Excerpt from Jin Guantao's "Disappearing Reality"
中信出版集团 2022 edition
The lessons of history tell us that the first wave of nationalism that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the First World War. This was followed by World War II and decades of the Cold War. In addition to tens of millions of deaths, humanity has also suffered from totalitarian rule.
Since the end of the Cold War, the world has enjoyed 30 years of peace and prosperity, and the economy, science and technology have made astonishing development.
In the process of reflecting on the twentieth century, mankind has re-examined the issues of modernity, the nation-state, democratic values, etc., and learned the lessons of the rise of totalitarianism, which led to the second globalization.
However, in the face of the problems exposed by the second round of globalization, especially in the face of today's turbulent world, the previous experiences of social and political philosophy, governance and integration have all failed.
Behind the tearing apart society and the turmoil in the world is a deeper crisis: the public nature of human things is disintegrating. To borrow a phrase from Fukuyama, "human politics is faced with a comprehensive dilemma, and even among established democracies, it is impossible to agree on the most basic facts."
A global economic community without shared values is unsustainable. The value foundations of the second globalization are shaking. Even though they knew that "the rupture of the common bottom line would lead to world war and the destruction of civilization", people's mentality still returned to the 19th century without hesitation, and the bitter lessons of the 20th century were wasted.
▌Roots: Philosophy is dead
Why did mankind come to this predicament? This starts with the two intellectual revolutions of mankind -- the scientific revolution and the philosophical revolution.
Over the centuries, science has developed at an accelerated pace, and disruptive scientific revolutions have taken place one after another. After the emergence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, many people believed that there would be a new scientific revolution, but more than 100 years later, the foundations of these two scientific edifices are still unbreakable.
"Why did the scientific revolution pause, and what is the nature of the scientific revolution?" 20th-century philosophers failed to come up with a reliable explanation.
Today, with the rapid popularization and application of emerging technologies in various fields, we still lack a macro understanding of science. I have used the progress of life sciences as an example to illustrate this point: today, the great changes caused by new technologies such as genetic engineering are unstoppable, but the macro understanding of life is far from keeping up with the understanding and manipulation of biological details.
In recent centuries, the public authority of religious ethics has been declining, and science has increasingly become the new religion of mankind. We can't understand "what is science" at a macro level, and technology dominates the entire field of science. Humanity has begun to blindly believe that it can play the role of "creator", and as a result, science has been misused and abused, and utopian ideas will inevitably proliferate again.
Gene-edited babies "violate scientific ethics and threaten human safety" and are denounced by peers as "worse than Nazi artificial breeding"
In the political and social sphere, if we cannot understand "what is the value basis of globalization" and the social operation mechanism behind it, then how can we avoid the recurrence of the tragedy of nationalism and the regression of human civilization?
It is the task of philosophy to think about the foundations of science and technology and to explain them in the form of modern social values. But today's philosophers are unable to explain social problems or understand modern technology. It can be seen that the task of philosophers is very arduous, both in the field of science and in the field of politics and society.
Where does the philosophical dilemma come from? Ironically, the philosophical dilemma is the result of the philosophical revolution of the twentieth century.
For thousands of years, human beings have grasped the world through language (i.e., the system of symbols) and used language (symbols) to discuss philosophy, truth, and history, but what are symbols, why can people use them, and what is the value of discussing symbols? Mankind did not think about it until Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized the philosophy of language.
In the same way that we can use the following metaphor to illustrate the philosophical revolution: a fish can only see the world in which it lives if it jumps out of the water, and in the same way, the philosophical revolution is to leap out of the linguistic environment in which we live and observe human language and consciousness from the perspective of a bystander.
The linguistic turn in philosophy is a great emancipation of the human mind, a revolution as important as the scientific revolution of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein was recognized as a philosophical genius. Unfortunately, after his untimely death, philosophy was emasculated, and philosophical creativity was confined to the cage of linguistic analysis.
As Carnap argued, the philosopher's job was reduced to linguistic analysis: on the one hand, the meaningless metaphysical sentences were sorted out, and on the other hand, the remaining meaningful sentences were divided into two categories: sentences that could be determined by logic and grammar, and empirical sentences that described the world, which were left to mathematicians, logicians, and linguists for analysis, and the latter to scientists.
Such an analysis may seem wonderful, but it leads to the death of "true philosophy": the decline of the humanistic spirit leads to the atrophy of "man", and man's ideals become the object of ridicule.
Today's human mind has returned to the nineteenth century, ostensibly as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The deeper reason is that the foundations of faith that underpin the second round of globalization are fragile.
The predicaments of humanity in the fields of science, politics and philosophy may seem unrelated, but behind them there is a common essence: the loss of the true mind.
▌Split: Why people's hearts are becoming more and more fake
What is the True Mind?
For a long time, man has been the vehicle of three kinds of authenticity:
First, the authenticity of facts, including those perceived through technology in a generalized sense. Each person is constantly facing the outside world, and can distinguish whether an object is real or not, and make judgments and reactions to it.
Second, the authenticity of value. The subject faces himself every day, and as a carrier of action and value, there is a sense of reality in the meaning and value of action.
Third, the authenticity of ultimate care. Human beings are beings facing death, and when they realize that death is inevitable, the subject will face the torture of the ultimate meaning of life, and will make answers, accompanied by corresponding thoughts and actions.
Authenticity is a condition of human existence and an epistemological cornerstone of human exploration in the fields of science, political society, and philosophy. In traditional societies, the above three levels of authenticity are integrated with each other.
The so-called "modernity" is a binary split that originated from ultimate care (biblical faith) and cognitive reason (modern science), from which the three realities that are integrated with each other begin to separate, and in their own unfolding, develop an understanding of themselves.
In the early days of the modern era, three separate realities could barely be maintained. But with the disappearance of the three mechanisms of truthfulness that sustain each other, each of them tends to be distorted in its development, and the result is the disintegration of the true mind. This is the root cause of the ideological crisis that has intensified over the centuries.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche proposed that "God is dead". In the twentieth century, moral relativism was on the rise, morality was equated with the pursuit of profit, and in the political and social sphere, ultimate concern began to withdraw from society (separation of church and state).
When ultimate care and authenticity of values no longer exist, technology and economics become the only goals of humanity. But can the truth of the facts on which science and technology depend always exist? Can a society without morality and faith, technology, and economy continue to develop?
In other words, after satisfying material comforts, do people really stop thinking about the problems of life and death? In this way, what bottom line do those who strive for power and profit have? This is precisely the reason for the expansion of power and nationalism.
In the 21st century, the advent of the Internet era and the expansion of virtual reality have made objective reality also disintegrate, and we are very likely to live in a world where there is no distinction between truth and falsehood. A world where there is no distinction between truth and falsehood is bound to be chaotic and turbulent. There are two examples of the confusion in truth-making judgments in the world today.
On April 10, 2019, researchers from many countries simultaneously released the first image of a black hole in human history in six places around the world, which came from the center of the nearby giant elliptical galaxy M87, which is 55 million light-years away from Earth
The first example is about "reasonable" scientific imagination and "absurd" religious facts.
In April 2019, a number of scientists around the world simultaneously released a photo of a black hole, which was a visual evidence "captured" by more than 200 researchers over a period of more than ten years from eight observation points on four continents, confirming Einstein's prediction of black holes by general relativity more than 100 years ago.
So, is the picture of the black hole we see a "real" image of the black hole?
Based on past experience, what is captured in the photo is real experience. But "black holes" are empirically meaningless, and their reality exists only at the level of mathematical symbols. Scientists may have known this when they took out the photographs. But when we look at black hole pictures, we confuse mathematical truth with empirical reality.
Following the same logic, I ask: Does God really exist?
According to the twentieth-century philosophy of language, the authenticity of a sign must come from experience, otherwise it is meaningless. This awareness has taken root in the humanistic, social and religious spheres. Mathematics is a system of symbols, and natural language is another, and if we replace the above examples with examples of natural language, it is easy for people to realize that it is inappropriate to confuse symbols and experience.
According to the Bible, God exists. In the view of many philosophers, God is only a symbol of natural language, and when reading natural language texts, a strict distinction must be made between pure signs and signs that represent objects of experience. The former is not real, the latter is.
Why, then, does the black hole as a symbol exist "really" and God as a symbol does not? I do not intend to discuss the question of religion, but I would like to use this example to illustrate that this mode of thinking that people took for granted in the twentieth century has led to a serious schizophrenia in human beings.
For those who revere science, their God is mathematics and would rather live in a virtual world created by advanced civilizations, while in the minds of others, religious belief is undoubtedly real, unconstrained by reason, even anti-rational.
How to understand the relationship between signs and experience, under what circumstances can signs be embedded in the empirical world, and under what circumstances cannot? No philosopher can answer.
Another example is the so-called "data speaks". Can big data really give us a more accurate and profound insight into the world?
Paulus, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Temple University in the United States, pointed out that the seemingly precise epidemic data is actually of very low reference value, because -
1. The uncertainty of basic data, such as mortality and infection rates, how many people died because of the epidemic? A large number of people who were treated without testing, and people who may have been infected but have no symptoms, cannot be counted.
2. The way healthcare providers and media report on this data can be distorted. For example, if the number of new cases in one place increases tenfold overnight, it may simply be because the number of previous virus tests is insufficient.
These statistics ultimately bring about growing divisions and fears in society. There is also often inconsistency between different big data. Because behind different big data, there are different patterns of interaction between different cultures, systems and infectious diseases.
In addition, the impact of the pandemic is not digital, but rather a catalyst and a display that exposes a seismic shift in societal attitudes.
The above examples abound in everyday life. When the lines between truth and falsehood, between experience and symbols, are increasingly blurred, how can we judge the rightness or wrongness or flaw of theories? If truth does not exist in humanities and history, then what is the point of the lessons of history?
▌ The way out: to regain human dignity
The disintegration of the true mind is the root cause of all the crises of humanity today.
Today, we are in a prosperous material civilization, but on the other hand, the human soul has never been so greedy for enjoyment and lacking courage as it is today. The future of humanity is bleak, and we will face a world with only technology and no civilization. In this world, the development of science and technology has no direction.
The most urgent task of the humanities scholar at the moment is to regain human dignity and to rebuild the true and grand human mind, which can match our technology, but it can never be produced from technology itself, or from scientific professional research.
How can we build a society where human beings are dignified? The answer is simple, but it is difficult to achieve – let everyone strive to live their own dignity.
In today's decline of religious ethics, how can we maintain the three truths of ultimate care, value, and facts, and make people the carriers of these three truths? This is the expectation of philosophers of the times, and it is also the "philosophy of truth" that I put forward:
First, learn the historical lessons of the loss of the true heart. Revealing the logic of the disintegration of the true mind through historical research.
As Isaac Asimov depicts in the science fiction novel "The Base," civilization can go backwards, technology can be forgotten, and modern people may live in the darkness of their minds – even if the process of loss is irreversible, but learning the lessons of history can at least shorten this "long dark period."
Isaac Asimov
Second, it discusses the possibility and methodology of rebuilding the true mind in modern society.
There are different domains of authenticity, but there are two levels of authenticity in each domain: empirical and symbolic.
For example, scientific truth (universally reproducible), social truth (repeatable to some people), and individual truth (repeatable to individuals); different fields do not necessarily intersect, and the standards of authenticity are not the same. To achieve the integration of different domains and levels of authenticity is to build arch bridges between them. Once the arch bridges are built, we can find the structures that are intertwined between the three authenticities.
If this analysis is correct, it is possible to rebuild the true mind in modern society.
For example, the "misuse of big data" mentioned above is an important cause of loss of authenticity. But that's not a matter of the math itself. Why is it that every scientific revolution must be accompanied by a great development in mathematics, because mathematics happens to be the symbolic expression of the self-consistent expansion structure of universally repeatable controlled experiments.
Therefore, we should use mathematics appropriately and appropriately. For example, the set of control variables is added, and a new controlled experiment is performed on top of it, and this new controlled experiment is also universally reproducible.
Third, try to discover the "true mind of the 21st century" from different levels.
With the rise of modernity, the ultimate care of traditional society inevitably disappears, but from the perspective of the overall structure of authenticity, the pursuit equivalent to the traditional ultimate care is not illusory, but philosophers have never explored the overall structure of authenticity and are unaware of their existence.
The modern ultimate care in the modern sense may be reconstructed, and the modern ultimate care "based on free will" may be integrated with the authenticity of values and facts to form the true heart of modern people, thus laying a new foundation for human exploration in the fields of science, politics, society and philosophy in the 21st century.