I guess but I suppose I rule out fundamental vagueness because vagueness implies complexity and fundamental complexity is a contradiction in terms. If you keep zooming in on a fuzzy picture you must, at some point, come down to sharply delineated pixels.

Among other things, the argument of the present post shows why this cannot be right. “Sharply delineated pixels” includes the distinction of one pixel from another, and therefore includes something which is a way of understanding as such, not a way of being as such. In other words, while intending to find what is really there, apart from any interpretation, Nerst is directly including a human interpretation in his account. And in fact it is perfectly obvious that anything else is impossible, since any account of reality given by us will be a human account and will thus include a human way of understanding. Things are a certain way: but that way cannot be said or thought except by using ways of speaking or thinking.

Modernism Responds to Pius X

Earlier I quoted Pope Pius X against the Modernists:




Agnosticism its Philosophical Foundation




They remark in the note on the name “Modernist”:









« Utrum tuto negari, aut saltem in dubium revocari possit
« unum sunt? »
Omnibus diligentissimo examine perpensis, praehabito que
DD. Consultorum voto, iidem Emi Cardinales respondendum
mandarunt: « Negative ».


Pope Pius X complains in Pascendi:














Knowing Knowing is Secondary

It would be a mistake in general to suppose that one could derive all important truths from a few first principles, but one particular way to fall into this error would be to think that one can or should derive metaphysics or other branches of scientific or philosophical knowledge from epistemology. One reason for this is implied by the previous post: insofar as we come to know knowledge from a knowledge of the known or knowable, it is never possible to begin by thinking about knowledge, but one must begin by thinking about things.

Descartes’s discussion of the scenario of the evil demon appears to be an example of this error, insofar as he seems to suggest that his first knowledge is of the fact that he is thinking something. In fact, it is quite evident that one must know oneself in order to have the thought, “I am thinking,” and that one would never think about thinking without first thinking about something else.

Still, Descartes’s adoption of this error is only partial. He does realize that this is not the natural order of coming to know. Thus in the Synopsis of his Meditations he says:

Finally in the Sixth I distinguish the action of the understanding from that of the imagination; the marks by which this distinction is made are described. I here show that the mind of man is really distinct from the body, and at the same time that the two are so closely joined together that they form, so to speak, a single thing. All the errors which proceed from the senses are then surveyed, while the means of avoiding them are demonstrated, and finally all the reasons from which we may deduce the existence of material things are set forth. Not that I judge them to be very useful in establishing that which they prove, to wit, that there is in truth a world, that men possess bodies, and other such things which never have been doubted by anyone of sense; but because in considering these closely we come to see that they are neither so strong nor so evident as those arguments which lead us to the knowledge of our mind and of God; so that these last must be the most certain and most evident facts which can fall within the cognizance of the human mind. And this is the whole matter that I have tried to prove in these Meditations, for which reason I here omit to speak of many other questions which I dealt incidentally in this discussion.
Descartes cannot be excused from error here insofar as he asserts that “the knowledge of our mind and of God” are “the most certain and most evident facts” that we can know, but he does realize that people do not actually deduce the existence of an external world from the fact that they think. This is why he admits that such things “never have been doubted by anyone of sense.”