Embracing Anti-Foundationalism: Why I Reject the Single Foundation

  I stumbled across anti-foundationalism and thought - wow, that's me as well. Don't be taken aback by the "anti" - something that has no place really in my dictionary. As often, it might not be the best choice of word for what it means. Foundations are important, but they're inevitably tied to a context. It is the single foundation that is the problem.

The Discovery

I got alerted to anti-foundationalism listening to Carlo Rovelli on the TOE (Theory of Everything) podcast - one that I highly recommend. Watch the episode here (particularly around 1h15m).

I see myself at the start of a journey trying to understand and get into the philosophical way of talking about stuff. As I said before, there is a lot I don't know (yet) and I'm only waking up to position myself in a clear way.

I would like to share a few observations around anti-foundationalism without going too deep into detail. I don't feel ready for that at this point in time, still too much of a basic learner.

What Is Anti-Foundationalism?

Searching for "What is anti-foundationalism in philosophy" on a major search engine gave an AI overview starting with:

 "Anti-foundationalism is a philosophical position that rejects the idea that there is a single, absolute foundation for knowledge or philosophy."

I directly subscribe to that. Not in the sense that it is not possible, but in the sense that we can't say due to the subjective way we experience reality around us, that we are part of the cosmos. What we discover about the world around us is nothing more than a shared view of individual agents within.

  What Anti-Foundationalism Rejects

When I first executed the search it listed a number of common beliefs that anti-foundationalists (as a heterogeneous group) hold, however subsequent execution of the same search replaced it with what it rejects. I feel happier staying away from 'beliefs' as it feels a slippery slope to me. I see beliefs as assumptions, current working hypotheses rather than anything more:

  • The idea that knowledge is certain
  • The idea that knowledge is based on pure reason or experience
  • The idea that there are infallible basic beliefs
  • The idea that there is a fundamental belief or principle that grounds knowledge

I subscribe to anti-foundationalism because I decide not to wear the 'tinted glasses' of foundationalism, the restrictions it comes with when trying to make sense of the world around us. I am completely happy for others to take a foundational stance, I respect and support this diversity.

Webs of Meaning

During my limited research into anti-foundationalism I also found a PDF by Mark Bevir that looks like being published in The Oxford Handbook of British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I enjoyed reading this introduction 'What is anti-foundationalism?', the politics side I am not really interested in at the moment. I found this paragraph rather interesting in the context here:

"The most obvious implications of anti-foundationalism are perhaps meaning holism and anti-representationalism. Given that we cannot have pure experiences, our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation. Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world since our experiences of those objects must in part be ones that we construct using our prior theories. Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not have a one to one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather form webs."

  This idea of webs rather than foundations resonates deeply with how I experience understanding - not as building blocks stacked on a solid base, but as interconnected networks of meaning that shift and evolve with new experiences and insights.

 

Am I a Libertarian?

What I most value are personal freedoms.
Freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom of speech.

Moreover, I believe we all have a right to a basic living standard and a right not to be judged.
Nobody chooses where they want to be born, what body they are borne into,
nor the type of upbringing and experiences that brought them into adulthood.
I am not saying we shouldn't be playing by the rules ...

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash

However, I have no opinion on what is the best way to life - in absolute terms.
It is up to everyone to make their personal choices, even if that choice limits their personal freedoms.
Even if that means to associate and live in a community without those freedoms.
Diversity should be respected as long as in our shared (public) space this respect is mutual.
Cultural diversity makes us richer, it is as important as biodiversity is to physical life.

Too idealistic?

I look at it from an evolutionary point of view. Cultures evolve in the same way as physical life does. ( Feel free to disagree :) Diversity is needed. Let communities self-organize with all the powers they need to govern their own private community with the life styles they see fit.

Step out of the human-centric bubble and look at life around you. Should we tell a cat not to catch a mouse, or a fungus not to kill a plant. Life wouldn't be where it is now without the behaviors we observe around us.

The earth used to be big, It took ages to get from one side to the other. Now it is nearly like a village.
We are so easily in each other's faces. However, what has brought us so close is also offering us an opportunity to regain distance. During the last 50 years we have created the internet, a virtual space. It allows us to communicate around the globe as if we are sitting next to each other. This virtual space could well be the perfect place to make these communities happen.

Yes. let's live in a global village but at the same time create strong local communities, both in physical and mental space. An unwanted side effect of this globalization has been excessive centralization. A handful of actors wired in to watch our every move and telling us what to do. We need to push back. Gives us law and order, ensure our freedoms are respected in public but let us express ourselves in our private communities. Be it as a heremite or as a single family, a congregation or a mega-colony.

I am not the only one thinking we need to decentralize. That is what Web3 is about, a growing movement to bring decentralisation to the internet. The sooner it happens, the better. But that discussion is for another day.

Evolution and the Brain

The brain is an organ with over 500 million years of evolution. It probably evolved through integration centers in nerve nets, the early brainless nervous system. 

From the reptilian brain to the mammal brain and then the primate brain, brain development (evolutionary sense) is about adding on further capabilities, not replacing or rebuilding. So the human brain still uses mammalian and reptilian brain structures. It is an organ of such complexity that understanding it in detail will keep us busy for quite a while.

That said, we are living in an era where a lot of progress is being made. One of the central questions to answer is how this organ evolved into a tool for abstract thinking. And slowly we are lifting the curtain on this. I offer just a few thoughts in what follows.

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Nematodes appeared more than 500 million years ago. They have a nervous system of a few hundred neurons but no brain as such. The nervous system of the C elegans has been completed mapped and is heavily studied. It contains 302 neurons in total of which about 200 are organised into a nerve ring. In comparison, the human brain as around 100 billion neurons. Interestingly enough it has already some interesting capabilities:

Let me quote from a recent science news article of the University of Leeds  What worms can tell us about brains and behaviour. It reports on research on the nerve ring ('its brain') of C. elegans.

Professor Cohen’s recent work, published in Nature in 2021, maps the structure of this brain, and builds a complete brain-map of its circuitry. The current study adds another important level of understanding: the link to behaviour. Even though the brain is very compact, the animal displays a range of complex behaviours, and neuroscientists have been interested in understanding its brain for decades.

The new research revealed three novel observations:
• neurons track behaviour not only of the present moment but also the recent past
• they tune their encoding of behaviours, such as motion, based on a surprising variety of factors
• and many neurons simultaneously encode multiple behaviours.

Another major outcome of the team’s work was that while most neurons always obeyed the predictions of the model, a smaller set of neurons in the worm’s brain—about 30 percent of those that encode behaviour—was able to flexibly remap their behaviour encoding, essentially taking on new jobs.

Suprisingly this primordial brain already exhibits many of the main base functions: sensory experience, (reasonably complex) encoding of behaviour, memory and (maybe surprisingly) task flexibility. If this can be done with a few hundred neurons, what about 100 billion?

The brain works heavily with associations, out of which concepts are naturally born. This process turns atomic entities (a sensory signal) into a composite of associations. For the brain to be able to work with these assocations it must do some sort of labeling so they can be referenced. That starts to sound very much like the appearance of language.

Some sort of (internal) language must have developed - signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. Retention, i.e. memory, is of paramount importance. The brain has a very pragmatic approach to this: what remains active remains retained in memory. Replaying recent experiences is one of the maintenance tasks of the brain. And when it replays these experiences it replays its associations at the same time.

Once a language exists one can expect it to evolve as the brain evolves. In an article "Evolution of Brain and Language" - an interesting read - the author states the following:

The evolution of brain circuits, therefore, cannot be understood independent of the evolution of language, and vice versa, which means the coevolution of brain and language—and, in fact, language itself—can be understood as a complex adaptive system.

It makes sense to look at the evolution of language in the same way as we look at the evolution of species or organs.

And with language comes culture. Culture uses language as its non-physical inheritance mechanism of values and beliefs, norms, symbols, language, artifacts and rituals. These social interactions create and maintain information stores retained within a specific group of a species. Each one of these groups drives their own mental evolution. The more intense the social interactions, the greater the capacity of potential mental evolution.

For a long time, this mental evolution of the brain was slow with respect to the life expectancy of the species or the physical evolution of the brain. However, over the last ten thousand years human social activity within specific cultures has intensified to such an extent that the cultural context in which individuals live their later life is completely different from the cultural context they were brought up in. There is an exponential increase in the amount of information that is part of cultural transmission. It looks more and more that the mental evolution has decoupled from the physical evolution. 

This decoupling from the physical pushes us towards virtual worlds as we look to intensify these interactions further. It is a road of discovery, no guarantee that we will find paradise. But I am ready for the journey.

Philosophy and the Brain

This century is seeing a exponential increase in knowledge in scientific disciplines like neuroscience, behavioral biology and artificial intelligence to mention a few. How can this guide our philosophical thoughts?  It leaves us with an interesting backdrop for a journey into philosophy.

Not a journey of long-winded discussions and speculative systems, but rather a contemplation on how the underlying principles uncovered by this knowledge impact on us as thinking beings. A better understanding of the thinking machine should lead to a better understanding of thinking itself, isn't it?

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

The brain is the hardware of our mind and our thoughts. It provides an interface to both our external and (body) internal world by processing the input of our senses. And it makes preset templates available to our mind to construct our 'world vision' from.

The interface that gives the mind access to the world has a (fairly) fixed setup. A lot of the preset templates for behavior and thinking that formed during early years development are difficult to shift later on in life. On the other hand, some parts like the frontal cortex remain more malleable.

The mind is wearing colored glasses, any form of absolutism it comes up with should be treated with caution ... 

I strongly believe in the importance of diversity of thought. To me it is as important for the health of our thought systems as genetic diversity is for the survival of a species. Adherence to one thought system should not mean endeavoring the extinction of others. We are all only ever right to some extent, always wrong on at least something. Be it rational thought, irrational thought, religious or non-religious beliefs, there should be mutual respect for all.

I am talking about thought diversity across different cultures, across individuals within a culture, across the different fields of study and artistic expression. There is no 'this is better or worse' in absolute terms. There is 'this seems more appropriate depending because of what I am looking for and considering the circumstances'. 

Trying to prove someone wrong for the way the think or live and then knock them for it misses the point: we are all only ever right to some extent, always wrong on at least something. 

And now, time to get on with that journey ...

Promises Made, Promises Broken

I started this blog nearly three years ago.
I laid out the course of learning I was embarking on with a blog to accompany it.
Some blog posts were created, more were promised but never materialized.

Oddly enough, it isn't because I am off the subject. On the contrary.
I am more focused and dedicated than I was nearly three years ago.
It's the writing part that let me down.

Photo by Jaleel Akbash on Unsplash

So what have I been up to?
Getting a better grounding in the history of philosophy, the history of the civilizations,
never mind digging further into evolution and origin of life ...

I wouldn't say I am there yet, but I feel a lot more comfortable in what I know.

I have decided to split the subject matter into three different areas.

Philosophy and the brain. This century is seeing a exponential increase in knowledge in the fields of neuroscience and human behavioural biology, not to mention artificial intelligence. This leaves us with an interesting backdrop for a journey into philosophy.

Evolution and the brain. The brain is an organ with 150 million years of physical evolution. But what about the thought evolution of a brain with increasing language capabilities?

The big picture of evolution. Starting from the Big Bang and all the way into the future, leaving our usual human-centric approach behind.

The next three posts will provide more detail for each area.
New promise made ... let's see what happens!

No Life Without Death

We take life for granted and expect it to last forever.
Well, life as a whole will be there for quite a long time, but our individual life is a lot shorter though!

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

After we are born we become aware of being conscious and alive, of being an individual. This happens seamlessly. We take possession of our individuality and typically don't want to let go. Why must we die? We seem to have less issues with the fact that we were born seemingly out of nowhere.

At the same time as we're having issues with death, we go to sleep every night relinquishing our conscious state and wake up in the morning as if sleep was never there. If we were to silently cease to be alive while sleeping the last conscious thoughts would have been those just before falling asleep.

We find it very difficult to accept that we'll return to nowhere at some stage. Not to mention that we switch off at night while asleep and find it only normal to wake up in the morning (or earlier). We want eternity in one form or another. Aren't we strange creatures?

Before you get struck by anxiety, let me say that we are part of something magnificent.
Life started more than 4 billions years ago and it is still going! It started very simple and took its time to create complexity. But it never stopped. Life does not do shutdown and reboot. The best it can do in that regard is hibernate (creatures that can survive in space). In that respect we are direct descendants of the start of life billions of years ago.

Whenever a new child is conceived it grows from a living cell provided by mum. The olympic flame of life is being passed on. But think about it, it was passed on by every ancestral mother before her, and by the species out of which homo sapiens evolved, all the way up to the first single cells. Isn’t that magnificent?

For life to evolve and to create species that evolve it needs death. It needs to be able to grow what works and and let die off what doesn't work. So we are born and so we die. The same principle is executed in our body. While we see ourselves continuously there while alive there is a continuous cycle of new cells replacing the old ones.

And now have a look around. All life around you is related to you. (We are not aware of life having started more than once.) And then you may say: why all this killing? Well, life is a pyramid. As part of its evolution life created species that serve as food to others. We couldn’t exist if there weren’t other species around. We need to eat other life in order to live. It is teamwork of the highest quality. There is no vegetarian escape.

In fact it even gets better: we think of ourselves as a individuals, all human. Forget about it. There are about as many bacteria in our body as human cells and we wouldn't be very healthy without them. Evolution drives life to explore what can achieved and we are one of those achievements. And there is one big support team helping us. We help to push evolution further as part of this continously recycling multitude of life.

I find the contrast so striking when I look at the pictures from the mars rovers: there isn't a living cell around (as far as we know). On earth it is the opposite, anywhere you look there is life. Be it high up are low down.

We are currently experiencing the consequences of the expansion of our activities on earth - global warming. Nothing unusual, the earth has gone through quite a few of these transitions before be it due to the abundance a particular species or a natular disaster. Don't worry about life, it is not the Earth that has to mind. It is us. If we manage to wipe ourselves out then life will come up with new species and continue on its path of evolution.

All this nothwithstanding, as conscious individuals we find it difficult to come to terms with our finitude, with pain and illness, with the luck of the draw of how our individual live turns out to be, with our place in the totality of life around us.

Wiring the Brain

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

In my younger years - I am nearly sixty now - I wanted to write a book about the human brain. The central idea was to look at the brain as a computer, applying equivalents of analogue and digital computing. I was very fascinated by how we learn and then are able to perform the learned task with eyes closed so to speak. As a side note, I recently came across recent experimental work that looks interesting.

Although the book never happened, my interest in the workings of the brain remained. And so did my love for metaphoric thinking. Metaphors are great to illuminate specific angles of thought when used with a light touch. Overstretched they become a drag. In my current endeavours it will be an essential tool as I am looking to identify patterns of similarity across the board.

In the few decades that have since passed our knowledge has just exploded. And with it the accessibility of knowledge. I studied in a time that books were still like bibles with everything on paper. Now nearly all material is electronically stored and immediately available. We can work with and train our brain at  a much higher frequency than ever before.

Our understanding of the brain is now such that we already have a firm grip on its operational principles. I am not talking about detail here. A lot of its complexity still elude us. We know that the brain is wired and that training the brain means actually wiring up neural networks. The power of neural networks is beyond doubt, judged by the proliferation of the AI neural networks present all around us. But beware: it is early days and there is a long way to go.

The dynamic nature of  the wiring of the brain really intrigues me. This dynamic configuration may well be more sophisticated than the actual running of brain (including consciousness). It is achieved thanks to the power of expression of our cells who have a few billion years of evolution behind them. Brains started to develop more than 500 million years ago. 

I came to the realisation that the brain is central in our quest to better understand reality and our place within. It takes part in the overall evolution of life. It is our means to sense the world around us, to think about it. The brain functional setup determines how we think. We are able to train our brain through mental exercise. We train our brain in our early years to fit in with the society we live in. In todays times, if one does not stay with the times one doesn't recognise the world any more by the time one is of mature age.

What will the consequence of this on the evolution of the brain? Before one could see brain evolution locked in with evolution of physical generation, but will this remain the same?  As we live longer and subject our brain to more information and change, decoupling of the brain/mental evolution from the physical (to a certain extent) looks inevitable to me.

More than thirty years later I want to refocus on the brain with an even stronger fixation.