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Editorial

Thoughts on Thought

by Rick Lewis

The title of this issue’s special theme, ‘Thoughts On Thought’, is partly a tribute to our onetime contributor Antony Flew, who wrote a well-known book called Thinking About Thinking. Flew’s book though was about informal logic including various kinds of fallacies. Despite the similarity in titles, the theme of this issue is completely different. It isn’t about logical fallacies, even if here and there it probably contains some. So if you spot any, we encourage you to honour Flew’s memory by writing us a letter!

Instead, this issue of Philosophy Now contains articles on a whole range of questions about our minds and the workings of our brains, the relationship between them, the nature of perception, consciousness, the evolution of intelligence and more. Perhaps we should have called it Minds on Brains, or even Brains on Brains?

This reminds me a little bit of the homunculus theory of mind. I first learned about this from a comic called The Beezer, when I was about ten years old. One of the regular comic strips in it was called ‘The Numskulls’, and was about a crew of tiny humanoids living inside the head of an average man (who they called “Our Man”), working the controls to get him through his life. Each had a particular job: they were in charge of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears, reasoning and so on. Without their efforts pulling levers and taking decisions, the man was basically just a complex but inert mechanism. Naturally, they had all sorts of hilarious adventures. In one episode Our Man developed a nasty cough, which caused the numskull who operated his mouth to be temporarily lost overboard. As a result, of course, Our Man lost his voice. So, as you can see, this picture of the mind did have some explanatory power. I was dimly aware even then that there was something not quite satisfactory about it. Much later, I learned that people quite often (seriously or not) described the workings of the brain by reference to an inner observer, perhaps one who is watching the outside world on a kind of screen inside our heads. This is sometimes called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’. The flaw with this theory is known as the ‘homunculus problem’. It is a problem of infinite regression that was summed up particularly clearly by Daniel Dennett in an interview in Cogito. He said:

“If a little man in your head is looking at the little screen using the full powers of human vision, then we have to look at a smaller man in his head looking at a still smaller screen, and so on ad infinitum. That’s what’s wrong with the little man in the head.”

So now finally, Philosophy Now has ascended to the philosophical level of 1970s children’s comics! This is a special moment for me, I can tell you.

The problem of how the mind relates to the brain, and whether they are two separate entities or just somehow a single thing, has been a central question in philosophy for a very long time. This ‘mind-body problem’ has long been of particular interest to our Editor, Grant Bartley, and you can find his videos about it on his YouTube channel. So, what is consciousness and how does it arise from our brains? The articles in our theme section mainly don’t tackle this question head-on, but instead discuss a whole host of enthralling questions which relate to this central one.

For example, one popular solution is that when brains and their activity become sufficiently complex then consciousness appears as an ‘emergent property’ of the physical processes involved. But what does this mean? Jonathan Moens in his article explains that examples of emergent phenomena can be found in many aspects of nature, and that emergence is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, well worth studying but very hard to fully understand.

A central problem with consciousness is understanding why there is anything it is like to be you, to have the perceptions and experiences that you do. It is a hard problem indeed, but philosophers are chipping away at it with ingenious thought experiments. Nigel Hems considers one that has become famous, and goes by the name Mary’s Room.

Perhaps a particular kind of first-person experience – that of being in love – sometimes so wonderful, sometimes distressing, always intensely meaningful, proves that we cannot be merely biological machines? Peter Westergaard puts physicalist theories to this test.

Rogério Severo and Roger Haines both explore different aspects of how our minds and brains work, and how the physical brain processes and the mental processes of consciousness and directed attention at least relate to one another. And lastly in this special section, a surprising claim: James Miles argues that we are the smartest creatures in the universe. On the face of it, this seems unlikely. One glance at the bloodsoaked headlines and anyone would doubt this. Furthermore, over centuries of intellectual and scientific progress we humans have painfully divested ourselves of the belief that we are central to some cosmic plan, that we are the pinnacle of creation. Yet Miles makes a pretty strong case, involving natural selection and brain evolution, and I couldn’t see the flaw in it. See what you make of it.

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News

- News: October/November 2024

News

News: October/November 2024

World Congress: a report from Rome • Morality found to change with weather • Critic & philosopher Fredric Jameson dies — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

World Congress of Philosophy

The 25th World Congress of Philosophy was held August 1-8, 2024 on the campus of Sapienza University in Rome. The theme of this Congress was ‘Philosophy Across Boundaries’ but there were hundreds of topics, as usual for big events like this. Notable plenary sessions and symposia topics included ‘The Boundaries of AI’, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Other Kinds of Minds’, ‘Vulnerability and Knowledge’, ‘Citizenship, Care, and Self-Determination’, ‘Epistemic Injustice, Power, and Struggle’, ‘Embodiment’, and ‘Trust Truth, and Knowledge’. Endowed lecturers included Nancy Tuana, Barbara Herman, Joakim Garff, Zhongjiang Wang, Tae-soo Lee, and Evandro Agazzi. More information is still online at wcprome2024.com.

That this event took place at all was a minor miracle. It was initially planned for 2023 in Melbourne, Australia, five years after the Beijing World Congress in 2018. But those plans were cancelled in the wake of the pandemic. An alternative was organized for 2024 by an Italian team sponsored by the Italian Philosophical Society and Sapiennza University, in cooperation with the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.

This Congress attracted over 5,600 registered participants, far exceeding the expectations of the organizers. This success sometimes overwhelmed the organizers, and organizational challenges were aggravated by the August heat. But the hosts met all problems with charm and patience, and they deserve thanks from the philosophical community for their work on its behalf. The next World Congress, to be held in Tokyo in 2028, will have a longer organizational time-line to prepare for a huge number of participants.

George Leaman, Philosophy Documentation Center

Morality Discovered to be Weather-Dependent

A 10-year study involving surveys of more than 230,000 people in the U.S., has revealed that moral values fluctuate on a seasonal basis, depending on the time of year. It was conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Nottingham. Ian Hohm, a doctoral student in UBC’s psychology department and the study’s first author explains: “People’s endorsement of moral values that promote group cohesion and conformity is stronger in the spring and fall than it is in the summer and winter… Moral values are a fundamental part of how people make decisions and form judgments, so we think this finding might just be the tip of the iceberg in that it has implications for all sorts of other downstream effects.” The researchers also discovered a correlation between the seasonal moral shifts and anxiety levels, using large-scale findings on seasonal anxiety provided by Project Implicit Health: “We noticed that anxiety levels peak in the spring and autumn, which coincides with the periods when people endorse binding values more strongly. This correlation suggests that higher anxiety may drive people to seek comfort in the group norms and traditions upheld by binding values,” said Dr Mark Schaller, a professor of psychology at UBC and senior author of the study.

Carl Hoefer Wins Lakatos Award

The Lakatos Award is given annually by the London School of Economics and endowed by the Latsis Foundation to the value of £10,000 for “an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science.” This year’s laureate is Carl Hoefer, Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Scientific Director of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy, who won the award for his 2019 publication, Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance. The selection committee characterises it as “a terrific book, thorough, detailed, and persuasive… it’s not hard to see that it will become the sort of book that no one working on the interpretation of probability will be able to ignore”, as it “has succeeded in producing the definitive version of the Lewisian theory of chance”, leading “to a number of interesting and original claims about the relation of macroscopic chances and causes to the micro-world.”

Philosophy of Aging and Loneliness Gets Funded

An assistant professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), has been awarded a $3.8 million research grant by the National Institute on Aging. John Beverly received it for a project focused on philosophically-informed ontology development related to the psychological study of aging,” according to the university’s website. An ontology is an understanding of or classification of what things exist. With an eye on both theoretical insights and practical applications, the research team will “develop ontologies for solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging research”, and use the results to create an ontology-based web interface to which other researchers can then upload data about solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging data. The project will also aim to “train stakeholders to investigate the impact of solitude on successful aging and disseminate results to the broader community.”

Thinking About Infinity

Can you imagine infinity? Does the infinity symbol mean anything to you? A recent study consisting of four main experiments, with 120 participants in total, came to the conclusion that people do not perceive the infinity symbol as representing an endlessness. The idea of the boundless is too elusive. Rather, people often miscomprehend it as a number similar to other numbers, another point on the numerical scale. “Traditional cognitive science has focused on phenomena grounded in sensory experience, but infinity is entirely different. Understanding infinity requires abstract thinking that goes beyond concrete representations and everyday experiences, which I find both puzzling and challenging,” clarifies study author Michal Pinhas of the Quantitative Thinking and Cognition Lab at Ariel University. “In my lab, we explore how people understand and process abstract or nonintuitive mathematical concepts beyond infinity, such as zero and exponential growth. The goal is to gain deeper insights into how the human mind handles concepts that lack direct, concrete connections to everyday experience, and how this influences reasoning and decision-making. I believe that studying these unique and challenging concepts can expand the way we think about numerical representations and processes.”

Fredric Jameson has died

Fredric Jameson in Brazil, 2011

© Fronteiras do Pensamento 2011. fronteiras.com Creative Commons 2.0

Fredric Jameson, a leading Marxist literary and cultural critic and philosopher, has died at the age of 90. Jameson was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, where he taught since 1985. Born in Cleveland in 1934, he studied at Haverford College with the rhetorical theorist Wayne Booth, who coined the term ‘unreliable narrator’. After majoring in French, Jameson earned his PhD at Yale in 1959. He spent his career in the fields of French and Romance studies, or comparative literature programs, first at Harvard, then the University of California, San Diego; Yale; UC Santa Cruz, before joining Duke. His outlook was informed by ideas from both Europe and the US, and he often used the one to critique the other. He theorised about the relationship between Western culture and political economy. He was awarded the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. His many books include Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; The Cultural Turn; A Singular Modernity; The Modernist Papers; Archaeologies of the Future; Brecht and Method; Ideologies of Theory; Valences of the Dialectic; The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

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Thoughts On Thought

- From Birds To Brains

- Mary Leaves Her Room

- Love & Metaphysics

- Iain McGilchrist’s Naturalized Metaphysics

- Managing the Mind

- We’re as Smart as the Universe Gets

Thoughts on Thought

From Birds To Brains

Jonathan Moens considers whether emergence can explain minds from brains.

One September in Rome, as I waited for the 700 bus, I looked up and noticed a black tide of birds hanging over Il Vittoriano monument. Tens of thousands of starlings had gathered here to dance their graceful, synchronous dance. They raced and morphed, splintered off and coalesced: they formed an endless stream of imaginary shapes in the tangerine sky, I was mesmerized by the scene above me.

I had recently learnt about ‘emergentism’: the view that complex systems, including certain substances, cells, bodies, brains, and ecosystems, can exhibit behaviours that are greater than the sum of their parts. The wetness of water, for example, can’t be explained by individual water molecules alone, which are not themselves wet. The wetness emerges when we have trillions of water molecules acting together. Similarly, the destructive power of a tornado can’t be explained by the individual water droplets, dust particles, and debris that feeds it – none of which individually are themselves violent. Even consciousness – that inner, subjective realm comprised of the fleeting sensations, feelings, and thoughts that shape our everyday lives – can’t be found in the activities of individual brain cells. And now here I am, observing the starlings’ collective murmuration.

Starling murmuration

© Mostafameraji 2014 Creative Commons 4

There’s nothing particularly mystical about how individual starlings behave: they mate, migrate, search for food, and perch themselves comfortably on balconies. But the shapeshifting choreography of the starlings flying together involves the kind of spontaneous finely-tuned collective decision-making that scientists still can’t predict by looking at any one bird alone. The murmuration simply emerges as an incomprehensible seamless phenomenon. I was in awe. “Each bird is responding to local information,” explains Timothy O’Connor, a philosopher at Indiana University specializing in emergent phenomena: “But somehow, a kind of organized behaviour just spontaneously emerges through all these little local interactions” (Most of the quotations in this article are from audio interviews conducted by the author).

Emergence, explains O’Connor, is not a new idea. In writing it dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who first articulated the idea in his Metaphysics (c.350 BCE) when describing how the ‘the whole is something besides the parts’ in entities composed of several parts. But while the concept has a long history, its usage in science and philosophy has been scarce. It’s only in the past few decades, with rapid developments in computer technology bolstering interest in complex systems, that the notion of emergence really took off. As O’Connor says, “Emergence is back in vogue.” Thus, since the 1980s, scientists have studied emergent properties in all kinds of dynamic systems, from flocking behaviours in starlings to shoaling in fish, all the way to traffic congestion and synchronous clapping in concert halls.

While these and other complex systems differ in many respects, they also share key similarities, including the spontaneous creation of order; quick, seamless adaptation to the environment; and behaving in novel ways, unpredictable from the behaviour of the individual parts. Identifying such patterns has enabled scientists to extend the concept of emergence across natural phenomena, including for hurricanes, tidal waves, and tornadoes.

Conscious Emergence Emerges

While emergent phenomena really do appear to emerge out of thin air, O’Connor thinks science will eventually be able to explain exactly how they work. Hence he describes this type of higher physical behaviour as a ‘weak’ form of emergence. “Ultimately, it’s an empirical question,” he says, “but I don't think there’s any reason to think that there’s some kind of irreducible group [behaviour].” Indeed, studies are already beginning to unpack the mystery of the starling dance by showing how individual bird movements can communicate information across entire flocks, enabling them to behave as if they have a ‘unified mind’. However, there may be a ‘strong’ kind of emergence that could defy scientific explanation altogether: consciousness from brain activity.

With on average around eighty-six billion neurons each, each neuron having on average about ten thousand synaptic connections to other neurons, the human brain is arguably the most complex system in the universe. Within this structure lies one of the greatest mysteries in the universe: our conscious experience. How and why do collections of neurons – these tiny, spider-like cells – give rise to externally invisible, immaterial, and fundamentally different experiential phenomena? As Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, says, “The redness of a red experience, the taste of chocolate – you can’t capture these kinds of qualities in a purely quantitative vocabulary.”

It’s a difficult problem. In fact, the question of consciousness has so eluded scientists and philosophers that it’s been labelled ‘the hard problem’. To quote the nineteenth century English biologist T.H. Huxley, how brain processes lead to subjective experiences is “just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” Despite rapid advancements in brain science, researchers are still scratching their heads for answers. “Let’s just say that neuroscience on its own doesn’t seem to resolve that question,” says David Chalmers, the philosopher at New York University who first gave the hard problem its name.

For Chalmers, neuroscience can potentially tell us how the brain produces certain processes that result in outputs along nerves that assist us in our daily lives. Using neurosciences to understand memory, learning, strategising, reasoning, planning – these are all examples of what he calls the easy problems (although he’s quick to warn that the ‘easy problems’ really aren’t all that easy). However, these problems of how the brain physically reacts to sensory inputs don’t answer the more fundamental question of how or why we have subjective experiences as a result of these reactions. “There’s just always this further question”, Chalmers says: “Why doesn’t this [brain activity] happen in the dark, without any conscious experience?”

No-one knows. To begin with, researchers don’t even agree on what consciousness is. And although some philosophers treat consciousness as indubitably real, others say it’s an illusion. And while many say consciousness is a purely biochemical phenomenon, others say it’s a separate substance distinct from brain activity. And while some argue that consciousness extends to the instruments we use to think with (pencils, calculators, and smartphones…), others like Goff go even further, and say consciousness pervades the entire universe.

With so many wildly different and incompatible theories of consciousness, the field has become fragmented. Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at University of Maddison, says, “There’s no ‘we’ in consciousness research – forget it. We all have different opinions.” Could emergentism bring consensus?

Emergent Issues

To some, there’s something satisfying about thinking of consciousness as something distinct from the brain. It certainly feels that way in our lives: we talk about how minds inhabit our bodies; how powerful emotions possess or enslave us; how our thoughts, fleeting as they are, wander into daydream; and so on. Indeed, Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, says it’s precisely this compelling sense of separation between our minds and bodies that makes us ‘natural born dualists’ – naturally inclined to the theory that the universe is made up of two very distinct substances: mental and physical.

Emergentism, which doesn’t necessarily invoke different substances, is also attractive, though, in how it seems to capture how the world works. According to Tononi, “It would be absurd not to be able to talk about how societies emerge, families emerge, how companies emerge” – so perhaps the same is true of the brain and mind. The basic idea is that consciousness – thoughts, feelings, etc – somehow simply appears when the signalling activity between brain cells becomes complex enough in the right way.

Tononi himself recognizes the usefulness of thinking of the brain as a complex system in which consciousness, loosely speaking, emerges. Tononi’s own work measures the level of complexity in the brain by mathematically calculating the degree of integration of information in brain activities. The higher the degree of integration (a measure he denotes as ‘phi’), the richer the kinds of experiences that brain activity is able to create. Thinking in this way has already proven fruitful for clinicians to understand key differences between vegetative, minimally conscious, comatose, sleeping, dreaming, and wakeful states. “It’s still a crude measure,” Tononi says: “But this is actually working better than anything else right now, to be able to get an empirical assessment of consciousness even if the patient is unresponsive.” However, as soon as scientists consider whether emergent properties exist as totally new, unpredictable entities that can’t explained by their component parts, even in principle (such as with consciousness), Tononi thinks the idea gets a little spooky: “It sounds magical.” To him and many other scientists like him, ‘emergence’ has become an all-purpose buzzword used to describe phenomena that seem to defy scientific explanation. Sure, ‘emerge’ seems to be a good verb to describe how consciousness, tornadoes, and flocks of birds spontaneously arise. But would consciousness emergence be the same kind of emergence as other ‘physical from physical’ types of emergence? And are these emergent phenomena actually something more than the sum of their parts? And if they are, it begs the question: how is this creation of this extra something possible?

Answers to these questions can only be speculative, says O’Connor. To him, emergent properties may arise spontaneously, but their emergence is also predictable. “There needs to be the right kind of organization,” he says, “and when that happens, then – boom – these things join together and give rise to a kind of fundamental disposition to the whole.” In many ways, he says, it is science’s job to decipher what kinds of organizational patterns a system requires for new properties to emerge. Others, like George Ellis, professor of complex systems at the University of Cape Town, on the other hand, are more fatalistic: “I think it might remain unsolved forever.”

But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation for the mystery underlying emergent properties: perhaps the science just isn’t mature enough. Consider that centuries ago scientists thought life was driven by an elusive ‘vital force’ – the theory called ‘vitalism’. But scientific progress has now debunked this theory, replacing vital force with a mechanistic explanation of how DNA, metabolism, and other basic cellular processes work in concert to produce life. The scientific theory of life isn’t complete, but it is largely resolved. Couldn’t scientific progress do the same with all emergent phenomena? Is it just a question of time?

As I watched the starlings break in and out of their dance, whirling and tumbling as a lissome mass, I wondered not just about their murmuration, but also about tornadoes, waves, consciousness – are they really beyond the reach of science? Every fall, the starlings come back to fly over Il Vittoriano. And every fall, I’m left amazed, stupefied – and totally clueless.

© Jonathan Moens 2024

Jonathan Moens is an investigative journalist based in Rome. jonathanmoens.com

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Thoughts on Thought

Mary Leaves Her Room

Nigel Hems asks, does Mary see colours differently outside her room?

The ‘Mary’s Room’ thought experiment devised by Frank Jackson goes something like this. Mary is raised from birth in a black and white room, never seeing anything of any other colour. Coloured objects are all carefully excluded. She always wears white gloves and there are no mirrors. Mary is given a normal education as far as is possible in the circumstances. She has all the information available to her to understand a full scientific account of colour, and in fact she eventually becomes a brilliant scientist specialising in colour perception. The question is, does Mary learn something new about colour, over and above the physical and scientific knowledge she has amassed, once she’s finally let out of her room and sees an expanse of bright red flowers for the first time? The idea is, if she does learn something new, there must be something about colour experience above and beyond any scientific description of it. Well, I think it can be denied that she learns something new; but not in the way most materialist philosophers might think.

For most philosophers of mind, the Mary’s Room thought experiment (originally presented in ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 32, Issue 127, 1982) is viewed in terms of one crucial factor: the idea that what Mary is seeing inside her black and white room is not a species of real colour experience. I will contest this idea later.

Pre-linguistic experiences have come to be known as qualia by philosophers of mind (quale is the singular). They’re the kinds of immediate subjective experiences we have as a result, originally, of sensation: when feeling a twinge, seeing a red apple, or tasting a piece of chocolate. They’re the qualities we’re intimately connected with when we experience the world.

Qualia are thought by non-materialist philosophers to be examples of states of mind which cannot be identified with, or reduced to, physical states of the brain or central nervous system. It is in this context then that philosophers of mind ask: can Mary obtain new knowledge of colour over and above her already-obtained scientific and physical knowledge, once she leaves her black and white room? Those who think that Mary’s scientific knowledge of colours obtained in her room covers everything she can know about them will say she does not learn anything new upon seeing colours for the first time. Those who think that Mary’s perceiving reds, blues, etc after leaving her room does give her new, if non-scientific, information – namely, of the nature of colour experiences – where this experience could not be explained in terms of the scientific knowledge Mary has already obtained, would answer yes, she does learn something new. So which is it?

Knowing About Colour Without Seeing Colour

It’s not difficult to imagine the black and white scenario inside Mary’s Room. Indeed, colour blindness is found in some animal species, as well as in humans experiencing rare acute colour disruption. There are documented cases of people who, due to very specific brain damage, only see in black and white. Moreover, one could easily imagine how it would be possible to come to know the pure scientific facts about colour if one were to be in this perceptual state. Mary’s perceptual knowledge would be limited to the things she came into contact with and came to name; but this would not, it seems, hamper her theoretical, scientific knowledge of all colours.

However, we can turn things around somewhat and so re-examine this thought experiment. If I can show that Mary is already in a position inside her room to understand what will be outside it, I can present a novel way of denying that Mary gains any new knowledge. To do this I will follow the lead of some of A.J. Ayer’s views put forward in The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973).

We can start by challenging two core assumptions behind the Mary’s Room thought experiment. The first is that Mary’s perception of qualia needs to be described in terms of intrinsic subjective states of mind. The second, connected, assumption, is that Mary’s perception of black and white inside her room is significantly different from any other kind of colour perception.

Does Mary Perceive Herself?

Let’s deal with the first main idea we are challenging. We need to show that it is possible to construe qualia perception as something that does not necessarily have to refer to any subjective states of mind or consciousness. Of course, Mary, the human being, is present in her room along with the black and white objects she perceives. What we are saying is that it is only necessary for us to refer to the basic ‘patterns’ of objects Mary perceives in her room detached from any reference to her mind or self. Ayer explains this point using the term ‘percept’ to designate a type of object made up from basic perceptions of qualia. He says that, “reference to a particular observer does not, and indeed cannot, occur in the primitive designation of percepts themselves.” (Central Questions, p.94, 1973). And why not? Ayer explains: “Since persons do not yet come into the picture, there is no implication that the patterns occur in the experience of any particular observer …” (p.94).

According to the above, Mary is not in a position to know the person she is when attending to her visual experience. Putting the point more generally, there’s no reason to think that Mary is thinking in speculative terms yet. So there are grounds for supposing that she also lacks the vital state of mind to imagine absent colour qualia. However, we can be pretty sure that she’s fully aware of all that she sees, hears, and touches. The point I’m making is that the type of things Mary perceives both inside and outside her room must be the same in this vital respect: namely, only things that do not require self-awareness or other abstract imagining, only sensory perception. This means that her knowledge of colours does not involve what she can imagine herself perceiving. Rather, there are only the perceptions themselves, and whatever scientific understanding of them she has.

We’re beginning to close the gap between Mary’s perceptions inside and outside her room – between the black and white things she’s already seen and the colour qualia which await her exit. We are now ready to challenge the second core idea.

Mary Sees Qualia Inside & Outside Her Room

The second main assumption of the Mary’s Room thought experiment is that the perception of black and white is significantly different from the perception of other colours. But I think it can be argued that Mary is already equipped to know what’s outside her room in the same way as she knows what’s inside it.

What is distinctive about A.J. Ayer’s visual qualia is that they are not like normal subjective ideas of things. They are instead merely descriptions of the contents of the world we see, hear or touch, etc, and they are “exemplified in anyone’s experience” (p.94). Ayer would class perceptions of black and white, as well as our perceptions of the sizes and shapes of things (which Mary also experiences), as examples of basic qualia (p.99). If so, we can say that black and white shades of visual qualia are already available for Mary to see inside her room, and can be considered among the basic building blocks of her knowledge of the world. Most philosophers see things ‘officially’ in terms of Mary actually perceiving some physical stuff inside her room but certainly not perceiving colour qualia, which she could only see in the outside world. But we can now turn this second assumption on its head. By applying Ayer’s account of what qualia are, we are now all but ready to finish closing the gap between what Mary sees inside and outside her room.

I think we can now say with some confidence that Mary’s perception of black and white and their shades is pretty much the same as her experience of any basic qualia. This means, in effect, that asking whether Mary learns anything ‘new’ concerning the chromatic qualia after leaving her room should be answered with a resounding, ‘No, she does not!’

Why? Well, I’m arguing that Mary gains full relevant knowledge of qualia inside her room, because all the essential elements of any absent qualia are already present in Mary’s experience of the black and white shades she’s already seen. So Mary cannot possibly hope to gain any significant new knowledge concerning colour.

A Final Example

We can flesh things out even further by way of an example. Let’s imagine Mary leaving her room and shouting out loud and clear after seeing red for the first time: “Eureka! I see it: I now see red!” Well, indeed; but must Mary now go on to say she knows anything new about colour? I say that Mary’s situation is more like a naturalist seeing a new species of bird, never seen before: it would still be a bird of some description. In that case, nobody would claim to be discovering some fundamentally new knowledge of a different kind of thing. The naturalist has merely seen something new comprised of the same fundamental materials as other bird species. So, to follow that analogy through, outside her room, Mary has seen another variety of colour qualia, but nothing too different from the previous qualia she’s seen inside it. There would be nothing essentially new added to her visual knowledge, in the same way that the naturalist would not claim to have found a new kind of thing.

I could flip things around in another way to make this point even clearer. Let’s switch around the inside and outside of Mary’s Room. If Mary had never seen shades of black and white, but only other colours, there would be no difference to her new knowledge gained here either. In each case she would simply lack various specimens of qualia perception amongst others – just like the naturalist’s list of birds lacked one specimen from the species. This would be the only difference for Mary. In philosophical terms, the absence of either type of qualia – the chromatic colours or the achromatic colours – would represent a contingent absence only, never a necessary absence. This means that each kind of qualia perception we have discussed could either appear or not appear in Mary’s Room without much gain or loss for Mary’s overall stores of knowledge.

Looked at from this perspective, this account of Mary’s Room represents a significant divergence from almost all attempts to account for the famous thought experiment in terms of the so-called ‘mystery’ of absent subjective qualia. But there is no mystery if only certain specific qualia are not present in Mary’s Room while others are. I shall leave it at that.

© Dr Nigel Hems 2024

Nigel Hems is a former Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He edited the Bloomsbury Companion to Kant.

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Thoughts on Thought

Love & Metaphysics

Peter Graarup Westergaard explains why love is never just physical, with the aid of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism.

Most people have felt the gap between the consciousness of love and the physical aspects of love. Science, even if it could describe all the hormonal changes, the chemistry of smells, and the social conditions of love, would still not able to accurately predict who will fall in love with whom.

Metaphysical dualism, which distinguishes the mind from the brain, might explain the difference between physical love and the consciousness of love. Indeed, I want to argue here that being in love as a mental state is a challenge to all materialist theories of mind, including behaviourism, type-identity theory, and physicalism. I’ll argue that you need to be a dualist at least about mental and physical properties, otherwise you will meet overwhelming challenges trying to understand the consciousness of love. However, you do not need to be a substance dualist like René Descartes. Rather, to metaphysically understand the consciousness of love, it is my suggestion that we should look in the direction of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism.

Love by Vikas Beniwal

© Vikas Beniwal 2024. Please visit his Instagram @wisdomillustrations

Reductio ad Absurdum de Eros

Descartes argued that each of us has a physical brain – subject to the normal laws of cause and effect – and a non-physical mind, with the two interacting in a part of the brain called the pineal gland. This ‘Cartesian dualism’ – or variants on it – was the dominant philosophical view for a long time. In his 1949 book The Concept of the Mind Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this kind of dualism, calling it “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Instead he favoured behaviourism, where mind is an aspect of behaviour and mental events are reflexes produced by a response to stimuli under certain conditions.

From a dualist point of view, one problem with behaviourism is that it cannot explain the experience of love. The experience of someone in love cannot be fully grasped purely through external observations of their behaviour. One must also take introspection into account, and look at consciousness from the inside, as the concept of love is an essential ‘ghost in the bodily machinery’.

The species of materialism called type-identity theory, which holds that mental states are identical to their associated brain states, is also problematic. For example, Saul Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity (1972) that there is an element of contingency in the correspondence between brain states and mental states, and this conflicts with the idea of them being truly identical. If they were, then they would be necessarily identical in all possible worlds, but this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, one might argue that no kind of physical monism – in which any mental event just is a physical event – can explain how it is to be conscious.

As David Chalmers puts it: “The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Human beings have subjective experience: there is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense […] A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state.” (Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2002). The hard question is, how do our experiences relate to the brain states or activities that underpin them? Even though we might be able to identify some stimulus and connect it to resulting brain states, and even monitor and explain internal states of the brain, we will still have great difficulties in explaining how it is to be in love. Any kind of physical monism can only explain structures and functions, and the causal order of these, but not consciousness itself – or how it feels to be in love.

Mental Events

There are some deep inherent contradictions in our understanding of consciousness, and our conceptions of love and of freedom. As humans we believe in freedom and that we are free to choose whom we love, even though the metaphor “fall in love” might suggest otherwise. It is difficult to explain the freedom of humans if you at the same time argue that consciousness can be explained from a physicalist, and hence determinist, point-of-view. Yet we cannot reject the physical aspect of love either, as the ‘falling’ metaphor suggests. As a consequence, in order to save freedom of choice, in love as well as out of it, we need to maintain a dualist perspective, yet on the other side we cannot deny the physical explanation and deterministic laws either.

Donald Davidson has tried to combine the internal contradictions in the explanation of consciousness in his seminal essay Mental Events (1970). In it Davidson asks: “Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the nomological [law-like] net of physical theory. How can this fact be reconciled with the causal role of mental events in the physical world?” To solve this puzzle, Davidson invents ‘the triad’. In doing so, he just might save consciousness from materialism. The triad says:

(1) There must be mental-physical causal interaction;

(2) “Where there is causality, there must be law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws.” Finally,

(3) There are no deterministic laws which can explain mental events, otherwise we would not have a free will.

Idea (3) he calls ‘the anomalism of the mental’. Davidson names his theory ‘anomalous monism’ since it contains these three apparently contradictory statements. Mental-physical causal interaction must be according to laws, but no laws can entirely determine the mental events if there is such a thing as free will.

Supervenience, Monism & Love

A key word in Davidson’s theory is ‘supervenience’. In philosophy this denotes a special kind of relationship, whereby A is supervenient on B if some change in B is necessary for any change in A. This doesn’t mean A is the same as B. Davidson thinks that mental properties are supervenient on brain events, but this doesn’t make mental activity deterministic.

Supervenience does not entail the reducibility of the mental to the physical. Indeed, Davidson argues that such ‘type-identity’ between the mental and the physical is impossible. So instead of type-identity, every mental event is a representation of a certain brain event as a ‘token-identity’, such that similar states of the brain will give rise to similar experiences, although the experience is not identical to the brain state. Clearly, mental events such as thoughts, or feelings of being in love, possess characteristics or properties that physical events do not, and vice versa, so the mental and the physical are different things. Nevertheless, Davidson denies a ‘substance dualism’ of mind and body, put forward most famously by Descartes. Instead, it seems he’s arguing for a kind of ‘property dualism’, in which both mental and physical events share a physical substance – brain activity – yet have different properties and predicates. As Davidson puts it: “Anomalous monism resembles materialism in its claim that all events are physical, but rejects the thesis, usually considered essential to materialism, that mental phenomena can be given purely physical explanations.”

Is Davidson any kind of dualist, though? One might argue that it seems contradictory that Davidson describes his theory as monist (that is, about ‘one thing’), yet so clearly stresses the differences between the properties or predicates of the mental and of the physical. One can say that he does save a monistic physical world, but on the other hand he must also admit that there is a “categorical difference between the mental and the physical.” One has to consider anomalous monism as a kind of nonreductive materialism, where the mental is only conceptually different from the physical, but not ontologically autonomous.

Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism is enlightening for the study of love. The experience of love is different from the physical explanations of love one finds in the natural sciences. There is what Chalmers might call an ‘explanatory gap’ between the subjective and the objective description of the consciousness of love. As Davidson puts it: “Mental events cannot be explained by physical science.” So you need to be at least a property dualist to explain love.

Free will also mean that love cannot be explained by physical-only law-like circumstances. As such, even the best physical science will not allow scientists (or any dating website or reality show) to definitively calculate which couple will match, even if they knew all the physical factors and behavioural data.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the mental events of love interact with the physical because the mental is not a separate, independent system in human life, yet it is only supervenient on physical states, and this suggests the freedom of love.

Love is also a phenomenon of consciousness – a mental event, if you will – and as such it cannot be entirely explained by or even deduced from the natural sciences. The reason is that the predicates/properties of the mental and of the physical are categorically different, even though they might be ontologically the same. This is why a future Big Date dating app based on Big Data will not help you very much in your search for true love.

© Peter Graarup Westergaard 2024

Peter Graarup Westergaard teaches philosophy at an upper secondary boarding school in Denmark.

• A version of this article was originally published in the Annual Review of The Philosophical Society in Oxford, 42, 2020.

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Thoughts on Thought

Iain McGilchrist’s Naturalized Metaphysics

Rogério Severo looks at the brain to see the world anew.

It seems there was a time when metaphysicians were all of a single species. Now they appear to make up at least two. Of the newer kind is the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, most famous for The Master and His Emissary (2009). His work is a notable contribution to what one may call ‘naturalized metaphysics’. It differs from classical metaphysics in that it justifies its statements empirically rather than by reasoning alone. Unlike traditional metaphysics, it grounds its claims about the nature of reality on the findings of natural science.

In modern philosophy, Willard Quine (1908-2000) can be said to be the father of naturalized metaphysics. A salient aspect of Quine’s work was his defense of a materialist worldview, based on what he viewed as the best understanding of the science of his time. This was one of the topics of his main work, Word and Object, originally published in 1960. Yet over the last few decades, some of the philosophical attempts at utilizing the findings of natural science have followed different paths, leading to metaphysical theories that are not materialist. The philosophy of mind of David Chalmers, for example, can be included in that category. In the case of McGilchrist, claims about the most general traits of reality are directly grounded on empirical findings, issuing straight from his own laboratory research on distinctions between the brain’s hemispheres.

It is irrelevant that McGilchrist is not a professional philosopher. The fact that most current philosophy is done in university philosophy departments is a modern idiosyncrasy. In earlier periods philosophy was less compartmentalised. But we seem to be witnessing something of a return to that earlier configuration, when philosophy was not contained by any formal academic boundaries. The essays on perspectivism by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; the works of biologist E.O. Wilson or linguist Steven Pinker on human nature; those on moral foundations by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt; as well those on equality, justice and freedom by the economist Amartya Sen, can all be viewed as examples of this trend. The confluence of goals and methods in philosophy and science is a basic feature of naturalism in philosophy; and naturalism is a main feature of a sizable portion of the philosophy now being done. But let’s focus on McGilchrist’s work in particular.

Focusing on Brain Hemispheres

McGilchrist’s staring point in his research is the psychiatry of brain hemispheres. Over the last four decades there have been significant developments in understanding of the way the hemispheres work and how they interact. Initially it was assumed that there was a simple differentiation of functions: language and reasoning would be processed mainly in the left hemisphere, whereas emotions and vision were handled by the right brain hemisphere of many people (exceptions include most left-handed people). This division of labour among the hemispheres seemed to be indicated by the behaviour of people who had undergone split brain surgery in the 1960s and 70s – a technique used to treat exceptionally acute and debilitating cases of epilepsy, in which the nerve fibres linking the two hemispheres are severed. Later, however, it was discovered that there is no clear division of labour between left and right brain. Language and emotions are processed by both hemispheres, as are abstract reasoning and vision, and likewise for most other functions.

This brought up a kind of riddle: Why is it then that we have two distinct hemispheres? Not only us humans, but all mammals, as well as fish, birds, and reptiles. And what are we to make of the fact that the division of brain hemispheres has became more accentuated over the course of evolution, not less?

McGilchrist lays out his hypothesis for the evolution of brain hemispheres in the first part of The Master and His Emissary, and again in the first part of his 2021 book The Matter with Things. There are two mental activities essential for the survival of animals, and they must be carried out concurrently. One is monitoring the environment for risks and opportunities (predators, food, sexual partners, shelter, etc.). The other consists in classifying then acting upon a risk or an opportunity once it has presented itself. This requires a focused attention that isolates that particular thing or event from the overall context, allowing for its specification and manipulation – such as picking up food and eating it.

These two basic activities require two kinds of attention. The first is wider and less focused, open to the environment as a whole and to what is unknown about it; the second is focused on something known and categorised, detached from its context and mentally represented in isolation from the environment. An illustration offered by McGilchrist is that of a bird scanning a field without focusing its attention on anything specific. Then, once it sees something on the ground that looks like a seed, its attention shifts and becomes more narrowly focused. Because the eyes of most birds are located on the sides of their heads, they must turn their heads one way or the other to engage one eye or the other. Scanning the environment for risks and opportunities, birds tend to use mostly their left eye, which is linked more strongly to the right hemisphere of their brains. Once something potentially edible is found, though, the bird will turn its head and look at it with the right eye, which is linked to the left hemisphere. The attention of the left hemisphere allows for the mental detachment of that seed from the environment and its categorization. It’s this kind of attention that’s used when coordinating eye and beak to grasp just that seed, and not any gravel that might be next to it on the ground.

The wider attention is more holistic and situates an individual in their overall context; it is open to unknown risks and potentials. The more narrowly-focused attention abstracts from the wider context, allowing for classification, and is thus about what is already known. This is an asymmetry in the workings of the two hemispheres. The kind of attention produced by the left hemisphere evolved to represent, map, and schematise the reality that’s first presented to the contextualized attention of the right hemisphere. In this way, the right hemisphere comprehends and provides a sense of meaning to the representations of the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the master, the left its emissary – just as McGilchrist suggests in the title of his book.

Perceptions by Abigail Vettese

Image © Abigail Vettese 2023 Instagram: @theshapeofsanctum Website: abigailvetteseart.com

Splitting the Human Mind

In the case of human beings, brain lateralization has several other features, since our imagination, reflection, reasoning, and speech are lateralised vastly more than in other species. But with us, too, the processing can be either more focused, decontextualized and abstract; or else more holistic, embodied, and specific.

Take language, for example. It can be used in a more precise and technical manner, to identify, classify, and describe things already known; or it can be used in a more ambiguous, metaphorical and open way – as in humor, poetry, metaphors, and the conveying of feelings and possibilities. The former kind, typical of the language of the sciences and the impersonal language of bureaucracy, is useful for schematizing and categorizing, tends to disregard singularities, and treats objects as instances of universal concepts. The latter kind tends to present specific, concrete situations, emphasizing the relations in a given context, and acknowledging what is unique, transient, personal, and partially unknown in whatever presents itself.

According to McGilchrist, the more technical, abstract uses of language make sense to us only within the more general context of metaphorical language that links abstract concepts to the particularities of our bodies and their environments. A similar point had already been made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their well-known Metaphors We Live By (1980), where they say that metaphors are not mere supplements of literal uses of language. Quite the contrary, they make up a basic use of language, since only metaphors can ground the meanings of abstract universal concepts in our particular experiences.

The kinds of attention brought to bear by each brain hemisphere induce perspectives or views of the world that differ yet complement each other. The right hemisphere tends to view the world as a flux: as inconstant, paradoxical, made up not of things and machines but of processes and organisms. It tends to consider implicit and hidden aspects of reality, and to consider risks and potentials. It also tends to have a more aesthetic and spiritual appreciation of events, and to be more melancholic and pessimistic. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, tends to appreciate mechanisms, and to view the world as a representation or picture: something fixed, involving boxed-in categories. It tends to pay more attention to manifest aspects of reality and disregard whatever might be hidden. Since it tends to disregard the unknown and the possibility of mistakes and ambiguities, it also tends to be more self-confident and optimistic about its own capacities. These two kinds of attention complement each other and are important both for our integration into the environment by making sense of what we see and do (right hemisphere), and for manipulating and grasping things already known and conceptualised (left hemisphere).

McGilchrist cites ample empirical research showing that individuals who have suffered lesions (damage) in one of the hemispheres show deficiencies in the corresponding type of attention. There’s also a lot of neuroscientific evidence with respect to the asymmetry of the two hemispheres. People whose hemispherical functions are excessively symmetrical – as is the case with many schizophrenics – show behaviour typical of people who have a right hemisphere deficit. This reveals that the normal working of the brain is asymmetrical and, generally speaking, guided by the right hemisphere. The world of a schizophrenic is fragmented, lacking continuity and fluidity. Objects and events are more isolated one from another, and their language is more literal. This shows, McGilchrist argues, that a healthy and balanced working of the brain is asymmetrical, with the right hemisphere having the first and the last word, so to speak. The right is, generally speaking, the hemisphere that evolved to understand: to make sense and integrate what’s experienced within the wider context of one’s life. The left hemisphere is more a sort of servant, useful for specific tasks, but unable to comprehend the whole.

The View From Each Hemisphere

According to McGilchrist, there may be a preponderance of perspectives and worldviews characteristically induced by one or other hemisphere in a given historical period. The second part of The Master and His Emissary lays out this hypotheses for different cultural periods of Western history. It’s unclear why it happens, and the author offers no explanation: he presents it simply as a fact that a culture might show signs of being more preponderantly aligning with the attention and perspective of one brain hemisphere or the other at different periods. For instance, both in classical Greece and during the Renaissance, there would have been a preponderance of worldviews typically induced by the right hemisphere. However, in scholastically-inclined Eleventh and Twelfth Century Europe, as well in the present analytical times, the opposite is the case: most contemporary culture (art, philosophy, science, technology, social bonds, bureaucracies) tends to conceive the world in technical, mechanical, and impersonal terms.

McGilchrist draws attention to how some contemporary conceptual art and the geometrical abstractions in some painting have a kinship to the kinds of drawings and descriptions of the world made by patients who have suffered damage to the right hemisphere. These too tend to be schematic, two-dimensional, geometric. This contrasts starkly with the kinds of drawings and descriptions made by patients who have suffered left hemisphere lesions. These tend to be more organic, fluid, three-dimensional and not schematic. This can also be contrasted with a good deal of twentieth century analytic philosophy, which deliberately shuns everything ambiguous, implicit, and metaphorical. And here we have some indication of McGilchrist’s motivations: as a lover of poetry and the arts, he regards the instrumentalist culture that’s become prevalent among us as a kind of insanity.

The Matter With Things

Whereas in The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist drew a conclusion concerning philosophy of history and culture from the findings of brain hemisphere research, in The Matter With Things he is much more ambitious.

This is a work that impresses not only because of its length (two volumes of 750 pages each) and erudition (the references section at the end has more than 150 pages), but also because of its intellectual scope. The intent is to comprehend the most general traits of reality as a whole.

The guiding star of McGilchrist’s reasoning in The Matter With Things is that our cognitive access to the world is mediated by consciousness, which varies according to our attention. Therefore what we conceive as being real varies according to the kind of attention prevailing in us at that moment. Different kinds of attention bring forth different aspects of the world, and thus induce different conceptions of the world – in effect, creating different metaphysics. When the kind of attention yielded by the left hemisphere prevails, we become more aware of and give more emphasis to what is static, fixed, discrete, mechanical, and geometric: we focus on what is there and how it works. Hence, the materialist metaphysics that have been abundant since the second half of the last century typically issue from the focused attention that extracts from the wider context and seeks to categorise whatever it’s focused on. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, tends to view the world in terms of continuous, holistic processes: it tends to be more aware of what is unknown, and tends to remain open to what is paradoxical and hidden. It tends to give more emphasis to relations than to what is related, and to the meaning of whatever presents itself than to its functions, and is thus more able to comprehend reality as a whole.

So is the world we live in made up of things or of processes? Mechanisms, or organisms? Is the world the sum of its parts, or are the parts mere aspects of the whole? Moreover, are values aspects of reality, or are they cultural constructions? Is the religious impulse some sort of wishful thinking, or is it a basic feature of human nature? One implication of McGilchrist’s work is that these sorts of fundamental question are not addressed from a neutral point of view, independent of how we attend to the world. Sure, we can imagine things from perspectives that differ from the perspective we have now, but to do so we must use the mental resources we have. There is no ‘cosmic exile’, as Quine once wrote, from which we might philosophise about fundamental questions. We cannot step aside from our minds to inspect the world and ourselves. We can only answer questions from one or another perspective. And if we address them from a left hemisphere perspective we will come up with answers that are quite unlike the ones we will get from a right hemisphere perspective.

However, we can reflect on what we already know about ourselves and the world, and thus correct, and change, our views. Considering then what we do know about the kinds of attention produced by the brain hemispheres, and the kinds of worldviews they tend to induce, we have reasons (evidence, if you like) opposing metaphysical materialism.

A Mind’s Perspective on Minds

Iain McGilchrist

© Rebel Wisdom 2018 Creative Commons 3.0

The asymmetric working of the hemispheres indicates that to make sense of our experiences as a whole, the right hemisphere has to be in charge and have the last word. The left hemisphere is good at instrumental reasoning, at formulating schemata and manipulating concepts, but not at making sense of them. In Parts Two and Three of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist indicates how we might find out about the world by giving prevalence to a right hemisphere perspective, and how the world looks when viewed from such a perspective. The implied conclusion, as I said, is an anti-materialist metaphysics. But those are just implications, not proofs or demonstrations. Uncertainty, after all, is itself a feature of the worldview induced by the right hemisphere.

A materialist or physicalist metaphysics says that the world is made up purely of physical objects devoid of intrinsic value or purpose, and that all we know about value, beauty, or spirituality reduces to the interaction of particles and forces. According to McGilchrist, such a metaphysics only makes sense to someone whose right hemisphere has been positively muffled. That view might be useful for particular purposes. However, the purpose for which it is useful can only be comprehended in terms that cannot itself be reduced to physicalism. In individuals whose brain hemispheres cooperate in a healthy and asymmetric manner – that is, in whom the right hemisphere plays the role of the ‘master’ – there always seems something nonsensical about a materialist metaphysics when it’s not viewed as merely useful for certain purposes, but taken to be about what there ultimately is.

The argument here is not that things are a certain way because we conceive them to be so (which would be something like philosophical idealism), but that we can conceive the world variously, and some of those conceptions are more adequate for the narrower purposes of manipulation, control, and explanation of what we already know and have catalogued, whereas others are more adequate for comprehending life and the world as a whole, always somewhat unknown and often paradoxical, and yet beautiful, valuable, and meaningful. The argument is then that if we take seriously what we already know about the kinds of attention produced by the brain hemispheres, our general metaphysics will tend to be a metaphysics of processes, values, and spirituality rather than a metaphysics of objects, causes, and geometric schemata. (McGilchrist also claims that this isn’t something that can be understood thoroughly literally, since literal language is only useful for certain narrow purposes!)

Therefore, starting from observations and findings that are strictly empirical, McGilchrist leads us, by way of considerations that are scientific, together with intuitions and reflective imagination (also intrinsic to scientific research) to the conclusion that the materialist metaphysics that prevailed in the twentieth century is mistaken in its most fundamental claims. In other words, we have in McGilchrist’s works a kind of empirical foundation (though surely also more than that) for the truth of these Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

(William Wordsworth, 1798)

© Rogério Severo 2024

Rogério Severo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).

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Thoughts on Thought

Managing the Mind

Roger Haines contemplates how we consciously manage our minds.

A Martian, I’m told, recently visited a terrestrial garment factory. He was surprised to see that the boss never touched a sewing machine. Even when she asked someone to order new material, it was only after other minions had brought her details of stock levels, work-in-progress, and garment orders. This woman who calls herself ‘the boss’, the Martian concluded, is a mere puppet, her every action being manipulated by these minions. Her only creative input was to make up a story justifying her instructions.

Students of the literature about the mind may recognize this fable as a metaphor for the way a certain school of neuroscientists describe the conscious mind as a helpless bystander manipulated by unconscious processes – because conscious decisions are always preceded by unconscious activity that shapes the conscious outcome.

Of course, we know the factory boss was only given the information she needed because she’d previously asked for it. I want to argue that, in the same way, the pre-conscious inputs to conscious processes very often arise only because previous conscious activity has served to define issues for unconscious processes to answer. Thus the ‘pre-conscious’ is also ‘post-conscious’.

Choosing Words

Consider what happens when we choose a word. Many accounts of this process are inadequate.

How did I come to use the word ‘inadequate’ in the last sentence? Did I choose it consciously, that is to say, with deliberation? No. I certainly didn’t recall a list or a thesaurus of words then consciously work through it. The only way I can explain my choice of that specific word, is that it popped into my mind when I needed it. As other writers have stressed, the actual search process is unreportable because it’s unconscious – which means it involves strictly non-conscious brain processes. But what these writers often fail to stress is that the right word doesn’t just pop into our minds by coincidence: it does so because we’ve held the idea the word is needed to express in our conscious attention for a few moments. This is a hugely important difference.

Sometimes the right word might not come right away, so we use some memory jogger – which might be thinking of a similar word in another language; or trying to recall an occasion when we heard the word we’re looking for used; or maybe concentrating on words beginning with ‘in’ because we have a hunch the desired word begins thus… And, how do we decide to use these little tricks? Again, we have to admit that each possibility just ‘occurs’ to us: it arrives out of the darkness without us knowing where it was hiding. But, it only does so because we were first conscious of the need to aid our verbal memory.

Perhaps the first word that came to mind was ‘fallacious’ rather than ‘inadequate’, and the thought then occurred to me that I ought to review this choice. So for a few moments I attended to the possible drawbacks of the word that first came to mind, before concluding, say, that it would gratuitously offend a reader who was unconvinced of my view.

In the previous paragraph, the terms ‘occurred’ and ‘came to mind’ signal the results of an unconscious prompting, while ‘attending’ and ‘concluding’ are elements of conscious thought. If we call unconscious activity ‘U’ and conscious activity ‘C’, the pattern that is emerging can be summarised as: ‘C⇒U⇒C’. Consciousness informs the unconscious, which then informs consciousness. Considering all these examples, the notion of consciousness as a passive bystander (the U⇒C stage without the C⇒U stage) should be consigned to the dustbin of once-fashionable bad ideas.

Making Decisions

Let’s take a quite different kind of activity: decision-making.

“The forecast’s good – where shall we go on Sunday?”

Presented with such a question, a number of options may ‘come to mind’. I then reflect on each in turn, resulting in relevant facts and feelings also coming to mind, leading to a choice.

Certainly, I was unconscious of the processes by which the options came to mind, and also of the processes by which the subsequent facts and feelings came to mind too. But I was conscious of acknowledging the facts, and of rejecting or accepting the options accordingly. The conscious rejection of options has been described by some writers as ‘Free Won’t, rather than Free Will’. The implication is that the conscious mind has a veto over suggestions arising from the ‘unconscious mind’ (that is, from non-conscious brain processes). But, crucially, that’s only half the story: the options only came to mind in the first place because I was consciously attending to the question of where to go on Sunday; and the ‘relevant facts’ only came to mind because I was consciously attending to the options generated in turn. So the conscious mind makes two distinct contributions to a decision process. Firstly, it demands suggestions from the unconscious, and secondly, it either vetoes or assents to them. Free Won’t only describes the second stage. So it’s recognizable as a normal element or sub-process of Free Will, but not as a description of the whole decision process.

The process described here is obviously very similar to the process of choosing a word, in that again, attention creates a demand that elicits unconscious activity which generates new conscious contents. So C⇒U⇒C is seen to be more widely applicable.

Although we cannot report on the unconscious processes by which options and facts come to mind, we can make a number of inferences both from studies of the neural correlates of consciousness and from experiences of many decisions.

Firstly, many of the responses to the demand created by attention fail to reach the highly condensed summary that constitutes our working memory of a thought. Secondly the response to a particular demand is normally not repeatable (at least in precise detail), depending among other things upon how recent experience has varied the strengths of relevant neural connections, or as we would say in common parlance, ‘what is fresh in our minds’.

It’s important to note the precise nature of the role being attributed to consciousness here. It is certainly not controlling the unconscious processes like a puppet-master controlling a puppet, or a sergeant-major controlling a parade-ground squad. It is as suggested by my initial anecdote, more like ‘managing’ the unconscious processes, in the sort of way that a boss manages a company – by asking questions or more generally, setting objectives, in the expectation that they will be met. And how objectives are set is by consciously attending to a need, for a moment or more. In fact, as we know, we can accentuate the priority given to a particular demand upon consciousness by concentrating attention on it. If we don’t want to be distracted from thinking of words, making a decision, or whatever else, we make an effort to ‘think hard’ about what we’re doing. Think about that, though: how can we possibly ‘think hard’ about something when the process we are trying to emphasise is an nonconscious one? Yet although it’s almost impossible to describe, everyone will recognise this virtually painful state of concentrating thought to try to come up with a response.

Attending To Experience

Perception appears to be quite distinct from word choice and other decision-making, but we control aspects of it in a very similar way.

From a variety of evidence, it appears that what the process of perception does is to construct a model of the instantaneous environment for the mind, which it constantly updates to match all the sensory inputs as closely as possible. If so, then what enters short-term memory and sometimes long-term memory is not our raw perceptions, but the mental model of reality our brain has shaped to match those perceptions. Notice, however, that the detail of what we perceive can be changed by what we’re paying attention to.

Take vision as an example. Consider that I can determine the position of some peripheral icon on the computer screen in front of me without moving my eyes, just by paying attention to it, even though a few moments earlier I was unaware of it. Here, I consciously give attention to the icon’s position, thereby unconsciously amending the processing of input data, and so modifying conscious knowledge of the answer received. So my analysis of what I’m seeing can be modified by the focus of attention, as well as the analysis modifying the focus. So C⇒U⇒C applies here, too.

This capability we have of modifying the processing of sensory data by means of attention, is, it seems, relied upon by those advocates of meditation who recommend periods of close attention to one’s environment. Others recommend periods of close attention to the stream of consciousness itself. In both cases, the purpose seems in part to be, to strengthen one’s ability to choose what one pays attention to.

Moreover, as a general rule, what we remember is a reconstruction of what we’ve previously been conscious of. That which we have not turned our attention to, or which has not seized our attention, flies beneath the radar of consciousness and goes unrecorded. The significance of this, as Catherine Price has put it, "Our lives are what we pay attention to" (The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, 2021). In any event, in the memory case, the second C of C⇒U⇒C is remembering, while the first, as always, is conscious attention.

Mind in Cave by David S. Soriano 2022 Creative Commons 4

The Competition For Attention

Sometimes, being open to interruptions can be valuable or even essential. Examples of how our attention can be suddenly changed by sensory input include things like hearing a familiar name in a conversation we weren’t listening to; somebody waving at us; or a stab of pain from a sore toe… In Livewired (2021), David Eagleman explains that this sudden refocusing occurs when the sensory input is unexpected. That prompts the question: why is conscious attention needed in such a case? Why can’t our unconscious model just be updated unconsciously in the light of the new data? Eagleman’s reply is that “Attending allows you to put your high-resolution sensors on the problem and figure out how to incorporate it into your model.” The second part of this answer seems to be the key: the external seizing of attention makes sense when we consider the role of attention in asking abstract questions for the unconscious mind to answer, because only in this way can the model revisions needed by the unexpected data be identified. The implicit question we focus on when some unexpected sensory input occurs is ‘Why was that unexpected?’

We have to acknowledge at least two other kinds of potential input into our minds that compete for the spotlight of our attention. Firstly, there’s conscious output from unconscious processes that were intentionally initiated by conscious attention some time earlier – like a name that I was trying to remember yesterday popping into my head today. Secondly, there are the many unbidden thoughts much studied by psychologists, arising from initially unconscious worries or cravings and other compulsions.

Moreover, initiating a memory search, modifying the handling of sensory inputs, and memory formation, are not the only capabilities of attention. We can also consciously intend to remember something, and ‘set a trigger’: for example, to remind ourselves that we were going to buy something the next time we walk past a particular shop. We can also consciously concentrate so that a particular focus is returned to after distraction – such as holding a number in mind while adding another number to it, or looking out for a particular name while scanning a list. We can consciously make a choice at whim, too – such as when asked to ‘think of a number’. The number thought of necessarily emerges from the unconscious; but only because we have consciously wanted the unconscious process to take place.

Attention & Online Searching

Given the very evident and ubiquitous role of attention as a means of managing mental processes, it’s surprisingly difficult to find neurological accounts of just how this remarkable capability might work – at least until recently, with new developments in AI.

There is certainly a resemblance of consciousness utilising the unconscious to online searching, with the conscious mind initiating searches and receiving results, and the unconscious mind operating like search software. However, there are crucial differences too. In a computer search, some kind of representation of what is sought must be put into the search box – usually some words. But when I am looking for a memory or thought with my mind, what goes into the metaphorical search box can be an abstract idea, free of any evident representation. The stored information is also of a quite different nature. Conventional computers rely on data storage, accessed by separately stored translating data (such as a jpeg algorithm to translate stored image data), all located by separately stored coordinate pointers. But the brain seems to integrate all these functions together: the sense of an idea, or the feeling of a quale [an instance of subjective experience], seems not to be something separate that’s derived from or pointed at by the neural cluster that correlates with it, but rather is the logical position of that cluster in the vast web of associations the brain makes for the mind. Indeed, all the material of thought is apparently stored in the brain as patterns of neuronal and synaptic associations.

The latest iteration of AI, Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, does seem to have made an important step towards reproducing this activity, although its stored web of relationships does not directly represent the world, but only what has been said by humans online about the world – and with no ‘self’ at the core, either.

© Roger Haines 2024

Roger Haines is a retired mechanical engineer with a lifelong interest in philosophy.

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Thoughts on Thought

We’re as Smart as the Universe Gets

James Miles argues, among other things, that E.T. will be like Kim Kardashian, and that the real threat of advanced AI has been misunderstood.

In 1995 the English mathematical biologist John Maynard Smith published The Major Transitions in Evolution. Maynard Smith was a co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology in the 1960s and the founder of evolutionary game theory in the early 1970s, and what this book was quietly saying about high intelligence can be considered revolutionary, or at least, notably evolutionary. As a result of a paper I wrote about evolution in the journal Philosophy in 1998, I ended up friends for the last decade of his life with the other co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology, the American biologist George C. Williams. And like Maynard Smith and the early Darwinians (including Darwin), Williams was fascinated by the so-called ‘high intelligence paradox’ and the evolutionary problems it implies. One of the early Darwinians even turned to philosophy to try to solve the paradox.

Although evolution is predominantly gradual, theoretical biologists recognise a series of major transition events, which involved profound changes in the way information is stored and transmitted between generations. In his Major Transitions, Maynard Smith recognised eight of them across the four billion years of life on this planet, including the early move from an RNA world to DNA, the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, and the transition from asexual to sexual reproduction. His seventh major evolutionary transition was the genetic flip-switch that allowed some species to live in large colonies, curing Darwin’s headache about non-reproductive insect castes and sterile workers. High intelligence through language was Maynard Smith’s eighth and ultimate evolutionary transition.

Evolutionarily speaking, natural intelligence caps out at two hard ceilings. Everywhere in the ecosphere intelligence is constrained at a relatively low level by the requirements of group stability (‘Ceiling 1’ in the graph). This incorporates Maynard Smith’s concept of the ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’ or ‘ESS’; meaning that a limited natural level of intelligence creates a sustained response to selective pressures. High intelligence such as ours is then the product of a further, one-in-a-billion major evolutionary event. (Remember that number: it will be key both to turning E.T. into Kim Kardashian and to the dangers of advanced AI.)

Perhaps Maynard Smith’s identification of human high intelligence deriving from language as one of the eight major evolutionary tipping points across four billion years seems bizarre to you, since he’s placing human linguistic development on a level of importance equivalent to the rise of sexual reproduction or multicellularity. At first glance this should seem like a stunning level of species self-conceit, if for no other reason than his other seven transitions have had effects on anything from thousands to billions of species, but transition eight involves just one species. However, it’s only bizarre if you view intelligence as a continuous spectrum. But as possibly the finest mathematical biologist of the last half-century, Maynard Smith had worked out that human-level intelligence could not exist on any primate (that is, pre-linguistic) cleverness spectrum. It had to be the result of an evolutionary discontinuity. So it had to be the final evolutionary tipping point.

However, the level of achievable linguistic intelligence caps out as well (‘Ceiling 2’), because such intelligence is thereafter invisible to natural selection (as I will explain). This means human-type intelligence is as smart as the universe can get. Ever. No matter how old the universe gets, no matter how long species evolve.

Extraordinary, right? Except, Maynard Smith was not actually saying anything new. In his correspondence with Alfred Russel Wallace in December 1857, Darwin had already termed human-level intelligence “the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist.” Wallace agreed with Darwin; he called it ‘the inverse problem’ of his and Darwin’s work: “to account for facts which, according to the theory of natural selection, ought not to happen.” And Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas Huxley, president of the Royal Society in 1883, would write and speak expansively on the high intelligence paradox. Huxley, who was also at one stage president of the UK’s Metaphysical Society, would turn from biology to philosophy – including the work of Heraclitus, Berkeley, and Kant – to try to resolve the problem. In seeking to get to the bottom of things, my friend George Williams, working with the MIT cultural historian James Paradis, would also write a book on Huxley’s answer to the paradox.

The high intelligence paradox, Darwin’s ‘highest & most interesting problem’, is that humans do not behave in the ways natural selection theory would at first sight predict. We co-ordinate in group sizes vastly larger – orders of magnitude larger – than we should be naturally capable of. We should not be capable of compassion. And we are far more intelligent than we should be. These are not unconnected problems, however: they turn out to be a developmental triad, a transitional troika of troubles. Let’s look at them.

The Group Size Conundrum

Group size is effectively kept stable by positive and negative evolutionary forces, including food availability, security, and evolutionarily stable strategies of behaviour; but generally, the smarter mammals get, the smaller their group sizes tend to be. Each year, wildebeest thunder across the Serengeti in their tens of thousands; but grass hasn’t yet evolved to escape, so wildebeest don’t have to work together to feed. The Oxford biologist Bill Hamilton wrote a paper in 1971 that was the start of what is called ‘selfish herd theory’, highlighting that the individuals of a herd are forever cover-seeking – pushing for the safest positions at the expense of others, including pushing to get to the centre of the herd, and thereby pushing others to the dangerous edges. Behaviour that necessitates many co-operative interactions between group members, in contrast, requires strong group cohesion. Baboons will usually live only in groups of up to a couple of hundred. But smarter primates are better at cheating, and smaller groups more effectively limit the opportunity for cheating and the subversion this creates, so our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, rarely live in groups larger than a hundred. However, humans have been called ‘supercooperators’ by one Harvard biologist. Even very different genetic inheritance mechanisms do not get close to creating creatures mimicking our level of co-operation, or our level of non-violence. Surprising as it may seem, we are in general thousands of times less violent than other primate species. To quote the late Stephen Jay Gould, we are ‘a remarkably genial species’.

Our group size problem exists irrespective of the underlying genetic model used. The naked mole-rat has been argued to be the closest a mammal comes to behaving like a social insect, with colonies of up to three hundred and a behavioural and reproductive division of labour. They have achieved this stable state partly through intense inbreeding. Naked mole-rats have average intra-colony relatedness of 0.81 – the highest recorded for a natural mammalian population. Yet neither mole-rats nor hard-wired social insects can be said to live ‘harmoniously’, as humans (comparatively) do. Naked mole-rat colonies have been called ‘reproductive dictatorships’, in which the breeding female is typically the most dominant animal in the colony. Rival challengers for breeding status are usually attacked and killed by the queen; and remember that these are often her very – and I mean very – close relatives, such as inbred sisters. Or, to quote from Mark Elgar and Bernard Crespi’s survey of cannibalism across social insects, “the social situation in colonies changes dramatically when the queen’s pheromonally-mediated and behavioural dominance begins to fail in late summer… Fighting occurs between queens and workers, and among workers” (Cannibalism: Ecology and Evolution Among Diverse Taxa, 1992).

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2024. To see more of his art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

E.T. will be Kim Kardashian

However, the paradox isn’t just that humans can cooperate in group sizes and achieve a division of labour not explainable by pheromonal suppression, reproductive dictatorships, or some correlate to the close genetic relatedness found across ants, bees, wasps, or the intense inbreeding found across termite colonies. We also cannot explain our moral behaviour in terms of earlier evolutionary transitions.

To quote the primatologist Frans de Waal, chimpanzees live in “a world without compassion”. Even bonobos, once touted by some as a proto-moral ape species, have, like chimpanzees before them, begun to shock us as more field data emerges. For instance, in 2016, Nahoko Tokuyama and colleagues caught on video instances of bonobo maternal cannibalism of recently dead offspring. One mother “grabbed the carcass in her right hand and suddenly bit off the head” of the motionless infant she had been grooming just a few hours before.

As long as you accept that humanity evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, you have to find some way to get from small group cohesion in an ape ‘world without compassion’, to ‘supercooperators’ in ‘a remarkably genial species’.

Furthermore, critical to human intelligence is our mass coordination with a complex division of labour. This is necessary for advanced language, writing, generational learning, scholarship, and advanced thought. You cannot get to complex reasoning and generational learning through the small groups otherwise found in mammalian nature, either out- or inbred. But you also cannot get to complex reasoning and generational learning with the transition to closely-interrelated hive living. Groups can get large, but only when there is a large degree of irreversible specialisation and genetic hard-wiring. Once you bring in mental plasticity, then, as with the naked mole-rat, co-operative groups never get above a few hundred.

What explains this discontinuity in humanity, then? For Darwin, writing in The Descent of Man (1871), the transition came about when there was sufficient brain complexity – enough to bring both a susceptibility to hopes and fears and the medium of language. Huxley at first seemed to suggest that reason might be the key: “Fragile reed as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed” (Evolution and Ethics, 1894 ). Huxley later backed away from this idea and aligned with Darwin, but it is an idea worth re-considering. But given our common ancestor with chimps and bonobos, could reason ever be enough to explain both our cooperation and our compassion?

In his short book Perpetual Peace (1795), Immanuel Kant wrote that even a race of devils (Volk von Teufeln) could cooperate to build a state if they were intelligent enough. However, the problems are, firstly, that they seemingly have to be perfectly rational long-term thinkers, yet evolution can do precision but not perfection; and secondly, that they remain at heart a race of devils rather than a remarkably genial species.

There are two explanations currently trending in biology. Both invoke a fundamental change at the genetic level. The first, termed ‘multilevel selection’, or MLS, requires higher-acting levels of natural selection. To quote the leading theorist in the MLS school, David Sloan Wilson, “multilevel selection theory has the potential to explain not only why humans are ultrasocial, but why they have experienced a unique variety of group selection” (Unto Others, 1998). Observe that term ‘ultrasocial’, and also that troubling requirement for a ‘unique variety’ of group selection. (Incidentally, Dave Wilson began as George Williams’ postdoc.) The second explanation, termed ‘human sociobiology’ – and which has sprouted off the popular branch called ‘evolutionary psychology’ – invokes the emergence of new and counteracting genetic mechanisms. Human sociobiology was theorised in the 1970s by two American biologists, Robert Trivers and the late Edward O. Wilson, the latter naming the discipline. In 2010, however, Ed Wilson abandoned his own theory when he subscribed to Dave Wilson’s model for the evolution of high-level social organisation in both eusocial insects and human beings.

Neither MLS nor human sociobiology link our transition to a compassionate species to a complex brain in and of itself. For both schools of thought, the most complex brain in the animal kingdom is (at best) correlated with an evolutionary transition such as a ‘unique variety’ of group selection. But Occam’s razor tells us that it’s more likely that our uniquely complex brain somehow fully explains our exceptional ability to live in vast groups without also requiring, say, a unique genetic re-wiring.

Whatever it was that allowed us to transition to large groups – a complex brain susceptible to hopes and fears; the independence of reason; or new genetic or group-selection mechanisms – group bonding after this point becomes synthetic rather than genetic, or, if you prefer to put it this way, cultural rather than biological. Groups of one hundred family members could suddenly become non-family groups of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Family survival units have become states and nations, which form and reform according to shifting and often contradictory cultural concepts.

However, this means that in our culture there’s now no longer anything for natural selection to operate on – which means, no natural selection pressure to get smarter. Natural groups are transcended at exactly the point brains reach the complexity to allow shared concepts, which catapults group size upwards and starts culture and civilisation; but everything comes to a grinding halt evolutionarily speaking. Because our behaviour is no longer an expression of natural selection in operation, after this point evolution cannot, and will not, make those beings any smarter. This means that we are, and must be, the smartest beings the universe can get to naturally.

It also suggests that if there’s other intelligent life in the universe, it will also have an average IQ around our 100 – the level we achieved when natural selection forces were transcended in our social development. We have long wondered if out there are creatures with “intellects vast and cool”, as H.G. Wells wrote of his Martians, or “curious and dispassionate, observing us”, as suggested by Carl Sagan. But because of the large group cohesion problem and its entirely post-natural-selection potential solutions, intellects much higher than ours – vast and cool, or curious and dispassionate – cannot exist in this universe. Technologically, yes, ETs might be far more advanced than we are; but psychologically, temperamentally, and intellectually, they will only ever be at the level of the characters on The Kardashians. After thirteen billion years of stellar nurseries, in a cosmos tens of billions and maybe trillions of light years across, all the universe has ever got to, or will ever get to, is intellects at the level of political wrangling, conspiracy theories, and reality TV.

AI’s One-in-a-Billion Problem

To the best of our knowledge, only one animal species out of more than a billion has ever managed to escape a ‘world without compassion’ (we can include here domesticated dogs, who have been given an artificial selective tweak that masks but does not free them from that world). This is why both human behaviour and the human intellect bothered Darwin so much that it was “the highest and most interesting problem.” It also means that pursuing high-level artificial intelligence through a proxy to biological development is fraught with a billion-to-one danger.

We’re already learning to live with narrow, or weak, AI, but the ultimate goal of almost all AI research is general intelligence, sometimes called strong, full, true, or human-level (and beyond) AI, but formally known as ‘artificial general intelligence’, or AGI. However, if AGI is pursued using proxies to biology, then it seems to be a billion times more likely that AGI does not attain the evolutionary transition event that leads to our compassionate nature. In other words, AGI is a billion times more likely to represent, in its essence, a world without compassion.

In standard biology, except for a one-in-a-billion transition, we cannot get away from the world without compassion, because competition for survival is the very algorithm behind increasing complexity. It’s why evolution by natural selection works so successfully, and so yields the behaviour patterns found across social insects, mole-rats, wildebeest, domesticated dogs, baboons, chimpanzees and bonobos. Yet AI development has been all about biological proxies for at least the last decade. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) took over from symbolic AI partly because it became obvious that symbolic reasoning could not be at the core of biological intelligence. ANNs are software abstractions of animal brains, if you like.

It is difficult to believe that the current AI debate understands this true danger of AGI. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, made waves talking about the dangers of AGI. He told the MIT Technology Review that he thinks there are two types of intelligence in the world now, the animal brain and the artificial neural network: “It’s a completely different form of intelligence”, he said, “A new and better form of intelligence”. But the greatest danger of AGI (should we one day get there) will not be that it’s a new and better form of intelligence; the danger will be that it’s a very old form of intelligence – one whose development is driven by natural or artificial selection, not compassion.

AI is mimicking the biological products of evolution, but does this mean it’s mimicking evolution itself? Not necessarily. But personally, I am not keen to bet our future on technologists’ ability to understand (and care about) the difference between mimicking organisms and mimicking evolution. Moreover, the only evidence we have to date across four billion years, is that if you program behaviour through an efficient inheritance mechanism (such as machine learning could be said to be) you end up in a world without compassion, except for a billion-to-one chance. Moreover, parts of the AI and machine learning communities are actively using the evolutionary algorithm itself. And the more ‘black box’ deep learning, the more ‘unsupervised’ learning, the more the competition and need for speed, the greater the risk of unforeseen (ie bad) consequences. Individual-level selection beats group-level selection in almost every situation because it is much faster, more stable, and less open to subversion; so individual selection evolution is potentially a very fast and efficient way to progress machine learning. But it’s one with a billion-to-one baked-in problem. (And let’s not forget the five AGI projects evolving behind the walls of Chinese state censorship; with another three being run from inside the corruption, aggression, and gangsterism of modern Russia.)

We have known about the high intelligence paradox for over 165 years, and we have not progressed in our understanding of it. Arguably, we are further from resolving the conundrum than we were in the first decades of Darwinism. It’s the paradox that keeps on giving. The paradox that shows the human animal to be the one-in-a-billion species exception. The paradox that turns E.T. into Kim Kardashian. The paradox that the real danger of advanced AI is not that it will be something very new, but that it may well be an example of something very old indeed.

© James Miles 2024

James B. Miles writes on the implications of evolutionary theory.

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The Funnel of Righteousness

Peter Worley tells us how to be right, righter, rightest.

We enjoy being right. There are many ways to delight in this pleasure, some more noble than others. We might feel good when we’ve made a good argument, drawing on good evidence, cogently structured. Or we might only care about others believing us, no matter how that’s achieved. But there are few who derive no pleasure at all from being right, or being thought to be right. Indeed, the sense of being right really matters to us. You had an argument with a friend or family member and it has been playing through your mind ever since: Were you right to have said that? Did they understand the points you were making? Or you may feel that you were seen as wrong in a board meeting because of some group-think rather than because you hadn’t made a good case. And so on.

Here I’ll identify different aspects of being right. This is designed more as a life-guide than a piece of theoretical philosophy. It’s to help us assess what’s going on next time we relax into a sense of self-righteousness. Are we right to? When, if ever, is it right to feel righteous?

Consider this: A teacher asks a class, “What’s 2 + 2?” Alison says, “22”. Belinda says, “4”. Who’s right?

Now imagine that Alison’s reason for her answer is “Because if you add the digit ‘2’ to another digit ‘2’, you get ‘22’”, while Belinda’s reason is, “Because 4 is my favourite number.” How does this affect your assessment of who’s right? There are some who would say that Belinda is right, even though her reasoning is wrong. One thing I want to do in this article is to explain how Alison and Belinda are both right and wrong.

First I want to describe and distinguish between a whole series of weaker and stronger senses of ‘being right’. It’s a weaker sense if there’s a greater probability of being wrong; it’s a stronger sense when the probability of being wrong is less. Being right and wrong are, on this understanding, by degree – a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch. There will be contexts under which the weaker senses may be sufficient, and I will give examples of these.

The Funnel

Having these weaker and stronger senses creates the possibility of arranging them in order of strength, to make a funnel, with the weakest sense of ‘being right’ at the top, and the strongest at the bottom. Potentially, some claims can be assessed for rightness by means of this funnel: drop them in at the top, where the conditions of rightness are easiest to satisfy, and then continue to assess them against stronger and stronger standards of rightness as they go downwards. Here then is the funnel of righteousness, to be followed by explanations of each dimension:

(1) Feeling (phenomenological dimension)

(2) Belief (cognitive dimension)

(3) Agreement (sympathy dimension)

(4) Persuasion (rhetorical dimension)

(5) Consensus (social dimension)

(6) Rules of the game (criteriological dimension)

(7) Verification (empirical dimension)

(8) Justification & Qualification (logical dimension)

(9) Triangulation (coherence dimension)

(10) Fallibility (defeasibility dimension)

(11) Right answer later! (contextual dimension)

I have omitted to include a moral dimension to my funnel, and will leave the reader to attach any intuitions of moral right or wrong they may have to the application of the funnel. That said, there are several conditions moral thinking may conform to here: morality may be a version of conventional thinking (see consensus) or legal demands (see criteriological) or it could even just be a feeling (phenomenological). Let me however make one distinction of moral criteria for good and bad thinking: between acting in good faith and acting in bad faith in your discussions or arguments. In the former, you would ensure that you have not left out anything relevant when addressing your listeners, even if they’re already satisfied with your idea. By contrast if you’re only interested in, say, seizing the moral high ground, then it’s enough to make people believe that you’re in a superior moral position, and so, paradoxically, you might be willing to advance any argument to achieve this, even if you know it’s false. Any feeling of being right achieved through careful and proper attention to all the salient conditions and details is then of secondary importance, if any.

Image © Joel Hasemeyer 2024 joelhase.myportfolio.com Instagram: @joel_hase

The Dimensions

Feeling (phenomenological)

Our feeling about what we think is right is so important to us that many people now say, “I feel that…” when expressing an opinion instead of “I think that…”. This includes adults and teachers as well as children and teenagers. However, in most cases, just the feeling of being right is not alone sufficient to warrant action, meaning, actually doing something, asking others to do something, or being disposed to act. But there are times when it might be. One example is when a parent has a feeling or hunch that their child is in danger. Here the cost is small if the agent is wrong, yet the cost of not acting if they are right is high. So erring on the side of caution may well be a case where a feeling is sufficient for action. Indeed, there is scientific evidence that our ‘gut feelings’, ‘intuitions’, or ‘hunches’ can be legitimate motivations to act. However, we must not think that this means feelings always provide good grounds for acting. They’re not immune to error.

Belief (basic cognition)

In the above example, it’s not necessary that you’ve formed a robust belief that your feeling is informing you of something true. If asked, you may express some doubt about your feeling, and yet you may still be disposed to act, erring on the side of caution. By contrast, religious (or political) faith is an example where a feeling is often accompanied by a belief – for instance, that Jesus is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For many people, a feeling that they’re right combined with belief that it’s true is sufficient to commit to that belief and ensuing actions.

Agreement (sympathy)

This is when you experience ‘being right’ as a result of someone else agreeing with what you say. No argument need be made, no persuasion needs to have taken place: you may simply have stated what you think and the other person is in accord with what you said. If the primary purpose of the discourse is to bond, then this is sufficient.

We need to still be careful of this weak sense of ‘being right’, as agreement is often considered to be a sufficient condition for truth in an echo-chamber such as a social media group. Algorithms reinforce these groups as being peopled by those with similar views, and the consistent sense of sympathy strengthens the feeling that the members of the group are in the right. This can result in unsavoury examples of group-think. I’m sure you can think of some yourself.

Persuasion (rhetoric)

In other cases, you will be required to make a case to get someone to agree with you. If so, then ‘being right’ in this (still) weak sense depends on your having successfully persuaded them – so that the other person accords with you as a result of your making a case. You’ll need to meet this condition if, for example, you’re looking to be elected for something.

This level of establishing ideas may be pragmatically sufficient but not morally sufficient. For instance, it may be the case that the person doing the persuading only persuades by making promises they have no intention of keeping, or by lying about evidence. They say what they needed to say only in order to be elected. Lying about empirical facts, however, is morally wrong. (We’ll come to empirical evidence soon.)

Consensus (society)

It was once ‘right’ in some cultures to believe that the Earth is flat, that it is no more than about six thousand years old, or that women were the property of their fathers or husbands. But this is ‘right’ only in the sense that these were generally accepted conventions, and conventional thinking changes. Most people in the West now think that the Earth is not flat but roughly spherical, a good deal older than six thousand years, and that women are not the property of men.

Culturally dominant or socially prevalent views change via a host of means, including persuasion and arguments and evidence contrary to the conventional thinking. There is for instance the famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of Galileo being made to recant that the Earth moves around the Sun not the other way around as the Catholic church’s official doctrine stated, but having done so, muttering to himself, “But it still moves.” Here Galileo still believed he was right despite having just said something to the contrary and before the general consensus changed, partly due to his own efforts.

Rules of the game (criteria)

I was once leading a class of eleven-year-olds, doing some philosophy in schools work with them to help with their critical thinking in preparation for an exam. We were looking at dimensions and shapes. I drew a square and a cube on the board, and stuck an actual cube on the board with blue-tac, then asked them what dimensions the shapes were. Many said that the square was 2D – though some argued that the ink I used had a degree of depth, which therefore made it 3D! Many also said that the real cube was 3D because you could turn it around. But most of the disagreement was to do with the drawing of the cube. Some said that it was 2D, others 3D, until a girl said, quite rightly, that “It’s a 2D representation of a 3D shape.” Notice that those who had said 2D were not wrong, even though her response was more accurate (can we talk about being ‘ more right’?). But when the teacher heard this, although impressed with the answer, he said, perhaps cynically, “But if you see that question in the exam, it’s 3D, okay?”

This is interesting because there’s a sense in which saying that it is a 3D shape seems wrong, even though it looks like a 3D shape. However, this shows a sense in which ‘being right’ is about knowing what is expected in a particular situation. Exams are a good example of this, where being ‘right’ is about knowing how to answer according to specific criteria. (This is all the more the case as exams increasingly become box-ticking exercises.)

Verification (empirically true belief)

This includes what we might call being right scientifically. Here we’re right because our claim has been shown to be true. For instance, if you’re arguing with a housemate about whether there’s any milk in the fridge, and one of you says, “Let’s check!”, you both go to the fridge, open it up and discover there is none, then the one who said there was none is right and the one who said that there was some is wrong. It might turn out that the last time he looked, there was some milk, and maybe he had good reasons for thinking the situation hadn’t changed – perhaps he didn’t realise that someone else was in the house. In this case, he met the conditions of feeling and believing that he was right, but fell short in terms of verification and justification. However, he may have no worse reasons for believing what he believed than you: it may just be a happy coincidence that the truth agreed with your claim. In other words, you may just have got lucky! Either way, you’re right, in that the world has corresponded to your belief about it, and this has been discovered by empirical investigation – you looked to check.

Of course, empirical investigation is not always as simple as ‘just looking’. Sometimes evidence, experiment, argument and triangulation are needed precisely because we cannot ‘just look’. This leads us to the next few dimensions.

Justification & Qualification (logic)

This is when someone carefully thinks through why they think something is or is not the case, makes an argument to express this, and also makes the necessary qualifications to ensure that the claim doesn’t go beyond its limit. It may or may not be accompanied by empirical verification.

Funnel of Scariness: a tornado in Manitoba

Photo by Justin Hobson © Justin1569 at English Wikipedia. Creative Commons 3.0

I sometimes use a toy rugby ball to help manage speakers in a classroom (you can only speak if you’re holding the ball). The ball has an Irish flag on it, and as a result, I occasionally get asked if I’m Irish. I sometimes then use this opportunity to introduce classes to inferential thinking: I ask the children, “If I have an Irish rugby ball, does that mean I’m Irish?” Some have said it does; some have even said that it definitely means that I am Irish. Others have said that it means that I am definitely not Irish; and yet others that it means that I could be Irish, but not necessarily.

Now according to logic, those who say it means I’m Irish are wrong because it does not follow that I’m Irish simply because I have an Irish rugby ball. Interestingly, according to the rules of logical inference, they’re wrong even if I am Irish, because their claim connects their thinking that I’m Irish with the presence of the ball, but there are many reasons why I may have an Irish rugby ball and not be Irish. In this situation, if someone were to simply claim that I am Irish with no appeal to the presence of the ball, they would be right according to the verification condition, even though we would resist saying that they know this; the truth just accidentally happens to correspond to their claim. Those that say it means I’m not Irish are also wrong, for similar but inverse reasons. But those that say that I could be Irish are right even though they’re not making a concrete claim.

Notice that being right according to the logical condition does not require that the world necessarily corresponds to the conclusion, just as my argument here does not require that I be Irish (or not). This highlights that there are two parts to logical justification: testing for validity (does the argument make logical sense) and testing for soundness (does the argument have true premises as well as being logically valid?). The second connects the justification condition to the verification condition.

Triangulation (coherence)

This is where the conditions we’ve drawn up so far are appealed to together to support one another, in order to make as strong a set of conditions as possible to achieve being right. If for instance I were making a case for enacting a policy, or sending someone to prison for a very long time, or for declaring war on another country, I might need to appeal to many of the previous conditions. That I feel I’m right, or even feel and strongly believe it, is simply not enough. And though I may be able to persuade people to believe me, I must do so in good faith, making sure they believe me for the right reasons, and that I’ve brought to their attention any facts or points they need to know before making a decision about whether they continue to believe me or not. I need to make a strong case that not only corresponds to how things are, but does so for good reasons, including a cogent argument and good evidence, where it can be found.

Fallibility (error)

Perhaps ironically, at the bottom of the funnel, and therefore the element that makes our sense of being right most highly warranted, is our defeasibility, meaning, a readiness to accept that what we are claiming may turn out to be wrong; in other words, an openness to re-evaluation and revision. So, the best way to be right is to know you could be wrong.

Fallibility can be manifest in two ways: either in an openness to rejecting what has been claimed in light of persuasive evidence or arguments to the contrary, or by adopting a tentative position when expressing a belief or making a claim, such as statements of the following form: ‘What I am NOT saying is…’; ‘All I AM saying is…’; ‘It is at least possible that…’, and so on.

This dimension can also be called a falsifiability condition, which helps to keep the verification condition in check. But verification and falsifiability are not in competition with one another as principles of knowledge. Rather, they complement each other.

Context

So, how can you be right? The right answer is that The best way to be right is to know in which sense it’s presently right to be right. This is the final dimension: the contextual dimension. It’s because not all contexts are equally demanding, as you can see from the examples I have provided.

2 + 2 Revisited

We can now say that Belinda was right that 2+2=4 in a weak sense, since her answer could be verified, but she lacked any good justification for it. Yet if, for instance, the security of the human race depended on her answer being correct (this we might call the ‘quiz show’ sense of being right – see ‘rules of the game’), we might be safe with the answer she’d given. But she wouldn’t have been right if her reasoning mattered. Rather, Belinda was right according to her own internal logic. However, if one were adding digits rather than values, then the answer to “What is 2+2?” would indeed be “22”. And Alison might be right according to criteria, if the teacher were teaching the difference between digits and values and asked questions to apply these two concepts, such as: “If we were just adding digits, what would 2+2 be?… And if we were adding values, what would 2+2 be?” Here, 22 would have been a right answer to the first question, but not the second.

I’ll leave you with this question: am I right?

© Peter Worley 2024

Peter Worley has degrees in Philosophy from UCL and Birkbeck, and is the Founder and Philosopher-in-Chief of The Philosophy Foundation, which teaches philosophy to children in London schools. His latest book Corrupting Youth (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), is an explanation of his method of facilitating philosophical conversations.

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Why is Freedom So Important To Us?

John Shand explains why free will is basic to humanity.

Much has been written about whether or not we have free will. That is not my topic here, but it has a connection to it, in that I want to ask why so much has been written on the matter. Whether we are free or not seems very important to us.

Let’s first suppose that we are not free – that there is no such thing as free will. Let’s further take that to imply that there is no sense in which we may be held responsible for what we do, any more than a tree or a rock may be held responsible when it falls on our head. It either falls, owing to some previous cause, or it does not. It’s a purely factual matter, devoid of any normative judgement as to whether it should or should not have happened. Let’s also suppose that the causes are all that is to be said about the matter. In that case, the entire universe can be summed up by an account of what does exist and what does and does not happen. Events either take place or they don’t. And that’s it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, the world is the totality of facts (Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, 1.1, 1921).

Image © Miles Walker 2024 Please visit mileswalker.com

To stave off an objection that might come into someone’s head here, we have to be careful in our language and pay attention to the way in which we use normative words such as ‘should’ or ‘ought’. We sometimes use these words in a non-normative sense; but the meaning in those cases is quite different. It may signal an ignorance of causes, for example. So suppose the jewellers have just returned your watch, after cleaning and servicing it. After a few days it stops: we might say that the watch should not or ought not to have broken down. What we mean here is that, given the servicing your watch has just been through, there should/ought to be no cause for it to stop working – while at the same time presumably not denying that there is a cause for the malfunction, we just don’t know what it is. But no moral blame attaches to your watch: it cannot be said to have made a mistake, or done something wrong in the sense of selecting poorly from various options. A watch simply does what a watch does (or in this case, does not do). Of the watchsmith, by contrast, we might say that he has done something incorrectly.

Having got that out of the way, in what follows the term ‘normative’ will be used to imply that it makes sense to say that doing something a certain way is correct or incorrect, and that the rule giving the correct way of doing it is not descriptive but rather prescriptive: it sets down how something should be done, regardless of what is actually done. Trees, rocks, watches, can neither ‘do things correctly’ nor ‘make mistakes’; they just do what they do. If what they do does not fit a putative law of nature saying what they ‘should’ do in a descriptive sense, then either we’ve misunderstood what happened or else we need to change our perception of the laws of nature, for it is one of these options which is mistaken or incorrect, not what happens. However, when we say of someone that putting ‘7’ after ‘2+3=’ is incorrect, we are suggesting, normatively, that they should have written 5 but chose to write 7, and that in so doing they did not correctly follow the rules of arithmetic. Generally, when a maths teacher sets a student a sum to solve, they are not just waiting to see what happens next, where one result is as good as any other, and no error can be made in what happens. Rather, in the normative case, they want to see if the student can give an answer that’s correct, or not.

Of course, it’s not arithmetic to which the minds of people turn when they think about our being free or not, but morality; and aesthetics too, that is, questions of taste or sensibility. More generally, in thinking about freedom, we think in terms of a panoply of values, and closely connected to that, meaning. It is value and meaning that would seem to be eradicated from the universe if free will goes, for without it we appear to be left with a world in which objects exist and things merely happen or do not happen, without the happenings having value or meaning.

First, consciousness is required for meaning and value. If you think that in the absence of conscious observers things and events in the universe could still have value and meaning, then you’re probably not thinking of our complete absence, but perhaps imagining that we’d still be looking on in some shadowy form. But suppose we’re not even there in that sense, and that no other creatures really value or ascribe meaning to anything. This would imply that nothing is more important, or significant, or valuable, or better, or worse, than anything else. If there are no human valuers, then there are no values. (There may be aliens who are able to value, so perhaps the universe would still have values and meaning to someone. Yet as far as we yet know, there are no aliens, so hanging the persistence of values and meaning on the hook of that possibility would be a gossamer hope indeed.)

Secondly, though, only if there is freedom to choose may anything be properly considered right or wrong, some things better or worse, some things to have a meaning because they’re more important or significant than others. So freedom of the will appears to be another necessary condition for there to be values, since only creatures with free will can choose between options of what should or should not happen. Only with free will is there the possibility of not just acting in accord with a rule but following a rule. So only if there is freedom can there be both ethics and aesthetics. Well, without freedom we would perhaps be left with the facts of our preferences and tastes, but with no normative implication – you cannot be right or wrong in respect to them; they would simply be situations that either are or are not. You either like cheese, or potatoes, or chicken, or you do not – there’s no point in arguing with someone that they’re not right if they don’t like what you do, or asserting that they’ve made a mistake, that they ought to like it. However, with values and meaning, there is such a point, for a (good) judgement of value or meaning follows a rational process, implying the possibility of normative judgement as to a correct or a mistaken view. This need not imply that one can come to a definitive conclusion, that is beyond question, but only that the debate is something that makes sense, because it might lead to one view rather than another.

Often those who are sanguine about freedom being an illusion we could happily live without, also say that accepting this position would eliminate the blame and resentment of responsibility, leading to a cooler, more rational way of dealing with attitudes and actions we take to be wrong. Whether it is possible or not to view people as devoid of freedom, and it is hard to see how that would be, the idea that the removal of free will from our lives would be good overlooks the other side of the coin – that it would simultaneously eliminate the praise and admiration that sometimes come with responsibility. Just as freedom to choose the bad would go without free will, so would freedom to choose the good, and any sense of praiseworthy achievements for which we could be given credit and be proud. We could neither rationally be castigated for the bad we do, nor praised for the good: all would just happen, or not happen. And this would not just apply to moral matters. Any actions that are praised or blamed could no longer be. If a person made great sacrifices, say in order to create a great work of art that was marvellous in itself and gave comfort or stimulation to millions, or made some scientific discovery after enormous labour, no acclaim could be given, either for the result or for the effort made: it just happened. Praise would be no more appropriate than it would be if directed at the sun for coming up and combining with the weather to produce a beautiful spring morning.

The denial of free will, and hence of moral responsibility, also potentially justifies the awful prospect of criminals not being held to account and punished for the wrongs they choose, but rather, being treated merely as broken mechanisms that need to be fixed (see for instance A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962). Indeed, the absence of freedom from our lives, or perhaps I should say, the firm belief that we are not free, that we have no genuine ability to guide our lives through freely-considered choices – would take us to an utterly different way of living, including being stripped of all values and meaning. We would no more have either of those than a rock does when rolling downhill until it hits something and stops. That would indeed be full non-significance, from our birth to our death: we would just be complicated rocks rolling down a hill until we stop. Such a terrible, barren prospect is the reason freedom is so important to us.

© Dr John Shand 2024

John Shand is an Honorary Associate in Philosophy at the Open University. His books include Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (2002), Arguing Well (2000), and, as Editor, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2019). For his understanding of free will, see ‘Free Will and Subject’ in The Polish Journal of Philosophy, Vol.9. No.1.

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Philosopher Kings – & Queens?

Helene Scott-Fordsmand explores legitimacy in philosophy.

In 2020 a book by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting containing twenty portraits of female philosophers was published under the name The Philosopher Queens. It’s one among many recent books about an extensive diversity problem in philosophy, which includes issues of gender, body, language, culture, class, and ethnicity. Here I focus in part on gender.

The title of the aforementioned book is a pun on the concept of ‘philosopher kings’, which many readers may know from Plato’s Republic (c.375 BC). According to Socrates, who is Plato’s mouthpiece in the text, philosopher kings are the would-be administers of the ideal society, who, based on their philosophical understanding, can lead the people in a true and just way. Describing these ‘kings’, Socrates notes they may perfectly well be women, as the ideal society would have equality between the sexes. He adds that the idea of gender equality will likely seem much less controversial to his audience than the idea of a philosopher ruling class. The controversy then is about philosophers, not women. But who gets to count as a legitimate philosopher?

Who Can Be A Philosopher?

First, being a philosopher is an activity-based identity. Unlike actual kings and queens, you’re not born a philosopher. Nor is it an officially conferred title, such as knight, mayor, or doctor. You’re a philosopher because you do philosophy. The challenge here, though, is that the nature of philosophy, is itself a philosophical question, and therefore the subject of rich philosophical debate. Many philosophers might agree that philosophy is hard to define, but might say, ‘I know it when I see it’. Thus a loop emerges, where those who can already claim to be philosophers get to ‘know it when they see it’ and hence shape the boundaries of what philosophy is. In turn, what they call philosophy then serves to legitimize their own ‘philosopher’ identity.

While most people nowadays (though not all) agree with Plato that the role of philosopher should be credited from ability and not from gender, there is still a predominance of men amongst philosophers. You can see this on course curricula, in philosophy handbooks, at conferences, and in the press. There are many reasons for this. For example, relatively more women drop out of philosophy (and academia more broadly) during their studies and early in their careers for various gender-related reasons. In the past, the obligations of marriage meant that many educated women had to give up academic life. Today, caring responsibilities are still an obstacle for women’s careers more so than for men’s. Adding to this, it has been shown time and time again that a general bias in evaluation makes it harder for women to get philosophy jobs. This continuous alienation can cause self-silencing and underperformance. Part of the explanation, however, may also lie in how we view the women who actually do manage to pursue a thinking career.

Elisabeth of Bohemia by Gerard van Honthorst 1636

A well-known historical example of such a woman is Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680). She was a key philosophical interlocutor for René Descartes (1596-1650). In correspondence between them, she challenged his dualism and urged Descartes to take the emotional aspects of human life more seriously – a topic she worked on and discussed with several intellectuals. Despite being an important figure for the philosophy of her time, who developed an interesting counterpoint to the Cartesian view of human nature, it briefly caused chaos and discontent among students at my old alma mater, the University of Copenhagen, when her texts were added to the History of Philosophy curriculum in 2018. Students feared that studying her would take away space from ‘real’ philosophers, and thus protested against this revision. And so we return to the question of what a real philosopher is.

One of the first things I was told when I started my philosophy degree, was that you don’t become a philosopher by studying philosophy, you became a philosophy professional (or fagfilosof in Danish). This, we were to understand, was a different matter. On the one hand, this awkward title is meant to protect serious academics from the ‘philosopher’ title to which anyone can lay claim. On the other hand, it signals that there’s a difference between philosophy graduates (us) and ‘real’ philosophers such as Plato, Kant, or Hegel. Again philosophy is characterized by canonical thinking, that is, demarcated by the identification of and engagement with the ‘real’ philosophers.

The construction of these canons – and the involved negotiations of belonging that goes with it – is a complex matter, and one which is historically and culturally sensitive. In the last century, names such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Kuhn, or Michel Foucault have been added into the canon. Other thinkers, such as Donna Haraway, known for her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), Bruno Latour, known for his ‘actor-network theory’, and Julia Kristeva, perhaps best known for her work on the concept of ‘abjection’, have been placed merely as ‘canon adjacent’. Asking why this or that thinker is or is not included takes us into swampy territory, because the criteria are vague. Nevertheless, let me outline some elements that may have been at play when a thinker such as Foucault – who was interested in social history, and deliberately avoided the ‘philosopher’ title – is canonized, while thinkers such as Haraway and Kristeva – widely recognized for their original conceptual analyses – are not.

Disciplinary Boundary Work

The complex game of who to accept as a ‘real’ X (eg, philosopher), and the arguments for and against inclusion, are known in science studies as ‘disciplinary boundary work’ (a term ascribed to the sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn). Motivations for maintaining disciplinary boundaries are many and various. It can be about power relations and the struggle for prestigious appointments or funding; but it can also be about who can ‘legitimately’ speak as an expert on certain topics in public debates or in the media. Or it can be a pragmatic question about identifying appropriate peers for the ‘peer evaluation’ system, which is a cornerstone of academia. It involves explicit positive definitions of what a discipline is, and negative definitions of what it is not. Equally, it is influenced by previous examples of inclusion and exclusion. For example, if someone says ‘Richard Dawkins’ work on biologically-based atheism is not philosophy’ or indeed the opposite, then they are doing philosophy boundary work. To justify this, one might compare Dawkins to already-recognized examples of canonical philosophers, or point out that Dawkins’ questions about religion are or are not within the scope of classic topics in philosophy.

Academic disciplines are distinct for a variety of reasons of course. It may be that members of a discipline share a particular field of study (as with astrophysics); or a methodology (as with anthropology); or that the discipline is united by being rooted in a historical tradition (as with phenomenology). For example, Dan Zahavi has argued that much of what calls itself ‘phenomenology’ is not exactly that because it does not relate to the texts of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl, who founded phenomenology, and thus does not follow the historical legacy, which, for Zahavi defines the discipline. Whether one belongs to a particular discipline thus depends on how one relates to whichever particular aspect unites that discipline. As we have already learnt, what that is for philosophy remains disputed, and thus, justification must rely on comparison to already accepted inclusions rather than to explicit definitions.

Canons & Heretics

To know a discipline, you need some familiarity with its ‘canon’. This in turn provides a helpful baseline for professional discussion, since you can refer to commonly-known texts rather than explain everything from scratch. You can also make such discussions more concise by refering to very specific interpretations or ideas. In philosophy, for example, you might make clear whether you are using the term ‘existence’ in a Heideggerian or a predicate logical sense. Or you might refer to classic thought experiments – that are widely-known and discussed – scenarios that illuminate and challenge the problems with which philosophy grapples. In ethics, for example, there is the Trolley Problem; a drier example from epistemology is the Gettier Problem.

Readers less familiar with the philosophical canon may now be a little annoyed that I’m not going to elaborate here on what ‘existence’ means in a Heideggerian rather than a predicate logical sense, or what the Gettier Problem is. But this emphasizes the point: membership of an academic discipline depends on being acquainted with such references.

This kind of boundary work, where a group cultivates a shared understanding, through a shared conceptual apparatus and terminology, is sometimes critically referred to as ‘creating jargon’. This specifically entails the use of language as a marker of disciplinary affiliation, and thus as a mark of belonging. Jargon can indeed be an effective, quick way of communicating complex ideas precisely; but it also makes conversations difficult to enter, and indeed, is an effective way of excluding the uninitiated, or of dominating a discussion with junior colleagues, laymen, or scholars from other disciplines.

Beyond the upside of efficiency, and the downside of exclusion, there is a further challenge with drawing disciplinary frontiers through canonical jargon. It means that variation can be perceived as either irrelevant or heretical. Thus, when thinkers such as Haraway or Kristeva draw on their interdisciplinary background (Haraway with her roots in biology, Kristeva in linguistics) and reference literature and theories unknown to philosophers, or use atypical examples, their disciplinary affiliation may be questioned. More classically-trained philosophers may be struck by the absence of ‘classical’ philosophical jargon, and take it as a sign that the author is inexperienced in philosophy. Or they may not understand the examples given at first glance – perhaps they need to read up on biology – and therefore perceive the texts as ‘foreign’. Instead of being an opportunity for classically-trained philosophers to learn something new, the ‘newness’ of the texts becomes an opportunity for classically-trained philosophers to dismiss them. This, of course, is not related to gender, but goes for anyone operating in the fringes of the canon.

Image © Sylvie Reed 2024

When The Queen Has A Body

According to some, philosophy is a metascience, exploring how science can give us knowledge.

In this role, it is claimed that philosophy is the ‘queen of the sciences’. This phrase comes from Immanuel Kant’s Preface to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – “There was a time when she was queen of all sciences” – but is reproduced in many philosophical texts. Philosophy is queen (or king, for that matter) because its royal gaze, like the divine gaze, is above mundane life. Indeed, for Plato, the philosopher king should be rid of material property and simply live for the philosophical ideal and the good of society. Philosophy, as the queen of the sciences, similarly cannot be bogged down in wordly complications. As Descartes claims in his Meditations (1641), philosophy must start with absolutely pure – that is, certain – thought, so that it can be the foundation for everything else.

This kind of philosophical self-view yields a philosophy that wants to free itself from the world and from empirical conditioning. It’s present in Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s obsession with the a priori, and in Husserl’s epoché (an attempt to start philosophical analysis by ‘bracketing’ all preconceptions). Here, philosophical theories must stand above time and culture. If we fall into the culturally specific or historical, we leave philosophy behind and move into the empirical sciences – anthropology, history and the like. Even philosophers who draw on historical examples, like Kuhn or Foucault, aim for structures that are above their examples (concerning paradigms or epistemes respectively).

It’s worth mentioning that a less arrogant version of this can be found in the work of Mary Midgley (1919-2018), who considers philosophy not as monarch, but as a cartographer of thought; not ruling, but still elevated above other disciplines, maintaining an overview. Nonetheless, a supra-worldly, supra-temporal and disembodied interest is presupposed in either metaphor.

The philosopher must be above history, above culture, and most of all, above the unruliness of the body, in order to be crowned. ‘Real’ philosophy queens don’t get overwhelmed by grief; and they don’t have uncontrollable period pains (or at least, they don’t talk about it). However, for thinkers such as Haraway and Kristeva, it is precisely the situated – the relational and emotional, the corporeal and the unruly – which is crucial. This is not because they cannot think beyond it, but precisely as a philosophical point: knowledge is situated. Humans are bodies – and not just ‘nice’ bodies, but screaming, bleeding, dying, sweating, and, not least, born and birthing bodies. Unfortunately, attempting to break philosophy’s obliviousness of the body and emotional life excludes people who think this way from the ‘royal’ philosophical position.

Legitimacy, Authority & Change

How does this relate to the gender imbalance in philosophy? In Women in Philosophy: What needs to change? (2013), Katrina Hutchison writes that the dearth of women philosophers – in the literature, at conferences, and in the media – may be partly due to the way we judge expert credibility. Studies from psychology and sociology show that in contexts where we do not have professional expertise, our willingness to attribute authority is strongly influenced by bias. Partly, there is second-order bias, since bias already plays a role in assigning structural credibility through academic positions and publications; but there is also a primary bias at play, because the assessment we make will not only draw on institutional indicators, but also on whether the person falls within a group we consider to be credible. For example, if we usually see men in blue shirts as credible witnesses when it comes to economics, we might attribute less credibility to a man in a Hawaiian shirt (Why he is wearing that shirt? Does he not know the norms? Does he even know the field?). The same applies if we’re used to a certain gender, a certain skin colour, or a certain accent (Can someone with a cockney accent really tell me about nature?). In such situations we are more likely to ask for evidence of their expertise: “show me that my prejudices are wrong so that I can trust your statements.” This generates a ‘culture of justification’, in which minorities often find themselves asked to justify why they can be considered philosophers (or even academics) – through, for instance, canon, jargon, or ‘a royal gaze’.

In the West, the standard philosopher is a white, English-speaking (or perhaps German- or French-speaking), man – perhaps not in a blue shirt, but in a jacket, and preferably with grey or white hair so we know there are many years of accumulated experience. These are among the traits we look for as immediate indicators of expert legitimacy. But it’s also white, English, German-, or French-speaking men with grey hair who have shaped the Western philosophical discipline for centuries. This is why topics that are not so obvious to them – including menstruation, childbirth, oppression, Indian, Chinese, or Arabic philosophy, epistemic injustice, and colonization – have not yet become part of the canon; and neither have texts, thought experiments, or methods that help us understand these topics. Yet, moving outside the canon makes it difficult to defend legitimacy. As a minority – as a non-stereotypical philosopher – you’re thus caught in a double bind. Your legitimacy is questioned, so scholasticism becomes your primary weapon: “Look, I know the jargon; look, I distance myself from the body, from (my) culture, and from (my) history.” But meanwhile, scholasticism helps to perpetuate a philosophy that’s incomplete, conservative, and rigid, discouraging engagement with new topics. The battle for identity as a philosopher is thus filtered into the battle for credibility and against bias. It’s the stereotypical philosophers who get to determine new initiatives – perhaps just because their legitimacy is far less likely to be questioned. Thomas Kuhn, who had many of the traits of the mainstream philosopher (he was a white American male) faced far fewer questions about legitimacy, despite his background being in physics and despite his historical methodology.

The legitimacy of speaking on philosophical topics becomes deeply dependent on whether someone credible appears as a ‘philosopher’. Haraway and Kristeva are unlikely candidates for canonical philosophers because they combine challenges to standard views with a failing to be philosopher stereotypes. Their status as philosopher queens is controversial because their disciplinary legitimacy requires justification: it must be proven that they are doing philosophy. But this justification must be grounded in demonstrating a relation to a discipline that has no well-defined shape. Their best bet would have been to aim for the conservative centre.

Let me end with a satirical parable from Philip Kitcher’s 2023 book, What’s the Use of Philosophy. He tells a story of musical talents who train in academies to become specialists in Mozart. Initially, there’s great enthusiasm, both musicians and the public attend their shows; but gradually the improvements in the Mozart performances become smaller and smaller, and the general public loses interest in the subtle variations that can only be made out by trained experts. Some musicians also get bored. They start writing their own music, or they take up Chopin or Satie. The experts are horrified, and they exclude these ‘frivolous’ creative or Chopin-playing musicians from the academies. As time goes by, the academies’ concert halls empty. Only tenacious experts with a special ear for variations on Mozart still give concerts for each other, while the rest of the population live their lives elsewhere. The scholastics agree that the population lacks taste, and that any criticism from them is simply due to their poor judgment and lack of understanding. In this way, what started as a genuine interest in musical development has become a rigid disciplinary regime, which excludes anything that could challenge, innovate, or move the musical boundaries. Just so, canonization, jargon, and scrutinized succession to the philosophy throne may be beneficial in nurturing specialisation and quality-assurance, but it’s also exclusionary, and when adhered to too strictly, it defines a dying philosophy that, hopefully, will satisfy few philosophers.

The parable lesson, and the suggestion of this essay, is that there is something to be gained if we treat philosophers less like royals, and display a curious rather than a suspicious attitude to questions of philosophical legitimacy.

© Helene Scott-Fordsmand 2024

Helene Scott-Fordsmand is a research fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, working in philosophy of science and medicine.

• This text is developed from an earlier Danish version, published in Baggrund X Golden Days (2022).

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Is Brillo Box an Illustration?

Thomas E. Wartenberg uses Warhol’s work to illustrate his theory of illustration.

Recently I took part in an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 2024 College Art Association Meetings. The three critics of my book, Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy Through Art (OUP, 2023), were all artists. Each had insightful things to say about the relationship between my claims about illustration and their own artistic production. I was genuinely touched to hear how my book had affected their understanding of their own work as well as how it shifted their previously dismissive attitude towards ‘mere’ illustration. But afterwards, during the question-answer session, a question arose that has been preoccupying me ever since.

During my talk I had mentioned Andy Warhol’s famous 1964 artwork Brillo Soap Pads Box, aka Brillo Box. The work is a replica of the cardboard cartons containing boxes of Brillo soap pads you can buy from supermarkets. Warhol had numerous boxes fabricated out of plywood, and with the assistance of Gerard Malanga and Billy Linich, he then painted and silkscreened the boxes with the Brillo product logo and associated words and colors. The result looked almost identical to the standard cardboard cartons containing Brillo soap pads. The question I’ve been thinking about is: ‘Is Brillo Box an illustration?’ Despite having discussed the work both in my book and my response to the critics at the CAA session, I had not considered that specific question. I was surprised by it and did not have a good answer to it at the time. But I have continued to think about it, and, as a result, have modified some claims I made about illustration in Thoughtful Images.

Brillo Box Warhol photo by Johnzhouse 2021 Creative Commons 4

Illuminating Illustrations

To explain this, it will be helpful to provide a little background about the claims I made in Thoughtful Images about the nature of illustration.

The most fundamental feature of an illustration is its relationship to the source of which it is an illustration. One reason illustration has traditionally been denigrated in relationship to, say, painting, is that this dependency on a source has been taken to disqualify illustration from being real art. This is, I argue, a mistake – one that results from failing to understand that illustration is not a specific artform, like painting or sculpture, since works in any artistic medium can have the relationship to a source that constitutes an illustration.

I developed a classification of the different sources that illustrations can have. The most common form is one in which an illustration is derived from a written text. Everyone is familiar with this type of illustration. For instance, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) originally contained many lovely illustrations of Alice’s escapades that John Tenniel made based upon Carroll’s own drawings.

I also discuss two other types of illustrations that are particularly relevant to philosophy: concept-based and theory-based illustrations, where illustrations are based upon a philosophical concept or theory. These types of illustration are not as familiar to most people since the works are not as widely disseminated as text-based illustrations, but one of the best-known is the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). The etching was made by Abraham Bosse under the supervision of Hobbes, and provides a visual analogue to Hobbes’ theory that the power of the sovereign is based upon the consent of those he governs. It contains the figure of the sovereign towering over a landscape, but upon closer inspection, one sees that the body of the sovereign is made up of the bodies of his subjects.

Quotation-displaying illustrations are the final type I recognized in the book, though I used slightly different terminology there (in the book I called them ‘quotation-based illustrations’). Unsurprisingly, these consist of artworks that display quotations from texts. This type of illustration was first developed by conceptual artists in the 1960s, who made works that consisted of quotations from a text rendered in a variety of artistic mediums. The first such work I know of is Bruce Nauman’s A Rose Has No Teeth (1966). This consists of a lead cast that displays the phrase from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that forms its title. (You can find an explanation of what the quotation means in Chapter 7 of Thoughtful Images.)

There are two fundamental norms that govern illustration: fidelity and felicity. ‘Fidelity’ specifies that the work must be faithful to its source; ‘felicity’, that illustrating something in a given medium can allow for alterations to satisfy the needs of that medium. The two terms are derived from translation theory, but are also applicable to the translation of a text or idea into a visual medium rather than from one language into another.

Leviathan

Illustration Illustrations

Now we’re ready to answer the question of whether Brillo Box is an illustration. Since I claim that any artwork that’s derived from a source is an illustration, Brillo Box qualifies as one, as it has a clear source – the cardboard cartons of Brillo Soap Pad boxes in grocery stores at the time the work was created. It replicates the cardboard carton in a different medium – plywood boxes of the same dimensions as their source, painted and silkscreened to look indistinguishable from their source. This fact is central to the work’s meaning.

However, admitting that Brillo Box is an illustration requires me to grant the existence of a new type of illustration in addition to the ones I’ve already included in my typology. Brillo Box is not a text-based, concept-based, theory-based, or quotation-displaying illustration: it’s an object-based illustration – an illustration that presents its object visually. What’s unusual about this work is that it does not transform the object it illustrates, but replicates it.

Other artists followed Warhol’s example. Most notably, in 1960 Jasper Johns made two sculptures entitled Painted Bronze. Both works are cast in bronze but painted to make them indistinguishable from the objects they illustrate. In one case, Johns painted two Ballantine Ale cans. In the other, Johns painted a bronze cast of a Savarin Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, to look like something you’d see in an artist’s studio. Like Brillo Box, the Painted Bronzes are object-based illustrations. (I owe this example to William Conger.)

Reflecting on the category of object-based illustrations leads one to see that many artworks that are not currently recognized as illustrations should be considered such. An example is Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Europa (1628-29). The work is derived from Titian’s similar work from 1562.

Titian

Once the work is categorized as an illustration, it makes sense to evaluate it in terms of the norms of fidelity and felicity. The role of the norm of fidelity is acknowledged in this description of the work by Rosily Roberts:

“Titian’s Rape of Europa is an erotically charged work consisting of soft, blurred lines and the use of bright but gentle colors. Rubens has brought all of these characteristics into his own version, mimicking, among other things, Titian’s off-centered composition, and the sense of dynamism and drama that underscores the whole work.”

(‘Rubens’s copies of old masters’, available online)

So in creating his painting, Rubens sought to remain faithful to many of Titian’s stylistic choices. But Rubens was not content to simply make a copy of the Titian painting. Rather, he used it to explore possibilities for his own work, following the dictates of the norm of felicity to alter features of the source, as Roberts points out:

“Rubens departed from Titian’s work in the rendering of the female body. Rubens used cool grey half-tints and emphasized the suppleness of Europa’s flesh, demonstrating his own approach to form and color.”

So Rubens’ work is not simply a copy of Titian’s. Treating it instead as an object-based illustration gets viewers to see the role of the norms of fidelity and felicity in it. This makes it apparent that felicity applies to changes in the target work that result from something other than a change of medium. At the same time that Rubens was adhering to the norm of fidelity to learn from Titian’s example, he was also following felicity to realize his own unique painting style, creating a work that had its own integrity.

Rubens

Why Illustrate?

Some might think that this use of the concept of ‘illustration’ strains its bounds. There are, they may maintain, paintings that are based on paintings by other painters that are not in any meaningful sense illustrations. Take Picasso’s Portrait of a Painter, after El Greco (1950). The work is based on El Greco’s Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (c.1597-1603). Although the structure of the painting is clearly derived from its source, Picasso’s use of his own characteristic style dominates the painting so fully that it could be maintained that it’s not useful to think of it as an illustration.

Without endorsing this view, I do acknowledge that it points to a limit in the applicability of the notion of illustration. When felicity becomes dominant over fidelity in a work, then even if the work is derived from a source, it makes no sense to view it as an illustration. Rather, illustrations are works derived from a source in which fidelity to the source is the dominant norm. But Brillo Box is such a faithful recreation of its source (albeit with different materials), that only the norm of fidelity applies to its relationship to its source. This immediately suggests a question: Why would someone create an artwork that replicates its source with near complete accuracy?

Paying attention to this issue points out that the framework for illustration I have so far articulated does not address the question of what the point of an illustration might be. I’ve simply categorized different types of illustration based upon their having distinct types of source. This says nothing about the significance of such works. But let’s take this opportunity to reflect on the ‘why’ of illustration.

Often, the reason for making an illustration is fairly evident. For instance, the manuscript illustrations in Nicole Oresme’s translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are intended to make his theory of friendship more accessible to the courtiers of the French King Charles V. Because French lacked the words for many of Aristotle’s concepts, the illustrations provided important information to the members of the court about the meaning of those terms. Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting The Death of Socrates (1787) is a text-based illustration that provides a visual rendition of Plato’s description of Socrates’ death in his dialogue Phaedo. Portraying Socrates as facing his death with equanimity, David intended his viewers to take away the message that they should follow his example. Rubens clearly made his version of Titian’s painting both to learn from Titian and to develop his own style. But sometimes the motive for making an illustration is more difficult to determine. Picasso’s rationale for painting a version of El Greco’s portrait of his son is more difficult to determine, since Picasso had already developed his own painting style. Was he simply searching for a subject to paint? Did he think he might learn something from El Greco and the other Old Masters whose works he copied? We don’t know what his reason was.

Andy Warhol with Brillo Boxes Stockholm-1968 Public Domain

What then can we say about Warhol’s rationale for making Brillo Box? Why create a duplicate of an easily-available commercial product? Especially at the time of its creation, this work puzzled viewers. We can imagine them also wondering, ‘Why create an object that’s nearly visual identical to such an ordinary thing? What’s the point?’

Arthur Danto championed the work as making a significant philosophical point. Here is one version of how he put his claim:

“Brillo Box, in any of its many exemplars, made the form of that question [how is art possible?] finally and forever clear: how is it possible for something to be a work of art when something else, which resembles it to whatever degree of exactitude, is merely a thing, or an artifact, but not an artwork?”

(‘Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box’, Artforum, September 1993.)

This way of formulating the issue of the nature of art was novel; but after Brillo Box, the question of what makes something a work of art had to be asked differently. So the work changed the landscape of philosophical aesthetics. Brillo Box did this by making a philosophical point: by doing philosophy through art. So we might well say that Warhol’s reason for making this work was to illustrate a philosophical problem: How can one of two visually identical works be an artwork when its ordinary counterpart is not?

I continue to reflect upon illustration and to develop a theoretical framework for conceptualizing it. Brillo Box is an example of an artwork that has for me produced a more adequate idea of the notion of illustration.

© Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg 2024

As well as Thoughtful Images, Thomas Wartenberg is the author of Thinking on Screen (Routledge) and other books. He is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, MA.

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Articles

Taylor Swift: A Philosopher For Our Times

Susan Andrews parallels Taylor Swift with Aristotle and Socrates.

Is Taylor Swift a philosopher for our times? Could she help us understand ourselves and the world we live in? In her song ‘So High School’ on her most recent album The Tortured Poets Department, Swift sings, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” Taylor Swift may seem an unlikely Aristotelian but there are notable parallels. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle explored the purpose of art in his work Poetics (c.335 BCE). At the time in Greece, tragedies were all the rage. He argued that the plays were a form of katharsis – a cleansing of our emotions from the bad stuff in life. Aristotle further recognised that in order to evoke emotion in an audience through drama or poetry, and so create a cathartic experience, certain features were essential. By applying key elements such as plot, character, style, song, spectacle, and thought-provoking ideas, artists can create powerful stories to move and inspire audiences. This rings true of Swift’s lyrical storytelling, too.

This is just the start of the story. Who am I? What is the authentic self? What is love? Am I free? What is the meaning of life? Philosophical questions are so vast they can seem irritating. However, a lack of self-knowledge can lead to trouble. Swift clearly explores this in her songs, when she considers how a lack of self-knowledge can get us into bad relationships, choose bad leaders, make bad choices, and lack good values. Socrates famously summed up philosophy as ‘Know Thyself’. According to Plato, Socrates concluded that wisdom lay in knowing the limits of his knowledge. Swift meanwhile divides up the discovery of the self into relatable chunks for her fans to dissect: Who am I as a friend? Who am I as an artist? Who am I as a lover? In ‘Willow’, Swift plays around with a paradox of knowledge, saying that “The more that you say, the less I know.” Meanwhile, in ‘Dorothea’, she sings, “And if you’re ever tired of being known for who you know, you know that you will always know me.”

If philosophy holds up a mirror to the human experience, then Swift can be considered not only a tortured poet but a thinker of our times. In ‘Champagne Problems’, for example, she has a sudden burst of self-awareness when she’s faced with making tough choices: “I couldn’t give a reason” she first sings, but then has a moment of clarity: “Sometimes you don’t know the answer til someone on their knees asks you.” In ‘Anti-Hero’ Swift explores her notion of self further: “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror” – expressing how easy it is to avoid looking internally by focusing on truths outside yourself instead.

Swift 2023 MTV Video Music Awards © iHeartRadioCA Creative Commons

Philosophers, poets, songwriters, academics, theologians, scientists and psychologists have long been puzzled by what the true self is. One challenge concerns the persistence of identity: Which you is you: the person you are today, or the one of ten years ago? And who you will be in another ten years? Which era of self are you in? A folklore one? A reputation one? Fearless? Lover? In ‘Happiness’, Swift sings, “I haven’t met the new me yet”; and in ‘Mirrorball’, she sings that our sense of self is strategic – a social construct: “I’m a mirrorball, I’ll show you every version of yourself”, and “I can change everything about me to fit in.” This is a struggle of identity her young audience can relate to. Then she takes a critical look at her motives in ‘Anti-Hero’: “Did you hear my covert narcism I disguise as altruism?”

In her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift again mirrors Aristotle’s philosophy, this time concerning virtue ethics. Aristotle thought that to flourish and live a happy life you need to be virtuous, and to achieve this, you need to practice the habit of doing the right thing. We are all potentially good according to Aristotle, and we can perfect our goodness by forming right habits. Our moral character is defined by our actions, such that ‘we are what we repeatedly do’. However, being potentially good by nature, we are also potentially bad, and in ‘The Smallest Man That Ever Lived’, Swift damningly sings, ‘You are what you did’.

Self-knowledge and awareness of our reasoned choices and values is a prerequisite for Aristotelian virtue of character. Many of us don’t take the time to reflect on who we are and what we want out of life; yet as Aristotle put it, ‘Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom’. Swift knows this too. What seems to connect Swift to her audience in such a powerful way is that they believe she shows them her authentic self in her art. Authenticity involves self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and courage to express yourself honestly, as is remarked on by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. So insofar as Taylor Swift inspires her fans to examine who their true selves are and live in alignment with that, then she surely can be called a philosopher for our times.

© Susan Andrews 2024

Susan Andrews teaches philosophy at Temple Carrig School, Greystones, Ireland, and is the co-writer of the Junior Cycle Philosophy curriculum: oide.ie/post-primary/home/short-courses/philosophy-junior-cycle/.

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Brief Lives

Anselm (1033-1109)

Martin Jenkins recalls the being of the creator of the ontological argument.

To Italians, he is Anselm of Aosta; to the French, Anselm of Bec; to the English, Anselm of Canterbury. If you’re a Catholic, you can dodge the nationalism by calling him ‘Saint Anselm’. But whatever you call him, Anselm is probably the most important thinker of the eleventh century, and he was responsible for one of the big philosophical ideas about God which is still discussed today: the ontological argument for God’s existence.

Anselm was born about 1033 in Aosta in northern Italy. At some point he quarrelled with his Lombard noble father Gundulf, and began the life of a wandering scholar. In eleventh century Europe, abbeys and monasteries were the only institutions offering any sort of teaching; they were the nearest things to universities. So Anselm travelled through Burgundy and the Loire valley before reaching the Norman abbey of Avranches, in the north of France. Then in 1059 Anselm moved from Avranches to the abbey of Bec.

Bec was a peculiar abbey. It had been founded twenty-five years before by Herluin, who was still its abbot. Herluin, a former knight, was committed to a life of poverty. In 1041, Lanfranc, another Italian, moved to Bec from Avranches, where he had been a teacher. Herluin eventually convinced Lanfranc, who had reverted to being just a humble monk, to resume teaching – and so the abbey of Bec, founded on principles of poverty by a knight who was no intellectual, became a centre of learning, in which Lanfranc was its prior, in effect, the abbot’s deputy.

Anselm studied under Lanfranc, and in 1060 was invested as a monk. Lanfranc, meanwhile, having become a principal counsellor to Duke William of Normandy (later William the Conqueror), left in 1063 to become the abbot of the men’s monastery at Caen. This led to Anselm’s becoming the principal teacher at Bec. In 1078, he became its abbot, too.

Anselm the Teacher

Anselm changed the emphasis of teaching at Bec from external students to the intellectual formation of the abbey’s monks. He also began to commit his teaching to writing. Probably Anselm’s first published work was the dialogue De Grammatico (On Grammar), a dense and challenging piece of linguistic philosophy. Anselm was quite modern in arguing that we need to think about the language with which we think, although he does refer back to ideas defined by the Catholic Church’s favourite pagan philosopher, Aristotle, such as substance and quality. (He only knew Aristotle at second hand, through the sixth century writer Boethius.)

Anselm’s next work was the Monologion (The Monologue), This was essentially a writing up of his lecture notes at the request of the monks of Bec, who probably had difficulty in following his arguments. As he states in the preface, they’d set out the condition, ‘Nothing whatsoever to be argued on the basis of Scripture’, although he cheated slightly by introducing a few Biblical quotations into the final chapters (maybe by then he was feeling tired).

In the Monologion Anselm was doing something original for scholarly research in the Middle Ages, relying on pure logic rather than on authority, the latter being the normal mode of enquiry. He sent a copy to his old teacher Lanfranc, now Archbishop of Canterbury, for approval. Lanfranc was slow to reply; and when he did so, he criticised Anselm for not citing Augustine of Hippo.

The Monologion begins with an argument for the existence of God. Since all existences derive from other existences, there must be an ultimate existence from which all others derive, which must be greater than all the other existences if they derive from it. The book goes on to explore the nature of God and to make a case for the doctrine of the Trinity. One has to question whether Anselm would have reached the conclusions he did if he had not already known where he was heading…

Anselm’s next important treatise was the Proslogion (Discourse). In its preface Anselm records his dissatisfaction with his argument in the Monologion. And “So it was one day… that I eagerly grasped the notion which in my distraction I had been rejecting.”

His new argument was that we must conceive of God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’ – in other words, as embodying perfection. But perfect greatness implies existence, since something great that exists is greater than something great that does not exist: Can anything be perfect if it exists solely in imagination? Therefore, if we must think of God embodying perfection, then the God which we think of must be real.

This argument was soon challenged by Gaunilo, an obscure monk from Marmoutier in Alsace. Gaunilo’s basic rebuttal was that it’s possible to conceive of a perfect island somewhere in the ocean, therefore, following Anselm’s reasoning, that island must exist. (Gaunilo ends his work by saying that the rest of Anselm’s treatise is sound and helpful – which is a bit like saying, “It’s a nice play, Mr Shakespeare; could you just get rid of the Prince of Denmark?”)

Anselm wrote a response to Gaunilo, and insisted that in future the Proslogion should be published with Gaunilo’s objection and his reply. His response was in essence what he had argued in the Monologion: that God exists in a different way to everything else. God enjoys a transcendent being distinct from the created being of his creation – for instance, of human beings, or of islands: so what might apply to God might not apply to his creation.

Anselm continued to teach and publish. However, in 1093 his life was turned upside down, when he was appointed to succeed Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Anselm versus Orthodoxy

Anselm hated administration but undertook it conscientiously. He also hated politics, and was not good at it. However, the job of Archbishop of Canterbury was highly political and, just to add to Anselm’s problems, the current king of England, William II, was notoriously anti-clerical. It was inevitable that they would come into conflict, which they did when Anselm objected to contributing money for the king’s campaigns in Normandy because it would be hard on his diocese’s tenants. It was also probably inevitable that Anselm would go into exile in Rome. Well, technically he went to receive formal investiture, but he stayed in Rome from 1097 until after William’s death in 1100. Pope Urban II did what he could with this rather unworldly scholar. It didn’t help that William II Rufus and most of the English bishops did not recognise Urban as pope.

The Catholic Church’s main difficulty then was with the Greek Orthodox Church, which had split with the Western (Catholic) church in 1054, mainly due to political power struggles, but ostensibly over the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed. Behind this word lay the theological question whether the Holy Spirit proceeded (or emanated) from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son. The Western church had insisted on adding filioque (which means, ‘and from the son’) to this key Christian creed.

The Pope sent Anselm to debate with Greek Orthodox representatives at the Council of Bari. Unfortunately, Anselm regarded the problem as purely intellectual, and apparently did not appreciate the political dimension. He’d argued the double procession in the Monologion, and probably thought that he could convince the Greek clerics. But the Greeks would not accept that the Pope could unilaterally impose the filioque: in their view, since the Nicene Creed had been decided by the Council of Nicaea, it could only be amended by another such council of the whole church, not by the Bishop of Rome alone. For them, it was democracy versus dictatorship. Anselm wrote up his arguments in another work.

Meanwhile he was writing his last major work, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), which he began in England and finished in Italy. In it he addresses the question, ‘By what logic or necessity did God become man, and by his death restore life to the world, when he could have done this through the agency of some other person, angelic or human, or simply by willing it?’

This treatise is, it must be said, not entirely coherent. For example, Anselm gets drawn into an inconclusive digression on whether the number of human beings saved through Christ’s death equals or is greater than the number of fallen angels whom they were to replace. Anselm’s explanation for the incoherence is that parts of his first drafts were being circulated without his permission and so he had to finish the work in a hurry. However, from a philosophical point of view, it is Anselm’s methodology rather than his argument which is important. A thinker of the generation following Anselm, Hugh of Saint Victor, distinguished between the opus creationis – the study of the nature of God and the universe – which was a legitimate subject of logical and philosophical enquiry, and the opus restaurationis – the understanding of the salvation work of Christ – which could only be understood Biblically and through church authority. What Anselm was doing in Cur Deus Homo was attempting to explain the second by methods appropriate to the first; that is, explain the incarnation through logical argument. So although Cur Deus Homo is perhaps not a triumph of philosophy, it is a triumph of the philosophical method.

Anselm Transcends

Eventually Anselm felt able to return to England. However, his relations with the new king, Henry I Beauclerc, were strained. The problem lay in what historians have labelled ‘the investiture contest’, which is one of those historical issues which seemed important at the time but which baffle modern minds. It was accepted that monarchs should invest bishops with the lands and goods which, technically, under the feudal system, they held on the ruler’s behalf; but could earthly kings also invest bishops with the ‘spiritualities’ – the symbols of their ecclesiastical power? Henry said yes, Anselm said no – and in 1103 Anselm went into exile again.

In due course the new pope Paschal II reached a compromise with Henry. Anselm was not happy with it, but accepted it obediently, and returned to England in 1107. The official version is that Henry was glad to receive him, which may translate as everyone was glad to have the problem go away.

Anselm had one final treatise in him: De Concordia (On Harmony). In it he sought to reconcile his understanding of God with his understanding of free will. God, he argues, is outside time and space and has an overview of everything that happens in the universe, while human beings are constrained by their existence in space and time. Therefore, although God does not preordain what humans do of their own free will, he is always immediately aware of it, and more importantly, of the consequences of it for their salvation or condemnation. Anselm argues that foreknowledge is not predestination: God knows what you do, but doesn’t make you do anything. So God does not damn you. Rather, your own sin damns you.

By now Anselm was an old, tired man. He hoped to write one final work on the origin of the soul, but illness prevented it. He died on April 21st 1109, at the age of seventy-six.

The Weight of Being

To understand Anselm’s thought we need to refer to what he said in the Proslogion, following Augustine of Hippo: “For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand.” For Anselm, faith (that is, theological belief) preceded logical argument, which meant that to a degree he knew the answers to his theological questions before he asked them. There was one exception: proof of the existence of God. He needed to find the logical argument which proves that God is. Whether he succeeded in this is open to question. Nevertheless, the Ontological Argument has bothered philosophers ever since Anselm first formulated it.

Generally, Anselm’s legacy is contentious. Both Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas found themselves uncomfortable with his conclusions and the logic by which he had reached them. However, Anselm established the principle that logic could legitimately be applied to theological questions. In doing so he allowed his intellectual successors to apply philosophical thinking to questions of faith, which opened the way to the philosophy of religion (among other things). So Abelard and Aquinas, although rejecting Anselm’s arguments, inherited the methodology he had created, and which dominated theological thinking until the sixteenth century, when Luther and Calvin insisted on a return to the Bible to settle theological issues.

© Martin Jenkins 2024

The late Martin Jenkins was a Quaker, a retired community worker, and a frequent contributor to Philosophy Now.

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Interviews

- Sarah Bakewell

Interview

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell, popular author of engaging books about exciting ideas, chats with Tim Madigan about Iris Murdoch, Montaigne, the meaning of hope, humanism, fallibility, and her own life, among other topics.

Sarah Bakewell is a British author. Her best-selling works include the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto and Windus, 2010), At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016), and Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (Penguin Press, 2023). She is the recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction, for work that “unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers.”

How did you become interested in philosophy?

Photo © Pietro Ficai Veltroni

It started when I was a teenager, reading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – all the usual existentialist types. I decided to study philosophy at the University of Essex, but not initially. I went to study literature, but we also did a module on philosophy. There was this wonderful interdisciplinary program in the first year. I discovered philosophy through that as a minor, then changed it to my major. I did start work on a PhD on Heidegger, as I was excited when I first read him, especially by his idea of ‘Being’. I suppose that, to a young person, his later philosophy, which is bizarre and kind of mystical, was incredibly exciting. Then, just as suddenly, I fell out of love with it. Because of that I decided to change paths altogether, and I didn’t continue with the PhD. I ended up working in other fields for quite a long time, specializing in rare books. I became a curator at the Wellcome Library in London. And then I wrote historical biographies, and weirdly, philosophy started to find its way back in. The next thing I knew I was writing this mixture of biography and philosophy, which, I must say, I find much more congenial to my temperament than pure philosophy, if there is such a thing.

You do seem to have an affinity for philosophers who are also literary figures, such as Montaigne, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre.

Oh, definitely. It’s very arguable with somebody like Montaigne whether you should call him a philosopher or an essayist, or a sort of all-purpose writer. I’m inclined to think it doesn’t have to be either/or. The same is true of Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I think I’m drawn to them because literature was my first love and is still very central to me. I don’t see it as any kind of handmaiden to philosophy – or the other way around, either. But it’s also because by its nature literature tends to be about specific people’s experiences – about the human being in a particular time and place, a person to whom things happen, which is more like life as we experience it. We’re not some sort of ‘pure consciousness’. As Heidegger said, we are ‘thrown’ into history. Events and quirks of personality and accidental encounters with others are the stuff of literature. So I think it makes for quite a happy combination with philosophy.

Did you have an interest in Iris Murdoch?

Very much so. She had this great phrase, ‘inhabited philosophy’. It’s not that philosophy has to be something that you live out in your life in a pure way so much as just having a philosophy that is absolutely tied up with the stuff of life – a philosophy that you live. That’s a much more interesting concept than just the idea that life and philosophy have some sort of parallel tracks.

Recently there’s been several books published about British philosophy Post-World War 2, often with an emphasis on female philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge, and Iris Murdoch plays a very large role in these.

Yes, that’s true. Two books about that group of women philosophers – Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch – just happened to come out at the same time recently, which is something that often happens in the publishing world, and is pretty much dreaded by most authors.

One book that I absolutely enjoyed which came out last year was David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit. That’s a wonderful example of biography and philosophy being interwoven. Parfit was such an extraordinary personality, a puzzling person in many ways. I like reading these things; it’s all part of a general interest in people. But when you’re writing about a philosopher or a novelist, you’re writing about someone who also reflects on their own life. The extreme case of that is Montaigne, because there’s nothing you could say about him that he hasn’t already said about himself. There’s a wealth of reflection on his own life and experiences. It’s great to write about someone who’s already written about themselves.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

What is it about Montaigne that brought you back into writing about philosophy?

I was interested in him as a writer in a general way, probably more than as a philosopher, initially. Then he led me to thinking about the influence of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical philosophers – the three Hellenistic sets of philosophers who interested him. It’s a philosophy that’s very borderline with literary reflection.

My book on Montaigne did well, and ended up leading me back, in my next book, to the philosophers I’d first gotten interested in when I was a teenager. So I next wrote about the existentialists. There was a connection, because Montaigne opened up the idea in me that you can write about a lived, inhabited philosophy of existence.

In terms of writing about Montaigne, that was just a pure labor of love, really. I discovered his writing quite by accident. I was about to go on a long journey from Budapest to Amsterdam, and was looking for something to read on the train. There was a very limited selection in a small secondhand bookshop near the train station in Budapest. I looked at the few books that they had that were not in Hungarian, and one of them was a translation of Montaigne’s selected essays.

I was fascinated to come across somebody so real. He gives such an impression of being a human being, complete with all the inconsistencies, oddities, opinions, and prejudices we all have, but he reflects on his own failings all the time. It’s a rich experience to come across even a selection of his essays. But it was a long time after that that I started writing about him. By then I’d gotten a more complete edition of his Essays (1580) [in which Montaigne first popularised the essay form, Ed]. This remained a favorite book for many years, before I eventually thought I’d like to write about him.

Was the title How to Live or A Life of Montaigne your title, or did the publisher come up with it?

It was mine, but it should have a question mark after ‘How to Live’. The question ‘How should I live?’ was prominent in the Early Modern period. There were a number of writers interested in it, and they picked it up from classical sources.

While not quite grammatical in English, the question ‘How to live?’ is asked in the book’s twenty chapters. So the structure of the book is that there’s this one question, and twenty chapters that are all attempts at an answer. And, of course, ‘attempt’ is what the word essai means in French. That’s how Montaigne came up with the term – from the idea of trying things out, tasting them, giving them a kind of test drive, as we might say. I wanted to capture something of that in the structure of the book: to say here are various approaches to how you might live. I was putting the elements of his life into this structure of possible attempts at an answer to the question, but with an account of his life at the core of it. This made it fun to write, as it gave me a different angle than a straight biography.

A theme that runs throughout your books is the desire to live authentically. One thing I noticed when I was teaching an Introduction to Philosophy course, is that up until roughly the Nineteenth Century and even beyond, almost all the philosophers covered in the course had either been jailed, executed, or threatened with death and exile because the beliefs that they were expressing were so controversial.

This still does happen around the world today, and nobody’s entirely safe from it. Even now there’s a great deal of controversy over freedom of thought in universities. When I was writing the book about existentialism I was interested in some of the stories that had come out of Czechoslovakia, as it then was known, during the Cold War period, from philosophers who had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, applying their thinking about oppression and freedom, and how a coercive society works. There was Jan Patočka, who was persecuted by the Communist regime, and became ill and died prematurely because of it. Vaclav Havel, who studied with Patočka, also wrote essays about oppression and freedom, and what it means to philosophize in a regime of that sort.

Yes, you pursue this topic in your most recent work, Humanly Possible, too. I think we often admire the people you write about because they spoke their mind, or wrote views that were at the time against the grain. Putting them in the context in which they lived helps us to better understand why they wrote what they did. For instance, Montaigne, as you point out, had to be quite cautious in regards to what he wrote.

Exactly. This leaves us, all these years later, wondering, ‘Well, what did he really think, and what did he really mean? And how much of it is just being careful, versus how much of it is genuinely what he thought?’ We simply don’t know. For instance, did he accept the right of the Catholic Church to tell people what to think? That seems odd given his temperament and attitude, but he may very well have done so. What to me seems the key point in understanding him is that he just wasn’t all that interested in questions about God or the afterlife. There’s a lot in him that rather implies that he didn’t think there was much of an afterlife to expect, but he doesn’t say that there isn’t one. He simply doesn’t seem to take it into account much. I think that his interest was very much focused on how to be a human being in this world. He was steeped in classical readings from pre-Christian times, and took on the ancient philosophers’ view that the important thing is to live well, to be a good human being, to be a thoughtful human being, and to deal well with other people. He seemed not to be influenced by expectations of an afterlife.

That’s pertinent to most of the people you write about in Humanly Possible.

A lot of them had that tendency. Many earlier ‘humanists’ wouldn’t have necessarily thought to question any of the otherworldly beliefs, but they come across as not being very interested in them, just because there’s so much else that’s interesting about our relationships with each other in the here and now. This very much applies to somebody like Petrarch [1304-74], who I more or less take as my starting point for the history of humanism. There’s no reason at all to think that he doubted the existence of God, or that he didn’t go along with the Church’s orthodoxy. But when you read his letters to his friends, he’s completely fascinated by how to be a good human being and how to live well in the world. It’s a matter of focus; and it’s that interest in human relationships, life, and culture, that makes him a humanist.

You also talk about the importance of hope in Humanly Possible. ‘Hope’ often has religious connotations, particularly hope for an afterlife. What would you say the humanist concept of hope is?

The humanist concept of hope is focused on this world. Moreover, hope, as most humanists would use that term, means that if we want things to be better, we have to do it ourselves. It’s up to us. And we have an ability to think about the future, to plan it to some extent; to collaborate, communicate, cooperate, and to take political steps that might improve things. And we’re completely interwoven and dependent with the rest of life on Earth, so we have a certain degree of responsibility for how things go on the planet, as well as with ourselves and our own lives.

I know this all sounds a bit of a dream now, when things seem to be going so badly. Well, if we want things to be better, it’s up to us. Nobody’s going to step in from on high and save us – contrary to one of Heidegger’s last comments, that ‘Only a god can save us now’. Heidegger always denied that he was writing about God when he wrote about ‘Being’, or even this ‘god’, but I think it’s his coming out of the theistic closet, as it were; his still having a mystical sense of some sort of a higher power. Whereas the humanist tradition, in all its various forms, doesn’t even think about eternal salvation. It’s more like, how should we behave responsibly and productively to solve the problems that are in front of us?

Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre in Beijing, 1955

Photo © Liu Dong’ao 1955 Public Domain

Throughout Humanly Possible you stress the concept of fallibility – the acceptance that humans are imperfect, and we’re not going to create utopias.

The desire to create a utopia, I think, is one of the most dangerous ideas we’ve had collectively, especially if it relies on changing human nature in some fundamental way. This connects to the idea of ‘engineers of human souls’ – a phrase used by Stalin, whereby, in order to bring about the perfect Communist state, writers, artists, scientists, and technicians will have to engineer human nature.

The idea of fundamentally changing human nature is a rather religious concept. It implies that there’s something fundamentally wrong with human nature and there’s a solution that will change it for the better. The humanist starting-point, on the other hand, is to have a reasonably realistic assessment of what kind of beings we are and what we can or can’t do. It does not say that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us – either via the concept of evil or original sin – or that we’ve fallen from grace. The humanist instead says, look, we have these helpful qualities, and we have these dangerous tendencies; indeed, we have all sorts of mixtures of qualities – let’s just try and act in such a way that the more constructive and helpful qualities can flourish and the dangerous tendencies can be contained.

I wonder in that regard if there’s a kind of a dialectic between At the Existentialist Café and Humanly Possible, because at least some of the existentialists seemed to be dealing with despair, angst, and the sense of staring into the abyss, whereas the humanists you write about seem to express a more pragmatic and hopeful perspective.

The classic case of an early kind of existentialist who stared into the abyss was Kierkegaard. For him, if there was going to be any salvation, it would come from something beyond the human, something divine. But Sartre didn’t believe in any divine being; he said that he lost his faith while standing at a bus stop when he was a teenager. Maybe the bus was really late! But he didn’t have this supernatural hope.

What are the consequences, then, for how we live as human beings without such a hope? For some thinkers we have a ‘God-shaped hole’. How do we fill it? If there’s no God, then there’s no divine order, and so no blueprint laid down for us on how to be a human being, and therefore it’s up to us to figure out how we do it. So with the existentialists we have the sense of an active choice all the time: freedom, but within a situation. Sartre and other existentialists emphasize that it’s all about what we make of our choices: what kind of beings do we want to make ourselves into by our choices? There’s a tremendous spectrum among existentialists regarding how religious or nonreligious we should be, but ‘responsibility’ is the key word for all of them – taking responsibility for our choices. And the nuclear age brought that very much into focus. If we want to survive, we have to choose to survive.

There’s also a huge historical backdrop amongst different humanist traditions emphasizing responsibility. Humanists today point out that, even if we did only care about human beings, we can’t survive without the rest of our ecosystem, so on those grounds alone selfish humanism would be untenable. Since the Nineteenth Century, humanism has been dominated by the view that we’re an evolved species. We’re absolutely a part of the entire world. But we also have language. We have various degrees of a sense of morality and politics, and an ability to think and reflect and work together. We have what we can call the cultural realm. Humanists take that realm seriously.

One of the central crises right now is the growth of Artificial Intelligence. You did a postgraduate degree in this topic, so you were ahead of your time.

Well I was very interested in it when I was a student, but now I’m way behind. I graduated in 1989. Just to put it in context, one of the main puzzles being discussed then was how to write a program that could map the optimal route for getting from point A to point B. That’s what Google Maps now does all the time, a billion times a day.

My interest in the topic really came from an interest in the philosophy of mind. It was a time when there was a lot of overlap between philosophy and artificial intelligence research. What’s happened since is that, with the huge increase in computing power and interconnectivity, quite a lot of the things that we now think of as AI are really just a reliance on processing absolutely massive data sources. This produces impressive effects – but the vision of what human-like cognition might be which dominated early work in AI seems to have become less relevant. At the moment, at least, that seems to be where AI is at. It’s facing diminishing returns if it just keeps on working from these massive data sets without doing anything new. But we really don’t know where it’s going to lead us.

It was an interesting time to be working in AI, but then I never got a job in the field. I decided to do something completely different.

You’re getting a sense of what my youth was like. I was just sort of all over the place, really, but I was having a great time. And you never quite know which things you do are going to end up becoming a spark that you want to take further.

What are your current projects?

I’m having a bit of a break, although I’m sure that something is sparking somewhere. But I must say I’m enjoying just taking a bit of time to see where it leads me. The humanist book took me six years to write. It was very all-consuming. I loved doing it, but I also feel like I need to do a reset.

• Tim Madigan is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at St John Fisher University, in Rochester NY.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Absurd Assumptions • Post Post, Meta Letter • I Am Not ‘Sexuate’ • Freedom For Snails Now! • Meaning Multiplies • Whipping Nietzsche Into Shape • Literature vs Life • Angry Stoics • Atomism

Absurd Assumptions

Dear Editor: I found Dr Doolan’s article ‘Authenticity and Absurdity’ in Issue 163 to be an interesting exploration of potential definitions of authenticity. However, the entire structure of the article fell apart for me when he type-cast society into one demographic of his choosing. Doolan seems to be describing people as something like walking stomachs, seeking to consume without critical thinking. To believe that we’re all obsessed with social media, all happily adopting the common denominator, all pursuing our selfish fame and fortune, and all gradually evolving into Kim Kardashian, is illogical. I don’t believe he recognises that the audience of this magazine are critical thinking, self-aware individuals! Perhaps he’s still in the 70s, where we’re all ‘just another brick in the wall’ (Pink Floyd).

His claim that business school prepares students to serve blindly in the corporate world is also incorrect. After my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I pursued an MBA, where the students were advised that we have a responsibility to ensure that people of all statuses are considered and cared for in our decision-making and business case proposals. We were advised to think of solutions that are sustainable – not just in terms of a clean, green Earth, but also in terms of the impact on people’s livelihoods. I can still recall one professor passionately advocating for our business cases to directly answer the question: ‘What about the plight of a poor girl living and working in a sweatshop on the other side of the world?’ One can only really belong in society if one takes some responsibility for it. Doolan seems to have excluded the entire demographic of people who care, people who lead, people who think critically, people who solve problems creatively, people who are not drones, not self-absorbed, not selfish, and who read, think and write. In short, his definition of ‘authenticity’ is absurd.

Rahul Dhingra, Toronto

Post Post, Meta Letter

Dear Editor: In Issue 162 Christina Aziz elucidates the progression from modernism to postmodernism, now converging in metamodernism, which represents a synthesis of the two previous schools of thought. As a strong supporter of science-based progress, I prefer the modernist perspective over the postmodernist, primarily because postmodernism succumbs to an inherent contradiction: as Aziz reports, one of the forerunners of postmodernism was Friedrich Nietzsche, who asserted that ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’. This statement reflects the rejection of objective truth, which is a fundamental postmodernist concept. However, the statement presents a significant problem: if someone asserts something like Nietzsche does in his statement, he asserts it as a truth; but if truth is an illusion, even his assertion is an illusion, thereby undermining its own foundations, and indeed, the very foundation of postmodernist thought. A school of thought that undermines itself is unsustainable.

Andrea Gianoncelli

Dear Editor: The problem with resurrecting and ‘feeling nostalgic’ for pre-post-modern narratives is: Just whose narratives are we talking about? Postmodernism arose out of a rejection of all things modern, that is to say, all things Western. Given the current political climate much of the Western world is entrenched in, I suggest that postmodernism’s light-your-own-way ethos towards metanarratives isn’t going away any time soon.

Marion Lisa Robson

I Am Not ‘Sexuate’

Dear Editor: It was interesting to learn about Luce Irigaray’s life and her ideas in the interview of in Issue 162, but I have a different point of view on gender and sex. First, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are different concepts. The former describes our body, the chromosomes we’re born with, etc. The latter is related to our psyche, and is far more complex. So, while there are at least three sexes (male, female, intersex), plenty of genders exist. As a feminist, it is painful to observe women who used to shout ‘My uterus is mine’, now saying ‘My uterus is I’, and trying to tell their sisters what is ‘feminine’ and what is not. I was born as a female, but it is not a key concept of my identity or personality: I am who I am, regardless of what my body looks like.

The differences between the sexes that Irigaray identifies are, in my opinion, a product of the narratives and stereotypes that societies built and imposed upon both men and women. But we’re free now; we are the writers of our own stories. So how about we stop worrying about what’s in other people’s underwear?

Alice Nieri, London

Freedom For Snails Now!

Dear Editor: This is in response to PN 163’s ‘Politics of Freedom’ theme. All that talk of politics has me thinking: What would be the politics of snails, if snails were capable of governance?

By chance, I happened upon the MNN (Mollusk News Network), which filled me in on the latest in gastropod politics. Snail Democrats (those who favor zipping towards the future) say that globalism is great as long as the globe is small. Republicans (who favor an approach where one can stop and behold one’s own slime tracks) say that the curvature of a globe is harder to slide across than a flat plane. Rebellious youth, be they slimennials or Gen S, have been painting their shells florescent colors in defiance of cultural norms. (Hungry birds sometimes show admiration for these bright designs.) Liberals continue to argue that global warming is a crisis because increased exposure to the sun is a form of ‘cosmic salt’. Conservatives claim this is ridiculous, since the increased moisture should revitalize mucus layers; and besides, they could all evolve into sea snails if the Earth floods. Transgender politics are politics as usual, since snails are hermaphrodites, and there’s already only one type of bathroom. Great way to keep it simple.

Then there’s the issue of capital punishment. Is it cruel and unusual to vinegar-spray a convicted felon? The beer trap was already vetoed, based upon the fact that it would waste good beer. I guess they might just have to go back to the old-fashioned ‘sprinkling of the salt’.

Privacy is a hot topic. Secretion hackers (shackers) have refined techniques in taking personal information based on people’s mucus trails; so the public is advised to carry a hose wherever they go. And then there’s arms control. A gang of cone snails has been on a poking spree near the beach. Congress is calling for a ban on all harpoon barbs longer than two inches. Of course, there’s been controversy surrounding the attempted assassination of former president Clump, who was well-known for his ungainly orange shell. Conspiracy theorists contend that no snail should have been able to get that close with a bottle of boric acid. The SSS (Snail Secret Service) say they had no chance because most of their bodyguards are banana slugs, who are usually, well, sluggish.

Larry Chan, New York City

Meaning Multiplies

Dear Editor: I enjoyed the many thought-provoking articles in Philosophy Now Issue 162, ‘The Meaning Issue’. My thoughts: Philosophers rightly frown on claims of knowledge based on blind faith, dogma, and myth. Using reason and empirical observation, we have discovered much regarding our own nature and our unique place in the universe. This has provided solid grounds for drawing logical conclusions as to the meaning and purpose of our existence. It shows us that humans are unique in numerous ways. For example, we are organic. This is rare. Over 99% of the stuff in the universe is inorganic. It always decays, going from more complex states to simpler states, until it all eventually ends up as nothing but dust. But organic stuff grows at least for a while. Our bodies and minds grow into more complex structures. Organic things are driven to eat and procreate, but humans rise higher, and use reason to understand the world and attempt to make it a better place. We think and feel. We thrive and strive. We build and create. Relative to anything we’ve found around us, we are far more intelligent, being able to reason and deduce. We seek and find truth and knowledge. We discover and capitalize on cause-and-effect relationships.

These unique abilities inform our calling: to seek truth and knowledge. Our purpose is to make meaning out of the chaos of the universe we reside in. To find and create order. To build, intentionally. To strive to reach understanding and knowledge, which we call truth. If in the future we find something that negates this, so be it, we will adjust our understanding. But for now, this is the most logical conclusion as to the meaning and purpose of it all.

Scott E. Newton, Pacifica, CA

Dear Editor: Our lives should have value, not just meaning. Hitler’s life had considerable meaning for himself, for his followers, and for his victims. However, for his victims his life had a marked negative value, and for many of his followers too. So we should assess the positive or negative value of a life, not its meaning.

How do we do that? Certainly it’s best to believe that our own lives have positive value. Believing our life has a negative value is a feature of depressive illness and a cause in itself of depression. It also makes us less capable of effective action, whether for good or for evil.

However, we are not best placed to assess the value of our own lives. To best decide whether our lives have a positive or negative value, we can turn to those who have been affected by both our actions and our failures to act. We will naturally find conflicting views, but we’re likely to accept the judgement of those we think lead valuable lives. It would be most accurate to assess the value of a life in some objective way. Unfortunately, probably the best we can usually do is to accept the verdict of those whose lives we’ve touched, as to whether we’ve harmed or helped them.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: C.S Lewis was a young officer in WW1, and an atheist at the time. He was injured himself, and also witnessed suffering of others. After converting to Christianity, Lewis spoke of suffering as ‘God’s megaphone’. So suffering is a discipline the Almighty imposes on His creation? But surely, in our quest for meaning in suffering, don’t we deserve a more three-dimensional process? The process must be one that both theist and atheist can embrace.

Victor Frankl’s seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) comes to our rescue. It is an autobiographical account of Frankl’s experience of incarceration in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Writing that book would have been a valuable and very personal opportunity for Frankl to reassess the meaning-based logotherapy he developed in the early 1930s. In PN 162, Patrick Testa cites Frankl’s three point plan for dealing with the ‘meaning in suffering’ dilemma. First there is creativity. Second there is love (this doesn’t necessarily mean between two people. It can be a passion for a project). Third, there’s striving for justice. Might there be a fourth dimension to Frankl’s process? One might add that there’s meaning in suffering when out of suffering comes some greater good.

Kevin Chubb, Cadoxton, Barry

Dear Editor: I really enjoyed ‘The Meaning Issue’ of Philosophy Now (Issue 162), because it goes to the core of existence, not only on an individual level but even the cosmic level, and the variety of discussions reflected that range.

Rob Gilbert’s article, ‘The Present Is Not All There Is To Happiness’, raised some interesting points. The intersection of Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia (a good life) with the significance of time’s projection into both the past and the future caused me to consider an aspect that Gilbert alluded to, which is the difference in perspective from youth to age. People rarely acknowledge that we’re not really in a position to judge if we’ve lived a ‘good life’ until later in that life. It’s only by looking back over what one might have achieved or feel satisfaction about that one can truly make that judgement. I say this as someone who is probably in the last quartile of their life. When we’re younger, we naturally project into the future dreams and ambitions that are yet unfulfilled. Not surprisingly, our priorities change with age. What seemed important in our youth no longer matters, and we judge our lives by other criteria, which could have to do with family or just encounters we’ve made over a lifetime. Many of us, looking back, can identify with John Lennon’s line, ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans’.

When we’re young there’s a natural tendency to want to explore the world, both physically and intellectually, because we instinctively want to broaden our horizons and expose ourselves to different perspectives. Looking back, I’m glad I did that, despite having limited resources. The journey of life is made most rewarding by diversity, of which failure is a part. I tell people that I don’t dwell on regrets simply because I own my mistakes and don’t put the blame on others.

Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne

Whipping Nietzsche Into Shape

Dear Editor: In your News section of Issue 163, reporting on a new exhibition on Friedrich Nietzsche, you state, “What finally pushed poor Freddy over the edge was the sight of a delivery man in Turin brutally whipping his horse.”

Recent works have started to question this long-established account. For instance, in his 2022 book Friedrich Nietzsche, Ritchie Robertson calls it a “dubious story, not found in print before 1930.” Yet in Nietzsche Now!, published this year, Glenn Wallis writes on the veracity of the story: “Apparently it first appeared in an Italian daily some eleven years after the event, written up by an anonymous reporter who had interviewed self-identified witnesses” as well as members of the Italian family Nietzsche had been lodging with. Would any Nietzsche scholars care to shed further light on the matter?

Patrick West, Deal, Kent

Author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Literature vs Life

Dear Editor: Thank you for the literature theme of Issue 161. I appreciated Mike Sutton’s piece on ‘Milan Kundera’s Philosophy of the Novel’, yet also couldn’t help but see it as another example of philosophers getting caught in the futile all-or-nothing binary that the search for essential truth in human affairs has come to feel, and, stuck in that mire, proposing constructions of the individual that are said to fit how things work in life but don’t – at least not in my life.

The pragmatist Richard Rorty supports Kundera’s case for essential truth’s usefulness in science and engineering, but not for the conduct of human affairs. They both seem to conclude that, where access to certainty and unanimity is lost, truth ceases to exist, at least in human affairs. To paraphrase, where there is no evident immutable truth, there is no truth. This is the futile all-or-nothing binary. Futile because setting the minimum standard at immutability is a hurdle designed to elicit failure. Futile, too, because in the absence of immutable truth, humans don’t give up on truth, they get on with making collective work around social norms – normative social truths if you like. They do this because the real world demands it. The real world works fine with ‘all-or-something’ rather than ‘all-or-nothing’. Normative truths are not immutable, but they are sufficient at delivering enough certainty for societies to go on functioning with a semblance of order. The truths are contested, and they will evolve through this process, as they should. They are not immutable, just good enough to work until they don’t, and then they get replaced.

Rorty and Kundera also position individuals contrary to the workings of the real world. Lines such as “The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth”, and “it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth…that man becomes an individual” suggest to me that people require an absence of collective truth in order to flourish individually. But individuals flourish in connected communities, and connected communities need normative truths to function. Think of a garden bed filled with flowers. Passers by will marvel at the flowers while not noticing that the flowers don’t exist without the bed, and that maintenance of a healthy bed is of deep interest to the flowers. Individuals don’t exist without the bed of society to live in, and they certainly won’t flourish when the health of their society is neglected. Maintaining normative truths is key to that social health, and therefore crucial to the flourishing of individuals.

Peter Pearce, Brisbane

Angry Stoics

Dear Editor: As both a student of Stoicism and a psychiatrist, I found David Ashton’s critique of the Stoic view of anger in Issue 163 quite compelling. I agree that the Stoics’ adamant and near-total opposition to anger is, as Ashton notes, ‘not the whole story’, and that in certain contexts, anger can have positive effects. That said, I believe Ashton goes too far in arguing that anger may “sometimes be rational, creative, or morally righteous.” This claim is not strictly wrong, but it misses the much more common disastrous effects of intense or prolonged anger, and it’s really these forms of anger that so worried the Stoics, as indeed they worried the great sages of Buddhism and Judaism (I make this case in my book, The Three-Petalled Rose).

In psychotherapy, we recognize that ‘getting in touch’ with one’s anger is often a necessary first step toward healing after emotional or physical trauma. However, getting ‘stuck’ in an angry emotional posture for long periods is never beneficial for personal growth or physical and emotional well-being. Indeed, the vast majority of patients I have treated would do far better with less, not more, anger. Furthermore, the supposed cathartic benefits of venting anger (‘blowing off steam’) have been convincingly refuted by recent research (see psychiatrist.com/news/it-might-be-time-to-rethink-how-we-handle-anger/).

On a more philosophical level, Dr Ashton argues that anger can represent a justifiable moral judgment in response to harms done. Again, I don’t disagree; but anger is neither necessary nor sufficient to reach a moral judgment regarding harms or injustice. One can conclude that slavery, rape, and genocide are morally repugnant without necessarily becoming angry – as indeed the ancient Stoics would have argued.

Finally, Dr Ashton’s assertion that “For the Stoics, the virtuous life is free from all passionate emotions”, though technically correct, requires some context and qualification, lest readers suppose that the Stoics were a bunch of emotionless automatons. Far from it! The ancient Stoics sought a life of eudaimonia, that is, of equanimity, happiness, and personal flourishing, characterized by what Seneca called “an immense, unchangeable, equable joy, together with peace, calmness… greatness of mind, and kindliness” (On the Happy Life, III).

Dr Ronald W. Pies, Lexington, Mass

Dear Dr Ashton: I write in response to your article on stoicism and anger management, for which I thank you, as it has allowed me to reflect and respond.

Stoicism is not a fixed philosophical system, but has always developed over time, both as a system and at the level of individual practice. Many of the issues to which you allude have already been accepted by many. A pertinent example is the use of emotion as a guide to virtuous action. However, you seem to have missed an important Stoic concept: what are termed the first and second movements. The first movement is the immediate instinctive, emotional response to an event. This is uncontrollable in humans and is often quite strong. It is this that can be used as a moral input to the process of evaluation. The interpretation of the experience is the second movement. It is under the full control of the conscious mind, and is the guide to the most virtuous response.

The Stoic exhortation to ‘extirpate emotion’ is not to remove the first movement, which is impossible. Instead it asks us to control consequent emotional responses, which I would suggest are harmful in the vast majority of cases. Our thoughts have consequences: anger leads to a rapid shift in our attention, and to a profusion of thought processes that take up our limited processor speed and cause perturbation, inhibiting rational reflection and causing emotional upset. Visible anger is usually viewed negatively when observed by others, especially if such responses are recurrent, which they often are. What results is the formation of negative opinions of us in others. Such an opinion spreads usually by word of mouth and can have negative effects on our life chances. Equally negative is the fact that we’re all role models to those who follow us: our children, younger relatives, those junior to us in the work environment… Role modelling is an extremely powerful source of teaching, for good or ill.

I am often asked by my junior doctor colleagues why I never get upset or stressed. My response is that my reason for taking up medicine is to serve the patients, and through them the community, to the best of my ability. The knowledge that becoming stressed or emotional will impair my ability to carry out this duty is a strong motivator indeed to maintain a quiet mind. In the past I was not able to do this; Stoicism has helped me a great deal. And one of the most helpful aspects has been the extirpation of second movement emotion, now accurately understood and put into effect.

Dr Ricky Jones

Dear Editor: It was disappointing to read the article ‘Stoics in Need of Anger Management’ by David Ashton in PN 163. The essay seems to promote many of the so-called ‘positive’ aspects of anger, like the correction of injustice or the creation of art. Now, I understand that anger evolved as a natural and powerful emotion that served the individual and collective needs of our Stone Age ancestors. But shouldn’t philosophers want humans to continue to evolve, to find other ways to motivate people, using wisdom and mindfulness to strive toward the greater good?

At one point, Ashton counters Stoic philosophy by asking, “[Stoics say that] Angry people make worse decisions than calm and ‘stoic’ individuals. But where’s the evidence for this claim?” The evidence cannot be more clear: just read a newspaper or watch CNN! The positive correlation between anger and carnage couldn’t be greater. Dr Ashton, it is time to evolve away from id-based behaviors like anger and fear, towards the higher, spiritual beings we are capable of becoming. Raise the bar, my friend!

Tim Strutz, Harrison Township, Michigan

Atomism

Dear Editor: I really enjoyed Raymond Tallis’s article ‘Atomism & Smallism’ (PN 163).

‘Boiling down’ into what stuff is made of is an application of the atomic hypothesis which he quotes from Richard Feynman. It is a great metaphor which describes the quest for ‘little particles’ that has occupied physics since scientific thought began. But philosophy throws up the conceptual problems of atomism as Tallis explains.

Atoms, for a start, displayed features which suggested that they are complex and therefore are not basic building blocks of matter. So physicists dug deeper, through sub atomic particles until – what? Featureless entities which are indistinguishable from one another?

The name of these entities, wave-particles, at least gives us a sort of picture to hang onto. But really we have no clear language for entities with no features, that can ‘boil up’ to create human size objects with all the features which we observe. Also we have no explanation as to how featureless entities can produce the features of the macroscopic world. If this is a search for fundamental reality then we are facing failure, he argues, and I think he is right.

I’m not a physicist but I understand that for any entity to be detected it must involve some medium which is disrupted by the entity. Objects become visible because they interfere with light waves. If they are smaller than the wavelength of light then that cannot be detected by light. A beam of electrons behave like waves with much smaller wavelengths so therefore, as in the electron microscope, much smaller objects can be detected. Moving into the sub atomic particles, traces of particles are used to construct their properties. As an example, liquid argon gas with an electric field applied can show up tracks of certain particles such as the neutrino. However as we dig deeper the methods become complicated and are far more indirect than a simple observation through a microscope. Eventually the question arises as to how we can detect these proposed entities at all. There may be no medium existing that they interact with, so rendering them permanently invisible to us. For these reasons there may be physical limits to ‘boiling down’ to any fundamental particles, as well as no explanation as to how to ‘boil up’ from featureless entities to the familiar world of human size objects. Therefore fundamental reality may elude us for reasons far greater than technological difficulties.

Pamela White, Nottingham

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Columns

- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

- Philosophers on Sneezing

- Extending The Mind

- Four Threats To Our Judgment

Philosophical Haiku

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

by Terence Green

We needs must have help

Nature’s secrets to discern.

Observe and take note.

Francis Bacon by Paul Van Stomer 1617

A long with René Descartes (1596-1650), Francis Bacon is considered to be the father of modern science. And like Descartes, he would meet a chilly end – at least, so the story goes.

Born into an aristocratic family, Bacon was a man of considerable ambition. He rose to the giddy heights of Lord Chancellor in the court of James I, but just a few weeks later found himself tumbling at great speed from those heights after being impeached for accepting bribes, thus ending his glittering political career. But Bacon had never had all his irons in just one fire. Even while he was negotiating the tortuous path that leads to advancement in court circles, he had been working on advancement in another area: knowledge of the world.

Since the Greeks, natural knowledge had developed little, in part because the Church guided inquiry, but also because we never solved the problem of our hopeless senses, which time and time again mislead and betray us. What was needed was a new method: and in works such as The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620), Bacon laid out for the first time the path to true natural knowledge, via science. Rather than wild speculation fuelled by fevered imaginations – the favoured approach up to that point – Bacon brilliantly suggested that we should actually observe our world, do experiments, combine our talents and abilities, and use whatever tools we could think of. Hurrah! You can imagine the excitement.

Demonstrating his commitment to his new method, it is said that on a cold, snowy night, Bacon went outside to stuff a chicken with ice to see if refrigeration would preserve the chook. We don’t know what became of the chicken, since Bacon caught the flu and died a few days later.

© Terence Green 2024

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Sneezing

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

“Ah yes, the ecstasy of sneezing.”

(Søren Kierkegaard Papers, p.225)

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was not normally one for giving advice on bodily matters, but he was such a big fan of the everyday pleasure of the sneeze that he made an exception in this case and counselled “that if you really wish to sneeze, then gurgle your nose with water, and if that doesn’t work try to tickle your nose” – though he pointed out that this “would not continue to work.” (Papers, p.104)

The Danish existentialist had several beliefs in common with his seventeenth-century French predecessor Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), including their agreement on Original Sin, the benevolence of the Almighty, and trusting obedience to the Deity. Bizarrely, they also shared a passion for sneezing. Like the Dane, the French writer stressed the blissful feeling of sternutation: “Sneezing absorbs all the functions of the soul,” he wrote. (Pensées, p.160)

This delight was not only the preserve of religious bachelors in the modern period. Sneezing was something from which even the ancient philosophers took pleasure. Aristotle (384-322 BC), who was normally not given to hyperbole, extolled the sensation associated with this respiratory phenomenon, and pronounced that “we regard sneezing as divine.” Not one to leave a topic alone, the Macedonian went on to wonder why “farting and burping are not regarded as sacred, but that of sneezing is so regarded?” His explanation was as follows: “Because this region [the head] is the most sacred, the breath from it is revered.” (Problems, XXXIII).

So far so good. But certain Anglicans were excessively worried about the consequences of sneezing. Pascal and Kierkegaard, while both hard-line Christian fundamentalists, did not subscribe to this form of Christianity. Nor did the famously atheistic Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), but he did write about the dangers of sneezing according to the Church of England: “Old fashioned people still say ‘bless you’ when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for this custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back, lurking demons were apt to enter the un-souled. But if you said, ‘God bless you’, the demons were frightened off.” (Unpopular Essays, p.98)

Perhaps more disturbing to modern readers is the knowledge that the droplets of a sneeze can travel up to four metres from the offending and possibly germ-laden nostrils. These days, it’s likely we will be more worried about social distancing than about demons entering our souls. Perhaps rightly so; or perhaps not. Take your pick.

© Prof. Matt Qvortrup 2024

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.

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Tallis in Wonderland

Extending The Mind

Raymond Tallis considers the mind in the body & beyond.

Over the years I have devoted many (perhaps too many) columns to discussing various philosophers’ doomed attempts to explain how mind can arise out of the matter of the brain. But in recent years, the hunt for the substrate of the mind has extended beyond the brain.

The most popular extra-cerebral destination for mind is the rest of the body – an approach called ‘enactivism’. Enactivism is a broad church, but its central tenet is encapsulated with characteristic brilliance by Adam Rostowski (with whom I have had happy hours of agreement and disagreement): “Enactivists eschew the… view of cognition as a brain-bound set of information-processing capabilities explained in terms of neurally-realized computation over internal representation” (In press).

Some (not all) enactivists embrace the ‘four Es’, according to which mental processes are:

a) Embodied: mental processes involve not just the brain but also other bodily structures and processes;

b) Embedded: mental processes function only in relation to an external environment;

c) Enacted: mental processes involve not only events in the nervous system, but also what the organism is doing; and

d) Extended: mental processes extend into the organism’s environment.

Enactivism is intended as a corrective to the idea of the mind as a discrete, bounded, neural computer acting on the body from a privileged interior, and, through the mediation of the body, its environment. Nevertheless, the problem of how first-person being pitches its tents in the apersonal physical world of the organism does not seem to be made easier by redirecting attention from ionic currents in the brain to a smorgasbord of giblets bathed in various fluids maintaining its dynamic equilibrium, physiological support systems, and, beyond that, to bones and muscles. Radical enactivists aim to restore the continuity between life and mind. Enthusiasm for the continuity between mind and living processes must, however, be tempered by acknowledging that pretty well everything that goes on in our bodies is mindless, and remote from the thoughts and other experiences that shape the voluntary activities that fill our days.

It will be clear from this that, regardless of whatever counts as ‘the body’ in embodiment and enactment, only a small part of my body seems at any time to be am bodied (a neologism, not a misprint) to the point where it’s both subject and object of cognition. The body as a whole may be inseparable from the performance of my journey up the hill, but not from the plan that lies behind my going up the hill in the first place. This would not need to be spelled out were it not that, at least for some radical enactivists, the key concept linking mind and life is autonomy, or self-individuation, which distinguishes the identity of beings as living organisms from what counts as their environment. It is self-individuation, we are told, that transforms a physical milieu into a place of significance, salience, and meaning. Some enactivist thinkers even claim that these capacities are present in single-cell organisms (I kid you not). But while cellular life may be autonomy’s necessary condition, it’s a long way from what characterises the distinctively human conscious subject. And in most cases, any meaning ascribed to the interactions between organisms and environment is present only when it’s ascribed to the organism by an informed external observer, such as a biologist. To suggest otherwise is to fall victim to the fallacy of misplaced explicitness.

This fallacy lies at the top of a slippery slope. Consider, for example, the claim made by certain radical enactivists that intentionality – the fundamental mark of the mental, such that consciousness is about something – can be ascribed to single-cell organisms in their engagement with their environments. However, there is nothing in the interaction between simple organisms and their environments that corresponds to the trademark asymmetry of consciousness, whereby a subject is conscious of objects, while those objects are not conscious of the subject. Out of the interaction between me and a cup comes my consciousness of a cup, but not the cup’s consciousness of me. The cup I look at is present to me, but I am not present to the cup. Merely increasing the size of organisms and of the physical complexity of their interactions with the environment does not change this.

Determining the nature of any putative transition from the supposed intentionality of bacteria to that of the human mind is also clearly problematic. One contrast between different organic processes that’s highlighted by Ezequiel di Paolo, is between a first dimension, instantiated in the regulatory processes that ‘define and sustain a living organism as a unity’, a second dimension, involving ‘sensorimotor’ cycles of sensation and movement interactions between the organism and the environment, and a third dimension, which involves ‘cycles of intersubjectivity in which they engage’, or in other words, interactions between different minds.

This categorisation is spot on. Among other things, it highlights an unreduced gap between the relationship to their environments of organisms not traditionally thought of as having intentionality, and the relationship of humans to their world. And it does not suggest a means by which this gap might be crossed. The idea that, for example, sensorimotor coupling (that is, simply responding physically to an environment) will necessarily generate a subject with a view upon a world, seems to assume that organic physical causal interactions will of themselves create subjectivity. This assumption has proved fatal for mind-brain identity theories, and it would most certainly fail to deliver those mental capacities that underpin our distinctively human behaviours, including the ability to entertain explicit shared possibilities, a directedness towards locations in tensed time (notably the future), and the profound elaboration of joined, shared, and collective intentionality that we call human culture.

We may grant that our negotiations with the material world are not purely intellectual exercises discharged through an entirely cerebrally-ambodied mind, without going to the opposite extreme of seeing all bodily activity shaped by an environment as potential agency. Enactivism, by incorporating (sensation and response) systems of an organism as part of the substrate of mind, narrows the gap between input (sensory) and output (motor). This effaces any sense of a distinct complex world constructed and faced by a distinct complex subject, and threatens to collapse into behaviourism (which, paradoxically, does not do justice to much human behaviour). So in its laudable endeavour to integrate life and mind, the organism and the conscious person, enactivism threatens to obliterate the mind. What it overlooks or minimises, is explicitness.

Continuous line drawing by Paul Gregory

Over The Edge

Some philosophers, in part inspired by enactivism, have embraced the so-called ‘extended mind hypothesis’, according to which the mind does not reside exclusively in the brain, or even the body, but extends beyond the body into the wider physical world.

This hypothesis was initially proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in ‘The Extended Mind’ (Analysis 58 (1), 1998). They argued that, given the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes, the borders of the mind must be extended beyond the body, into the extra-corporeal physical world that drives it. Not everything in the environment, however, was suitable for such promotion and could take ‘epistemic credit’. The part of the world had to be linked with the human organism “in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components of the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour in the way that cognition usually does… This sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.” In this account, the typical extensions of the extended mind are the technologies that support our cognitive activities, and these may range from pen and paper, to books, to supercomputers and the internet.

Clark and Chalmers defend their thesis with the example of Inga and Otto, who both want to see an exhibition, and hence to travel to the museum where it’s being held. Inga remembers where the museum is, and goes there without assistance. Otto, however, has mild Alzheimer’s disease and relies on his notebook to guide him as to where it is. Both arrive at the museum, thereby accomplishing the same cognitive task, Inga with her unextended mind, and Otto with his mind coupled to a cognitive prosthesis.

Contrary to Clark and Chalmers’ (much-criticized) claim, the equivalence of their achievement does not, however, demonstrate that Otto’s notebook is as mind-like as Inga’s unaided mind, or indeed, Otto’s diminished mind. After all, Inga’s mind achieved the desired cognitive result without any assistance, whereas Otto’s notebook would not achieve anything by itself: it’s merely a prosthesis, which depends for its status on the capabilities of Otto’s mind to recognize it for what it is and to be able to consult it as necessary. If Otto deteriorated further, his notebook would not deliver any cognitive assistance to him.

An aide-memoire is not a memoire, just as a prosthesis is not a leg unless it’s attached to a body. What’s more, the prosthetic cognitive supports are public, unlike the cognitive activity of genuine minds. So Otto and his notebook are not cognitive equal partners, any more than are the many cues arising in the material world around us which may prompt and guide our cognitive activity. The fantasy that they are partners perhaps has its roots in the personification of our technical supports – the kind of loose talk that takes literally the idea that a computer has a memory and a pocket calculator does sums. Google Maps may guide us to our destination, but it has no idea of ‘a destination’, and even less a sense of the reason we may have for wanting to go there. It does not arrive when we do. It has no experience of the journey itself, however timely its advice to turn left or take the third exit from a roundabout, or how nimble it is in changing the directions it gives us when we’ve accidentally gone off-route. In short, our technologies do not themselves make explicit that in which they assist us. They are unaware of the cognitive processes they participate in (which is one of the reasons that they’re accessible to anyone to use). This is another reason, that the extension of the mind, as a corrective to thinking of it as intracerebral computer processing itself, needs a corrective. Apps are not the stuff of chaps.

The explanatory gap between matter and mind is not crossed, or even narrowed, by providing the mind with more spacious material accommodation. Irrespective of whether that accommodation includes limbs or notebooks as well as brains, there is nothing in enactivism that makes sense of the fact that some parts of the world are lit up by conscious subjects aware of themselves as being in that world. Extending the mind does not make it more amenable to being understood as a manifestation of matter.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2024

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City will soon be published in conjunction with Philosophy Now.

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The Art of Living

Four Threats To Our Judgment

Massimo Pigliucci hails the stoicism of a philosopher-emperor.

According to one version of Stoic philosophy, the most important thing in life is to keep a well-functioning faculty of judgment, because everything else follows from it. If I have good judgment, I will make good use of things and events; but if I have bad judgment, I will make bad use of them. For instance, is wealth good or bad? We’re normally inclined to say that it is good, but the Stoics would object that that depends on our use of it. If we acquire wealth justly and we use it for the betterment of humanity, then yes, it’s a good thing. But if we acquire it by exploiting other people, or use it to corrupt public officials so that we can have our way, it’s a bad thing.

“Don’t mess with the Romans!”

Roman soldier © MatthiasKabel 2005 Creative Commons

The second century Stoic philosopher Epictetus of Hierapolis called the faculty of judgment prohairesis, which is often also translated ‘will’ or ‘volition’. Epictetus was a great influence on another Stoic, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). The philosopher-emperor was himself particularly concerned with prohairesis and with its location, which he called hegemonikon, often translated as ‘ruling faculty’ or ‘command center’. In modern terms, we may think of the prohairesis as the brain’s executive function in charge of attention control, problem-solving, working memory, and generally speaking, of planning, monitoring, and executing our goals. Anatomically, it is located most prominently in the prefrontal cortex, which can therefore be considered akin to the Stoics’ hegemonikon.

At one point in his book Meditations (c.175 CE), Marcus is sufficiently concerned about the smooth functioning of his executive function that he jots down a list of four things that may impede it:

“There are four ways above all in which the command center can take a turn for the worse. You should be on your guard against them at every moment, and whenever you detect them, they must be eradicated by your telling yourself, as appropriate for each case: ‘This thought is unnecessary’ or ‘This thought tends to dissolve society’s bonds,’ or ‘What you’re about to say does not come from yourself’ (which you should regard as one of the most monstrous things that can happen). And the fourth aberration for which you need to take yourself to task is when the more divine part of you is overcome by and succumbs to the less worthwhile, mortal part, or in other words the body and the body’s rough and smooth motions.”

(Meditations 11.19, trans. Robin Waterfield)

Let’s take a closer look at this. The first thing Marcus is concerned about is not to indulge in thoughts that are unnecessary. He’s worried about wasting time and mental energy going after things that are not relevant. Our lifespan is limited, and we don’t know how long it extends (in his case, it turned out to be only fifty-nine years).

Second, he worries about ideas that will undermine social bonds. The Stoics were cosmopolitan, meaning that they trained themselves to think of every human as their brother or sister. Bonds with other people are crucial for our society, as well as for our flourishing as individuals, so you don’t want to even think along lines that might undo such bonds.

Third, Marcus wants to not just mindlessly repeat what others say. In order to be true to ourselves, we should only say what we ourselves think, after careful consideration. Notice that he says that contravening this practice is the worst thing one could do. This is because, for all effective purposes, it means that we’ve abdicated the use of our ruling center.

Finally, we should be wary of letting the body or its various emotions and appetites get in the way of the proper functioning of the ruling center, since it’s the most precious thing we have. What might get in the way? Well, a large number of things, as it turns out. If we drink too much we impair our judgment, for instance. The same goes for a number of other over-indulgences that are common in the pursuit of pleasure. Some strong emotions also interfere with the executive function. Anger, for instance, is an unhealthy emotion for the Stoics because it can override reason and bring us to do things we will likely later regret, even in those cases in which our initial angry response to the situation might have been reasonable, as in the case of an attack or a perceived injustice.

So, beware of the four threats listed by Marcus Aurelius, and keep your prohairesis working smoothly and reliably. Everything else in your life depends on it.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2024

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us About Our Search for Good Leaders (Basic Books). More by him at massimopigliucci.org.

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Reviews

- How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna

- Nonhuman Humanitarians by Benjamin Meiches

- Love Lies Bleeding

Books

How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna

Hugo Whately argues that analysing the problems of philosophy’s history is doing philosophy.

At the start of her career in philosophy, Regan Penaluna thought that “contemplating eternal truths” was the “closest a human could come to immortality” (How To Think Like A Woman, pp.248-9), by reflecting “human thought at its greatest magnitude… [embodying] a culture’s quest for truth and self-knowledge” (p.xii). Fired up and harbouring idealistic dreams, she starts out wanting to think like her philosophy professors. However, in a lecture, her male professor quotes approvingly, proudly even, Plato’s view of women being unfit to rule. Penaluna is initially silenced. But later she nails down the incoherence of the sexist philosopher: on one hand philosophy done by women is (apparently) inseparable from their femininity; yet at the same time, philosophy done by men is (apparently) entirely separate from their masculinity.

Humiliated by this public sexism, what her younger self needed in that moment was what she has now produced: a conceptual renegotiation of what it means for anyone to think philosophically from the perspective in which they find themselves. Her underlying point is that justice matters in philosophy: “the plight of women in philosophy is part of a much larger story of the suppression of individuals who are not white, male, heterosexual, cis, and able-bodied” (p.xiii). She points out that academic boundary policing can explain how work undertaken from a feminist, queer, disabled, black or other marginalized perspective can be dismissed as ‘unphilosophical’. It seems that the ideally abstract, unbiased truth-seeking of mainstream philosophy automatically fails when it’s undertaken from a non-dominant perspective – that is, from a non-white-male perspective. The logic of such an exclusion is precisely that the white male position is as much a perspective as any other – it just happens to enjoy dominance. (For transparency, I am a white male, and I have been recommending her book to anyone and everyone.) For Penaluna, philosophy is a holistic project, and her experience shines a bright light on the nature of mainstream philosophy. It’s not some kind of identity-free utopia of objective truth-seeking thought-work in which ‘true’ philosophers have no actual body and certainly no domestic responsibilities that might shape their thinking. Instead it’s a boundaried and necessarily partial culture of truth-seeking carried out from the perspective of, mostly, white men.

For Penaluna, the experience of having to think from within the categories of white male philosophy was alienating. She ‘lost herself’, and eventually had to leave philosophy wholesale – physically, professionally, conceptually, and romantically. Her rediscovery of herself was through the lives and works of the four women she researches here – just four of her questing, curious, determined, talented philosophical ancestors, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catherine Cockburn. They too were conceptually and professionally excluded. They too faced the tragedy of being compelled to think in the face of massive barriers to thought.

However, Penaluna has received some kickback for attempting this reorientation, even from other women. Before I managed to get hold of a copy of the book, I read Becca Rothfeld’s review of it in the New York Times – read it in disbelief, as the Harvard Philosophy PhD candidate ruthlessly policed her discipline on behalf of the status quo. Penaluna is, Rothfeld claims, a scholar who ‘left the field’, nay “ abandoned the field”, and has nevertheless published a “rather uncharitable and distorted” “general lament” “indicting sexism in contemporary academic philosophy.” Penaluna must be onto something, I thought, if she’s provoked a real philosopher to use phrases like ‘mushy and maudlin’ and ‘shallow and cursory’ to show that Penaluna is not a real philosopher, and cannot therefore do philosophy. Even the ‘field’ concept is nauseating: some select few have been chosen for paid employment at universities, and although the rest of us (amongst whom Rothfeld presumably includes Hume, Descartes, and Wollstonecraft) are free to ‘cogitate outside of the academy’, (Rothfeld’s phrase), proper philosophy lies beyond our reach. Really?

When I got hold of the book a couple of months later, I went back to Rothfeld’s review to give a calmer response. It seems to me that there are four charges Rothfeld levels at Penaluna:

1. She lacks an appropriate methodology.

2. She practices essentialism.

3. She lacks objectivity.

4. She propagates identarianism.

If true, then Rothfeld may have a point. But I think these charges can be rebutted, and furthermore, that Penaluna has penned something far more interesting than a ‘lament’. She poses questions that cut to the root of philosophy’s own self-understanding. More on this later.

First, methodology. Rothfeld writes that Penaluna’s book merely “takes philosophy to task”, posing “wispy rhetorical questions along the way”, doing lots of ‘agonizing about philosophy but little philosophy itself”. Moreover, the ‘capsule history’ chapters in which she documents her evidence-base for the workings of patriarchal discrimination stand as ‘short anecdotes’, from which “no broader conclusions are drawn”.

Granted, ‘taking to task’ is not a recognised methodology in philosophy, either on the field or off it. But a fairer characterisation of Penaluna’s method might be that she uses evidence to substantiate her claims. Women, she points out, have been excluded from mainstream philosophy over centuries via strategies as numerous as their victims: clever women with no money; clever women with no confidence; clever women whose ideas were taken without attribution; clever women who wrote letters that were never answered; clever women who tried to start schools and colleges; and clever women who wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and who were simply told, time and again, “No, not you.” Penaluna documents these histories in chapters that stand as litanies of evidence which build and build.

Such biography is not the absence of philosophy; it is rather a mark of its intellectual honesty, since Penaluna’s insight is based on evidence; stacks upon stacks of it, personal, historical, institutional – and all of it offering philosophy the opportunity to be honest about its actual nature and practice. How is it not philosophy to research, document, and analyse the historical conditions that have shaped philosophy over time? Does philosophy have no right to know its own genesis? Or simply no interest in it? ‘Taking to task’ makes it sound like Penaluna is merely complaining. She is not. Rather, her method includes reflexive self-awareness as part of her evidence base, and it drives her insight that the distinction of philosophical practice from patriarchy is unclear; and yet it needs, for the sake of justice, to be made clear.

Rothfeld admits that we learn a great deal about oppression in How To Think Like A Woman; her criticism is that we learn little about the content of anyone’s philosophy. But this seems to miss the point. Investigating oppression seems an appropriate method for generating insight into whether philosophy engenders such oppression – is inherently discriminatory – or whether such injustice comes from outside it.

Second, essentialism. Rothfeld opens her review in a state of irritation that all women are ‘assumed to think alike’ (because the book’s title is How To Think Like A Woman). No. Penaluna is clear from start to finish: the concept of woman is dynamic (p.xv), and not one thing. “I don’t believe there is one way to think like a woman, just as I don’t believe there is a single way to be a woman” she writes (p.249). Her extensive evidence-base also demonstrates a close sensitivity to complexity, multiplicity and diversity.

Third, does Penaluna lack objectivity? Yes, she’s searingly honest about her marriage, her divorce, and the ruin of her personal and professional dreams. Yes, she has empathy with the women who inspire her, move her, and with whom she finds kinship across time. But rather than using Rothfeld’s terms – ‘mushy and maudlin’ or ‘distorted’ – wouldn’t the terms ‘truth’ and ‘historical accuracy’ be more appropriate to evaluating Penaluna’s judgements? And if the logic of the philosopher-in-the-field can’t recognise well-documented injustice, then perhaps the problem lies with the logic, not the topic.

Fourth, identarianism. I had to look it up, for a start. To Rothfeld it means the emphasis on identity over ideas – and it’s apparently ‘so thoroughgoing’ in Penaluna’s work as to render her whole project self-contradictory – the implication being that proper field-based-philosophy is able (being so institutionally and professionally high-minded) to bracket out a thinker’s identity and treat the content of their thought ahistorically, as if without any context.

Let us be mindful of nuances here. It could be argued that, to an extent, at the start of her book Penaluna does collude in the notion that the personal and the biographical have nothing to do with philosophy. But later she faces head-on the issue of the relationship between the life of a person and the content of their thought: “What do we ignore about Aristotle to take him seriously, for his legacy to endure?” she asks. This is a question about the relationship between identity and thought. It’s making the point that, far from being irrelevancies, there is some meaningful extent to which the facts of Aristotle’s social and financial standing, and the relationships he had with those around him (to women, yes, but perhaps especially to the slaves who did the manual labour) actually enabled his thought, coloured it, and carried it. So it is for each of us. And so it is also for Democritus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and other peddlers of sexist content in their philosophy. Given her work witnessing patterns of sexism across time, it is with artful restraint that Penaluna notes how, historically, “male philosophers wrote extensively about the shortcomings of the female mind” (p.xiv), and that “Philosophers have been some of the most consistent and fruitful contributors to theories of women’s inferiority” (p.xii).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Damaris Masham and Catherine Cockburn, with John Locke in the background. By Gail Campbell 2024

Real Philosophy

So how, exactly, is documenting and challenging the logic of how philosophy sustains itself somehow not philosophy? Indeed, how can we better understand the messy relationship between identity and thought, than to consider the pursuit of thought with determination and curiosity – not sitting alone in a quiet, well-furnished study in a university somewhere, but in the full storm of life, amidst motherhood and marriage, prejudice, homekeeping, despair, love, hope and the work – the compulsion to do philosophy?

The philosophical question Penaluna lays before us, and which Rothfeld seems to ignore, is this: In which do we find more justice and truth – in institutional philosophy, or in ‘identarian’ philosophy? Institutional philosophy makes the claim that, done properly, philosophy is not the work of real philosophers, in the sense that it is abstracted beyond the personal identities of those who practice it, reaching standards of objectivity commensurate with those of science. The sociological fact that it just so happens to be carried out by a cast of mainly white, male, paid academics – who cannot, we should remember, give birth to a child – is therefore not relevant, clearly.

The charge of ‘identarianism’ levelled by Rothfeld at Penaluna can perhaps stick. Indeed, how could it not? Identarian philosophy would have it that thought requires a real thinker, and that the nature of that thinker is the context of the thought. The two interconnect, inseparably. But this implies that there are such things as ‘female thoughts’ or ‘male thoughts’, or ‘white male thoughts’ and ‘black female thoughts’, and so on – and that we transgress those borders only at risk of explicit subjugation, whether through mansplaining or through full-blown racism. Either way, conceptual boundary policing follows: under current institutional philosophy, either the white males are policing everyone else (even as they claim they’re not), or under identarianism, where everyone gets to boundary police each other, on a more level playing field – in which case, at least it has more credible democratic credentials. Perhaps, then, that is the reform package on offer here. Maybe an alternative title to the book could be: How To Think Like A Woman: Or, How To Democratise Philosophy Boundary Policing To Let More People Have Their Say.

I hope I have rebutted Rothfeld’s criticisms. I hope as well that I have not posed too many ‘wispy’ rhetorical questions along the way. My final contention, just to make it obvious, is this: This book would not have been better written by a white male philosophy professor at a high status university.

Tentatively, I would humbly suggest one other revision. The book’s subtitle is: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How To Love The Life Of The Mind. Not four. It should say five.

© Hugo Whately 2024

Hugo Whately is a trustee of Wyedean School and Sixth Form College, and teaches Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Haberdashers’ School in Monmouth.

• How To Think Like A Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How To Love The Life Of The Mind, Regan Penaluna, Grove Press, 2023, hb, 320 pages, $14.99

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Books

Nonhuman Humanitarians by Benjamin Meiches

Andrew Strebkov considers animals to be unlikely humanitarians.

Dr Benjamin Meiches’ main (academic) interests lie in armed conflict, genocide, and international law. An associate professor of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington University, he is known in the field (and no, I don’t mean the battlefield) for his book, The Politics of Annihilation. He’s also known for winning the Best Article of 2019 Prize of the Review of International Studies for an article on ‘Nonhuman Humanitarians’. His new book Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (2023) is in line with that article. The professor says he considers this topic important because nonhuman animals potentially offer a new form of humanitarian politics, through multispecies collaboration.

In the book Meiches argues that nonhuman animals do not merely support humans in humanitarian efforts, but directly affect the nature of that work. He also attempts to demonstrate the agency of the animals involved and so challenge conventional assumptions of them being merely passive instruments in the hands of humans. Meiches deplores the general ignoring of the suffering of nonhuman animals, pointing out the tension between on the one hand how much praise humanitarian animals receive, and on the other hand how humans blithely justify killing and eating animals.

Dog helping soldier to find landmines

Mine dog team photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Robert Larson 2010 Public Domain

To support his arguments, Meiches describes dogs’ role in finding land mines, the employment of rats in sniffing out both explosive and tuberculosis, and finally, the deployment of cows and goats to help malnourished communities worldwide with their meat and milk. Meiches strengthens his argument by referencing research in biology, ethology, and animal behavioral science. He also cites philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze.

He begins by providing a history of dogs’ humanitarian service since the Second World War, and cites scientific research explaining how dogs’ olfactory and other physiological characteristics allow them to identify explosives and operate in the complex environments of minefields. He describes how dogs transform demining practice, using perceptual abilities well beyond those possessed by humans. Working in minefields is incredibly psychologically difficult for humans due to the uncertainty and stress of the situation. Nevertheless, dogs demonstrate joy cooperating with humans in this environment, arguably understanding the deadly nature of the endeavor. Interestingly, the human deminers themselves report that the dogs inevitably improve their own emotional state. The different reactions to the circumstances shows how the dogs’ reactions cannot be defined within an anthropocentric framework.

In Chapter 2 the author elaborates on the African giant pouched rats’ services to humanity. Meiches describes how due to their sharp senses, low maintenance and small size, rats can helpfully identify explosives and even diseases. To argue for the agency of these animals, Meiches evokes Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘the impossible gift’ – “in effect, formally annulling the possibility of formally reciprocating a debt or responding to the gift in advance” (Nonhuman Humanitarians). Humans can never communicate their thanks to the rats in other than our inevitably anthropocentric terms. The rats provide their invaluable services to humans without awareness of the gratitude, medals and fine words directed to them in return. Yet although the rats’ behaviour constitutes a gift not reducible to or understandable in terms of existing humanitarian forms, it also shows that the care, generosity, and engagement celebrated by humanitarianism do not originate with humans.

In Chapter 3, Meiches describes the nonprofit organisation Heifer International’s initiative of sending cows and goats to impoverished communities worldwide. These animals permanently improve lives by enabling recipient families to become self-sufficient. By this, they play a significant role in humanitarian relief, and therefore should be considered part of global political life. But Meiches is critical of this initiative for what he sees as a double standard of praising these animals but killing them at the same time – which he calls ‘cannibalistic humanitarianism’. The resistance of these animals, in the form of kicking, bleating, and stamping, is silenced or ignored, but it nevertheless demonstrates their perception of the process and even agency.

In his last chapter the author affirms the ultimate interconnection of all species and discusses the need to extend the horizons of humanitarianism; to move beyond the human and include ‘third ecology’ questions of multispecies justice. He summarizes that non-human animals are not merely contributing to humanitarian projects, but instead they do “a mutual work of interspecies labor that has yet to fully consider the status, needs, and statements of its nonhuman collaborations” (p.179).

Together, these four chapters provide important insights into the emotional and psychological components of animals’ involvement in humanitarianism. The author’s argument on the joy of dogs or the ‘quiet’ resistance of cows and goats, provides a vivid example of their active participation on the one hand, and of the idea that humans should change their attitude and ‘modes of cooperation’ with them on the other.

To make his points, Meiches sometimes employs controversial ideas. For example, in the Introduction he says, “When compared in terms of their capacities, biologists, geneticists, and neuroscientists have documented few, if any, distinctive traits of humans except for sweating and throwing” (p.22). Based on this idea, the professor calls the idea of the distinctly ‘human’ a fantasy produced to reaffirm the hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals.

The author supports his attempt to deconstruct the notion of ‘human’ by noting that recent philosophy questions the salience of the ‘human-nonhuman’ distinction. He quotes Derrida saying: “The animal is nothing more (or less) than a word that men have given themselves the right to give” (p.5). Perhaps this argument is possible only within a poststructuralist framework – in other words, by rejecting the material, objective reality behind the words. Still, even without complex scientific research there are good reasons why humans devised a different category (and word) for ‘animals’. The fact that humans spread across all continents, create atomic bombs, and build skyscrapers (with the elevator music), is by itself enough to choose different words for humans and animals.

It also must be said though that there is much scientific evidence of clear differences between humans and animals. For example, in A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014), Michael Tomasello illustrates that animals don’t demonstrate the level of sociability humans do, and can’t devise and perceive shared objectives. Whales and dolphins aside, animals do not have complex language, being limited strictly to signal communication. This means that their communication does not involve words representing abstractions that cannot be specified by pointing to specific objects or phenomena. We might say, animals only recognise particulars, not universals. For example, animals probably don’t know that they’re ‘animals’, or that a tree is a ‘tree’. But abstractions are necessary prerequisites for language development overall. Our advanced language also allows humans to learn from reading a textbook or attending a class, and not solely from mimicry.

These are not the only differences between humans and nonhuman animals, but they’re sufficient to make us ask how much human sociability and language affects our capacity for humanitarianism. These capacities may well be necessary for the emergence of humanitarianism as a conscientious endeavor, because it demands moral references, which arguably cannot develop without abstract thought. But if the author’s foundational claim that there is little difference between animals and humans is scientifically false, and if Derrida’s linguistics do not hold, this weakens the main argument of the book and calls into question the degree of agency of animals.

There are also some contradictions in the work. On the one hand, the author says that animals have highly complex thinking, therefore the distinction between humans and animals is ‘without difference’; on the other hand, he says they are “forms of life that can never make a claim to humanity in the first place” due to “cognitive, sensory, and morphological differences” (p.23). Donald Davidson argues that the ability to make claims, or as he calls them, ‘propositional attitudes’, is characteristic of rationality (see for instance his ‘Rational Animals’, Dialectica, 1982). So if animals cannot have propositional attitudes, they are not rational. But abstract thinking is necessary for such attitudes. This further reinforces the hierarchy between different species that Meiches attempts to deconstruct.

In general, Meiches provides a well-structured argument supported by examples, research, logic, and original thought. However, internal tensions and its contradictions of scientific research undermine the main argument of the book regarding the agency and defining role of animals in humanitarian work. Suppose animals are not rational and unable to comprehend humanitarianism as a concept due to an inadequacy of language. In that case, it is questionable if we can consider their aid in humanitarian work as a manifestation of their agency. In other words, it is uncertain if they are indeed capable of acting independently, and are doing so, or are instead mere ‘instruments for human ends’ in humanitarian work. Nevertheless, the book makes a strong case for expanding our understanding of nonhuman animals’ role in humanitarianism, while demonstrating how interconnected humans and nonhuman animals are. It also illustrates well the transformative psychological and emotional aspects of the interaction between humans and animals in a humanitarian setting.

© Andrew Strebkov 2024

Andrew Strebkov is a Canadian writer and blogger with interests in epistemology and political philosophy.

• Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics, Benjamin Meiches, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2023, £21, pb, 232 pages

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Films

Love Lies Bleeding

J.R. Dickerson decodes a film that likes to pretend it doesn’t have messages because it’s a comedy.

Katy O’Brian got ripped [muscular] for her role in Rose Glass’s second feature, the 2024 lesbian romantic comedy Love Lies Bleeding. Her character, Jackie, is a doe-eyed drifter who, sometime in the 1980’s, rolls into the small New Mexico town where Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a gym so gritty, sweaty, and testosterone-drenched that it makes Rocky Balboa’s boxing club look like a five-star resort. After banging Lou’s cheating, wife-beating brother-in-law JJ in the back of his car, Jackie sleeps under a bridge and wakes up the next morning ready to pump some iron to prepare for an imminent Las Vegas bodybuilding competition. Viewers are left in no doubt as to her prospects. You see, Jackie codes as male in all but phallus, and her rippling muscles are given a staggeringly unnecessary boost by the steroids she regularly injects after tossing her ‘ au natural, baby’ policy aside following a single flirtatious nudge from Lou. In about five seconds flat the two women are doing the horizontal tango. After about a week, in true lesbian style, they declare their love for one another and will betray family to prove it if necessary.

The director and co-writer, Glass, defies genre and narrative, and indeed any commitment to any point, by making the film such a parody of itself that it’s like a movie-length exercise in plausible deniability. Any message it may have sent about gender, feminism, or anything else, is done with so much hyperbole that it becomes a joke. This makes it little more than a parade of images and ideas unconnected to any statement. And yet it’s packed with infotainment that works on the subconscious like hypnosis, partly by means of the ‘mere exposure effect’ – a propaganda trick in which just being exposed to a concept or image softens the subject, allowing him to normalise what he’s exposed to. There’s also a man-sized helping of ‘associative conditioning’: a technique that links something you already like or value with something more controversial, so that the appealing connotations of the former will rub off on the associated object or concept. (It also works negatively, by the way – by associating an idea with things you hate or despise.)

Now I’m probably just too old-fashioned, but the way the film doesn’t take anything seriously is frustrating because it renders it impossible for me to get my hooks into a critique of its transgender and transhumanist subtextual propaganda. One could, for example, easily be fooled into thinking that this is a feminist film. For instance, Jackie lays some seriously brutal payback on wife-beating philanderer JJ. But true to its self-parody, all the men in the film are caricatures: they’re either scumbags, like JJ and Lou Sr, or just stock characters, like the FBI agent. Ed Harris plays Lou’s bug-munching, gun-toting Dad, and looks not unlike Richard O’Brien in The Rocky Horror Picture Show thanks to his hideous hairstyle. There are plenty of refreshingly ‘unfeminine’ forms of womanhood represented in the film. And yet the gender non-conformity and ostensible feminism are illusory. In their place are a set of subtextual messages, including:

1) Truly cool lesbians get turned on by, and have sex with, male-bodied people;

2) Injecting steroids is a fun and easy way for boyish lesbians to stay hard;

3) Injecting pharmaceuticals is sexy and provides an unproblematic way of changing your body to make it fit the image you want;

4) Guns are for insecure men, and only misogynist reprobates use or sell them;

5) Feminine cisgendered lesbians are clingy and cringe-worthy; not to mention that they have unappealingly soft, ‘fat’ bodies;

6) Straight cis women are hopelessly stupid and weak, and possibly deserve the abuse they get from cisgendered men;

7) Bugs are food and, while that seems gross, it doesn’t hurt to get the idea of eating bugs into your mind; and

8) Straight white men are misogynistic trash.

None of these ideas are explicitly expressed, though, and I will no doubt be raked over the coals for misinterpreting the film. But my point is that there is no way to correctly interpret it, because if you try you’ll be told you’re taking it too seriously. However, I didn’t take the film seriously at all; so I’m on board with the whole ‘Hey, the film isn’t making a statement’ disclaimer. It isn’t. And yet, it is. Which is why I’m allowing myself to unpack the non-meanings that just aren’t there, but are. It’s kind of like eating those jellybeans that taste like coconut, vanilla, or pineapple, but are just a jellybean so you can’t blame them if they have zero to do with real coconut, vanilla, or pineapple. Similarly, you can’t critique Love Lies Bleeding as though it takes itself seriously. And yet, for our susceptible brains, a very cool-looking, attractive lesbian like Lou, some dazzling images of muscles, and a decent soundtrack, are associated with ideas 1-8 above. So while the movie is not straightforwardly trying to normalise the idea that lesbians are attracted to the male anatomy, or that chemical injections are a fun and easy way to change our bodies, or even that insects are food, associative conditioning is employed to get us to regard its ideas as ‘cool’, so that anyone reluctant to buy into them is uncool, and probably ‘right wing’. So, go and enjoy this fun movie, and maybe be titillated by the gratuitous and overly long lesbian sex scenes – but don’t walk away thinking that nobody’s messing with your mind.

Movie image © A24 2024

Perhaps I’ll be told that I’m unaware of my own bigotry against butch lesbians (even though I am one): after all, Jackie is doing some radical and progressive stuff by bending female gender norms. She’s stronger and larger than most of the men in the film; she is the beefiest hunk in the mostly male gym; she has sex with women; and she can’t be kept in a kitchen to (literally) save her life. And yes, there are women bodybuilders in the real world who have bigger muscles than most men, and who sleep with women, and who are tough. Hooray for them! However, there’s only one type of ‘woman’ who could realistically do all the things that Jackie does in the movie (including beat up men, tower over them, and fearlessly hitchhike with male drivers) – and we all know which ‘women’ I’m talking about. To make matters worse, Jackie shoots Lou’s annoying cis femme paramour in the back of the head, and when she drops to the floor, we’re instantly given the sight of square-jawed brawny Jackie holding the gun while at the same time looking as though she’s the vulnerable victim. (Is this ringing any bells?) Unfortunately for Jackie and Lou, the female-bodied lesbian wannabe girlfriend isn’t that easy to get rid of, and is still breathing. Butch Lou realises what must be done and finishes the job. So much for the sisterhood.

All this subtext might explain why the film so often lurches into unrealistic fantasy – because it isn’t going to say anything direct about its underlying ideology and so open itself up to either a feminist or a lesbian critique. So here’s my lesbian non-critique of a film that hasn’t got the guts to be honest about the messages it purveys because if it dared, lots of people would hate it. As it is, just enjoy the spellbinding flow of images and associations that lead you ever deeper into transgender ideology.

Aldous Huxley in 1947

anonymous Public Domain

In Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley pictured a future of captivity through anodyne entertainment, sexual ‘liberation’, and drugs. In his later collection of reflective essays, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Huxley discussed methods of mass persuasion, including associative conditioning. The most subtle and insidious form of propaganda appeals not to reason, but to the emotions, passions, and prejudices that lie beneath the surface of consciousness. The principles underlying the technique are, he says, simple. First, find a widespread unconscious fear or anxiety. Second, find a way to relate this fear to the product or idea you wish to sell. Finally, build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which the subject can pass from his fears to the dream ¬– by using the product you’re selling as a ‘solution’. At times, says Huxley, the symbols take effect by “appealing only to the aesthetic sense” and not to “the truth nor the ethical value of the doctrines with which they’ve been… associated.”

In Chapter 9, ‘Subconscious Persuasion’, Huxley describes one of the most effective methods of non-rational persuasion, which he calls ‘persuasion-by-association’. This involves the propagandist associating his chosen product, candidate, or cause with some idea that most people in the culture he’s addressing unquestioningly regard as good. Huxley recounts an example from Guatemala that awed him when he witnessed it. American calendars published by an aspirin manufacturer failed to sell the pain-relievers among Guatemalans. However, German advertisements for aspirin were very successful with the same audience. The difference was that the German advertisers had taken the time to find out what Guatemalans valued and were interested in. The American calendars had adverts that associated the pills with depictions of American values and lifestyles, while the Germans associated the pain-relief tablets with the Holy Trinity, St Joseph, and the Virgin Mary.

I’m afraid that Love Lies Bleeding works in a similar way; and yet what it’s selling is not some item that can be bought cheaply in small quantities, but something larger and more abstract, which will cost us something dear. The clue to the ideological ‘product’ that the movie’s selling may be found in the second word of the movie’s title.

Often, what subconsciously influences us hides in plain sight. Seeing it is a matter of putting on the decoding glasses, and so perceiving the symbols and meanings that are right in front of us.

© J.R. Dickerson 2024

J.R. Dickerson is a gender non-conforming liberal feminist autodidact. She loves movies with strong female leads, slam poetry, fiction that does not masquerade as fact, and equine therapy.

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Fiction

- Bubblegum Prayer

- Thought Experiment

Fiction

Bubblegum Prayer

Dawn Muenchrath considers the nature of art.

He said later that he knew almost immediately, knew before he’d finished reading it through – before he’d even reached the third stanza. That happened sometimes, every once in a long while: a piece of art – a movie, a novel, or in this case, a poem – that didn’t reveal its treasures slowly but instead all at once, bowling you over with the staggering force of its insight, the words leaping off the page to take hold of your hunched shoulders and shake them, to remind you not just why you loved art, but why you loved life – or why you had loved life, and could again.

For the first time in thirty-five years, Elroy packed his papers (yes, he still insisted on hard copies of everything) into his briefcase and left the office early. It was June, raining, and he didn’t have an umbrella or a jacket, he marched into the street with his head held high. He gazed upward and laughed in wonderment as fat drops smacked his forehead and flowed in rivulets down the lines of his face. He walked from the office towers to the park with the pond, and followed the paved path along its perimeter. He admired the new leaves trembling on the elms, the ducks preening in the water, and even smiled at the smattering of fellow walkers and joggers sharing the path – these health-conscious people who normally irritated him. For over an hour he walked, until the storm had cried itself dry, the sun had cut through the clouds, and the fresh smell of wet stone wafted up from the concrete. Then he headed out of the park, and up the hill to the old brownstone, the one that had made sense when there were five of them (if you include the dog), but now seemed excessive. Inside, he peeled off his wet clothes, dried with a towel, and tied on a robe. Then he took the poem from his briefcase and sat down to read it again.

The next morning he showed it to Alina. Of all the girls who worked at the office, he liked Alina best. She had long, dark hair, green eyes, and a small, thin mouth, and she reminded him not only of his eldest daughter but also a little of his wife when she was young and beautiful. Standing by the coffee machine, he waited patiently as she read, her eyes flitting back and forth rapidly, lips wordlessly mouthing the verses.

She looked up, wiped a tear from her eye. “My god, Elroy.” She sniffled.

“What did I tell you?” he said with a smile.

“My god,” she repeated.

By ten o’clock everyone in the office had read it. Theirs was a mid-sized paper, but the Arts & Literature section was small, getting smaller by the year, and so most people reading it had not read a poem in quite some time. Francesca proposed that she hadn’t read a poem since ‘Flanders Fields’ in the fifth grade, and there was a murmur of agreement. No matter. It didn’t take an expert to see that this one was something special – a winner, and then some.

“It’s like…” Francesca began, and everyone turned to her eagerly, poised to agree: “It’s just like so much yes.”

Everyone laughed.

Someone else tried: “It’s this moment. It’s now. But, also, it’s… more.”

“It’s what we’ve all been thinking.”

“It’s what we’ve all been feeling.”

“It’s what no one has been able to put into words before.”

“It’s going to go viral.”

“So viral.”

They were all curious, naturally, about the poet. The name on the online submission form read, cryptically, ‘L.P. Page’, but the gender, age, and ethnicity boxes had all been left blank.

Since Elroy was the Managing Editor of the section, it fell to him to contact the winner of the ‘Poem of the Year’ prize. Typically, alongside the poem, they printed a photograph of the poet and a blurb about how they’d written the piece.

Elroy settled himself in his chair and sipped some water. He was imagining the poet as a young woman, twenty-something, with dark hair and a nice smile. He supposed he was imagining someone like Alina, who was an aspiring writer herself. He picked up the phone, dialled the number provided, and listened to the ring. This was the best part of the job: delivering good news. Making someone’s day. Perhaps changing, however slightly, the course of her life.

After five rings, the call went to voicemail. But the canned voice that told him to leave a message belonged not to a young woman, but a man – no, a boy, a teenage boy. He sounded entitled. Bratty. Elroy hung up.

Determining he would try again after lunch, he pulled out the proofs he was working on for an interview with a very famous author, but he found he couldn’t bring himself to care about the author’s current favorite writing destination. Who had thought that was an interesting question? All he could think about was the poem. He had to know.

He called again. In fact, he called five times. Then, finally, the call was picked up.

“Hello?”

“Good morning,” Elroy said. “I’m calling with regards to the poem ‘Bubblegum Prayer’ which was submitted to our Poem of the Year Contest. Are you the writer?”

There was a pause. “Damn, did it win?” A chuckle. “Is that what this is about?”

Elroy looked around his desk, at the piles of print-outs, at the framed photograph of his daughters barefoot on the dock by the lake, and considered hanging up. He closed his eyes and counted to five.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

“Holy shit!” A pause. “There’s some cash with that, right?”

“There is a monetary prize associated with the winning poem, yes –”

“Awesome. Do you need my banking deets? Or will you guys just send me a check?”

“Someone will be following up about all that,” Elroy said. “For now, however, I’d just like to say congratulations –”

“Thanks.”

“We were also hoping you could provide, on the record, a short statement to be included alongside the poem.”

“Come again?”

“In the past, winners have commented on their inspiration for their poem, their influences, their writing process…”

“Ah. Okay, okay.” The line went silent. Then there was the sound of a door. Traffic.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, sorry, still here. I’m just thinking. ‘Bubblegum Prayer’, that’s the poem that won? You’re not just messing with me?”

“Do I sound like the type?”

The boy laughed. “Okay. Okay. Cool. Well… I didn’t write it. I mean, I’m the creator, but I’m not a poet. I programmed the code that wrote it. How’s that for a statement?”

Mobius Strip by Venantius Pinto

Painting © Venantius J Pinto 2024. To see more of his art, please visit behance.net/venantiuspinto

Having ended the call, Elroy remained motionless in his chair for some time. Perhaps if he happened to forget the unpleasant revelation, everything might go on as normal. He could make up something, a harmless quote, to put in the blurb. The boy on the phone might not even care. He seemed mostly concerned with the money, and, moreover, not particularly precious with his words. Then again, he could have easily kept the vital bit of information to himself. He’d told Elroy for a reason.

Elroy called Alina into his office. At first, she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. That poem had spoken to her soul. Elroy loved her even more for her romanticism. He was not, as a general rule, one to solicit advice, but he asked her what she thought should be done. She raised her hands in exasperation. “This is over our heads,” she said.

By two o’clock, the Editor-in-Chief, another senior Editor, Gerrie, and three junior Editors, including Alina (in case the young people might have some special insights on the matter of technology) had been called into Elroy’s office for an emergency meeting. Like Alina, they were all initially disbelieving. It was an insult to their own sophisticated literary sensibilities to think they might have been fooled by a computer. Once the matter of pride had been put aside, the contest rules were dug out from a dusty filing cabinet and read aloud. Twice. The issue of human authorship was not even mentioned. It was simply assumed.

The six faces grimly exchanged glances around Elroy’s desk. Alina looked down at her hands. The Editor-in-Chief cleared her throat and suggested, with unusual hesitancy, that, perhaps, it was their duty to share this poem with the world – regardless of, or even because of, its origins. There were a few nods. But Gerrie straightened in her chair, shaking her head: “What about our duty to protect true art?” she said.

“But what is ‘true’ art?” Alina asked, her face flushing pink from the attention.

No one had an answer.

The Editor-in-Chief got up and walked to the window. The sky was blue and cloudless. She turned back to them. “Well…” she said, “The way I see it, our hands are tied. With the writer notified, we have no choice but to go ahead and break the story, warts and all. Otherwise, he’s liable to blab to another publication.”

No one said anything, but instinctively, the group turned to Elroy, who had said little since the meeting began. “If anything could use a good scandal to shake things up, it’s poetry, isn’t it?” he said, with a shrug. On this, everyone agreed.

They went public with the story that Friday. They published the poem in print and online, alongside the so-called poet’s admission that he’d coded a program to write it (he refused to provide a photograph), and a lengthy essay meditating on the meaning of art and authorship. However, judging by the comments proliferating on social media, most hadn’t bothered with the essay. They had their own opinions, and didn’t need any further information to confirm them.

By midnight the story had been picked up by all the major news stations in the country, as well as many internationally, and the poem itself had been translated into fifteen languages (in some cases, with the help of AI). In the coming weeks, the paper received some praise, but considerably more condemnation. Several talk shows reached out for an interview with Elroy or the Editor-in-Chief, but they both declined. L.P. Page was similarly evasive. By some reports, he had received as many as fifty death threats, and fifteen marriage proposals.

At the end of the month, on his therapist’s recommendation, Elroy took leave for a month to go to Los Cabos and decompress. He also invited Alina along, and paid for her ticket.

He was sitting beachside, sipping black coffee and reading a dog-eared copy of Dickens one morning, when Alina came running down from the hotel, flip-flops smacking against the rocky path, phone clutched in hand. “Elroy! Did you see the news?” She was wide-eyed, breathless.

He set down his cup and said, not unkindly: “If it’s about that poem, I don’t want to hear it.”

“You’ll want to hear this.”

She passed him her phone and sat in his lap as he adjusted his glasses to read the article.

The boy, the programmer – the bogus poet – had been found dead in his home. Police said the place had been ransacked, the computers stolen.

Oddly, Elroy felt neither shock nor sadness. He felt as if he’d known all along that this was coming. He said something appropriate to Alina about the senselessness of a young life lost, and they headed back up to the restaurant to have breakfast. Over their toast and egg-white omelets, they talked less than usual. It seemed everything about the issue had already been said. When the waiter came to clear their plates, Alina said she wanted to go for a swim in the ocean. Elroy said he’d meet her there, he just wanted to stop at the room for a moment first.

There, he set his suitcase on the bed and unearthed a small square of folded paper from beneath his clothes. The mattress squeaked as he sat down and uncreased the paper. For perhaps the hundredth time, he reread ‘Bubblegum Prayer’. When he was through, he felt better. He refolded the sheet, returned it to its spot at the bottom of the suitcase, and changed into his swim trunks. Then he headed out into the sunshine to meet Alina.

© Dawn Muenchrath 2024

Dawn Muenchrath is a writer of fiction and poetry based in Calgary, Alberta.

• This story was provided by After Dinner Conversation, an independent nonprofit that promotes philosophical and ethical discourse by publishing short fiction: afterdinnerconversation.com.

Questions For Consideration

1. Is something art because of what it means to its creator, or because of what it means to the consumer? Can something be art without the creator intending it to be?

2. What (if anything) is the difference between using a program to write a poem, Photoshop to make a photo, or a camera obscura to create a painting?

3. Do you think the newspaper should have retracted the poetry award? Why; or why not?

4. Would it make any difference if the program had produced dozens of poems and L.P. Page selected his favorite to submit, discarding the others? What if he had made minor word changes prior to submitting it? Is there some minimal level of choice that makes a computer-generated poem a human creation? If so, what is it?

5. Would it make a difference if Page were a genius programmer, and others wouldn’t have been able to write the code to produce such an impressive poem?

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Poetry

Thought Experiment

by Carol Hart

There’s a well-known one that goes like this:

Mary lives in a black-and-white room, learning

about the world from black-and-white books

and from a monitor that shows the world

in black-and-white, explained by lecturers

who I suppose are also her examiners.

Because Mary is stipulated to be brilliant

and to understand all of neuroscience.

It’s known as the ‘knowledge argument’:

It asks whether experience is

explained by factual properties or not,

pivoting on the moment she’s released.

Does Mary then learn something new

over and above all possible knowledge

regarding brains and eyes and spectral light?

The question asked is one I brush aside

as trivial. I’m too wrapped up in Mary.

I’m invested in her story. I am, if only

momentarily, Mary. Wanting to know why

the door never opens till it’s much too late.

Mary felt contentment in her room.

The shadows flickering on the screen.

They emanate from others who inhabit

black-and-white rooms with monitors and books.

They are her friends, they are her enemies.

If they nod, as if in answer to her words,

if they seem to smile, however faintly,

Mary trembles with a secret passion.

There’s beauty in the subtle tones of gray

flowing across the monitor. There’s beauty

in the words that march in ordered ranks and

files across the pale monotony of paper

within a room of rectilinear sameness,

(books, monitor, chair, table, and bed)

where knowledge is reduced to formulas

and laws – difficult, but definitive.

Okay, it’s my thought experiment now:

I’ll stipulate that the door opens onto

a lush garden, blooming outrageously,

visited by flamboyant butterflies and birds.

Mary steps out – No, an unseen force must

push her out, must break down the walls

where she attempts to hide, compel her

to perceive what’s been unknown till now.

She is expelled, thrown overboard, into

the nauseating riot of the world – not just

color, though color would be enough – but

the welter, strife and strangeness of life’s forms.

Does Mary learn a new thing? No.

Her mind empties like an open drain.

She wants only to get back into the room,

slam the door shut. But the room is gone.

I pity Mary – although I put her there.

The black-and-white nuns who schooled me

said, ‘A sin in one’s thoughts is as bad

as a sin in deed.’ Which would render me

culpable for the cruelty of Mary’s being

imprisoned in my gray matter, furnished

with only a coarsely pixelated sense

of what’s out there beyond these narrow bounds.

© Dr Carol Hart 2024

Carol Hart has a PhD in English Literature, was employed as a freelance science writer for many years, and has since happily retired to write poetry and fiction.

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: Oct/Nov 2024

Editorial

Thoughts on Thought

News

News: October/November 2024

Thoughts On Thought

From Birds To Brains

Mary Leaves Her Room

Love & Metaphysics

Iain McGilchrist’s Naturalized Metaphysics

Managing the Mind

We’re as Smart as the Universe Gets

Articles

The Funnel of Righteousness

Why is Freedom So Important To Us?

Philosopher Kings – & Queens?

Is Brillo Box an Illustration?

Taylor Swift: A Philosopher For Our Times

Anselm (1033-1109)

Interviews

Sarah Bakewell

Letters

Letters

Columns

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Philosophers on Sneezing

Extending The Mind

Four Threats To Our Judgment

Reviews

How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna

Nonhuman Humanitarians by Benjamin Meiches

Love Lies Bleeding

Cartoons

Phil Witte’s Cartoon

Guto Dias’ Cartoon

Ryan James Terry’s Cartoon

Simon & Finn

Chris Gill’s Cartoon

Fiction

Bubblegum Prayer

Thought Experiment