Episode #039 ... The Limits of Empiricism
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For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophizethis.org. For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophizethispodcast, all one word, on X at I am Stephen West. Be well, and I hope you love the show today.

Maybe the best place to start the show today is to talk about this really confusing moment in time that we've been talking about for about the last seven or eight episodes. You know, all of these thinkers that are living relatively at about the same time period as each other. Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. These philosophers, and all the humans for that matter that were in the know at the time, were living in a very weird place. That's really the best way to put it. At this time...

There was a giant change in the way that these thinkers viewed themselves as humans in the natural world, and that fact created a level of weirdness that was just unprecedented. And the reason why it was unprecedented is because it was being driven forth by a couple different inventions that just, before these guys were alive, they just didn't exist yet. One of those inventions was the telescope.

With the telescope during this time period, for the first time in history, we're looking out into the vast expanses of space. Imagine how that must have been.

And the more we looked out there, and the more sophisticated these telescopes got, the more information we got. And that information categorically reinforced the fact that Earth was very, very small. Practically a speck of dust in this giant sea. Oh, and not only is it not big, it's far from the center of the universe. The universe even has a center.

The point is, as we use these telescopes to just gaze deeper and deeper into space, slowly realizing the absolute enormity of it all, we started realizing that this tiny blue speck that we call Earth might not be as significant as what we initially thought it was. Now, the other invention that was really driving this weirdness home was the microscope.

The thinking was, look, we may be an incredibly small little speck in the grand scheme of things, but we do have some things on this planet, and let's magnify it a hundred times and see if we can get some insight into what reality is truly made out of. And what these thinkers were finding as they're putting this stuff under the microscope is that entire worlds existed underneath what we could see with the naked eye.

The deeper and deeper they went into these microworlds, they realized that microworlds existed inside of microworlds, and they started to realize how strange this reality is that before, we had no idea existed before our very eyes. But as we'll find out over the course of this episode, that really is the problem, isn't it? Our eyes. Personally, I kind of have mixed feelings about eyes.

They're so great and yet so terrible at the same time. Look, I feel like you guys are going to think I'm railing against eyes this episode. I feel like I need to balance it out. Equal time to the pro-eye side of things and the anti-eye side of things. On one hand, eyes are pretty amazing things, all right?

They are these completely unique jelly-filled spheres, right, that absorb the light around you and send signals to your brain that creates this incredible map of the world around you so that you can walk around in it safely. Absolutely incredible. I mean, why do we have eyes if not for this reason? And if you think about it, eyes do that thankless job pretty darn well. I mean, you can see perfectly well enough to do anything that you need to do to survive on this planet.

Like, as you're walking through the woods, your eyes work more than well enough to determine whether this is a poisonous mushroom or a harmless mushroom. You know, you can see more than well enough to determine whether there's any threats around you. You know, you're not going to get trampled by a buffalo. Your eyes work well enough to make that happen. You can even see well enough to determine whether members of your species are attractive or not. This is what eyes were designed for, and they do it pretty well. On the other hand, that's not the only thing we use our eyes for, is it?

For example, if we wanted to, say for instance, understand the nature of matter itself better, or gain certainty about the fabric of reality, if we only have our eyes to do that, well, they're not so incredible anymore, are they? Yeah, they're great at knowing whether a buffalo's right in front of you, but when it comes to understanding the fabric of reality, that's just not what they were designed to do. They have certain limitations.

Well, these very real limitations of our senses plagued these 17th century philosophers tremendously, and we're going to talk a lot more about why. But before we go deeper into that, I want to ask a question that's going to set the stage and help us understand what they were feeling like. This is a very big question. What is reality? It almost sounds like I'm trolling you guys. Like, how do you even answer that question? It's honestly such a weird question that most people, when you ask them it, they usually look at you like you're a little crazy.

Well, one common theory would be reality is what is real, right? Reality is what's right in front of me. It's what I can see, smell, touch. I mean, after all, when you think of something that's not reality, you're thinking of somebody daydreaming about a fantasy world, right? You're thinking of people playing video games. You're thinking about movies and TV shows.

Maybe somebody on some sort of hallucinogenic drug. That's not reality. Reality is not fleeting in and out of existence, right? For example, I'm looking at my arm right now. My arm is not a fleeting thing. It's not coming and going out of my awareness. I see it right there. I can touch it. Therefore, this person would say, my arm is real. But you see the glaring problem here, right?

You are perceiving reality through your eyes. These eyes were designed to create a map of the world accurate enough for you to eat, sleep, reproduce, and survive as long as possible. These eyes weren't designed to see what reality truly is. This is something we're all familiar with. I mean, we all know the world is made up of trillions of these little tiny particles called atoms, and they're constantly moving around. But when you look at a table in your room, or a tree outside, or even your arm for that matter,

You don't see those atoms moving around, do you? Really, why should you? What's going on at an atomic level is just not that important to you. Being able to see those atoms moving is not going to make you more or less capable of eating, sleeping, reproducing, or surviving. So why would your eyes be designed to see that? Why would your eyes evolve to see that? But then again, in reality, they are moving.

And just to illustrate how extreme this can get, each of those atoms that's constantly moving around are made up of 99.9% empty space. Just consider for a second that the world you're walking around in, the world your eyes are telling you is made up of entirely stationary, completely solid objects, is actually made up at the micro level of 99.9% empty space, and that 0.1% is constantly moving.

Again, the point is, human eyes create a map of the world that is accurate enough, but far from actual reality. So what do we do to make up for this, if we want to truly understand what reality is? Well, we use special tools and instruments, like the microscope or the telescope, to augment our sense experiences to be able to get a more accurate view of that actual reality. But what is that actual reality? That's the question, right?

Do our senses, being so flawed, prevent us from ever truly experiencing it? This is the weird place that these thinkers like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz found themselves in. Just think about the task these guys had ahead of them. Before their time period, we used to do something very different to arrive at certainty about what caused things to happen in the natural world. We thought we had it all figured out. Talked about it before. We grew complacent. Turns out, Aristotle may not have known everything, after all.

Turns out some dude in a sand dune channeling God through him wasn't the best way to arrive at absolute certainty about things. So when these new thinkers were faced with the task of finding a science that could arrive at understanding about causes in the natural world with certainty, they really took the task seriously. They weren't willing to just compromise here. They didn't want to end up where we were before. They didn't know if it was possible.

But they wanted to try to find some system that we could use to arrive at absolute certainty about things. And one of the biggest problems they were running into is what we're talking about right now. No matter how flawless the system that they came up with was, it was still ultimately going to have to be implemented by humans. Humans that are biased and they make mistakes. But more importantly, humans that are looking at the results of the experiments through very flawed senses from the get-go.

It's funny, if you think about the modern religion versus science debate that's going on, and you think about it as like a play, then one really common recurring character is the person that says, where's the evidence about stuff? Where's the evidence? Fact is, there are a lot of people in modern times that highly value empirical data, right?

And on one hand, it totally makes sense. I mean, a lot of the BS that people peddle has to do with some sort of magical force that you can't really see or hear or touch or anything like that. But it's also funny to think about the fact, the hypocrisy, that like...

When some ostensibly crazy person gives one of their transcendent religious experiences, you know, someone says, I was sitting in my front room and Jesus came down through the ceiling and he told me that he is the son of God and that I need to stop being so mean to my neighbors and that I need to start going to church and get 10% of my income, you know?

That guy makes these giant claims, and these people hook him up to an MRI machine and a polygraph test, and it shows that he truly believes what he's saying. He believes that it happened. Now, there's a certain type of evidence-based thinker in today's world that would say, no, I don't think that actually happened. Obviously, his brain was malfunctioning, right? His eyes were messing up. Maybe he drank some Pine Sol right before that happened, and his senses were playing tricks on him.

It's funny because if you ask that same person why they don't believe in God, they would say, well, where is he? I've never seen the guy. If he just came down and talked to me or told me that he exists or I could see him or touch him, then I know for sure that he exists. It's kind of funny to think about. My overall point is let's have some respect for the task that these thinkers put themselves through, all right? These people in the 17th century weren't satisfied with the way that science was being done.

And in many ways, they wouldn't be satisfied with the way that science is done today. After all, science is not perfect, right? Look, don't get me wrong, I'm not railing against science here. It certainly may be better than blindly believing something that seems reasonable to you and then trying to find good reasons to believe it. But science is far from perfect if you're trying to be absolutely certain about things, right?

Now, we're going to talk about some of the inherent flaws with what we call science today, but I want to be sure we understand the fact that these thinkers didn't know whether it was possible to be certain. They didn't know whether they would ever arrive at certainty, but they were trying to access true reality. Whatever that matter or physical reality or spiritual reality is that's on the other side of this crude map of the world that our eyes create.

This reality was where they were looking to for certainty, because it was obviously very different in reality than how we perceive it, and they wanted to access that reality. This problem is commonly referred to in philosophy as the veil of perception. We can't get past this veil between how we perceive the world and how it actually is. Now we're going to come back to that, but first let's talk about some of these inherent problems that these thinkers were addressing when trying to use science to arrive at certainty, all right?

Maybe the best place to start is let's think back to the earliest of humans. Imagine yourself being one of these early, early humans. They found themselves existing within this natural world. They looked around them and they saw stuff happening. Lightning comes down from the clouds. Why does that happen? Your female counterpart spontaneously spawns a baby. Why did that happen? You see old meat laying on the ground and you eat it. And then for two weeks afterwards, you feel terrible.

Why does that happen? Stuff is happening all the time all around them, and understanding what causes those things to happen can give you a real edge when it comes to survival. So this is something humans wanted desperately.

Go back far enough, and humans were almost entirely ignorant of what caused things to happen in the natural world. And they wanted to find some way to organize this stuff with some level of confidence that they were correct. Now when we do science, this is basically what we're trying to do. We're just much further along at it than the earlier humans were. We're ultimately trying to arrive at certain truth to make sense of this natural world. But how do we arrive at truth?

Well, let's talk about a couple different ways that humans throughout history have commonly tried to arrive at truth, or at least tried to convince people that something was true or not. Let's talk about induction versus deduction. Deduction, or I guess I could just say deduction. I don't know why I gotta say it, enunciate it like that. What we refer to as deduction is the process of starting with something that you think is true, and then you apply that truth to some individual specific case.

That individual case reinforces it, and something is deemed to be true because of it. For example, a police officer shows up at a traffic accident, and he sees certain things. He sees glass on the ground over here, he sees the positioning of the cars after the accident, he sees skid marks leading up to this section of the road, he sees the person lying in a bloody heap over here.

From this scene of the accident, and certain truths that he holds after a long career of seeing accident scenes and figuring out what happened, he deduces what happened there. Now this may be an effective way of finding out what happened at a crime scene, but it runs into problems when trying to arrive at certainty. We can understand that. Now the other way of doing things is called induction.

Induction is what we use in modern science. Induction is inferring a general truth based on individual experiments or cases or previously established general truths. For example, if you wanted to arrive at the truth about the moisture present in dogs' noses, do all dogs have wet noses, for example? How would we go about finding that out?

Well, I could start with one experiment myself right here in this house. I could go to my dog Charlie, I could touch his nose, and I could realize it's wet. So, so far, all dogs have wet noses to me. I could spend years of my life, theoretically, going door to door, conducting thousands of experiments, checking to see if every dog in the city of Seattle has a wet nose. And let's say they all do, just for the sake of our example. Can we conclude at that point, for certain, that all dogs have wet noses?

Now, no one has the time or the patience or the lack of a social life to go around and check every single dog in the world to see if it has a wet nose. But even if we did, and even if every dog did have a wet nose, could we use induction and say now that all dogs have wet noses as a rule? Well, in modern science, we would. I mean, for all intents and purposes, we're pretty sure all dogs have wet noses at that point. But are we certain of that?

How do we know the same laws of nature apply on Mars or Jupiter or some other distant planet where dogs don't have wet noses, right? How can we be sure that the next dog born on planet Earth is not going to be the exception to the rule and it's going to throw a monkey wrench in everything? We can't know. Now, to us listening to this podcast, this may not be a big deal.

Look, there's a lot of useful stuff that you can derive from the fact that every dog on planet Earth has wet noses. And barring that super unlikely chance that it's proven wrong one day, we do that. But to someone trying to develop a system to arrive at absolute certainty, this is a huge problem. The way we do science now can never be trusted to arrive at certainty about something, because we're limited to the things we have on this planet to experiment on.

These thinkers weren't doubting whether this way of doing things might eventually lead us to things that were true. They saw it all the time. They didn't doubt whether this way is much better than any other way we've done it in the past, or it's the best thing we have going. But let's call a spade a spade. It's far from certainty about things. And that's what they were aiming for. The only way you're able to have constant scientific progress, which is great, is if earlier things that you thought were true are disproven.

The way I like to think about this age of empiricism, as they call it, is that no matter how good a system is, we are ultimately limited because it's executed by humans existing on planet Earth during this time period, right? Those are huge handicaps when it comes to arriving at absolute truth, certainty about things. Again, the eyes and ears and nose are great at doing what they were designed to do,

but they're absolutely terrible tools if you're trying to understand the nature of reality with any certainty they just aren't the right tools for the job really look if you were given a wrench and someone wants you to tighten up some bolts with it it's going to work perfectly but if they ask you to use the wrench to saw through a piece of wood

It's going to get ugly real fast, all right? You might be able to do it eventually, but it's going to be a longer, much less clean process than if you had a saw, for example. That's all these people are saying is that these tools that we were given weren't designed to do what we're trying to do with them.

The limitations caused by our senses when it comes to arriving at certainty about things was something that deeply concerned all of these thinkers in the 17th century. This is why Leibniz and his ideas of truths of necessity and truths of fact, that's why they were so awesome. Science helps us arrive at truths of fact, but those are far from certain. Is certainty possible when we talk about truths of necessity?

Where the terms themselves make specific qualities certain? Remember, all bachelors are unmarried, right? Can that said to be something that we know for certain, then? The point is, these thinkers were all really interested in these problems, and they all came up with different approaches to try to address them. One of these approaches that became very important in philosophy was by Mr. John Locke himself.

In case we haven't already realized this, he was an absolute genius. You know, not only laid the foundations for the Constitution, his whole tabula rasa or blank slate theory, but also something that we touched on very briefly before was his idea of primary versus secondary qualities of things. And this is incredibly important when talking about this issue of empiricism. What he's trying to address here is what lies beyond that veil of perception that we were talking about.

Whenever we use these flawed senses that we have to look out into the world and we see something or we smell something or we hear something, whatever that thing is that we're looking at, Locke says that it has both primary and secondary qualities. Let me give an example. I'm sitting here at my desk right now and I'm looking at an iPhone sitting on my desk. It's my wife's iPhone. It's encased in a green iPhone case.

Because you all know, right before I started recording this, I went feverishly through my wife's emails to see if she was cheating on me. Because I'm an insecure, damaged person. I'm just kidding. I don't actually know why it's in here. You know, I just realized if that thing rings while I'm recording this, I'm going to be very off-putting.

So let me hurry up. When I look at the iPhone sitting on the table in front of me, there are certain things that John Locke would say I can think I know about it based on what my senses are telling me. There seems to be only one iPhone there, right? There's not two or three iPhones. It seems to be sitting still. It's not moving around. It seems to be smooth, sleek on the sides, glossy maybe. Not rough like concrete or something like that. That's the distinction, smooth versus rough.

It seems to be about the thickness and size of a checkbook, and it seems to be rectangular. Now, all those things to John Locke would be considered primary qualities of the iPhone.

On the other hand, me looking at the iPhone and saying that it's green, or me picking up the iPhone and smelling it, or me hearing the iPhone ring at me, or I guess, hopefully not, me eating the iPhone and describing to you guys what it tastes like, the subtle notes of caramel inside of the iPhone, these can be seen as what John Locke calls secondary qualities. Now this is a really good question to ask yourself.

When you look at something and it has color, you know, when you see a green iPhone sitting on the table, what is that greenness? Does that greenness exist inside of the matter at some level that makes up the iPhone? Is there something in the matter itself that is green? Or is greenness created when your eye looks at that iPhone and it's perceiving some interaction between light and some specific arrangement of what matter is underneath the veil of perception?

Now, to these thinkers in the 17th century, this is a big, big question. And it had huge implications about what that actual reality was underneath it. And to talk about the primary and secondary qualities, just to finish talking about that, as we talked about before, Locke was a huge proponent of Boyle. Remember, in his ideas that the real fabric of reality are these tiny, colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless corpuscles, he called them, of matter.

And the arrangement of these core puzzles explain the primary qualities of something. You know, I see the iPhone as rectangular because there is some rectangular arrangement of these core puzzles in that actual reality. Now, on the other hand, when I experience it being green...

This isn't because the core puzzles themselves are green, it's because of some arrangement of them interacting with light in my eyes. And Locke said that because all these secondary qualities are explainable only by referring to the primary qualities, secondary qualities can't be said to be part of that reality behind the veil of perception. Now if this is confusing on the surface, John Locke gives an incredible example, absolutely genius. What if we had a knife that was made out of steel?

Now, if somebody comes up to you with that knife and they stab you in the chest with it, and you feel pain, well, you wouldn't say that pain was somehow cooped up inside of the knife and when they stabbed you it came out of the knife. No, you'd say that the knife, the physical primary qualities of that knife, stabbed inside of you, and your senses are interacting with it. Well, all this brings us to the question that Barclay famously offered a solution to. By the way, Barclay, uh...

You know, this is kind of an embarrassing admission of mine, but I guess it kind of showcases how I do philosophy personally. Have you guys ever read something in a book, like a word, and you've read it a hundred times, and you just kind of assume that it's pronounced one way, but then you hear somebody say it and it's pronounced a completely different way? For the longest time, I just knew that the school Berkeley was named after this guy, George Barkley, and I assumed that his name was pronounced Berkeley, and I've said on this podcast multiple times, Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley.

And I was talking to somebody this week, and they said, no, it's Barkley. I said, no, it's Berkeley. The school's named after him. And he said, no, it's Barkley. That's how it's pronounced. Those people don't know what they're talking about. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for my ignorance. You know, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I learned a lot every time I did one of these episodes. But his name is Barkley. George Barkley.

In fact, he was made into a bishop, so he's sometimes referred to as Bishop Barclay. And he's a lot like Leibniz because he's this religious guy, and he's faced with the problem of reconciling this new mechanistic way of viewing the universe with the notion of God. He's also very concerned with that, as Leibniz was. Now, this whole situation is...

So ridiculous to me. All right. It's it's it's honestly like a corporation, a big corporation calls in corporate downsizers, like a team of downsizers that come in and they look at how everything operates and they look at how everyone does their job and they check to see who's important in the office because eventually they're looking for people to eliminate to cut costs.

And this whole situation is kind of like Barclay and Leibniz are people that are just trying to convince these corporate downsizers that God really is important around the workplace. Keep him around. I promise you, we need him around here. Barclay really wants God to be required in his view of the universe. All right. So he starts from this premise and he arrives at an idea that would spark a chain of ideas that would change the philosophical world. Incredibly influential.

This idea, when you first hear it, may not seem revolutionary, but trust me, it really shakes things up. And since we've spent the entire show today talking about empiricism and the problems that come up when trying to arrive at certainty, you guys, more than most people that study philosophy, are going to understand fully why Berkeley arrives at this conclusion. The extended explanation of this is going to have to wait until next episode, but let me give you the basic idea so that you have something awesome to think about throughout the week.

If we have this pesky veil of perception that we have to deal with all the time, if there is this world as it truly is underneath this flawed map of reality, you know, this idea in our minds of what reality is created by our senses, then we never actually directly experience that true reality underneath, do we? No, all we ever experience is that idea of reality.

So, instead of trying to explain and get a hold of what lies beneath those ideas, Barclay asked, why do we even need to assume that something exists underneath the ideas we perceive? Look, isn't it more reasonable to conclude that only the ideas themselves exist? I mean, really, that's the only thing we have any kind of interaction with. Is it reasonable to conclude that to be is to be perceived?

Look forward to getting deep into this next time on Philosophize This. Have a good week. Talk to you soon.