The 'Parmenidean Life' is about Connecting Dots
Parmenides wrote about a number of things in his poem, On Nature, but what he did primarily was try to connect as many dots as he could. Connecting the dots is a euphemistic way of talking about the effort to see the big picture, to get an overall view, to have as much of an exhaustive account of reality as one can make. This is the major work done by On Nature and one which is not done or relied on enough in our day and age.
What is the value of connecting the dots? I want to refer here to the story of all the blind men asked to describe an elephant. They all have a chance to feel some small part of the elephant, and on the basis of the evidence they had, they came up with wildly divergent accounts of what they were trying to describe.
This is a familiar story. We can hear it retold here,
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3
This poem by John Godfrey Saxe says in a simple way the concern that Parmenides may easily have had in mind. After talking about the limited descriptions made by all the blind men, Saxe concludes,
Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3
The point of an overall account of what there is, of what we think is real, has to do with this problem of describing the elephant. If you have an overall view, you can then see what the relevance of comments about its details might be. So, if one is concerned about only some part, you can see whether you understand that part by placing it in the big picture.
Allan F. Randall made some points about Parmenides in his on-line essay Parmenides' Principle, to some extent summarized here,
To modern cosmologists, "no boundary condition" means no absolute boundary condition. One must still impose a subjective boundary condition based on the simple principle that the only worlds one can be conscious of are worlds that are capable of supporting conscious life. Only worlds with certain life-supporting properties are worlds in which it is possible to be "passing through" in the first place, so we can effectively eliminate any others in trying to explain our world of experience. This is the many-worlds version of Carter's "Strong Anthropic Principle", and it gives us something that Parmenides sought but could not explicitly articulate: a well-defined, purely rationalist foundation for connecting the Way of Objectivity with the Way of Subjectivity. Such a foundation was Parmenides' hope and his challenge to the rest of the scientific community of his day.
Something else we have today that Parmenides lacked is a rigorous and universal conception of language, logic and mathematics (i.e., that which can be spoken or thought of). The modern notion of computability (developed by Gödel, Church, Turing and others) gives a precise definition of the thinkable. There are numerous different languages that are generally assumed to be "maximally expressive", as they seem to be capable of precisely describing anything describable. Such "Turing-equivalent" languages include English, computer programming languages and predicate logic (to name but a few). It has been shown that these languages are all interdefinable and intertranslatable. Anything expressible in one can be translated into any of the others, and any one of them can be defined within any of the others. This provides a precise and mathematical way of characterizing Objective Truth (see my papers on quantum phenomenology, modality, Platonism, and Wittgenstein for a more detailed treatment). The objective component to an expression is just what is preserved when we translate between different Turing-equivalent languages. We cannot, of course, step completely outside of language and see Objective Truth from the point of view of the Goddess, the view of all possible languages, since there are an infinite number of them. But that is exactly how Parmenides would have it, since the Goddess-view is just a fanciful literary device, a useful aid to the human imagination, but a viewpoint that cannot in reality ever be achieved. There is no "outside" to the universe as a whole, from which to view it. Yet through logic, we can indeed take a kind of objective stance, even though it is necessarily incomplete.
Randall tries to tell us that there are certain true things about reality, and that Parmenides for one reason or another failed to take these truths into account. For example, according to Randall, there is the idea that, "the only worlds one can be conscious of are worlds that are capable of supporting conscious life." This way of putting the point makes it sound as though philosophers are not capable of being conscious of worlds that you couldn't survive on as a well protected astronaut. If the world isn't something that could support life, where people could stay awake, I suppose, then we aren't going to be able to see, hear, touch, or otherwise find out about it. Philosophers couldn't send unmanned probes, maybe, or hear about it from some travelers who've been there. However, the issue that Parmenides is discussing is the problem of subjectivity, and it is not clear that being conscious of the surface of the moon is an accurate way of understanding the distinction between the subjective and objective way of truth. It is not clear that the contrast between being conscious or unconscious is an accurate contrast to help us understand the contrast between subjective and objective. Although being conscious may be thought to be subjective, being subjective is not just being conscious.
http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/AS/400Index.htm
There is a question what one means by subjectivity. There are several answers to choose from. Don Levi in his text Critical Thinking and Logic thinks subjectivity has to do with rhetorical argument. He tells us,
"What makes for a good argument? According to the rhetorical approach, the answer seems to be that an argument is correct if it satisfies its audience. If that is the answer then you can see what is wrong with it: the criterion of correctness is subjective. Such a criterion would be appropriate for judging the persuasiveness of the argument, but not for its correctness."
Don Levi, Critical Thinking and Logic, page 427.
Of course the claim that Parmenides is concerned about the way that the meaning of the terms of logical arguments are determined is one of the bones of contention here, still, this would present another way in which to understand subjectivity. If the arguers determine the meanings to their terms, or the makers of language do that for their language, then meaning is subjective. If the meanings of these terms are determined by the way that the world, Nature, is already divided up and labeled, or named, then meaning is objective.
Randall thinks it has to do with being conscious of something, so, if one is in an environment or a planet where one cannot be conscious, then that is an environment that we cannot be conscious. When Parmenides tries to consider other minds, a modern way of putting the question, he considers many logical arguments and is troubled because he believes no one of them can be compared or contrasted with any other one. This is a problem for him because our points of view are expressed in terms of logical arguments, and so, resolving conflict between them is impossible. Randall tries to make this problem go away by supposing that Parmenides is concerned about one person being able to go from one environment to another with the question whether he will be able to understand or compare all that he is aware of or examines. The only problem for Randall is if this traveler is conscious in all these environments, then Parmenides' problem as he understands it is solved.
Parmenides did have a problem trying to connect up the Subjective Way to Truth with the Objective Way to Truth. Randall thinks Parmenides came up with this question and challenged the scientists of his day with trying to find the answer to it. The issue was that if one is limited to what is subjective, then one will never be able to state anything true about what's real, as any statement based on what we think could always turn out to be false. We thought it was true, but we were wrong. The only way to get at truth is to base it on objective observations. Unfortunately, according to Randall, Parmenides was unable to come up with an answer beyond the impossible one provided in his imaginary discussion of the Goddess.
The solution that Randall promotes tells us that if you can think of yourself as walking through these conscious environments, then one can suppose that what you are conscious of in one can be compared and contrasted with any of the others that one can walk through. If one can do that, then one has done the same thing as having sat yourself down in an objective environment wherefrom one can assess and judge all subjective points of view, in particular.
Randall goes on to discuss the "modern notion of computability" and how that explains 'the thinkable." The idea is that if you have different statements or languages and you can translate what's said in one language into what is said in the other then one can specify Objective Truth. It would be what is the same, what is common and peculiar to the statement or the language that you translate accurately into another language. So, Randall tells us,
The objective component to an expression is just what is preserved when we translate between different Turing-equivalent languages.
This is the account of Objective Truth that Randall thinks is much more accurate than anything suggested by Parmenides. It is what, he believes modern scientists are now supposing to be correct. In fact, he goes on to contrast and bemoan the account provided by Parmenides involving the Goddess,
We cannot, of course, step completely outside of language and see Objective Truth from the point of view of the Goddess, the view of all possible languages, since there are an infinite number of them. But that is exactly how Parmenides would have it, since the Goddess-view is just a fanciful literary device, a useful aid to the human imagination, but a viewpoint that cannot in reality ever be achieved. There is no "outside" to the universe as a whole, from which to view it.
To sum up, the account of Objective Truth preferred by Randall is about what might be common between what we translate either from one statement to another, or from one language into another. There is something that remains the same that allows us to say we've made an accurate translation. If there was not something common then we would say that they were not translated at all, or maybe not very well.
The question here is whether Randall has been able to show that Parmenides gave a poor or inaccurate account of what's real whereas Randall and modern science gives us something more accurate. The reason Randall and modern science have it right, according to Randall, has to do with the way that the modern ideas about "computability" and "translation." We don't have to have an objective viewpoint from which we could make assessments of what's real in order to have knowledge or to get at the truth. All we need to do, according to Randall, is discover what's common to what we translate from one statement or language to another. If we can see what's common, then when we make claims we can refer to the commonalities in what we're saying in order to talk about or refer to the same things in the world.
http://mtbethel.blogs.com/whats_new_at_mt_bethel/2007/03/new_computers.html
It is not clear that Randall understands what Parmenides said about the problems he saw in the Subjective Way to Truth. One problem for Parmenides may have been that it is impossible, by any way he could figure out, how one could compare the meanings of the terms of what one arguer used with the meanings used by any other arguer. The impossibility came about because of the subjective way that mortals determine the meaning to things. The problem with determining these things subjectively is that one might always be mistaken. A problem could always turn up. So, whatever one thinks cannot imply that one has it right. Now, translation depends on knowing the meanings of one language and the meanings of another. If these terms have been determined subjectively, that is, by the arguers, then it won't matter how many of them you can translate, not one of them can be shown to have any grip on the way reality is truly differentiated and named.
It is not clear that Randall has addressed himself to the problem of conflict. If one is traveling from one environment to another, as Randall suggests, it is not clear that this is the same thing as confronting different points of view in conflict. It may rather be that one is just confronting yourself with different aspects of yourself, different takes you've made of different environments. There is no evidence given by Randall that we have confronted what makes different points of view conflict.
Randall might think that his own view is better than Parmenides because if you have a lot of people who agree on something, then it's much easier to say that they are correct about what they're claiming than if only one person made the same claim. So, if one can translate what someone said over here into what another person said over there, and they both say the same thing, then, Randal figures, it's more likely that they are both correct than if only one made the same claim. Randall here seems to think that merely saying something is some way to justify a claim, as though several people urging you to jump off a cliff should be more legitimate a claim than if just one person made the same request.
It's hard to know if Randall's view actually does reflect the views of scientists. I would hope not. The fact that a majority of scientists agreed with Aristotle before Copernicus, or Newton before Einstein, did not make the old science correct. Nor did agreement ever go to showing something was objective, and not just what the mob preferred.
I have given some reason to think that Randal hasn't given much of an argument that we should prefer over Parmenides' on the question of how we might define Objective Truth. But, there is another question whether Randall is ever going to make any headway against Parmenides by picking at his view piecemeal. For example, Randall thinks here that Parmenides has been bested by the modern view of Subjectivity and the ideas of "computability" and "translation." I can imagine that Parmenides will say that the ways that people like Randall complain about Parmenides' view result from their not really understanding the argument that Parmenides is making. That is, Parmenides may say that Randal is like one of the blind guys trying to criticize the views of Parmenides after having examined only a part of what Parmenides is saying. Randall is like the guy who thought the elephant was just an ear and complains that Parmenides cannot be such a good philosopher because ears can't move around, or eat, or do much of anything except hear. They can't do enough of what an animal is supposed to do.
Anna Leonowens Gallery exhibitions Nov. 7-12
Mike Sharpe, Subjective Objective (To Make Us Remember to Help Us Forget)
http://www.nscad.ns.ca/news/newsarchive.php
Randall wants us to believe that Parmenides failed at certain things at which modern scientists and philosophers have been more successful. For example, modern philosophers give us, "...something that Parmenides sought but could not explicitly articulate: a well-defined, purely rationalist foundation for connecting the Way of Objectivity with the Way of Subjectivity." They can give us, "...a rigorous and universal conception of language, logic and mathematics (i.e., that which can be spoken or thought of)." And, "...a precise and mathematical way of characterizing Objective Truth." Randal tells us that whereas Parmenides was unable to connect up the subjective with the objective, the moderns have been able to do so. The point here is to see that in order to be successful at doing something that Parmenides failed to do suggests, if not shows, that Randall and modern scientists who follow him are pursuing the same project as Parmenides. They would succeed where Parmenides failed unless they were running in the same race.
I am concerned to ask whether Randall paid enough consideration to what Parmenides was saying to have taken precautions to avoid the inherent pitfalls in the project. That is, Parmenides argued that there were certain problems with the Subjective Way to Truth that only taking the Objective Way could solve. Did Randall agree with him about that and successfully solve those problems? Apparently, Parmenides thought you had to assume the point of view of the Goddess in order to get to an objective viewpoint. Now Randall tells us that is impossible, but that you can do just as well by looking at what all the subjective views say in common. Considering that a whole lot of subjective thinkers can't be any more right than any one subjective thinker, I don't think we have good reasons to think Randall has any better view than Parmenides. Are we then left with Parmenides?
The really good thing about Parmenides is that we can ask again whether he's on the right track. According to him, we have to somehow rely on the Goddess to get at truth because it's the Goddess's world, where she made the stuff and named everything, and we only live in it and try to learn what she did. Randall thinks this can't be right because it's impossible to have anything to do with the Goddess. She's only a literary device, according to Randall. This makes Randall try to give an account of Objective Truth in terms of group think. If enough people say they same thing, then it must be true. This cannot be right either.
So, my question is whether Parmenides and his critics Randall, et al, got off on the right foot. I'm suspecting that as they all end badly, where we have no knowledge, or values, they did. So, where did they begin and is there some other way of starting off? My thought is that one thing we need to do is challenge the claim assumed by Parmenides that reason is a matter of logical argument. If he assumes that, then he has the problem with subjectivity that Parmenides or Randall cannot go on to solve.
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