Metaphysical Object Permanence

Why empiricism is immature

Babies like the game peek-a-boo. It’s fun to watch babies be surprised and laugh, but playing peek-a-boo is also a sign of healthy growth and development of a child - it helps them develop object permanence.

Object permanence is our ability to recognize that even though we no longer perceive something, it can still exist. This is held as a basic skill of human development, but a strict understanding of empiricism (and the popular conception of it) takes the opposite viewpoint: “If you can’t prove it with hard data that I can see or measure, then it doesn’t exist.”

Strict empiricism isn’t held as a serious idea by philosophers anymore, but its effect lives on in the corporate world: it’s the basis for the data-driven processes that are held as the gold standard of decision-making: bean-counting MBAs and STEM grads looking at spreadsheets full of raw data and reaching conclusions that may not be accurate. The beans should be counted, but how they’re counted makes all the difference - numbers are fixed quantities and so seem objective, but all that does is obscure the subjectivity of their origin.

The capacity for subjective experience is a hallmark of sentience, of consciousness. Unlike machines that result in consistently similar outputs given the same input (AI gives a greater variance of outputs, seemingly replicating sentient beings), sentient beings have markedly different responses to the same stimuli because they experience that stimuli differently.

This is why the hard problem of consciousness is maybe the most important philosophical question of the day: it’s what underlies the entirety of human existence. Subjective experience drives the entirety of rational thought, even if our goal is that which is ultimately objective.

Intellectually of growing up requires that we develop metaphysical object permanence - that we accept things as true that we may not be able to perceive ourselves. When we develop metaphysical object permanence, the most important question becomes: “What source do I trust?” That’s an epistemological question which I won’t dive into, except to say that I personally subscribe to the notion that real knowledge is a combination of testimonial, inferential, and experiential knowledge.

At the very least, it’s clear that empiricism (at least in its strict form) lacks that metaphysical object permanence. It’s the peek-a-boo of philosophy: entertaining, but ultimately lacking.