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siriuschico's review against another edition
5.0
Figments of reality is an interesting mix of philosophy, mathematics, evolution biology and fiction about bird-like Zarathustrians. It comments on a lot of things - from begging of life, intelligence and culture, but still, it is quite readable and understandable.
Authors highlight the importance of community and family in evolution - we are humans mainly because we have been educated and exposed to human language and behaviour, which is why we can behave like humans. Tarzan would be much more savage than Edgar Burroughs suggests. And this cultural environment (or like the authors call it - extelligence) is the primary weapon of evolution to keep the winning streak going. It is flexible enough to allow each generation to experiment and change the direction of life, but it will still allow us to make more humans from tabula rasa babies.
Well... It has many interesting theories. Some readers are complaining about this book's age - after more than twenty years, evolution and molecular biology moved much further, and it changes some facts the authors used to build their arguments. But it doesn't matter - Aristoteles is much older, and his Metaphysics (the most outdated philosophy book I have tried to read) still serves as groundwork for further philosophers. And Figments of reality are similar - some views are outdated, but not entirely wrong and if something that modern knowledge actually confirms the importance of education and the environment. We really cannot get a proper human without a human-make-kit - which is his family, peers and community. So I don't think those last twenty or so years hurt this book that much.
Authors highlight the importance of community and family in evolution - we are humans mainly because we have been educated and exposed to human language and behaviour, which is why we can behave like humans. Tarzan would be much more savage than Edgar Burroughs suggests. And this cultural environment (or like the authors call it - extelligence) is the primary weapon of evolution to keep the winning streak going. It is flexible enough to allow each generation to experiment and change the direction of life, but it will still allow us to make more humans from tabula rasa babies.
Well... It has many interesting theories. Some readers are complaining about this book's age - after more than twenty years, evolution and molecular biology moved much further, and it changes some facts the authors used to build their arguments. But it doesn't matter - Aristoteles is much older, and his Metaphysics (the most outdated philosophy book I have tried to read) still serves as groundwork for further philosophers. And Figments of reality are similar - some views are outdated, but not entirely wrong and if something that modern knowledge actually confirms the importance of education and the environment. We really cannot get a proper human without a human-make-kit - which is his family, peers and community. So I don't think those last twenty or so years hurt this book that much.
blackoxford's review against another edition
3.0
Lying To Children
Figments of Reality is almost 25 years old. In the fields of biological and cultural evolution, this makes its content mostly passé. When it was written the human genome hadn’t been mapped, Amazon hadn’t destroyed the High Street shops, no one except the fundamentalists took religious fundamentalism very seriously, and globally politics looked to be converging on variations of liberal capitalism. As Mark Twain said about New England weather though: “If you don’t like it wait a minute.”
But, although dated, the book is a good example of the thesis it presents, namely that our explanations of the world depend for their adequacy on the concerns we have as individuals and societies. This thesis might seem obvious but only because we conceive today’s concerns as more refined versions of yesterday’s concerns. Isn’t this how science, actually all reasoning, progresses, by becoming more and more precise about the nature of reality? We know our theories, and models, and everyday conceptions of the world are better than those of our parents and grandparents because they produce better results over a wider range of conditions. In short we have more truths and understand reality better than at any time in the past.
We project this view far into the past. For example, at an early point in the evolution of life on Earth, the planet was dominated by what was effectively a sheet of diverse species of bacteria. One of these became dominant for a time, not because it was better adapted to its environment than others, but because it produced the corrosive element oxygen which created a new environment that was toxic for whole phyla of competitors. Oxygen-producing bacteria are not superior, even in terms of environmental conditions at the time; they are merely different. Entire lines of evolutionary possibility were dead-ended by the organisms that allow our ultimate emergence. But calling this progression progress is ridiculously obscene. Evolutionary development is random not an enrichment or upgrade.
This view of continuous advance is also applied to the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Every generation has this same view: ours is more clever than the last. More research has been published; discoveries in every field have increased exponentially; machines are bigger, more powerful and more efficient. It is easy to smirk at the claims by Lord Kelvin at the end of the 19th century that classical Newtonian physics was approximating perfection, perfection which would be shown as fundamentally wrong within a decade. We do smirk but we see Kelvin’s remarks in the context of what we choose to designate as improvements in understanding. Quantum and relativity physics are merely more general than Newtonian physics, we say. They therefore represent a continuity in scientific development. The rationality of human learning and the reputation of science has been not threatened but demonstrated. Progress has been achieved yet again.
But, of course, this is a kind of scientistic whistling in the dark. The 20th century developments in physics and all other areas of human knowledge, are based upon a fundamental discontinuity in what is considered ‘rational’ and what ‘real’ means. As philosophers like Thomas Kuhn have pointed out decisively, not just the ideas of science have altered radically but the very idea of science has been transformed. The consequence is that the criteria by which science had been previously judged were permanently swept away by developments at the turn of the 20th century. Science could not pretend, like the Catholic Church in its 20th century revisions of doctrine, that modern results simply built on empirical and theoretical history. From the point of view of quantum theory, historical physics was the equivalent of voodoo. It might be seen to ‘work’ in various circumstances; but it was based on serious misconceptions about both the world and what constitutes knowledge of the world.
What is most interesting is that such discontinuous development has always been the case but constantly denied by cultural convention. Kelvin’s ‘state of the art’ physics didn’t disappear, it was rationalised as a temporary approximation, and still useful as such. Like Aristotle’s Physics and Medieval Scholasticism, Newtonian physics still has a career. Even though engineers of all sorts know at some subconscious level that the concepts they employ - gravity, instantaneous action at a distance, centre of mass, time - do not exist other than as words, they act ‘as if’ they were not just true but also real. Many scholars are keen to show how these concepts have their intellectual origins in the Philosopher himself and in the bookish knowledge ‘saved’ by the monks. And we continue to teach our children this cultural history as a sort of cheer by humanity for itself in its climb up the ladder of knowledge.
This is obvious myth-making, an activity that will no doubt continue when a solution to the contradictions and paradoxes of today’s physical theory are resolved. For whatever reason, we find it necessary to pretend that we are becoming more and more reasonable the greater we feel disquiet about what we think reason might be; and that we are getting closer and closer to reality as we chase down more and more unreal particles. Quantum entanglement undermines any reason one cares to apply to it. The Higgs boson is no more real than phlogiston. Odds are better than even that it will be an early ontological casualty of whatever replaces the contemporary concepts of space-time and gravity.
The authors use an effective running gag, an allegory of an alien ‘Zarathustrian base-8’ culture which encounters Earth and its mysterious ‘base-1’ beings. As in the recent sci-fi novel Qualityland, members of the alien force bear the names of their occupations. Two in particular are instructive about the cultural honesty of the aliens - Liar-to-Children (the Teacher), and Destroyer-of-Facts (the Scientist). These two are incredulous about how seriously human beings take their intellectual efforts and cannot understand the euphemistic avoidance of what truth and reality mean. The Liar and Destroyer are continually dismayed by the arrogance of the individual human mind and can only attribute this regretful state of affairs to a wrong turn in evolution. One can hardly disagree.
Figments of Reality is almost 25 years old. In the fields of biological and cultural evolution, this makes its content mostly passé. When it was written the human genome hadn’t been mapped, Amazon hadn’t destroyed the High Street shops, no one except the fundamentalists took religious fundamentalism very seriously, and globally politics looked to be converging on variations of liberal capitalism. As Mark Twain said about New England weather though: “If you don’t like it wait a minute.”
But, although dated, the book is a good example of the thesis it presents, namely that our explanations of the world depend for their adequacy on the concerns we have as individuals and societies. This thesis might seem obvious but only because we conceive today’s concerns as more refined versions of yesterday’s concerns. Isn’t this how science, actually all reasoning, progresses, by becoming more and more precise about the nature of reality? We know our theories, and models, and everyday conceptions of the world are better than those of our parents and grandparents because they produce better results over a wider range of conditions. In short we have more truths and understand reality better than at any time in the past.
We project this view far into the past. For example, at an early point in the evolution of life on Earth, the planet was dominated by what was effectively a sheet of diverse species of bacteria. One of these became dominant for a time, not because it was better adapted to its environment than others, but because it produced the corrosive element oxygen which created a new environment that was toxic for whole phyla of competitors. Oxygen-producing bacteria are not superior, even in terms of environmental conditions at the time; they are merely different. Entire lines of evolutionary possibility were dead-ended by the organisms that allow our ultimate emergence. But calling this progression progress is ridiculously obscene. Evolutionary development is random not an enrichment or upgrade.
This view of continuous advance is also applied to the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Every generation has this same view: ours is more clever than the last. More research has been published; discoveries in every field have increased exponentially; machines are bigger, more powerful and more efficient. It is easy to smirk at the claims by Lord Kelvin at the end of the 19th century that classical Newtonian physics was approximating perfection, perfection which would be shown as fundamentally wrong within a decade. We do smirk but we see Kelvin’s remarks in the context of what we choose to designate as improvements in understanding. Quantum and relativity physics are merely more general than Newtonian physics, we say. They therefore represent a continuity in scientific development. The rationality of human learning and the reputation of science has been not threatened but demonstrated. Progress has been achieved yet again.
But, of course, this is a kind of scientistic whistling in the dark. The 20th century developments in physics and all other areas of human knowledge, are based upon a fundamental discontinuity in what is considered ‘rational’ and what ‘real’ means. As philosophers like Thomas Kuhn have pointed out decisively, not just the ideas of science have altered radically but the very idea of science has been transformed. The consequence is that the criteria by which science had been previously judged were permanently swept away by developments at the turn of the 20th century. Science could not pretend, like the Catholic Church in its 20th century revisions of doctrine, that modern results simply built on empirical and theoretical history. From the point of view of quantum theory, historical physics was the equivalent of voodoo. It might be seen to ‘work’ in various circumstances; but it was based on serious misconceptions about both the world and what constitutes knowledge of the world.
What is most interesting is that such discontinuous development has always been the case but constantly denied by cultural convention. Kelvin’s ‘state of the art’ physics didn’t disappear, it was rationalised as a temporary approximation, and still useful as such. Like Aristotle’s Physics and Medieval Scholasticism, Newtonian physics still has a career. Even though engineers of all sorts know at some subconscious level that the concepts they employ - gravity, instantaneous action at a distance, centre of mass, time - do not exist other than as words, they act ‘as if’ they were not just true but also real. Many scholars are keen to show how these concepts have their intellectual origins in the Philosopher himself and in the bookish knowledge ‘saved’ by the monks. And we continue to teach our children this cultural history as a sort of cheer by humanity for itself in its climb up the ladder of knowledge.
This is obvious myth-making, an activity that will no doubt continue when a solution to the contradictions and paradoxes of today’s physical theory are resolved. For whatever reason, we find it necessary to pretend that we are becoming more and more reasonable the greater we feel disquiet about what we think reason might be; and that we are getting closer and closer to reality as we chase down more and more unreal particles. Quantum entanglement undermines any reason one cares to apply to it. The Higgs boson is no more real than phlogiston. Odds are better than even that it will be an early ontological casualty of whatever replaces the contemporary concepts of space-time and gravity.
The authors use an effective running gag, an allegory of an alien ‘Zarathustrian base-8’ culture which encounters Earth and its mysterious ‘base-1’ beings. As in the recent sci-fi novel Qualityland, members of the alien force bear the names of their occupations. Two in particular are instructive about the cultural honesty of the aliens - Liar-to-Children (the Teacher), and Destroyer-of-Facts (the Scientist). These two are incredulous about how seriously human beings take their intellectual efforts and cannot understand the euphemistic avoidance of what truth and reality mean. The Liar and Destroyer are continually dismayed by the arrogance of the individual human mind and can only attribute this regretful state of affairs to a wrong turn in evolution. One can hardly disagree.
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