so let's start with post-modernism the
first thing to understand about the post
modernists are that they are by no means
unintelligent quite the contrary
jacques derrida for example and michel
foucault for that matter two famous
french public intellectuals who are both
at or near the head of what you might
describe as the postmodern intellectual
revolution are extraordinarily
intellectually capable that doesn't mean
they're correct by any stretch of the
imagination but it certainly means that
they're more than able to put together a
an argument that's difficult to
disentangle and so we'll start with that
what I think is the most central power
the most powerful central claim of
post-modernism a claim which i think is
actually correct and which also has
bedeviled many other fields including
surprisingly enough artificial
intelligence the claim is something like
there is an infinite number of ways to
interpret any even finite set of
phenomena and and and that actually
happens to be true it's it's it's part
of the reason why it's been so difficult
for human beings to develop artificial
intelligence and for them to develop
machines that could operate in
real-world environments because it turns
out that the world is so complex that
perceiving it appears virtually
impossible technically speaking we heard
a little bit earlier the previous talk
about embodied cognition and one of the
ways psychologists are trying to address
the issue of the impossibility of
perception is to note that perception
isn't possible without situating the
mind in a body that has a certain set of
constraints we also devote a tremendous
amount of our neurological landscape to
to sensory processing so that when we
look at the world it can manifest itself
in this self-evident way that it appears
to but that doesn't mean that it's a
simple problem it's a very complicated
problem and the post modernists were
technically correct there's there's a
there's a near infinite number of ways
to to perceive and interpret a finite
number of phenomena and now you see the
thing that's interesting about that
claim apart from the fact that it
happens to be technically true is that
you can use it to mount an assault on
any and
interpretation of anything whatsoever
because there is a tremendous
variability in the number of
interpretations that you could bring to
bear on a situation then you can
instantly jump to the conclusion or
expound the proposition that none of
those interpretations should be
privileged amount above all above any
others
now that's actually wrong and this is
why post-modernism is correct in its
central assumption but incorrect in its
secondary assumption now the reason it's
wrong is because although there is a
very large number of potential
interpretations of the world that does
not mean that there is an equally large
number of viable interpretations of the
world now you might say well what
constitutes constraints on the viability
of an interpretation and I would say
well there's a number of them and I
think you have to understand this in the
context of living creatures viewing and
interpreting the world and also within a
broader evolutionary context the way
that evolution solves the problem of the
infinite number of potential
interpretations is by killing every
single thing that interprets things
badly enough to die right and so I mean
this this is actually one of the most
powerful arguments for the necessity of
the evolutionary for the necessity of
the accuracy of the evolutionary theory
it's it's that you know it's taken three
and a half billion years of evolution to
produce creatures of our sort who can
interpret the world which is impossible
to interpret well enough to live for
approximately 80 years and to have some
reasonable chance of propagating during
that period of time three and a half
billion years and that's the best we've
been able to do it's a very complicated
problem and evolution solves that
problem by producing a tremendous number
of variants and then killing almost all
of them and so death is the solution to
the problem with interpretation and it's
a terrible solution but the point I'm
trying to make there is that
interpretations are constrained by such
things primary things that happen to be
relevant to living beings like suffering
and death so those are the first sets of
constraints your interpretations of the
world should shield you to the degree
possible from excess suffering and death
that doesn't seem to be too debatable of
proposition unless you're aimed in the
suicidal direction and so so we can
start by merely pointing that out we
also might point out that such things as
the necessity for cooperating and
competing with others also constrains
the interpretations that you're allowed
in the world especially given that not
only do you have to cooperate and
compete with people one time but that
you have to cooperate and compete with
often the same people many times in many
different contexts and so that not only
do you have to interpret the world so
that you can cooperate and compete with
those people you have to do it in a
manner that can be iterated and repeated
and that constitutes also an
extraordinary serious constraint so you
don't want to suffer too much and you
don't want to die and you want to be
able to cooperate with people and you
want to be able to compete with them and
you want to be able to do that over long
periods of time and then maybe you also
want to do it with an aim in mind
because generally we have aims in mind
and so there are things that we like to
have more than other things and so we
aim at those and then we have to
constrain our interpretation so that
when we enact them in the world the
probability that what we're aiming at is
going to happen will improve and all of
those constraints operates operate
simultaneously and what that implies and
I think Jean Piaget the developmental
psychologist maybe went farther along
this line of thinking than anyone else I
know about anyways it's sort of an
elaboration of Kant's fundamental
ethical Maxim which was something like
act as if the thing that you're doing
will be done by everyone and but the
piagetian sense was more like act as if
the thing that you will be doing needs
to be repeated endlessly in a manner
that moves up instead of down it's
something like that but the point is is
that there's there's tremendous
constraints on the manner in which we
can interpret the world from any
realistic perspective so the criticism
that there are an infinite number of
interpretations falls apart on closer
examination so that's that's the first
place that the post modernists are
seriously wrong they radically
underestimated the intrinsic constraints
on on on interpretation
you
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