Philosophy as counter-productive in a therapeutic sense?

From Irvin D. Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy:

As nature abhors a vacuum, we humans abhor uncertainty. One of the tasks of the therapist is to increase the patient's sense of certainty and mastery. It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a causal sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The '"because" offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). [pp. 189-190]

Does the study of philosophy, I wonder, run counter to that need we have for certainty? Or on the contrary, does it perhaps assist it? After all, though philosophy does not provide us with cut-and-dry answers, and its study exacerbates our awareness of the human's dismal epistemic and existential plight, nonetheless any sort of rational investigation (of which philosophy purports to be the discipline par excellance) will invariably encompass the latter part of Yalom's quote, viz., the bit about "naming" and explaining/ordering events.

The Ancients make for a good example here: reducing the physical world's phenomena to a limited number of substances--e.g. fire/change for Heraclitus, water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, all four elements for Empedocles--allows the more succinct and manageable comprehension of that world. Rational reductionism of all shades and hues affords a better sense of psychological certainty, and consequently an increased feeling of "mastery". Science, as the eventual granddaughter of this impulse, performs the same function, although our methods have since grown much more mathematical and empirical.

But by no means ought we think this strategy unique to science and philosophy. Human mythology is cross-culturally rife with proposed explanations for phenomena ("just so" stories). Tellingly, many of them explicitly exalt the importance of words and naming in the development of humanity. For current Euro-American culture, most obviously we see Adam's naming of the beasts in Genesis. Sigmund Freud asserted that religion attempts to reconcile our needs for control against the volatile chaos of nature: if the natural world is controlled utterly by a superior being who acts as a father for us, we are thus assured that there is order lurking behind ostensible chaos; and, more importantly, it is an order with our own best interests in mind (eventually, that is. Because God's will is inscrutable and ineffable, we must accept that bad things will happen to us in the now). Finally, it is an order which is not set forever in stone, but an order which may be bargained with and appealed to, since it is ruled fundamentally by a person of sorts, not by a blind, unintelligent, and uncaring force. (The "Communication/Negotiation" section of my post "The Immutability of Vicissitudes, Part 1" addresses this too.)

It may in fact be fruitful to analyze the scientific thirst for knowledge in light of psychoanalytical need for control, and I am positive that I'm not the first to suggest this. We might say that science-lust is an extension of Freud's interpretation of religion: science serves similar psychological needs, although it requires a deep paradigm shift as well. The scientific Weltanschauung does not privilege humanity by pretending that the universe operates in humanity's best interest, nor does it offer us a kindly father-figure. However, it does give us an explanation--an understanding of order inherent behind the horrible confusions nature presents us with; and it supplies us, through understanding, with a means to combat our own helplessness.

Thus, science may be seen nearly as an outgrowth of religion (more properly, the religious impulse); but it is one that replaces an anthropomorphic epistemology with a mechanical epistemology. As Quine said of physical objects and gods,

Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. ["Two Dogmas of Empiricism"]

That is to say, we put forth the common understanding of physical objects (as opposed to the skeptic's or the idealist's) as an explanation for our collected observations in the same way that, and for similar reasons as, our ancestors put forth gods. However, gods are not very good explanations and they do not enable us to do things the way that believing in the reality of physical objects do; hence their (physical objects') epistemic superiority.

Though we cannot appeal to a God anymore, science does furnish us with a means to control nature ourselves, which is something that religion and mythology could never adequately supply. From this we get the term "playing God" and our species' tradition of shunning technological progress for the power it takes away from God. Now, the contemporary existentially-minded human finds herself sitting down in God's throne after having killed Him, and she finds herself terrified by the loneliness, the lack of direction, and the growing awareness that, if God had ever existed, He wouldn't have been any better off than she is now.

So, all respect due to Boethius, is philosophy actually a consolation? Cautiously, I say that it can be; but I hasten to add that stopping there is woefully (and willfully?) near-sighted. Rational inquiry enables us to satisfy some of the needs Yalom detailed above in a similar capacity that religion has served past-ly. Unfortunately, we no sooner find a good reason to believe something than we recognize that there can be no absolute certainty (in a broad sense). Naming (and, these days, quantifying) the surrounding world is a valuable ability, but the relentless and open-eyed pursuit of exhaustive naming schemes leads one to the conclusion that such things are impossible--and that certainty is more so.

(It seems to me that Mark Z. Danielewski deals with these themes among others in his novel House of Leaves, although I may not be able to say exactly how.)

Link Dump

So here are some blog entries (or whatever) I have recently found interesting.

At Theoretical Atlas, Jeffrey Morton recounts a talk given by Gregory Chaitin where Chaitin urges us to create a more rigorous "theoretical biology". Something where we could prove interesting theorems about evolutionary models, for example.

At (Blog&~Blog), Ben Burgis writes a bit about Graham Priest's Sylvan's Box story and the (im)plausibility of drawing conclusions about "real life" logic from the logic that exists in fiction.

Alan Rhoda discusses the Law of Excluded Middle in the context of propositions about the future, responding to an example supplied by David Hunt.

This is a somewhat older paper (1997) by Allen F. Randall entitled "Quantum Phenomenology". He attempts something of an updated version of Descartes' cogito (maybe mixed with Kant's transcendental project), attempting to logically derive the principles of quantum mechanics from the basic awareness of experiential existence (my phrase, not Randall's). Randall claims, "Far from being "bizarre" and "weird", as is usually thought, the strangest paradoxes of quantum theory turn out to be just what one ought to expect of a rational universe." I admit, I've only read the first part of this paper, but it's still a very fascinating idea.

At Mixing Memory, Chris reports on several studies where unpleasant stimuli (such as foul odors, messy/sloppy workspaces, disgusting video footage) harshen the severity of people's moral judgments.

Why we're here

It doesn't seem as though the universe should exist. It is common to think there should be a reason--a truthmaker--for why the universe exists as opposed to not existing.

Which is a mighty peculiar thing, since we've certainly never had any observations of a non-existent universe, nor can we even properly imagine it (in my opinion). All we have is the assumption that the pre-natal and natural state of anything is non-existence, or absence; accordingly, there must be something else, some kind of metaphysical mechanism, that causes that non-existence to become existence.

This stems from our observations about causality, perhaps coupled with innate physical intuitions. Maybe it isn't so peculiar to have this belief, then, since every time that we witness an effect in everyday life, it is preceded (anteceded) by a cause. Hence cosmological arguments; hence the conclusion that there must have been either a single "unmoved mover" or an infinite chain of antecedent causes to explain the universe's existence. Well, that or the universe shouldn't exist at all, being causeless.

I wonder if we're really justified in this conclusion. We have never witnessed something come from nothing (which is presumably what must have happened when a pure void became material substance?) but then... we have truthfully never witnessed "nothing". As our scientific instruments grow more and more powerful, we end up discovering that even that which has appeared empty before--vacuums, space--is nonetheless filled with a frothing mass of virtual particles and other bizarre fauna of the micro-universe. (See, e.g., this Wikipedia article on the vacuum state).

And if there is always something there materially... I guess then we have to suppose that those minute, practically non-existent material bits must be able to exert causal influence on other bits of matter. In that case, how can we be sure that it's even physically possible for the universe (or at least matter) not to exist? Maybe it is logically possible, infosofar as we can imagine it (which I have my doubts about, as I said before). Metaphysically possible? Hmmm....

Consider another Easter egg laid by the goose of science: the first law of thermodynamics. The total amount of energy in an isolated system must remain constant, though it may change form. (Similarly so with physical information, as came up in the black hole information paradox. I believe the conservation of one quantitiy--information or energy--may be derived from the other.) If the universe is an isolated system, and if we presume that this law holds invariably, then we must conclude that the universe has always existed--or rather that the energy within it has always existed, which is close enough for our purposes, since energy may be converted to matter.

Thus, the laws of physics do not allow the energy of the universe to come into or out of existence--thus, we must presume it has always existed.

But then, all I'm doing is shifting the question back a step. Now we ask instead, "Why is it that the total energy in the universe equals a positive value, not a zero or negative value?"

I don't know. Should we expect there to be a reason that gravity exists? That time exists? Some physicists do look for causes there, I suppose. And to a certain degree, we may get explanations about gravity and other forces as they (we think) split off from a single unified source in the very early universe. Still, if we accept that laws or forces need no justification for their existence, maybe we shouldn't expect a justification for the existence of energy either?

Edit as of 07-05-2009: I should clarify that under some theories, the total energy of the universe actually does add up to zero; it just that the way it's distributed gives us the material and energy formations we're used to. (I think gravity is typically suggested as the negative counterpart for the energy released during the Big Bang. Here's a handy and relevant (though brief) link for further reading).

Controlling oneself

Fascinating post over at Less Wrong about the influence of control systems on human behavior, and the role they seem to play in the brain. A control system here basically means a feedback device that catalyzes or inhibits some variable in order to maintain it within an accepted range. (Thermostat, homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a lengthy quote that seems most pertinent to me:

In a primitive, tribal culture, being seen as useless to the tribe could easily be a death sentence, so we [likely] evolved mechanisms to avoid giving the impression of being useless. A good way to avoid showing your incompetence is to simply not do the things you're incompetent at, or things which you suspect you might be incompetent at and that have a great associated cost for failure. If it's important for your image within the tribe that you do not fail at something, then you attempt to avoid doing that.

You might already be seeing where this is leading. The things many of us procrastinate on are exactly the kinds of things that are important to us. We're deathly afraid of the consequences of what might happen if we fail at them, so there are powerful forces in play trying to make us not work on them at all. Unfortunately, for beings living in modern society, this behavior is maladaptive and buggy. It leads to us having control circuits which try to keep us unproductive, and when they pick up on things that might make us more productive, they start suppressing our use of those techniques.

Furthermore, the control circuits are stupid. They are occasionally capable of being somewhat predictive, but they are fundamentally just doing some simple pattern-matching, oblivious to deeper subtleties. They may end up reacting to wholly wrong inputs. Consider the example of developing a phobia for a particular place, or a particular kind of environment. Something very bad happens to you in that place once, and as a result, a circuit is formed in your brain that's designed to keep you out of such situations in the future. Whenever it detects that you are in a place resembling the one where the incident happened, it starts sending error signals to get you away from there. Only that this is a very crude and unoptimal way of keeping you out of trouble - if a car hit you while you were crossing the road, you might develop a phobia for crossing the road. Needless to say, this is more trouble than it's worth.

(P.S., I should note that the author of the quoted blog post, Kaj_Sotala, draws this conceptual material largely from a self-help article by PJ Eby).

Fascinating stuff. Maybe not without its problems though, as commenter Silas Barta notes:

The explanations here for behavioral phenomena look like commonsense reasoning that is being shoehorned into controls terminology by clever relabeling. (ETA: Why do you need the concept of a "feedback control system" to think of the idea of running through the reasons you're afraid of something, for example?)

The thought concerns me a bit too. Are we really getting any benefit from describing these aspects of behavior as control mechanisms? Are we getting a more accurate model of behavior? At an individual, practical level, does it help us to conceive of our thought processes in this way?

"Following From" Addendum

Ah, this is a perfect example of why I should actually read philosophical work that has already been done on subjects that I wonder about.

My last post, Following From, concerned itself (loosely, and among other things) with the nature of metaphysical laws. However, I uncritically assumed a view analogous to the regularity theory of laws of nature--as opposed to the necessitarian theory. That is, I took it for granted that laws (though of course I have in mind metaphysical laws, not just those in the physical world) are simply descriptions of behavior rather than forces which "govern" or "command" objects to act in particular ways.

Yet, while I took the regularity view for granted, I speculated about what it is that "causes" or "makes" things behave the way they do, while at the same time rejecting the necessitarian view which would--we hope--give just that kind of explanation. Now, this isn't really a solution to whatever problem I had in mind, because I would still be inclined to ask of necessitarians, "But what, in turn, makes necessitarian laws hold the sway they do?", thus leading us obnoxiously into a typical infinite regress. But my point is that if I'd already been aware of these existing philosophical positions, and read at least a modicum about them, I would have had a basis from which to work when asking my own questions--it may not have furnished me with answers right off the bat, but I believe that marking this distinction has helped to clarify the matter in my mind.

Following From

[I wish that I had the interest/dedication to actually pursue these thoughts more rigorously by studying existent philosophical work on the topic, but alas.]

Consider a state governed by absolutely no physical or metaphysical laws. Does this mean anything can happen? Or for "something to happen", does that require that there be something to guide or direct "happenings"?

Natural laws, of course, probably don't "guide" action by any means. They're simply descriptions of how phenomena behave. But... how do phenomena "know" how to behave? What makes them behave in a particular way versus some other way?

I suppose I'm inquiring about how causation works in general--what exactly goes on when some observed or postulated event (which we call the antecedent) is supposed to cause, or in some way be responsible for, another event (the consequent). (As a side note, "event" is too loose of a term. Really, I suppose I mean "states of affairs" or "sets of circumstances" that obtain at a certain point in time. But event is a bit quicker to write, and most of the discussion examples that I can think of are events in the more standard sense too.)

If nothing else, we can at least say that human minds (and thus what we call rational thought) work best thinking under the following paradigm: to understand how/why a circumstance came to be, the circumstance must have followed from, or been enabled by, a pre-existing framework. {{And it is this necessity of thought unchecked that Kant rebukes in his Critique. The search for the unconditioned condition--a final explanation--the prime mover--God--is an attempt to step outside of the infinite regress that otherwise results, and thus to give us a circumstance which needs no further explanation. Kant (perhaps rightfully) claims that reason oversteps its justifiable boundaries when it tries to make this move.}} This paradigm seems to have served us fairly faithfully so far, but we cannot nonetheless discount the possibility that this fundamental "strategy" of thought might be flawed. {{As you will notice, the current topic is regrettably plagued by difficulty (impossibility?) of discussion. Like many other areas of philosophy, we are trying to grapple with notions that extend into the core of our most basic assumptions, and even trying to think about them will be difficult, much less to question their "accuracy".}}

What, however, does any of this mean? The ideas I suggest now may be completely nonsensical, possibly incoherent as well. And surely there is nothing to be gained by indulging nonsense.

I believe the question ties into (is enrooted in?) regress and the problem of finding first causes. Which in its own way mirrors the confusing interrelationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

Systemic Therapy

Holy cripes, there's a form of psychotherapy based off of cybernetics / systems theory?

Crazy. I doubt it's as cool as it sounds to me, and really I don't even know that much about the aforementioned subjects, but I really like the idea of understanding a psychosocial situation in terms of interacting systems.