_This incident is quoted by Lacan’s biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco in her Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought as evidence of Lacan’s eccentricity and desire to scandalize, rather than teach the Americans. Whether it did scandalize Chomsky, it’s hard to say. It must have had, but perhaps not in the playful way that Lacan might have intended. Chomsky was reportedly convinced, and perhaps still remains convinced, that this Lacan must be a madman.

Now, amusing as this story might be, a question remains. What did Lacan mean? Did he really speak metaphorically, as many of his friends accompanying him in America insisted? If not, then what?

Well, let me spell it out from the beginning. I do not think that Lacan spoke metaphorically. In my view he spoke literally, perhaps too literally, but definitely too elliptically as well.

I think the key in understanding Lacan’s response is the actual meaning of the words he used.

Take the word “thought”, for example. What is it, exactly? What do we mean when we speak about a thought? At the time of this writing (1/Feb/12) Wikipedia suggests that thought “refers to mental or intellectual activity involving an individual’s subjective consciousness”. So, let us accept this.

Let us now think a bit more carefully.

Let’s imagine that I am thinking of a cat, say a cat I had seen last year in Spain.

Where is this cat now? It’s not with me, here and now, that is for sure. Possibly it is still in Spain.

What do I have here with me then? I have the thought of a cat, we said that.

But what do we mean? Is this thought an entity? Is the thought of this cat in Spain an entity sitting somewhere alongside other, similar entities such as that cat in Portugal or that other cat in Edinburgh?

And is the thought of this first Spanish cat self-contained as an entity? Does this particular thought begin and end with the cat, or does it “extent” somehow to include details about the day I saw the cat, the circumstances of my being in Spain --for example the time of the day or the weather-- or even other circumstances of my life --such as the friends I was with, the reason I was in Spain, more details about my life etc.?

And where exactly is this thought located? Is it alone or grouped together with other thoughts?

Is it grouped together with other thoughts about that trip in Spain, or with thoughts of other cats? Or will it be found together with thoughts that share other similarities? Or does it perhaps belong to all these possible groups together? And if yes, does it exist in many locations simultaneously?

And really, where are all these things? Are they in my brain?

One might be tempted to answer “yes”. And yet, it is not so straightforward. What does it mean “to be in the brain”? How can it “be” in the brain, if we haven’t even established where it begins and where it ends?

Would it not be better to say that the thought is a product of the function of that organ that we call brain rather than an entity “inside” the brain? Would it not be even better to say that a thought, strictly speaking, is something that obtains its meaning in the collective interaction of human beings? Because how otherwise can we conceive of thoughts of abstract entities such as “Spain”? Or "Portugal"?

Starts being a bit confusing, isn’t it?

Indeed it is.

Now, let’s return to what Lacan said.

I've seen enough electroencephalograms to know there's not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain.

Does it not make more sense now? Lacan (who, incidentally, was a medically trained professional as well) stresses the fact that what you see in an electroencephalogram is evidence of brain activities; you don’t see thoughts.

And, even if you think you can see thoughts, or words, in the so-called “superior temporal gyrus” as reported by the BBC, the only thing what you can actually see with this new technique is a track of blood flow in association to certain sounds.

Our thoughts, as thoughts, are out there, in Spain that sunny day, with the cat, or in the letter I have just sent, or with everything else I might have been thinking about; they are not “in” the brain.

Granted, they are products of brain’s functioning, but they are not identical with this functioning, however well you might decide to monitor it.

Well, that’s slightly different, don’t you think?

The point of departure is that scientific statements are meaningless unless taken within a framework of understanding in which they can have a meaning. All scientific theories, conjectures, statements, proofs of statements, research hypotheses and so on, presuppose such a framework of rational reasoning which we call scientific. Scientists strive for consistency within this framework. Real truth, as such, is irrelevant.

Which brings us back to our main issue: What is truth? How do we establish it?

As we saw, it is rather easy to establish the truth value of a statement such as “the cat is on the mat”. All we’d have to do is to check and see whether there is a cat on the mat. That would do.

In contrast: How do we establish the truth of a scientific statement? Say, for example, that someone, a particle physicist, publishes a paper: “Higgs boson exists”. What do we need to do to check if this is true? Is it enough to just have a look? What is a Higgs boson, anyway? What does it look like?

The thing is, we do not know -or rather, we don't really know.

Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. The two keywords here are “hypothetical” and “predicted”. Higgs boson is a research hypothesis. In order to establish the truth of this hypothesis, we need to check it against our evidence. But the evidence for or against the existence of Higgs boson is not of the same kind as the evidence for the existence of that cat on the mat; the truth that we are trying to establish is not similar either.

First of all, nobody would really be able to “see” Higgs boson. One can only infer its existence indirectly by studying the products of collisions between elementary particles accelerated at immense speeds. This is why we need instruments, such as the Large Hadron Collider. Their job is to accelerate particles at very high speeds, and let them collide in a controlled (and monitored) setting.

But we cannot “see” the products of the collisions either. We can only infer their existence indirectly by observing the interactions between these products and some specially constructed detecting instruments. These interactions, too, can only be inferred by indirect evidence. And so on and so forth.

In short: the evidence that we need in order to establish the existence of Higgs boson makes sense only within the highly sophisticated network of interdependent theories and hermeneutical models of particle physics. It does not make any sense outside of it.

In fact, this evidence –if ever collected– would only confirm the internal consistency of our theories, not the “reality” of Higgs boson. Our theories, both the ones that predict Higgs boson as well as the others that explain all the intermediate steps that we have taken in order to interpret our evidence, might be proven wrong or incomplete or inadequate, and might be abandoned or replaced.

Of course that’s not a problem. As we said, this is what scientists do: Questions of reality are irrelevant to them. They are only concerned with consistency –i.e. with scientific, not real, truth.

The point that I think is important, crucial really, is that sometimes people forget this distinction, and allow this “forgetfulness” to blur their understanding of truth.

This is a fallacy, and, as such, has major repercussions.

Last week I commented in passing upon how questions of a “subjective” nature (such as how beautiful a house or a painting is) are usually brushed aside, precisely because “they are subjective”. We usually accept this as a fact of life. We accept that “subjective things” are out of the reach of science. We accept that science can only study “objective” things, and we are fine with this.

Why shouldn’t we be fine, really? Objective things are measurable and verifiable –what is better than science to deal with them?

Higgs boson, for example, is such an objective thing. It is measurable, albeit indirectly, and verifiable. Yet, we do not know if it is real. Even if we collect evidence about its existence, we will still not know if it is real. But, as I tried to show above, this would not matter; what matters is that our theories remain consistent.

The fallacy that bothers me, is when we take qualities such as consistent or objective (in the sense of measurable or verifiable) to be identical with real; this fallacy leads to a further, more serious, fallacy that only objective things are real –with the corollary that subjective things are not real, i.e. non measurable or verifiable, and therefore unsuitable for serious study.

Do you see where this leads us?

It leads us to a place where I can study Higgs boson, even though it is hypothetical, but I cannot study something very real but subjective such as one’s sorrow for the loss of a loved one.

And instead of recognizing that as a limitation of our tools and our scientific worldview, we try to tame (one would say, bully) subjectivity into becoming objective, i.e. measurable.

We usually do this with the help of questionnaires. But whichever the way, the approach itself is highly problematic. This I will try to elaborate in another post.

For the time being, though, let’s summarize the argument.

1. Science deals with objective, i.e. measurable and verifiable, entities.
2. Scientific thought is only concerned with consistency, not with “truth” or “reality”.
3. People, however, tend to confuse scientific truth with real truth.
4. Subjective reality is taken, then, to be less “real” than objective reality –where in fact it only is less measurable.
5. Subjective reality is brushed aside, or forcibly converted to objective, e.g. with the help of questionnaires.

I shall return to this.

In the meantime, please feel free to leave your comments, using the form below.

In the excerpt of the abstract quoted above, Ioannidis uses the term “true” in three different occasions.

In the first he speaks about the probability that a research claim is true.

In the second he speaks about true relationships and their ratio to no relationships.

And in the third he speaks about the likelihood of a research finding being true.

So, we have a) a claim that is true; b) a relationship that is true; and c) a research finding that is true.

Now, let’s pause here for a moment. When the words “is true” are used, are they referring to the same thing? What do they mean? What is truth?

Usually people take statements to be true when they correspond to reality.

When I say “I have some money to spend today”, this is true if (and only if) I really have some money to spend on the day that I utter these words.

Or should I announce that “the cat is on the mat”, this statement would be true if and only if at the point of my saying so there was a (real) cat on a (real) mat.

So far, so good.

What about a statement such as “this house is beautiful”? What are the conditions that such a statement be true? It would be true, you would think, if and only if the house in question is beautiful indeed.

But how do we establish this? While it’s relatively easy to establish the reality of an observable state of affairs (such as the cat’s being on the mat), things become a bit more unclear when a statement refers to concepts (or qualities) such as “beautiful”. People usually brush this kind of statements off, explaining that they are subjective. Of course we need to clarify what subjective means, but let’s say that this is so. Still, we can see that there is a tiny little problem with our understanding of truth. It seems, in this case, that we employ the term differently, depending on whether the issue in question is of a subjective or objective matter. Objective truths are somehow more real than subjective ones.

Keeping that in mind, let’s get back to our scientific paper.

As we saw, it speaks about a) a claim that is true; b) a relationship that is true; and c) a research finding that is true.

We can see that when a claim is said to be true this can only be so if said claim corresponds to some specific and observable state of affairs. I claim that “the cat is on the mat”, and on hearing my words, you look, and you confirm that this indeed is the case. Therefore my claim is true. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that the same applies to research claims.

What about a relationship? When can it be true? What does it mean “true relationship”? The paper talks about scientific research, so it is safe to assume that when it mentions the ratio of true relationships to no relationships it actually means statistical relationships (correlations and dependences) between variables or sets of data. Let’s accept then that the same reasoning applies. A statistical relationship will be true if and only if it corresponds to a specific and observable state of affairs, i.e. if and only if the variables or datasets in question do indeed demonstrate said relationship.

Finally, what can be said about a research finding? It is clear that a research finding cannot be true or not true on its own with no reference to anything else. From the context we can presume that when the paper talks about true findings it means findings that confirm a research hypothesis. So, a finding can be said to be true if and only if it confirms a research hypothesis.

So, the words “is true” are used in three different ways. In the first they are taken to represent a correspondence between a claim and a state of affairs; in the second they are taken to mean the demonstrable existence of a correlation between variables or datasets. And in the third they refer to the confirmation of a hypothesis.

It’s easy to see that none of those conceptions of truth refers to reality as such. The cat might really be on the mat, independently of the observer, but a research claim does not exist outside the framework in which it can have a meaning. It is real, ok, but not in the same way that the cat is real.

As a work hypothesis, then, let us differentiate between “real truth” and “scientific truth”.

Scientific truth only refers to the internal consistency of theories, hypotheses, claims and statements within a field of research and their verifiability by data collected according to other theories, hypotheses, claims and statements within the same field of research. It never refers to real truth.

That is a very important point which many times goes unnoticed.

Let me spell it out. Scientific research of the highest standard strives for scientific truth, i.e. consistency within a field of research. Inconsistencies make researchers re-evaluate their concepts and theories, sometimes abandon them, sometimes change direction and sometimes replace them. Scientific research never aims at real truth as such. It can never do so. Real truth is irrelevant, as far as science is concerned.

To put it more boldly: Science does not have anything to do with Reality.

That was perhaps too bold. I should clarify.

I shall return.

(added 27/7/11: Please click here.)

I say “confused” and this might sound very strong, but it is not.

The question here is a question about the universal applicability of scientific pre-suppositions.

Let’s take things from the beginning.

Science works by formulating theories. Scientists posit hypotheses based on the theories; then they conduct experiments to check those hypotheses; and finally they confirm, refute, or amend the theories as needed based on the results of the experiments.

The guiding principle in all this is that the object of study of any scientific field is not “lawless”. (It would be futile to try to formulate theories if you did not accept that there are at least some laws in effect, and that these laws can be known.)

So, for example, physics can study nature, and formulate theories about nature, because we accept that nature is adhering to certain laws, which we call “natural”. We did not know all these laws from the beginning. We started discovering them as soon as we started studying nature. But first we accepted that nature operates according to natural laws –such as the law of causality. This we did not check. We accepted it as an axiom, so to speak.

Now, different scientific disciplines have different fields of study, and the concept of law can vary rather radically. For example, “causality” as a concept has a very different meaning in classical physics than it has in quantum mechanics or, say, in geology, or psychology. The same applies to any law or laws based on causality. These laws can have a very different meaning depending on the scientific field of study.

In classical physics, for example, it is conceivable that if you know in every possible detail the specific state of a system, you can predict the future and infer the past. You don’t need anything else. This, famously, was the argument of Laplace against the existence of God. “I have no need of that hypothesis” he answered to Napoleon when asked what was the place he (Laplace) gave to God is in his theories.

It’s not the same with quantum physics. According to our present understanding, you are not even able to know the details of a specific state of a quantum system in full. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the better you know the velocity of a particle, the less you can know its position –and vice versa. Quantum systems appear to be inherently unpredictable.

Or in cosmology: No scientist would claim that the law of causality is relevant when we study singularities such as the moment Zero of the Big Bang or the “inside” of a black hole.

Similarly, in psychology, the “laws” that govern human behaviour, if we accept that such laws exist, seem to be radically different to the laws of physics, and any question of predictability seems to be a bit out of place. No psychological theory of human behaviour can (or, dares to) claim that it can predict the future. At most it can hope to be able to explain the past.

What then about this whole talk about free will?

Well, this is what I meant earlier when I said that it is confused.

The neuroscientists who study the brain processes of humans and animals are falling in the trap of the so-called “genetic fallacy”. They believe that the observed lawfulness of the processes they study also can be observed –or should be able to be observed– in the actual behaviour of the human or animal under scrutiny. The conceptual error is that human or animal behaviour is taken to be the result of “nothing but” lawful brain processes.

This is an oversimplification, and my thought experiment with the lottery was aiming to show exactly that.

It might be that my decision to play this or that number is corresponding to observable and lawful brain processes, but by your telling me this (i.e. by interacting with me) my brain processes change, and I decide to play different numbers or not play at the lottery at all.

Just before I finish, let me add here Kant’s definition of free will.

Free will, he writes in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “is a rational causality which is effective without being determined by any alien cause”.

Here Kant anticipates the neuroscientists of more than 200 years later and points out that it is not relevant to the question of free will whether there is causality in the brain processes or not. In fact he accepts there is a causality. But he points out that my will is free to the extend that it is not determined by an alien (i.e. extraneous) cause.

In other words, it's not the causality in my brain processes which might render my will un-free but the extraneous causes that might affect it, for example if I am forced to act in a certain way (because, say, I am in prison).

If scientists would read a bit of philosophy before making big claims…

Some years later other neuroscientists, “long sceptical” with this conclusion, as New Scientist magazine puts it, designed a more detailed experiment aiming to check the nature of this “readiness potential” (RP). In this new experiment the volunteers were asked to wait for an audio tone and then decide whether to tap a key.
According to the New Scientist article, the researchers reasoned that if the RP was really representing the participants’ decision before the participants knew that they had made up their minds, (this is what the original experiment allegedly showed), then it (RP) would be present in the readings for those participants who would decide to tap the key.

Complicated? Perhaps.

To cut the long story short, the newer experiment’s results were apparently disproving the previous experiment’s results. There was, indeed, this unexpected, anticipatory RP, but all participants to the experiment had it, both those who had chosen to tap the key, and those who had chosen not to tap it. Conclusion? The researchers said that the RP possibly shows that the brain is paying some sort of attention, and not that a decision has been made.

Relief! The free will is still with us. It survived yet another attack.

Now, let us for a minute imagine this: Imagine that free will has been proven not to exist. Imagine that scientists have shown that it is always and invariably an illusion. Imagine, moreover, that they (the scientists) are in the position to predict, in a most systematic way, the actions of each and every human being that they put under their focus. Should they be, let’s say, observing someone writing down the numbers to play in the national lottery, they are in a position to predict all the numbers, one by one. Because free will does not exist.

Spooky one would say.

Now, put yourself in the place of this hapless lottery player, and imagine that you are in friendly terms with these scientists. You sit down to choose numbers for the lottery, and your friend, the scientist, calls you.

“Don’t bother choosing”, he says. “We are monitoring you, and we know that you are going to choose 1, 32, 35 and 43. So, go ahead and play these numbers. There is no free will. Don’t waste your time.”

What would you do? Would you not say to yourself something along the lines of the following?

“I don’t know what has gotten them scientists, but I know this. I am not gonna play those numbers. Ever. Period.”

And then you would play something like 19, 22, 23, 45 –anything that would prove the scientists wrong.

So much for the scientific prediction.

But what does this mean? What’s the problem with a prediction, if I choose to contradict it as soon as I get to know it? Does my action invalidate the prediction?

No, it does not invalidate it. But it certainly undermines it.

I shall return to this here.

Sloppy “scientific” explanations aside (involving quantum mechanics, parallel universes and supposedly persisting subliminal states of consciousness just before actual brain death) “Source Code” was a highly entertaining film –if you are into this kind of films that is.

“Groundhog Day”, on the other hand, did not turn to any science, sloppy or not, to explain why and how this entrapment in that particular day had happened. By watching Bill Murray’s character’s ordeal, however, we could not but get a sense that a sort of second chance was given to him, one that he was sort of obliged to make the best use of: Our weatherman would have to live the same day again and again for as long as it was needed because he had to become a better person. Better? What does this mean? We do not know, and Bill Murray’s character did not either, he had to figure it out for himself. The weatherman was trapped inside past patterns of behaviour and was now “forced” to find a way through and past them, if he was ever to leave Groundhog Day.

One would think that this is an appropriate metaphor for analysis –of course, leaving the being “forced” aspect aside. One is “trapped” inside patterns of past behaviour, helplessly living and reliving them, until such moment comes that it becomes unavoidable to take action. (Now, I cannot know if this was the intention of Harold Ramis, the man who directed “Groundhog Day”, but I cannot but observe that he has also directed “Analyse This”, this comedy about therapy and the mafia, with Robert De Niro.)

In “Source Code” the hero is not trapped in the errors of his own past behaviour patterns as such –in fact he is not trapped in any kind of pattern of his own at all. But he is expected to revisit any single second in these eight minutes that he finds himself in, in an effort to find some vital information missing, and thus to complete his mission.

I am not going to give out more spoilers for the story. If you are interested, please do find the film and watch it.

I will only add one more comment. “Source Code” belongs to this group of films which also includes recent blockbusters like “Inception”, “Avatar”, “Matrix”, “12 Monkeys” and “Total Recall” (to name but a few) but also older films such as “Last Year in Marienbad” (1963) or “La Jetée” (1962).

What those films, and many others, share in common is the premise that a set of experiences is something that “happens” to one’s body, something that can be “fed” into one’s brain in order to create a completely believable (or deceitful) semblance of reality. Characters in those movies are willingly or unwillingly allowing themselves to be transferred in a simulated reality (“Matrix”) or to occupy a different body (“Avatar”, “Source Code”). The origin of this premise, or rather, its most prominent exponent in the West, is of course Descartes. In other words, what these films have in common is the Cartesian version of the mind-body problem.

And we have seen elsewhere how difficult is to get away from Descartes' solution.

This is what the Government has written in its Command Paper "Enabling Excellence: Autonomy and Accountability for Healthcare Workers, Social Workers and Social Care Workers":

“Regulation of the health and social care workforce is sometimes necessary where there are significant risks to people using services which cannot be mitigated in other ways. However, in recent decades compulsory blanket statutory regulation of the health and social care workforce in England has too often been seen as the first resort, rather than the last, in deciding how best to assure safe, effective and respectful care. Where regulation has been extended, there has not always been a robust and transparent case made based on the level of presenting risk.”

And further down in the text:

“For the overwhelming majority of occupational and professional groups which are not currently subject to statutory regulation and which are generally not considered to present a high level of risk to the public, but where recommendations that regulation should be introduced have been made (including those groups recommended by the HPC for statutory regulation in the past, but not yet registered) the assumption will be that assured voluntary registration would be the preferred option.”

Case closed!