This is the stance which Quentin Meillassoux describes as correlationism: the idea that all we can have access to is the correlation between thought and being.
I think that in After Finitude, he makes a decisive argument to the effect that this position is untenable. I'll quote from the book to provide a brief snippet into his (larger) argument.
- First, he defines as 'ancestral' any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species – or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.
- Second, he defines as 'arche-fossil' not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life. An arche-fossil designates the material support on the basis of which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed – for example, an isotope whose rate of radioactive decay we know, or the luminous emission of a star that informs us as to the date of its formation.
Now I'll provide the snippets of his argument. I recommend reading it carefully, as it is profound and quite penetrating.
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"For the correlationist, in order to grasp the profound meaning of the fossil datum, one should not proceed from the ancestral past, but from the correlational present. This means that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present. What is given to us, in effect, is not something that is anterior to givenness, but merely something that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. The logical (constitutive, originary) anteriority of givenness over the being of the given therefore enjoins us to subordinate the apparent sense of the ancestral statement to a more profound counter-sense, which is alone capable of delivering its meaning: it is not ancestrality which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present which retrojects a seemingly ancestral past. To understand the fossil, it is necessary to proceed from the present to the past, following a logical order, rather than from the past to the present, following a chronological order.
Accordingly, any attempt to refute dogmatism forces two decisions upon the philosopher faced with ancestrality: the doubling of meaning, and retrojection. The deeper sense of ancestrality resides in the logical retrojection imposed upon its superficially chronological sense. Try as we might, we do not see any other way to make sense of the arche-fossil while remaining faithful to the injunctions of the correlation.
Now, why is this interpretation of ancestrality obviously insupportable? Well, to understand why, all we have to do is ask the correlationist the following question: what is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?
In one sense, yes, the correlationist will reply, because the scientific statements pointing to such an event are objective, in other words, intersubjectively verifiable. But in another sense, no, she will go on, because the referent of such statements cannot have existed in the way in which it is naïvely described, i.e. as non-correlated with a consciousness. But then we end up with a rather extraordinary claim: the ancestral statement is a true statement, in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible event; it is an ‘objective’ statement, but it has no conceivable object. Or to put it more simply: it is a non-sense. Another way of saying the same thing is to remark that if ancestral statements derived their value solely from the current universality of their verification they would be completely devoid of interest for the scientists who take the trouble to validate them. One does not validate a measure just to demonstrate that this measure is valid for all scientists; one validates it in order to determine what is measured. It is because certain radioactive isotopes are capable of informing us about a past event that we try to extract from them a measure of their age: turn this age into something unthinkable and the objectivity of the measure becomes devoid of sense and interest, indicating nothing beyond itself. Science does not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning.
Thus the retrojection which the correlationist is obliged to impose upon the ancestral statement amounts to a veritable counter-sense with respect to the latter: an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense. If one divides the sense of the statement, if one invents for it a deeper sense conforming to the correlation but contrary to its realist sense, then far from deepening its sense, one has simply cancelled it. This is what we shall express in terms of the ancestral statement’s irremediable realism: either this statement has a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all. This is why a consistent correlationist should stop ‘compromising’ with science and stop believing that she can reconcile the two levels of meaning without undermining the content of the scientific statement which she claims to be dealing with. There is no possible compromise between the correlation and the arche-fossil: once one has acknowledged one, one has thereby disqualified the other. In other words, the consistent correlationist should stop being modest and dare to assert openly that she is in a position to provide the scientist with an a priori demonstration that the latter’s ancestral statements are illusory: for the correlationist knows that what they describe can never have taken place the way it is described."
(After Finitude, Chapter. I, pp. 25-26)
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So in conclusion, yes, I can conceive a world without mind. All I have to do is read a scientific work on arche-fossils, and assume that it is not speaking nonsense (i.e. that it is made of true statements whose referents did exist in the way the true statements describe them).
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