Bacon's Idols Aren't All That Bad After All
On subjectivity, filters, and world models.
We are not objective observers separate from reality but are part of the very reality that we observe. We can only sense things in relationship to ourselves. We are subjects because we must always observe the world from one particular point at one particular time, with a particular past leading up to that moment and a particular state of mind, emotions, energy or tiredness, distraction or attention, at that moment. We cannot get outside of the moment, get outside of all of space, and observe an event in all its details, from all sides, in the full context of the universe’s past and future, and with reference to all it’s causes and knowledge of all of its effects. We can’t read and debug the source code.
There is thus no naive human thinker uninformed or uninfluenced by something. Everyone’s experiences, and therefore, their thinking about those experiences, is formed by the subjective nature of their particular culture, time, and past experiences.
For example, think of yourself as a Native American waking up in the year 500 BC on a chilly morning in Wyoming.1 You have a range of sense experiences. Darkness and its terrors, and cold, painful cold give way to the warmth and light of day. What has changed? The object in the sky that appeared—and moves. What is it? Well, for you, perhaps a god, a benevolent being gifting you comfort or at least the remediation of the pain of cold. A mysterious force, an agent, a unity. Again, you think, it’s a god.
The 21st-century account of the same experience means nothing to you for your experience is of a god looking out for your benefit. For the modern, the Native American’s experience is meaningless, conditioned as the modern is to see to blind, mechanical natural forces at work. We glance past the sun and get bored. Nothing to see here. Just a big ball of gas operating according to mathematically simple—boring, in fact—rules. Nor can it even technically be considered a whole. Like everything else, its merely made up of atoms, themselves made up of the same elementary particles as everything else making the sun just one random amalgamation among many. No agency, no mystery, no unity. Again. nothing to see here.
These two views, the ancient and modern both reflect the real experience of the effects of the same object. The Native American really and truly had the experience he relates. The modern experiences things the way he says he does. And yet the two tales of the same object are contradictory. As long as we admit that there is a consistency in reality, that we have the same Sun today as they did then, the different accounts are not because of a difference in objective reality, which is, broadly, the same then as now. But since the experiences are different, something truly is different, and the obvious place to find this difference is in the experiencing subject, who approaches his experiences with different expectations, biases, and axioms.
Therefore: The objective meaning of reality is always filtered through a subjective lens. Only a baby naively perceives reality, and even then our common biology makes this naivite questionable. What we perceive is a filtered reality, filtered by the limitations of our sense organs, as well as our customs, habits, and particular philosophies or stories that we find appealing at the moment.
An easy example of this is your experience of reality as a 4-year-old versus as an adult. When I was 4, I had a set of axioms I used to understand the world and many things made perfect sense to me under that system then that seem ridiculous today. For example, the hallway outside my room was haunted by an evil diesel train that I needed to hide from by putting my head under the covers, darkness was in and of itself dangerous, and that the Tooth Fairy would exchange a dollar for each of my teeth while I slept (and was not to be feared). All people probably have similar memories of past experiences that were predicated on past assumptions.
And these interpretations of the world were not a mere academic pursuit for my 4-year old self. They were as real, as viscerally obvious to me then as Newtonian physics is to me now. My subjective experiences then were reality, as best as I could understand at the time. Which means that similarly, our subjective experiences today, are for us today, reality, as best as we can understand at the time today.
More broadly, as Donald Hoffman argues in his book Visual Intelligence, experience is a creative, or perhaps more precisely recreative process. We attempt to construct (or reconstruct) a representation or reality within our mind by carefully applying rules to the phantasms we receive from without to come to one true accurate representation out of the many possible ambiguous representations of the “raw data” coming from each sense.
What someone objectively receives from their senses, simple objective phantasms of sense, is combined with the subjective framework they have inherited or themselves built up to produce the experience experienced:
Objective Reality + Subjective Framework = Experience
Phantasms from Proper Sense Objects + Interpretive Lens = Content You Receive
Thus two physically identical sets of sense experiences could have different content or produce different experiences in two different viewers because of the differing interpretive lenses or alternatively phrased background frameworks or subjective frameworks, of the viewers.
We see an illustration of this in art, culture, and communication. Man is capable of leaving records behind him each with a truly objective meaning, yet this meaning must be filtered through the shifting contingencies of matter and material signs, a realm of subjectivity because man-made signification is solely2 by convention.3
Content, meaning, or truth, transcends the limitations of the medium of the phantasms that constitute proper sense objects. There is more to reality than what directly is visible to our senses.
Another illustration of the action of the background framework comes from the four idols of Francis Bacon, the ways he warns us that our perceptions fall short of truth. For Bacon, these are terrible stumbling blocks to the long struggle for knowledge of and power over nature, but let’s look a little more closely.
First, Bacon’s idols:
Idols of the Tribe (Biological)
Deceptive opinions about the world that come from tendencies in human nature. Seeing order where there isn’t order
Idols of the Cave (Individual/Personal Experience)
Deceptive opinions from the state/mind of a particular individual
Idols of the Marketplace (Cultural)
Errors that arise from the false usage of the words, which often obscure the true meaning that someone wanted to impress
Idols of the Theater (Cultural)
Errors that come about from the spread of false philosophies. These equate to the setting up of false superstructures or world systems
Most see, as Bacon did, these as errors that arise in our work of coming to know, but I see these rather, or further, as enabling limitations or in fact filters that reveal how/why it is possible for us to come. In my view, these flaws reveal how we come to access any truth at all. Our capacity as knowers to know is limited, but these very limits allow us to find any order or knowledge at all.
As above, our understanding comes forth always out of sense experience but the process of this sense experience becoming understanding involves this sense experience passing through three subjective filters, the sum total of which I am calling the background framework, and which I will now formally define
Background framework: The sum total of prior biological autoresponse training, cultural assumptions made unconsciously habitual, and biases arising from the limitations of our own narrow experience.
Now, here are each of the three subjective filters of said framework. We’ll look briefly at each in turn:
Biological filter: Reactions to sense stimuli given to us by reason of their effect on evolutionary fitness. For example, most people either feel an aversion to red or at the very least see red as corresponding to danger or evil. This comes about for us because of our very evolutionary history. These operate mostly at a subconscious level, but inform our conscious perception. Another example might be involuntary responses, like flinching in response to a noise, or aversion to or attraction to certain smells.
Cultural filter: Ideas about the world passed down to us from generation to generation from our parents, other ancestors, and teachers. Do you live in America? Well, then you are probably taught, or at least absorbed from adults that freedom and economic opportunity are the ultimate moral ideals. Grow up in the Soviet Union? Equality and the dignity of the worker are at least preached to you (even if they’re not practiced). Did you live in classical Japan? Shame and family honor are all you think about in society. They provide your moral lens. And so on. This includes the interpretative knowledge and paradigms of our age as well as the biases and blind spots of our age. See something you can’t explain? Of course there’s a rational, material explanation for it, you’re conditioned to think. But if your medieval ancestors saw the exact same thing, they just might be a little more open minded to—other explanations.
Personal Experience: How do you know not to touch a hot stove? Well, usually because you did once and it caused you pain. Your background framework includes “hot stoves painful” amongst its premises. But its very likely that you’ve never been to space, or encountered a superintelligent shape morphing computer. Your model will not necessarily include the danger of the Van Allen radiation belt to your health or the computer you’re reading it on enslaving you. You may have intense knowledge of birds and the ability to distinguish differences between species not shared by your neighbor. He, on the other hand, might have an eye for cars, and immediately recognize and diagnose issues with them. Your model will include particular conclusions not shared by anyone else. You lack the personal idiosyncrasies of your neighbors and they lack yours. And your idiosyncrasies inform how you process the world and respond to it.
Notice how these three filters correspond to the four “Idols” of Bacon, the Idols of the Tribe to my idea of a “biological filter”, the Idols of the Marketplace and of the Theater to the “cultural filter”, and the “Idols of the Cave” to flaws in “individual/personal experience.” Bacon’s idols are but examples of our very means of coming to know about the world gone wrong. Invert his idols and you get the filters, the frameworks, the world-models, the systems that allows us to know anything at all about the world.
We process raw sensory data first at an unconscious biological level. We next attempt to fit it into the paradigm or framework granted to us by our upbringing and society, and then finally clarify
The world model is like a map we constantly use to orient ourselves by making a correspondence between every new object or event we experience and a particular point on it.
And so, while Bacon was right to call these things that give us such a map idols, and right to tell us not to worship them, perhaps they at least deserve some reverence.
We do like to not to be totally overwhelmed and confused at every moment. At least those of us not on drugs…
But if as stated above, these stages are filters, filters do one thing that seems bad for wanting to know, for wanting to reach truth. They eliminate. They filter out. And if our filters for the world are filtering out details, that means we’re obviously always missing something about the world.
More on what we’re missing later…
Though of course, you don’t call it Wyoming. Because of my colonialist and patriotic American background framework, I do. Oh, and your decision to call it “colonialist” or rather to call it “patriotic” also depends upon your background framework. Because I’m trying to create a more all-encompassing framework that balances the two I’m using both.
Of course, theology might question the “solely.” Since discussions of the fittingness of the mode of the Incarnation and Redemption, and matter utilized by the Sacraments often include the idea that particularities of each were willed specifically by God to be as they were for the sake of their playing a direct part in Christ’s life or the Sacraments, like wheat, the grape, the thorn, etc., perhaps a similar thing might also be true for words, letters, sounds, etc. Particularly interesting examples might be found in Greek letters chi and rho — ☧, also perhaps the sound of the words “Jesus” or “Christ” in Hebrew or Aramaic. Perhaps these are in some sense natural, and not merely by convention?
For another example, language. The meanings of words in different languages “float” and “shift” over time, meaning that translations from one language to another must continually be updated to stay true.