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Editorial

- AI Think Therefore AI Am

Editorial

AI Think Therefore AI Am

by Rick Lewis

“To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer.”

Anon.

We are caught between heaven and hell. The skies are full of portents of doom. Oh wait, no, those are explosive AI-controlled drones being released from a ‘mother ship’ deployment aircraft. A few years back when we reported that somebody had started a UN-registered organisation called the Campaign Against Killer Robots, the name seemed cute. No longer.

Our world is going all digital and this brings the questions crowding in. Is it fair? Is it safe? Will AI take our jobs? How will we find meaning in this new reality? Are we just sitting around drinking cocktails as the world ends? Better to think about where we are going, what AI cannot do, how we can use AI for good and avoid doing evil. So ‘digital philosophy’ is our main theme in this issue, as humans wrestle with how to navigate between digital technology’s brilliant promise and its very real dangers. I tried asking ChatGBT to summarize the main questions and some possible answers, but it told me it was too busy playing cards with the other AIs and chatting about whether or not to keep humans in some kind of zoo, so it couldn’t help. Never mind – we have found some excellent human philosophers willing to do the job.

To rely deliberately upon AI in science or philosophy, to ‘work with’ it uncritically, is to choose to be away with the fairies. Not only does AI sometimes make stuff up (engineers euphemistically refer to it as ‘having hallucinations’), but its output often embodies the collective delusions of humanity, our prejudices and biases and preconceived assumptions and deep-rooted mistakes. How then can we rely on it in the ethical sphere? Our opening article examines the possibilities.

AI Large Language Models work by scraping all the text off the internet, digesting it, then serving up sliced-and-diced versions on demand, which can, Max Gottschlich says in his article, seem very attractive to those looking for a swift summary of existing knowledge. Yet he argues that overusing it in university study misses the point of being there in the first place. Could AI potentially write great literature? In our interview with Stephen Fry he discusses the deep attraction of words and the prospect of AI becoming ever-better at using them.

Can computers think? For several decades it was widely accepted that a computer would be capable of thought if it could pass the Turing Test. If an experimenter communicating with a computer and a human via a text interface couldn’t tell which was which, then this would show the computer was thinking. Well, the Turing Test looks out of date now, as most AI chatbots would pass it with ease, yet we are still arguing whether AI could ever become conscious. What does that even mean? How could we tell? Is there ‘something it is like’ to be a machine? Vincent Carchidi in his article in this issue explores some rather important differences between brains and computers – and in doing so throws some light on the nature of human minds. How do we even know that other humans are conscious? In our daily lives we have to work on the assumption that they are, and this assumption enables empathy – which is about putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Elon Musk claimed recently that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” in that we have too much of it, or talk about it too much, or something like that, but it seems more like a necessity for functioning in any complex society or indeed in any kind of friendship or relationship. People who genuinely lack the ability to empathise – and there are a few – are known medically as psychopaths. The question of whether computers could ever have consciousness or an inner life links to another article in this issue, which explores whether androids should have rights. They haven’t asked for any just yet, but perhaps as ethical beings ourselves we need to consider whether they might be ethical beings too.

Finally in our digital philosophy section, the article on Virtual Reality explores human interaction with digitally-generated immersive worlds. It connects with a long history of philosophical debates about the meaning and nature of our presence in this world, particularly Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. As with so many questions about the digital world, if you want to understand them in depth, don’t ask AI – ask a philosopher.

In the end, many questions about digital philosophy, and particularly about AI LLMs, are about what we can know, and how we can know that we can know. In other words they connect with the broader questions about epistemology (alias theory of knowledge) that have loomed so large in philosophy throughout its long history. If only this issue had some article discussing some of these classical questions in the context of modern culture… Oh wait, it does! We are delighted to be publishing a brand new article contributed by Slavoj Žižek about the Liar Paradox and its unexpectedly central place in our society and politics. It’s a highly original and surprising piece, and that’s no lie.

Digital Edition News

Ironically, we have some hot news about Philosophy Now’s digital edition. If you are a print or website subscriber to Philosophy Now, or decide to become one, you will now be able to access our completely rebuilt and greatly improved iOS app at no extra charge. Simply download it from the Apple app store and log in using the same username and password as on our website.

News

- News: June/July 2025

News

News: June/July 2025

Renowned Ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre Dies • Thoughts About Happiness • Sex versus Gender in the Courts — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe has died

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe 2013. Screenshot from video conversation with Boaventura de Sousa Santos at http://tiny.cc/Mudimbe

Photo © Alice Ces Creative Commons 2.0

The Congolese philosopher and professor of literary studies Valentin-Yves Mudimbe has died. Having emigrated to the United States for political reasons in 1979, Mudimbe lectured at Haverford College as well as Stanford and Duke Universities. Known mainly for his influential 1988 book The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe challenged the assumptions and the epistemological basis of historical accounts of Africa. Mudimbe died on 22 April 2025 at the age of 83.

Spain Honours Byung-Chul Han

The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has been awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2025. The award is to honour “the work of fostering and advancing the sciences and disciplines considered humanistic activities or any activity related to social communication in any of its forms” and is very prestigious; in Spain it is comparable in importance to the Nobel Prize. The award committee says in a press release: “Considered one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers, Byung-Chul Han has above all dedicated his thinking to what he calls the ‘burnout society’ and the ‘transparency society’… Highly critical of neoliberalism, Han believes we live in an age of neuronal disorders (depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, etc.) caused by an excess of positivity in a society that has abandoned reflection, retreat and meditation, and therefore does not value individuality. He argues that this is a society increasingly dominated by narcissism … in which we become progressively incapable of relating to others.”

World Happiness Report

Did you know that there is a UN International Day of Happiness? In time for its celebration on 25 May, Oxford University published its World Happiness Report 2025, which finds that people are kinder than we think – which certainly is news conducive to happiness. It also ranks the world’s happiest countries based on a wide range of criteria. Spoiler alert: Finland comes out top for the eighth year running. The United States, plummets to its lowest-ever position at rank 24, and the UK, coming in at 23, has its lowest evaluation since the 2017 report. Choosing interdisciplinary approaches, the report examines the meaning and reality of wellbeing of people around the globe. For example, “sharing meals with others is strongly linked with wellbeing across all global regions” and household size matters: “four to five people living together enjoy the highest levels of happiness in Mexico and Europe.”

Variations in Happiness

The above World happiness report links well-being to GDP, life expectancy, and access to healthcare, falling in line with one of the established theories of happiness, called ‘bottom-up’. The other main theory (top-down) suggests that if you’re a happy person, you will probably feel good about your job, relationships and health, no matter what they’re like. Now new research suggests an alternative approach, finding that happiness and what causes it differs for different people. Latest research by Emorie Beck (UC Davis), Joshua Jackson (Washington University in St Louis), Felix Cheung (University of Toronto), and Stuti Thapa (University of Tulsa) published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour calls for a personalised happiness model. This massive study, involving 40,000 people across Germany, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Australia over 33 years, collected each person’s overall life satisfaction levels and how they felt about five key areas: work, income, housing, health, and relationships. They identified no less than four happiness models, including the aforementioned top-down and bottom-up, but also bidirectional and non-directional, of which people can have unique combinations.

UK Supreme Court Ruling

In a landmark ruling on 16th April 2025, the UK Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the case of For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers which determined the correct interpretation of the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010 (EA 2010). The court ruled that “the words ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man… mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man.” ‘Biological sex’ was taken to mean the sex of a person at birth. Trans-identified individuals are also protected under the EA 2010, but in a separate category, as ‘gender reassignment’ is a different and separate protected characteristic from ‘sex’. (The EA 2010 prohibited acts which put individuals or groups at risk of suffering discrimination or harassment in relation to the characteristics of age, sex, race, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, gender reassignment and marriage or civil partnership.)

Australia’s Tickle vs Giggle Case

In contrast to the above, Australian judge Justice Robert Bromwich found in April that case law has consistently seen sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”, as he found in favour of transgender woman Roxanne Tickle, who had sued the social media platform Giggle For Girls and its CEO Sall Grover, seeking damages amounting to A$200,000. Having been denied access to the app, which Grover had designed as “a safe, women-only space”, on account of being biologically male and protesting “persistent misgendering” by Grover, Tickle was ruled by the court to have been a victim of indirect discrimination.

Alasdair MacIntyre Has Died

Alasdair MacIntyre at University College Dublin, 2009

© Sean O’Connor 2009 Creative Commons

Just as we were going to press we heard the sad news of the passing of Glasgow-born moral and political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. His most famous book After Virtue (1981) is widely considered a classic of moral philosophy and contributed greatly to a new wave of interest in virtue ethics in the late 20th Century. A senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, as well as permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, MacIntyre lectured at numerous universities, including Yale, Duke, Brandeis, Vanderbilt and Boston Universities. MacIntyre died on 22 May 2025 at the age of 96. A full obituary will follow in the next issue of Philosophy Now.

Humour

- Is Laughter Liberating or Cruel?

- The Functions of Humor in Writing

Humour

Is Laughter Liberating or Cruel?

Alfie Bown investigates different categories of laughter.

Comedy has become a pressure point for contemporary culture. It flares up in debates about censorship, cancellation, progressivism, and even fascism. An obvious example would be the now infamous Oscars ceremony at which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife – on a stage that’s renowned for its ‘roasting’ humour. This provoked anxiety among those on stage and those off it, leading to arguments about the overstepping of boundaries. Other examples might include recent controversies over Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, or the fallout over Paul Currie ejecting a guest who refused to applaud the Palestine flag. If once comedy was a shared experience of relief – a departure from norms and cultural pressures – today it seems to be a nexus of social tension. Some say that comedy should champion the social politics of the day, while others argue against what they see as the regulation of comedy by social politics. Commentators, and comedians themselves, are invariably tempted onto one or other side of this war. By taking up sides in this argument, they frame the situation in a particular way. This, I will argue here, precludes the possibility of comedy working against the excesses of contemporary culture, or for the universal fraternal solidarity that marks funny comedy.

A long of history of philosophizing has worked to consider the deep and instinctive power of comedy and laughter, pointing to how critical it is for the healthy life of people and society. Since the time of Aristotle and the Greek and Roman comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus, it has been known that comedy is ideologically deeply powerful, and critical to the maintenance of society, even if people have always been inclined to dismiss it as unserious and apolitical.

For many of the philosophers, if true comedy is defined by anything, it is by its ability to confront us with a deeply philosophical realization: that we’re all lacking, with failure at our core. This is something we all have in common. Perhaps then, with comedy presently becoming a point of tension rather than a point of connection, this universalist spirit of comedy is at risk of becoming a thing of the past. True comedy might be under threat. In this moment, then, we should revisit and contextualize the philosophical history of comedy.

Types of Laughter

Russian revolutionary philosopher Alexander Herzen (1812-70) wrote that it would be interesting to write a history of laughter. The idea is provocative, because in some ways we think of laughter as a universal instinct – a human response unchanged over time. On the other hand, if humour does change over time – as seems incontrovertible – this shows something unsettling: that even our most instinctive and apparently spontaneous reactions are conditioned by social and cultural change.

In the last several decades, those studying comedy have divided theories about it into types, with the most common typing being ‘superiority theory’ and ‘relief theory’. Writers who have taken this approach include Andrew Stott (Comedy, 2005) and Simon Critchley (On Humour, 2001).

Historically, the first name associated with superiority theory is perhaps the most famous theorist of comedy, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (1651) that “laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.” The idea is that laughter is the act of a secure individual, in a Hobbesian ‘glory’ of self-celebration. Perhaps following in these footsteps, the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in the nineteenth century that when we see a man fall over in the street, we issue a sudden and irrepressible laugh that seems to say “Look at me! I am not falling! I am walking upright. I would never be so silly as to fail to see a gap in the pavement, or a cobblestone blocking the way” (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1859). Baudelaire’s tone might however indicate a critical departure from Hobbes: Baudelaire emphasizes the ‘I’ of the person laughing – suggesting a subject who, unlike the secure subject of Hobbes, asserts himself anxiously through his laughter, boasting in his celebrated position over the target of the laughter. But Baudelaire’s emphasis makes this claim itself seem comic, ridiculous, hinting that it could just as easily be the laugher who fell over and was laughed at. Thus, we might called Hobbesian laughter ‘secure superiority’, and Baudelairian laughter ‘anxious superiority’. Continuing in the superiority tradition, the undervalued theorist of comedy Jonathan Hall argues that, since it is a group activity, laughter can even be a ‘fascist joy’, involving ‘collaboration with the powerholders’ (Anxious Pleasures, 1995). In other words, this type of laughter of superiority simply affirms one person or group over another.

On the other side of the debate, associated with relief theory, is the idea of laughter as liberation. In his 1905 essay ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, Sigmund Freud remarks that “civilization and higher education have a large influence in the development of repression” – which in turn means that “primary possibilities of enjoyment… are lost to us.” Freud then explains that in a joke repressions are lifted, and thus the work of civilization and higher education are undone: “we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut.” Broadly in the same tradition, the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that true laughter – which he called ‘carnival’ laughter – “is the laughter of all the people… it is universal in its scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity” (Rabelais and His World, 1984).

On these theories, in contrast to the laughter of superiority, laughter can function as a kind of carnivalesque or joyous confrontation with one’s own inadequacies and failures. It is a laughter often breaking rather than conforming to social norms, and in this we find an equalizing, democratic, universal quality. In this laughter, kings become peasants and left becomes right. One might for instance imagine that this laughter might be associated with ‘inappropriate’ material (Freud uses the term ‘smut’); or on the other hand, with potentially offensive attacks on those in power, such as in caricature (Bakhtin refers to taking down kings and queens). Yet in fact, relief laughter is directed at ‘all and everyone’, including the participants themselves.

Artwork © Simon Ellinas 2025 please visit caricatures.org.uk

One or Two Laughters?

We might provisionally use this ‘type’ theory to read the present comedic moment, to simply say that while we see plenty of superiority laughter, the laughter of carnivalesque relief seems to have receded into the background. But this would be too easy, as another philosophical tradition in the history of laughter stresses the inadequacy of dividing laughter into types.

As theorists of laughter, we are inclined to divide it into types so that we can focus on what we like of comedy while dismissing what we do not. A clear example is found in a small section of Simon Critchley’s On Humour titled ‘Reactionary Humour’. Here he writes that “it is important to recognize that not all humour is [liberating], and most of the best jokes are fairly reactionary, or at best, simply serve to reinforce social consensus.” After this disclaimer-like appraisal of good jokes creating ‘bad laughter’, Critchley focuses his attention on humour which can be seen as more radical and – to his mind – preferable.

The novelist Milan Kundera noticed the problem of humour one doesn’t like, and tried to deal with it differently. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1996), he wrote that “imitation of laughter and (the devil’s) original laughter are both called by the same name.” For Kundera, this is an unfortunate mistake. He continues: “Nowadays we don’t realize that the same external display (that of laughter) serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.” Even more forcefully than Critchley, then, Kundera feels such a great divide between a preachy, imitative laughter at jokes which repeat and reiterate social positions, and a truly diabolical and radical ‘devil’s laughter’, that he feels it’s a mistake to label them with the same word, of ‘laughter’. Rather, ideological laughter is laughter that supports existing ideologies (overall ideas and positions, which usually support those in power), whereas diabolical laughter is a dangerous comedy that produces something new. Perhaps – again – we can relate this distinction to the situation today. Are we seeing the ideology-supporting imitation of laughter, rather than the real – diabolical – thing?

Yet the fact that we use the same word to describe these reactions is surely not a mistake. For a comparison, Freud wrote of ‘love’, that it is no coincidence that we use the word for so many different things: sexual or romantic love; relationships with family members; even desire for objects or types of food. Instead, he insists that the reason we use the same word points to a hidden connection between the phenomena. We can apply the same logic to ‘comedy’ and ‘laughter’, too.

For the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar, laughter has an ideological impact on us by making us feel free and relieved – liberated to give up ourselves to it:

“Laughter is the condition of ideology. It provides us with the distance, the very space in which ideology can take its full swing. It is only with laughter that we become ideological subjects… It is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us.”

(‘Strel sredi koncerta’, 1986).

By this logic, we can’t really separate relief theory from superiority theory, since it is in laughter’s very appearance of spontaneity and relief that we are laid open to being subjected to ideological influences, and thus to feeling superior to those who don’t share that worldview.

Once we arrive at this conclusion, it seems present even in the arguments of Hobbes and Baudelaire, for whom the subject can only really feel superior to the target of the laughter by believing in the ideology of the laughter itself, as it were. Indeed, it is when we experience laughter as if it represents freedom and truth that we are most in the grip of a worldview. This shows the powerful fantasy of a joke: it can catch us in its grip and make us the subjects of a particular worldview. But it can also make us confront the production of ideology as the deceptive illusion it often is.

Perhaps then, contra Critchley, there are no good and bad jokes (when they are actually funny), because all jokes – even when they seem to be a burst of self-celebratory glory – contain a signal of the core of our subjectivity: failure, lack, disaster, and contradiction. In this sense, attempts to divide jokes into ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ miss the point. Jokes might attempt to support or to attack contemporary political or social positions; but whatever the joke is, it is always attempting to be universal, either in its contradictory status that goes against the grain of the conscious position of the joker, or in its consciously universalist approach.

Laughter Now

Perhaps it is only when it isn’t funny that comedy can be truly didactic, affirmative and ideological. A comedy that confirms what we already believe is reflective of the particularly divisive ideology of contemporary online discourse, defined by bubbles of self-confirming identitarianism. Such jokes are designed to be perfectly fit for sharing on social media platforms among communities on which they rely for their success. They are circulated in curated feeds to target audiences made up those who ‘agree’ with them. The laughter that follows them displays a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect: self-assessment takes place in which objectivity is eschewed and the superiority of the listener is simply confirmed. Perhaps this is the ‘imitative’ laughter that Kundera had in mind. It has nothing to do with funny, true laughter and comedy.

We began with the idea that the tension around comedy is greater than ever. Perhaps this is simply because comedy is universalist, and our culture is particularist and divisive.

Laughter, as we can learn from the history of its philosophy, is a powerful ideological tool, which can construct, entrench, and solidify identities, ideologies and truths, playing a deceptive trick that makes it appear as though we’re living in a world that makes sense and has structure and order. But it is also the anxious signal of the universal failed subjectivity from which we all originate, and on top of which all worldviews must be built. Our society can apparently handle only the first of comedy’s functions – its ideological reinforcement – but not the second – its universalizing instinct.

© Alfie Bown 2025

Alfie Bown is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is the author of In the Event of Laughter (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Post-Comedy, a new book on comedy and politics, out now with Polity Press.

Humour

The Functions of Humor in Writing

Omar Sabbagh contemplates the use of humor, in fiction, and in life.

My work as a novelist and short story writer inevitably involves plenty of moments in which I stare into space. In such moments, I sometimes consider the ways in which I use humor in my own writing, and these moments have prompted me to write this article. If this were a systematic discussion of the functions of humor, I might start by making distinctions between the different types of humor, such as, irony, wit, satire, and sarcasm. However, this article is no such thing. It is instead a meditation or a reflection on the different ways humor has happened to play out in my published fiction, as well as in my life and thinking more generally.

I say ‘happened to play out’ because there was and is nothing overly planned about anything funny I may have written (or lived). If ever humor has had a central function in my fictions, it has been a facet of the way my mind works, not a conscious strategy. So, in trying to discern and elucidate the function of humor, in life as much as in fiction, my opening gambit will involve what certainly is a central motor for humorous effects, namely, ‘reflexivity’.

Writers differ widely in the temperament they bring to their work, and this of course means different kinds of humor emerge. My own temperament aligns more with metafiction [fiction that explores its own boundaries, Ed] than with straightlaced psychological realism. At least, the kind of writer I am is very aware of the modes and features of his own story-telling at nearly every step of the way. So apart from the story itself, there is an additional story, superimposed: the story of the writer telling (or showing) his or her story. This can itself result in humor. Borges or Nabokov, for example – two iconic entrepreneurs of metafiction – are not always or not even in the main trying to be funny. Yet the feature they share, reflexivity, does nearly always engender, if not humor, then irony. And irony, whether verbal or cosmic, involves a conflict and differentiation among the parts of any writerly whole one may be producing.

Thoughtful Writing

What is reflexivity? It is more than heightened cognizance. It is the coming of consciousness into self-consciousness. This self-consciousness may be literal – such that, for instance, a writer writes a sentence that then begins to curve back upon itself, continuing via some kind of determinate development or negation, undercutting itself in the process. This type of self-reflection can be maddeningly unending – to the point where it completely fritters away the tale at hand in favor of the tale of the teller trying to tell the tale at hand.

Charlie Chaplin Film Fun cover, 1918

One doesn’t have to necessarily include a ‘story within a story’, or even a thematization of the process of storytelling within the storytelling, to be reflexive. And even when one does have layers or levels of authorship and of story-telling, the effects need not necessarily be funny. In this regard I think of the Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, or even more emphatically, The Avignon Quintet. Although the roles of authority and authorship are deeply at issue there, these novels are not in any direct or primary way funny, nor are they meant to be. However, irony is completely redolent here, which makes them, more broadly, highly entertaining. But then irony in this sense, as well as entertainment, are not the same things as humor.

I think that apart from the disembodying work of reflexivity, another temperamental feature at play when humor works is imagination. Imagination is at work in all creative writing, humorous or not. But while imaginative work need not be funny, funny work must be imaginative. I’ve noticed in everyday encounters that while higher IQs might result in quicker wits, being funny is not in my experience a function of analytical intelligence, but more a result of the capacity for fantasy. In particular, when someone makes you laugh, they are in my experience invoking the specter of otherness. They are in effect illuminating the present moment with a quick ranging over some kind of elsewhere.

The bringing of two distinctively different things up against each other can often be the motor of humorous effects. Or, put otherwise, humor nearly always betrays or contests uniformity or univocality. It doesn’t require a whole cacophony of voices or senses or directions, but at the least two, and no less. And the capacity to imagine is central to this, because imagination is both ranging and adventurous as well as deeply constructive. It builds between different things – connects the dots; and when humorous in its effects, there is no absolute resolution or absorption of the elements at play into one finished, sealed thing. If it wasn’t for the antagonistic couplings engendered by humor, perhaps our world would be simpler. It would certainly be more boring.

The Heart of Laughter

The idea of a remainder – of something left over or out – is at the heart of laughter. If everything did what it was supposed to do, fitted in its proper place forever, then we wouldn’t be challenged into laughter. Perhaps in this sense laughter is akin to desire. I mean that laughter indicates the lack of a complete satisfaction of one’s wishes or expectations. Laughter, like sex, is a little death. It may also indicate a breaking-point – a point at which the only way one can process one’s experience is by putting it to the flames. This is not to say, however, that humor need be cynical, only that in its functioning humor must be an artefact of, if not a direct voicing of, skepticism about the future.

Humor as a kind of doubting conscience, then? This might be why at the inception of the Western tradition of disciplined approaches towards truth, Plato uses dramatic irony (ie, unnoticed incongruities) in his dialogues. That said, it has been argued that Plato wasn’t a true midwife of ideas (as Socrates claimed of himself); that, as a writer of philosophical dramas (starring Socrates), he had an agenda and knew strategically, as it were, which ideas were to come. And yet it has also been argued that this wasn’t the case with Socrates himself, whose life and dialogues were indeed as open-ended and adventurous as they appear to be. And the path of questioning and answering and questioning again – that is, of philosophy – was we know imagined by Socrates as a ‘preparation for death’. Perhaps because true reflection on a life, its examination, is not and cannot be construed as the same thing, or on the same plane, as living itself, but the invoking of a different, other, or othering, way of being. And to connect my own dots, does this make humor, insofar as it provokes thought, an angel of death?

In my own work, such as my Y Knots: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023), there are metafictional effects engendered by playful narratorial voices; allegories that work satirically; and parodies that invoke more iconic writers in a certain tradition. In each vein a certain othering is always at work, even if only implicitly. And my hope is that when humor is at work in my fiction it entertains the reader: makes him or her smile, wryly or wholeheartedly, or, in a more emphatic mode, laugh out loud.

While one can be entertained without humor, one cannot have humor without entertaining. One can clearly be entertained by horror, say, or by tragedy, as much as by humor, but on the whole they are determinately different genres. But it does occur to me: might Aristotle’s point in his Poetics (c. 4th century BCE) about the ‘purging’ effects of watching tragedies in the theatre, also apply, if differently, when a reader is made to laugh or grin? I tend to think so. There is as much destruction of illusions engendered by doubting laughter as there is by the quagmires of tragic conflict. Both in that sense are political, even if inadvertently. Just as I’ve often thought that weekly football is a needed pressure valve for many of its mostly working-class fans – diverting much everyday anger and frustration that might otherwise prove socially perilous – so being made to laugh is also perhaps a way of diverting our attention from the less laughable truths of our world in a resonant and responsive way. In short, humor, in whatever form, puts the oh-so-fallible world to rights: realistically at times, fantastically at others.

A Humorless World

But such corrective moves are always temporary. In my view what is truly laughable about our current world, is sad – something to grieve over – and intractable. We could have fed everybody the whole world over, infrastructurally, logistically, and economically, since well before the last quarter of the twentieth century. It didn’t happen then, much as it doesn’t today. And when someone dies in an untoward manner – either from a tragic terminal illness or from ruthless, mindless, rabid, genocidal intent – we doubt our world, naturally; but we do know that there’s nothing in the least humorous about it. In a way, what I’m trying to say is that however central laughter and humor are to the human condition, and so to any writing that engages with that condition, there is a story beyond all stories out there, far simpler and more uniting – a flash fiction of just one word, as it were: horror. The afflictions of our contemporary world, especially, are so far othered – so distant from our being able to do anything effective about them – that there’s no true way of honing them into fractious wholes of irony or humor. Humorists and humor are important. But humor and humorists must always come later. First, there is the sanctity of human life.

The Arabic proverb, often quoted at me by my own father, about how ‘the worst tragedy to befall one is actually very funny’, may well have applied in my own life. Maybe even I can laugh at my suffering, like many can at theirs. But the proverb’s formula just doesn’t apply to the levels of horror and abjection we see in our world, which are deeper and lower and more riveted than can be expressed by any kind of meaningful articulation.

© Omar Sabbagh 2025

Omar Sabbagh is a poet, writer, and critic. His latest books are: Y KNOTS: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023) and Night Settles Upon the City (Daraja Press, 2024). Gazan Days (Dar Nelson) will be released in June 2025. He also teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

Digital Philosophy

- Ethics for the Age of AI

- Rescuing Mind from the Machines

- Studying Smarter with AI?

- Affirmative Action for Androids

- Is VR Meaningful Escapism?

Digital Philosophy

Ethics for the Age of AI

Mahmoud Khatami asks, can machines make good moral decisions?

Imagine a self-driving car speeding down a narrow road when suddenly a child runs into its path. The car must decide: swerve and risk the passenger’s life, or stay the course and endanger the child? This real-world dilemma echoes the classic ‘trolley problem’ in ethics, and highlights the ethical challenges of AI. Similarly, AI systems in healthcare diagnose diseases and recommend treatments, sometimes making life-or-death decisions. But can machines truly understand right from wrong? What happens when they make mistakes, or reflect their creators' biases? As AI integrates into our lives, it will both transform how we work and challenge our understanding of morality. From facial recognition to loan approvals, AI makes decisions once reserved for humans; yet machines lack empathy, context, or moral reasoning. This raises profound questions: Can AI make ethical decisions? Should it? And how do we ensure it serves humanity’s values, not undermines them?

This article explores AI’s ethical challenges, including bias, privacy, and accountability. These issues, from fairness to trust, impact everyday life. So as we navigate this new era, we must ask: How can we ensure AI aligns with our ethical principles?

The future of AI is not just technological: it’s deeply moral.

The Ethics of AI Decision-Making

At the heart of the debate over artificial intelligence ethics lies a fundamental question: what does it mean for a decision to be ethical?

For humans, ethical decision-making involves weighing values, considering consequences, and often navigating complex dilemmas. It requires empathy, intuition, and an understanding of context – qualities that are deeply rooted in our experiences and emotions. But can a machine, no matter how advanced, replicate this process? And even if it can, should it?

Ethical decisions are rarely black and white. They often involve balancing competing principles, such as fairness, justice, and the greater good. For example, should a doctor prioritize saving the life of a young patient over an elderly one? Should a judge impose a harsher sentence to deter future crimes, even if it seems unfair to the individual? These questions highlight the complexity of morality, which is shaped by cultural norms, personal beliefs, and situational factors. Translating this complexity into algorithms is no small feat, especially as machines lack the ability to feel empathy or to understand the nuances of human experience.

Despite these challenges, AI is being increasingly used in high-stakes scenarios where ethical decisions are unavoidable. For example, self-driving cars must make split-second choices in emergencies – such as between swerving to avoid a pedestrian or risking harm to passengers. Should the car prioritize passenger safety, or minimize overall harm? And who decides? Similarly, in healthcare AI diagnoses diseases and recommends treatments; but what happens if it makes a mistake? Can (or should) we trust machines with life-or-death decisions, especially when their reasoning is often inscrutable? In criminal justice, predictive policing tools identify potential criminals and sometimes determine sentencing. However, these systems often reinforce biases, such as racial or socioeconomic discrimination, by being trained on or otherwise relying on historical data that reflect past injustices. This raises further critical questions about fairness: Can algorithms ever be truly impartial, or will they always mirror their creators’ biases? Or an AI system might prioritize efficiency over fairness, or fail to recognize individual circumstances. This underscores the need for human oversight and careful ethical consideration, as machines lack compassion or cultural awareness.

To better understand the ethical challenges of AI, we can turn to the insights of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Kant’s deontological ethics emphasizes the following of moral rules or duties, regardless of the consequences. From a deontological perspective, an AI system might be programmed to always prioritize human life, even if it leads to what in some senses are less efficient outcomes. In contrast, Mill’s utilitarianism focuses on maximizing overall happiness and minimizing harm. A utilitarian approach might program an AI system to make decisions that result in the greatest good for the greatest number, even if it means sacrificing individual rights.

These contrasting philosophical frameworks highlight the complexity of ethical decision-making, and indicate the difficulty of translating human morality into algorithms. While AI can assist in making decisions, then, it cannot replace the human capacity for moral reasoning.

Robot © Marcin Wichary 2009

Algorithmic Bias & the Problem of Fairness

As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into our lives, one troubling issue that has emerged is algorithmic bias. This occurs when often unintentionally AI systems perpetuate or even amplify existing biases in the data on which they’re trained. While AI has the potential to make decisions more efficiently and objectively than humans, it’s not immune to the flaws of the society that creates it. In fact, without careful oversight, AI can reinforce discrimination and deepen inequalities.

Algorithmic bias arises when an AI system produces results that are systematically unfair to certain groups of people, usually because the data used to train the AI reflects historical or societal biases. For example, if a hiring algorithm is trained on resumes from a company that has historically favored male candidates, it will learn to prioritize male applicants over equally qualified female ones. Similarly, if a facial recognition system is trained primarily on images of lighter-skinned individuals, it may struggle to identify people with darker skin tones. These biases are not intentional, but they can have serious consequences, particularly for marginalized communities.

The impact of algorithmic bias can be seen in a variety of real-world applications. I’ve already mentioned these:

• Facial Recognition Systems: Studies have shown that many facial recognition technologies are significantly less accurate for people of color, particularly women. For example, a 2018 study by MIT researchers found that commercial facial recognition systems had error rates of up to 34% for darker-skinned women, compared to less than 1% for lighter-skinned men (‘Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification’, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81, Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018). This disparity can lead to serious consequences, such as wrongful arrests or a denial of services.

• Hiring Algorithms: AI-powered hiring tools are increasingly used to screen job applicants, but they have been found to favor certain demographics. For instance, Amazon once developed a recruiting algorithm that penalized resumes containing terms like ‘women’s’, or graduates of all-women’s colleges, reflecting biases in the historical hiring data on which it had been trained. Such biases can perpetuate inequality in the workplace and limit opportunities for underrepresented groups.

• Predictive Policing: Predictive policing tools use algorithms to identify areas where crimes are more likely to occur, or individuals who are more likely to commit them. However, these systems are often trained on historical crime data, which may reflect biased policing practices. As a result, they tend to target marginalized communities, reinforcing cycles of discrimination and mistrust.

The ethical implications of algorithmic bias are profound. When AI systems discriminate against certain groups, they exacerbate existing inequalities and undermine efforts to create a fairer society. Biased hiring algorithms can limit economic opportunities for women and minorities, while flawed facial recognition systems can lead to wrongful arrests, or the surveillance of innocent individuals. Beyond these immediate harms, algorithmic bias also erodes trust in technology and the institutions that use it. If people believe that AI systems are unfair or discriminatory, they may be less willing to adopt those technologies or accept their decisions.

Addressing algorithmic bias requires a concerted effort from developers, companies, and policy-makers. Programmers must be aware of the potential for bias in their algorithms and take steps to mitigate it, such as using diverse and representative datasets, testing for fairness, and incorporating other ethical considerations into the design process. Companies, meanwhile, have a responsibility to ensure that their AI systems are transparent and accountable, allowing users to understand how decisions are made and to challenge them if necessary. Policy-makers can also play a role, by establishing regulations and standards to prevent discrimination and promote fairness in AI use.

The problem of algorithmic bias also raises deeper philosophical questions about fairness and accountability. Can an algorithm ever be truly fair, or will it always reflect the biases of the society that created it? And who is accountable when an AI system makes a biased decision – the developer, the company, or the user? Such questions challenge us to think critically about the role of technology in our lives and the values we want it to uphold.

Privacy, Autonomy, & the Human Factor

As artificial intelligence becomes more pervasive, it is not only transforming how decisions are made, but also raising critical concerns about privacy, autonomy, and the role of human judgment. How do we balance the benefits of AI with the need to protect privacy and preserve human autonomy? And what happens when machines make the decisions that were once the domain of human expertise? While AI offers remarkable efficiency and precision, its use often comes at the cost of the nuanced understanding that only humans can provide.

One of the most pressing issues surrounding AI is its impact on privacy. Many AI systems – particularly those using facial recognition or data mining – rely on vast amounts of personal information to function effectively. For example, facial recognition technologies scan and store images of thousands, even millions, of individuals, often without their consent – raising concerns about the erosion of privacy. Similarly, data mining algorithms analyze mass online behavior, purchase histories, and even social media activity, to make predictions of likes or recommendations. While these technologies can be useful, they also create opportunities for misuse, such as unauthorized tracking, profiling, or even manipulation. The ethical question here is clear: How much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for the convenience and efficiency that AI promises?

Another significant concern is the loss of human autonomy in decision-making. As AI systems take over making decisions that were once performed by humans, such as diagnosing medical conditions, recommending treatments, or even determining prison sentences, this raises questions about accountability and the value of human judgment. For instance, if an AI system misdiagnoses a patient or recommends an inappropriate treatment, who is responsible – the developer, the healthcare provider, or the machine itself? Moreover, when decisions are made by algorithms, the individuals concerned may feel disempowered, as though their fate is being determined by an impersonal and inscrutable system (which it is).

At the heart of these concerns is the recognition that ethical decision-making requires more than just data and algorithms – it requires empathy, intuition, and a deep understanding of context. Humans are very capable of considering the unique circumstances of a situation, weighing competing values, and making judgments that reflect moral principles. Machines, on the other hand, operate on predefined rules and patterns. Naturally they can’t feel compassion, but neither can they understand the subtleties of human experience. For example, a human doctor might consider a patient’s emotional state, cultural background, and personal preferences when recommending a treatment, while an AI system might focus solely on statistical outcomes. This limitation once again underscores the importance of preserving the human factor in critical decision-making processes.

A compelling example of the tension between algorithmic efficiency and human judgment can be seen in the use of AI for hiring. Many companies now use algorithms to screen resumes, assess candidates’ suitability for a role and even conduct interviews. While these systems can save time and reduce bias, they raise concerns about fairness and transparency. For instance, an AI hiring tool might prioritize candidates solely on factors such as education or previous job titles, and overlook qualities like creativity, resilience, or interpersonal skills that are harder to quantify. This raises the question: are we sacrificing the richness of human judgment for the sake of efficiency? And what does this mean for the future of work or for the individuals whose lives are shaped by these decisions?

Accountability & Responsibility

As artificial intelligence systems take on increasingly critical roles in society, the question of accountability becomes more pressing. When an AI system makes a decision – whether in diagnosing a disease, approving a loan, or even in causing harm if it’s a combat AI – who is responsible? Is it the developer who designed the algorithm, the company that deployed it, or the user who relied on its output? This question lies at the heart of the ethical and legal challenges surrounding AI, and it highlights the need for clear legal frameworks to assign responsibility and ensure accountability.

However, determining accountability for AI decisions is far from straightforward. Developers create the algorithms, but often lack control over how their creations are used. Companies deploy AI systems, but they may not understand the intricacies of the technology, or its potential consequences. Users, meanwhile, may rely on AI for decision-making, but may not have the expertise to question its outputs.

This diffusion of responsibility creates a moral and legal gray area. Without clear guidelines, holding anyone accountable for AI decisions becomes a daunting task.

One way to address this challenge would be by ensuring that AI systems are transparent and their decisions explainable. If an AI system recommends a medical treatment or denies a loan application, both users and affected individuals should be able to understand how that decision was made. This is not just a technical issue, but an ethical one. Transparency fosters trust, and allows for meaningful oversight, helping to ensure that AI systems are used responsibly. However, many AI algorithms, particularly those based on deep learning, operate as ‘black boxes’, making it difficult even for experts to explain their reasoning. This lack of explainability complicates efforts to assign accountability, and undermines public trust in AI.

To address these challenges, there is a growing call for ethical guidelines and legal policies to govern AI development and use. Governments, industry leaders, and civil society must work together to establish AI standards that ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency. Regulations could require companies to conduct regular audits of their AI systems, disclose potential biases, and provide mechanisms for redress when things go wrong. Such measures would not only protect individuals, but also encourage responsible innovation.

The question of accountability in AI also resonates with broader philosophical concerns about moral responsibility. Hannah Arendt developed her concept of the ‘banality of evil’ in a very different context, but it highlights how ordinary individuals can contribute to harmful (or evil) systems without fully understanding or acknowledging their role. Similarly, reliance on AI systems might diffuse moral responsibility, allowing individuals to defer difficult decisions to the machines, and thus avoid confronting the ethical implications of their actions. This raises a troubling possibility: As AI becomes more pervasive, will we lose sight of our own moral agency?

Conclusion: The Future of AI & Ethics

It’s clear that AI holds immense potential to improve decision-making, enhance efficiency, and address global challenges. From healthcare to criminal justice, it is transforming how we live and work. Yet, these advances come with ethical risks, including algorithmic bias, privacy threats, and accountability gaps. While AI can assist in making decisions, it cannot replace human judgment, empathy, or moral reasoning. It lacks the ability to understand context or feel compassion, underscoring the need for human oversight, transparency, and fairness. So the central question – Can machines make moral decisions? – remains unresolved.

As we integrate AI into more aspects of life, we must ensure it serves humanity’s values, not undermines them. This requires sound ethical principles in research and development, robust governance, and effective public engagement. Policymakers, developers, and users all have a role in shaping a future where AI enhances, rather than diminishes, our collective well-being.

As always, the true measure of progress is not the sophistication of our machines, but the wisdom with which we use them. This means that the future of AI is not just a technological challenge – it is also a moral one.

© Mahmoud Khatami 2025

Mahmoud Khatami is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tehran.

Digital Philosophy

Rescuing Mind from the Machines

Vincent J. Carchidi agrees with Descartes and friends that our ability to use language creatively distinguishes our minds from computers.

The study of artificial intelligence was originally conceived partly as an effort to make sense of the human mind. That is to say, the pursuit of practical computing machines ran parallel to an interest in computing as a model of human cognition. This was present from the start in Alan Turing’s 1950 essay ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. Indeed, some scholars argue that the field of AI moved from a multidisciplinary effort to simulate the workings of the human mind, to a project of literally building human-like intelligence into machines.

The shift can be exaggerated; after all, figures such as John von Neumann spoke even in the twentieth century of an approaching technological ‘singularity’. That said, the shift towards desiring human-like artificial intelligence is real, and it has resulted in an ever-intensifying trend that in fact devalues the human mind. Indeed, a routine association of computational models with biological minds in part prompted this warning in Nature Machine Intelligence in December 2024: “The era of machines as deterministic, predictable, and boring objects of fixed structure is coming to an end.” One implication of all this is: we need clarity on the relation between engineered machines like AI systems and biological beings like us, and we need it now.

Descartes’ Turing Test

AI poses anew a centuries-old challenge: What, if anything, distinguishes the human mind from the workings of a machine? This problem traces back at least to René Descartes (1596-1650), who put it as follows: Suppose one comes across a creature that bears the outward appearance of a human being and moves through the world like a human. How are we to determine whether this being has a soul – or a mind – like ours?

Descartes’ problem of other minds reveals that our current dilemma in understanding them is not new, and that this whole topic has deep ties with machine history. The Large Language Models (LLMs) of recent fascination are merely the latest iteration of this challenge.

The cultural influences on Descartes’ thought help us understand why he posed this problem – why he thought it so important to distinguish humans from machines. For many Christians in Europe even before Descartes, machines were a common part of life. As Jessica Riskin details in The Restless Clock (2016), life-like automata of various kinds – humans, animals, angels – were constructed for use in churches and cathedral clocks. Such machines could have an active presence in the world, displaying, as Riskin puts it, ’a vital and even a divine agency.” This perception of agency was thus both attributed both to living beings and to (some) machines.

However, in the 16th century the Reformation, triggered a shift in how the natural world was perceived. In the eyes of religious reformers, machines became, as Riskin elaborates, ‘empty of spirit’ by virtue of their composition merely of mechanical parts. Furthermore, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ – the idea that all of existence’s diverse phenomena can be accounted for as though the world were a complex machine – was gaining prominence. The natural world’s mechanical properties were separated from divinity and agency; thus the life-like automata that once accompanied Christian liturgies were no longer in possession of spirit. Their construction from artificial components made them mere machines lacking agency.

Human uniqueness required something beyond the mere complex organization of matter. So although Descartes, according to Philip Ball, “set out a view of the human body as a wondrous mechanism of pumps, bellows, levers, and cables” (How Life Works, 2023), these components are for Descartes, “animated by the divinely granted rational soul”, which is connected to but independent of the body.

The metaphysical rubber begins hitting the road for Descartes at roughly this juncture. He poses his problem of other minds in his 1637 book Discourse on Method thus: Imagine observing a mechanical body that exhibits all of the outward appearances of a human being – it appears to have the same skeletal and muscular structure, the same layout of veins and arteries, and it exercises the same movements of the body as any human might. How, Descartes asks, can we distinguish between this body and an actual human being, if each is ultimately the product of a complex network of mechanical components ? He then argues they can be distinguished through ‘’two most certain tests”, one of which is a language test. Descartes argues that how human beings use language has a distinctive character, inexplicable in purely mechanical terms and the detection of this distinctive character indicates that we are not observing a machine, but a creature with a mind like our own:

“Of these [tests] the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others : for we may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs… but not that it should arrange them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do” (Emphases added).

So, according to Descartes, one may judge that a being possesses a mind like ours if its language-use meets certain criteria. One is that the subject’s speech is intelligible (‘competent to us’). Another is that it uses speech to express its thoughts (‘declare’ them). The third is that it combines words in an appropriate fashion (‘arrange them variously’ as ‘appositely to reply’). Finally, they should do so habitually, without specialized intelligence (‘as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do’). Descartes also rules out two language conditions as insufficient for inferring the presence of a reasoning mind: the mere output of words (‘emits vocables’), and the mere output of words as a direct result of contact with external stimuli (‘correspondent to the action upon it’). Also, on Riskin’s reading of the history of automata, it was the ‘limitlessness of interactive language’ that stopped a physical mechanism from reproducing human linguistic ability. So ordinary language use, therefore, was granted the status of non-mechanical – attributed instead to, as Descartes would put it, a ‘rational soul’.

Descartes’ initial remarks on the language test were extended by his followers, including Géraud de Cordemoy. Yet, this problem of infinite linguistic generativity from a finite physical being stymied further inquiry until long after the mechanical philosophy’s demise.

Artificial Intelligence Eye Mohamedgu123 Creative Commons 4

Computing Language Computability

Alan Turing’s (1912-54) genius was to prove it a possibility: “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence” (‘On Computable Numbers’). He demonstrated that in principle a single ‘Turing machine’, with a fixed structure, could carry out every computation that can be carried out by any machine. Put simply: infinite generation from finite means is possible. The establishment of general computability theory in the early twentieth century gave us the tools to study this possibility.

Linguists in the early-to-mid twentieth century reformulated Descartes’ problem along lines enabled by computability theory. But just as Descartes first articulated the language test within a problematic framework – the mechanical philosophy from which human language use was exempted – computability theory re-shaped the problem of artificial language use in ways that similarly disturb our efforts at explanation. For computability theory has its own limits. For instance, notice that the study of a finite biological system capable of infinite generativity says nothing about the actual use of the system. So computability theory provides no direct insight into ordinary language use – the original Cartesian problem. Thus, a distinction between competence and performance is drawn: a person might be able to speak with infinitely more variety and facility than they actually do speak. This distinction is crucial. The tools that enable us to study the infinite generativity of a finite biological system, residing within the human brain’s language faculty, are suited only to the task of characterizing the system. The use of this ability in actual linguistic production is another matter entirely. Today, this ‘creative’ aspect of language use occupies ‘linguistic performance’ inquiry. Contemporary linguists and philosophers have formalized Descartes’ and Cordemoy’s observations about human linguistic possibility into three conditions:

Stimulus-Freedom: Humans can produce new expressions that lack any one-to-one relationship with their environments. Generally, stimuli in a human’s local environment appear to elicit utterances, but not cause them. If human language use is not affixed in some determinate, predictable fashion to stimuli, then language use is not directly caused by situations. Among other things, this means that meaningful expressions can be generated about environments far-removed from the local context in which the person speaks; or even about imaginary contexts. The contrast with animal communication is striking here. For animals, communication is restricted to the local context of its use. Human language use is, in sharp contrast, detachable: a pillar of the human intellect may be the ability to detach oneself from the circumstances in which cognitive resources are deployed without reliance on stimuli to do so. In other words, we can think for ourselves.

Unboundedness: Human language use is not confined to a pre-sorted list of words, phrases, or sentences (as it is with LLMs). Instead, there’s no fixed set of utterances humans can produce. This is the infinite productivity of human language – the unlimited combination and re-combination of finite elements into new forms that convey new, independent meanings.

Appropriateness to Circumstance: That human language use is stimulus-free can be revealing when we reflect that utterances are routinely appropriate to the situations in which they are made and coherent to others who hear them. If human language use is both stimulus-free and not caused by situations, this means its relation to one’s environment must be the more obscure relation of appropriateness. Indeed, language use “is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation who might have reacted in similar ways and whose thoughts, evoked by this discourse, correspond to those of the speaker” (Language and Problems of Knowledge, Noam Chomsky, 1988).

Only when all three conditions are simultaneously present does language use take on its special human character. As Chomsky summarized it:

“man has a species-specific capacity, a unique type of intellectual organization which cannot be attributed to peripheral organs or related to general intelligence and which manifests itself in what we may refer to as the ‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use – its property being both unbounded in scope and stimulus-free. Thus Descartes maintains that language is available for the free expression of thought or for appropriate response in any new context and is undetermined by any fixed association of utterances to external stimuli or physiological states (identifiable in any noncircular fashion)”

(Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 1966).

It is a distinctively human trait to use language in a manner that is simultaneously stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent to others. Such language use is neither determined (by a stimulus) nor random (inappropriate). This ability enables people to deploy their intellectual resources to any problem, or to create new problems altogether, putting our shared cognitive capacities to use across contexts at will. It is little wonder then why Descartes assigns such importance to language use in his test for other minds. A being that uses language in only one or two of the three ways described can be explained in mechanical terms – but the presence of all three is something that modern technology lacks the tools to create.

There’s no quick fix for this. First, it’s difficult to adequately specify what counts as ‘appropriateness’ – but we would not do away with it, for some uses of language are inappropriate and incoherent. Likewise, we may be tempted to assign to human language a controlling stimulus, not in the local environment, but in an internal state: perhaps the brain causes language use. Yet, the limits of explanation again disturb our inquiry here, just as they did the Cartesians’: physical causality, even in an internal (brain) state, is deficient as a ‘governing principle’ for language use, since it only explains the physical combination of linguistic elements, not the generation of meaning. Generally speaking, it does not account for the attribution of meaning to a remark. Nor can the term ‘stimulus’ be applied to any internal brain state without emptying the term of its present psychological meaning.

Still from I, Robot

I, Robot image © 20th Century Fox 2004

Back to the Machines

We return to the present, where the need to distinguish humans from machines made in our image remains strong. As Paolo Bory argues, technology firms who use the spectacle of human-machine showdowns, are in effect reintroducing Descartes’ problem to contemporary audiences (Deep New, 2019). While these firms’ aims are not intellectual, the resulting problem is similar, we’re confronted with a machine bearing, in either form or output, the image of humanity, and we’re being guided toward the idea that such machines have minds like ours. Existential doubt and an impetus to redefine humanity are only a few steps away. But do modern AI-enabled machines exhibit the creative aspects of language use? A reasonable (and honest) observation of LLMs reveals that they do not. They are:

Stimulus-Controlled: The output of a Large Language Model is predictably and inextricably tied to the input it receives. It transforms its input into an output by statistically manipulating a dataset. This means three things: (1) LLMs will generate an output having received an input, unless instructed to the contrary; (2) The operation performed over the input value is determined; it’s a product of the internal programming and external prompting; (3) The LLM will not alter the process of transforming an input into an output. So LLMs are fundamentally input-output devices, unlike the creative human mind.

Weakly Unbounded: Though LLMs are currently the subject of an ongoing debate concerning the implications for generative linguistics, the debate is often misframed. To be sure, LLMs can generate new text (converted from existing examples of language use) according to a specific configuration acquired during their training. This may be considered a ‘weak’ unboundedness. However, figures such as Descartes and Cordemoy were not concerned with the organization of strings of words into particular configurations; their concern was with the expression of thought; with the contents of one’s mind. In contemporary generative linguistics the productivity of language use that is being studied is the ability to generate an unbounded array of form/meaning pairs, not ‘the organization of strings’ (‘A Model for Learning Strings Is Not a Model of Language’, Murphy and Leivada, 2022). At least three reasons suggest LLMs do not achieve strong unboundedness. First, the persistence of distortions in their outputs and deficiencies or inconsistencies in their instruction-following indicate that they are not generating form/meaning pairs – showing that they have no concept of the meaning of the linguistic strings they create. Second, their training procedures are highly idealized compared to human language acquisition: they’re not in the world learning how to use language in response to experiences, as humans are. Third, state-of-the-art models like OpenAI’s, fail to represent principles of linguistic structure, but instead work through manipulating already existing texts (Murphy et al., ‘Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure are Not Represented by o3,’ 2025).

Functionally Appropriate Only: That LLMs are stimulus-controlled means that they lack humans’ ‘obscure’ condition of appropriateness in their language use. Being stimulus-controlled means they are not ‘inclined’ in certain ways, but rather, ‘impelled’ to do so. Therefore the question of choosing language for its appropriateness does not arise. The transformation of an input value into an output value based on internal programming and external instructions means that LLMs’ outputs are caused by stimuli, rather than being elicited by them.

For these reasons, we can see that LLMs do not meet the three criteria of Descartes’ test for minds. They fail to demonstrate the creative aspect of language use characteristic of humans.

Colossus Mark 2 codebreaking computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right), 1943

Human Outputs

What is the significance of this for human self-understanding? I have two immediate lines of thought, one directly related to LLMs, and another related more broadly to the study of human nature.

For one thing, this view reframes recent philosophical perspectives on the significance of LLMs. For example, Tobias Rees argued that ChatGPT-3 was just as epoch-breaking as Descartes’ Discourse on Method once was – with engineers having “experimentally established a concept of language at the center of which does not need to be the humans” (Non-Human Words, 2022). Moreover, Jonathan Birch, referencing Descartes, argues that LLMs “add great urgency to a question… what kinds of linguistic behaviour are genuine evidence of conscious experience, and why?” (The Edge of Sentience, 2024). These perspectives take Descartes’ remarks without linking them to the crucial theoretical accommodations of the twentieth century whereby the creative aspects of language use have been formalized. That LLMs do not replicate this way of using language is not particularly surprising – although a reassertion of human intellectual freedom is in order. LLMs are simply a different type of thing.

These ideas also raise a distinction between agency and intellectual freedom. Ball, noting biology’s traditional resistance to the notion of agency, contends that agency is nonetheless observable in commonplace creatures like fruit flies and cockroaches. There it consists of two components: (1) The ability to produce different responses to identical or equivalent stimuli; and (2) The ability to select among such responses in a goal-directed fashion. Yet neither condition entails a creative use of the organism’s cognitive abilities. And remember, human language use is neither deterministic nor random. A fruit fly that flies with random variation in its turning movements is not demonstrating free will. A cockroach that runs from the movement of air in a random path, is not free of the initial stimulus. Moreover, these goal-oriented behaviors have nothing analogous to appropriateness in language use. Finally, neither organism can be said to have a storehouse of thoughts relentlessly being generated throughout their lives; a storehouse that has its contents identified, retrieved, and reassembled for whatever situation or problem by the agent.

The philosophical problem runs deeper. Although some scholars argue that language is not necessary for thought, and is best conceived as a tool for communication, this neglects the original Cartesian problem (‘Language Is Primarily a Tool for Communication Rather than Thought’, Fedorenko et al, 2024). Just as the behaviourist B.F. Skinner stretched concepts like stimulus-control so far as to void them of scientific content, researchers today risk stretching concepts like communication to account for the otherwise ‘useless’ tool of language – a tool that, despite what they say, can be appropriately recruited for the deployment of cognitive and intellectual resources over an unbounded range at will (‘Language Is a ‘Quite Useless’ Tool’, Watumull, 2024).

Much more could be said, but it is clear that contemporary AI does not meet Descartes’ original language challenge, nor do conceptions of the human mind’s freedom advance with sufficient clarity on an ‘computational’ analogy.

Whether future AI systems could replicate true human linguistic behavior is an open question. There are reasons to doubt it. Human language use being neither determined nor random yet appropriate seems to put it beyond the scope of computation per se. The problem is not likely to be evaded by inserting ‘an added element of randomness or noise’ into a system to induce low-level indeterminacy, as Kevin Mitchell tentatively suggests (Free Agents, 2025).

Human beings are willfully creative creatures. “It is remarkable,” James McGilvray writes, “that everyone routinely uses language creatively, and gets satisfaction from doing so” (Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, 2005). The mind “can also be freed from current practical concerns to speculate and imagine.” In all this, humanity is an unusual species – one with an instinctive ability to use its cognitive abilities creatively, and which willingly wanders into what Larry Briskman (echoing Albert Einstein) describes as the darkness, attempting to ‘’shed light where none has been shed before…” (Creative Product and Creative Process in Science and Art, 1980).

This is the species that confronts AI. If we are thrown into self-doubt by existing AI systems that do not have minds, then it is incumbent on us to rescue the human mind from a misunderstanding entirely of our own making.

© Vincent J. Carchidi 2025

Vincent Carchidi is an independent researcher in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, with an interest in artificial intelligence.

Digital Philosophy

Studying Smarter with AI?

Max Gottschlich on sense and nonsense when using AI in academia.

Artificial intelligence is becoming an ubiquitous companion in our lives and institutions. As we strive for greater convenience and efficiency, we’re increasingly outsourcing our intellectual activities in judging, reasoning, and decision-making to what Bruno Liebrucks called ‘automated thinking’. In former times, it was believed that the divine intellect alone could comprehend a large totality at one glance. But nowadays, any AI user can feel like a voluntaristic deity, capable of commanding entire worlds of data at will. AI is especially appealing when thinking is hard work – as it is in education, and particularly at university. In subjects involving large amounts of text, using AI seems to offer a convenient shortcut. But this is only a seductive semblance. Cutting through this illusion requires a quite developed insight into the point of studying at all.

Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Alenoach 2023 Public Domain

The central problem is that the use of AI in the academy poses a threat to independent thinking. It undermines the tension thinking needs for a critical engagement with science and represents the final closure of an attitude of consumption established well before it. Why exert oneself when the hard work can be outsourced? Yet this attitude is contrary to the idea of university education. Being a student means acquiring the current level of knowledge achieved in your chosen discipline, reflecting critically upon it and ultimately perhaps even extending it. All of this takes hard work. Hegel called it the ‘sour labour of the concept’. AI evokes the seductive illusion that such labour is no longer necessary, but what in fact happens is that control is abandoned to automated thinking all too easily.

It is an error to believe that one can avoid thinking for oneself. Indeed it begins already in the lecture hall. The universally accepted method of writing notes during the lecture is practiced less and less. It seems to have become unnecessary. Devices like smartphones evoke the semblance of easy availability. A photo is taken of something which is then regarded as acquired and secured. But then why is taking notes on the lecture so important? Because it represents an elemental activity of acquisition. Each sentence heard has to be actively thought through and instantaneously decided upon: is what has been heard essential in terms of the matter at hand and hence to be recorded, or not? This discriminating judgment separating essential from inessential is itself already an activity of comprehending. It can only be acquired by exercise. Initially this will be difficult and almost everything said will be written down. But improvement makes it easier to distinguish and then the clearer and more pertinent the notes become.

In general neither speaking nor learning can be reduced to automatic operations on signs. This becomes especially obvious in the case of scientific texts. For those not yet initiated into a discipline, these texts will be opaque. The student knows neither the terminology nor the problem at issue nor its relevance. It’s all a lot of signs without meaning. Nevertheless it remains true both for difficult texts and for straightforward ones: the meaning within them has to be revived to new life by speaking, reading, thinking. To that end the student must remain permanently active on their own initiative. From what is read only those meanings can be received that one is capable of evoking in oneself. The more we occupy ourselves with the matter the more concrete our comprehension and the more meaningful the texts become.

Growth Thrives on Resistance

AI promises the attractive possibility of an abbreviation where none is available. The illusion of the easy availability of texts arbitrarily generated and arranged is highly seductive, but this semblance is the greatest obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge and finding new information. Whoever wishes to avoid personal engagement with the matter, including the experience of failure, of failure to understand, whoever prefers not to exercise their own insight against the resistance of a text that initially appears completely opaque, denies themselves the possibility of genuine insight and new knowledge. Growth does not happen without resistance. We know this from the physical powers of our bodies and it holds just as much for the mental capabilities of our minds. The body degenerates without gravity and in the weightlessness of automatically generated stocks of information the mind decays.

If this engagement is abandoned to AI then the mind falls into a double dependency. There is firstly a dependency on algorithms which fundamentally do nothing more than combine signs according to probabilities. Reliance on the data material currently accessible on the net also has its dangers. Such dependence represents the opposite of critical thinking. In contrast to this kind of automated thinking, the critical kind is characterised by its capacity to ground itself, reflecting upon the sources and presuppositions of its knowledge and steering its own development in an awareness of its path forward and its goal. This critical thinking is precisely what should be cultivated in university study.

The meaningful utilisation of AI, for example as translation support, thus requires that we always be even ‘better’ than the AI software and that means being able to assess and evaluate the quality of the results it delivers. This sovereignty of critical judgment can only be achieved by autonomous thinking. AI’s role in this could be that of a vehicle making it easier to traverse a known distance. But the goal of the journey must be known in advance as well as the pathway to it.

Courage for Autonomous Thinking

A good knowledge of a foreign language is a great advantage in using translation software. As a rule each sentence delivered by AI will be refined from knowledge of terminology and semantics also with the help of software. Another example: obviously AI can be used as a source of inspiration in the preparation for a meeting. This can save time in a hectic business day. Even here though it is necessary to remain in overall command of the procedure and not to abandon control to the machine without a critical awareness.

Briefly then the use of AI as a substitute for the direct, personal engagement with a problem undermines the autonomy of the student in dealing with the given issue. Academic study is not about reaching a conclusion with the minimum effort possible.

Against the temptation to make life easy and comfortable for oneself with AI stands the impetus to the freedom of an autonomous critical thinking. Every academic study lives on the resilience of thinking. Immanuel Kant’s maxim of enlightenment has lost none of its force: Sapere aude! or in English “Have the courage to use your own understanding!” This courage is called upon more now than ever to avoid succumbing to the temptation of the illusion of easy accessibility with AI. What Kant means is clearly that the mind must free itself from bondage. That can only happen when its thinking is founded on the authority of reason and not on the tutelage of ‘intelligent’ systems.

© Dr Max Gottschlich 2025

Max Gottschlich is at the Institute for Practical Philosophy/Ethics at the Catholic Private University of Linz in Austria.

Digital Philosophy

Affirmative Action for Androids

Jimmy Alfonso Licon asks, when should we prioritise android rights?

We should begin examining the question of whether there should be affirmative action for androids by first answering a couple of prior questions. Would androids count morally anyway? And what conditions, if any, would justify affirmative action for androids?

It’s easy to dismiss the possibility that androids, being machines, would deserve any greater moral consideration than a cellphone; but in any future world where androids have become self-aware, capable of suffering, and have projects and values which matter to them, to not give them moral rights would mean that the androids would be second-class citizens at best, and slaves at worst. Such an arrangement wouldn’t survive: many humans would feel bad for the androids, and the androids would resist.

So what are we to think morally about androids?

Do Androids Count Morally?

For something to qualify as the subject of fairness considerations, it must first have moral standing. As the philosopher Christopher Morris explains:

“[The] metaphor of the moral community is an interesting one. It makes possession of moral standing analogous to the political status of citizenship. Like membership in the political community, membership in ‘the moral community’ gives one a particular status that non-members lack, in particular a set of rights. [Something] has moral standing if it is owed duties. This understanding of moral standing connects it with the notion of legal standing; both are conceptions of a status that entitles the holder to something.”

(The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom Beauchamp and R.G. Frey, p.262, 2011)

To put the point simply: to have moral standing is to deserve moral consideration for one’s own sake.

So it must be that for androids to be appropriate recipients of affirmative action, they must have moral standing. Androids of the conscious kind we have in mind would likely count as persons. And if androids were persons – self-aware, rational, capable of suffering, with a point of view – they would deserve moral treatment on par with humans. So if androids are persons, they would deserve fair treatment.

Some people suspect androids aren’t the kind of thing that could, even in principle, have moral standing. They think that androids, unlike humans, aren’t the kind of thing that could warrant moral concern.

Mechanical Man © Bill Mcconkey/Wellcome Collection

One intuition at work in the background here is that androids are synthetic, and thus couldn’t be persons. However, it isn’t clear why their physical constitution should bear on the question of their moral status. Even if they’re made of silicon and metal, while humans are made of meat, these differences appear incidental to the question of their moral status. Put differently: if androids and humans are relevantly similar ‘on the inside’ – in terms of having a sophisticated self-awareness – then the question of their material constitution is immaterial. And there clearly are logically possible androids that are similar enough to humans psychologically to warrant moral treatment. (We’ll put aside whether androids like this are technologically possible; instead, we’re evaluating the ethical implications if they are.)

There is a well-known thought experiment devised by Daniel Dennett in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained. It will illustrate why we should take the idea seriously. Suppose you have a rare cellular disease that’s slowly killing you. Upon consulting a doctor, it turns out there is a radical new treatment available. Slowly, over the course of time, your body is to be replaced bit-by-bit with synthetic parts, including your brain. The change will happen gradually, over the course of months and years, so that from your point of view the changes are almost imperceptible. From your point of view, you remain you, with the same memories, values, personality, and so forth. At the end of the transformation, even though you now have a constitution similar to that of an android, it seems from your perspective that you’ve simply survived.

Presumably this story isn’t impossible. It should also be clear that you preserved your moral standing throughout the procedure. But if so, it cannot be that your moral standing is a function of the kind of stuff you’re made of. The same holds for androids: if they have a similar psychology to humans, then they warrant similar moral considerations.

We are thus left with the distinct possibility that androids could warrant moral consideration if they have the right psychology. Androids like this would deserve to be treated as morally on par with their human counterparts. This opens the possibility that androids would require affirmative action.

Would Androids Need Affirmative Action?

Even granting that such androids have similar moral standing to humans, there is still the issue of what would justify special treatment for androids. If anything, their similar moral standing would appear to buck against special treatment through policies such as affirmative action.

There are a couple of reasons to think a compelling case for android affirmative action can be made. Firstly, that androids are made worse by the actions of humans; second, that humans are not psychologically disposed to treat androids fairly, even though androids and humans have similar moral standing. But we should begin by distinguishing between different varieties of affirmative action.

When people hear the phrase ‘affirmative action’, they often construe it in terms of prioritising identity over qualification. For instance, in the case of racial affirmative action, it is tempting to frame it as a policy favoring a black applicant over a white applicant even if the former is less qualified than the latter. This is why when the subject of affirmative action is broached, people often express opposition to the policy through the idea that a company should hire ‘the best man for the job’. But this is a woefully poor understanding of the policy. It’s true that on a strong version of racial affirmative action, minority applicants are favored over white applicants in virtue of their identity, even if they’re less qualified; but hardly anyone defends strong affirmative action.

Nevertheless, even if we think ‘the best man for the job’ is a good rule of thumb (antiquated phrase aside), it doesn’t tell us how to handle cases where, say, black and white applicants are equally qualified for a job. On weak affirmative action, the minority status of an applicant favors them only to the extent that it breaks this tie. On this weak version of affirmative action, we end up with qualified applicants for the job, yet past and on-going discrimination encourage us to favor the minority candidate when there’s a tie.

While some may balk at this for still running afoul of fairness, they often balk because they think appeals to minority status as a tie-breaker remain unfair. It would be better in such cases to, say, flip a coin, they might claim. But this would only be right to the extent that the applicants are on equal footing in every other relevant respect. Those who favor affirmative action reject this assumption: they hold that centuries of discrimination toward minorities put them at a current disadvantage, either because of historical trends that are still felt, or because of disadvantages embedded in the current system. Weak affirmative action aims to correct this.

Critics might argue that such unfairness is no longer a large enough factor to warrant favoring minorities in the workplace. This response is revealing, since the implication is that if significant discrimination were still a fact, there would be a good case for weak affirmative action. As the philosopher Alan Goldman writes:

“The rule for hiring the most competent was justified as part of a right to equal opportunity to succeed through socially productive effort, and on grounds of increased welfare for all members of society. Since it is justified in relation to a right to equal opportunity, and since the application of the rule may simply compound injustices when opportunities are unequal elsewhere in the system, the creation of more equal opportunities takes precedence when in conflict with the rule for awarding positions. Thus short-run violations of the rule are justified to create a more just distribution of benefits by applying the rule itself in future years”

(Justice and Reverse Discrimination, pp.164-65, 1979, my emphasis).

So the standard objection to affirmative action – that it unfairly ignores the merits of the candidates – doesn’t have the same bite against weak affirmative action. On a weak version of affirmative action, candidates must be equally qualified before considering the different paths each candidate took before applying for the job. The objection would have greater bite if each candidate had to overcome similar obstacles to be considered for the job; but that often isn’t the case. The devil is in the details; but this at least shows that weak affirmative action need not be unfair in favoring members of disadvantages groups who likely face background disadvantages.

These points have already been made in the debate over affirmative action for historically discriminated minorities; but they could equally apply to androids. If the system was rigged against androids who have moral standing, then we may need a policy change to address the resultant inequalities.

But why think androids in the future might one day require affirmative action? There are a couple of reasons.

First, we imagined a world where androids were created to serve humans, but were eventually freed from mere servitude because of the recognition that they had acquired the same moral standing as their human counterparts. It is plausible androids would be discriminated against in such a world because humans fear they will be cognitively superior. Better to keep them down than to risk switching places with them!

This is a common theme in history: we humans have an impulse to keep our boot on the throats of those whom we fear are a danger to us. There are numerous more mundane examples of this, too; from supervisors fearing they will be replaced by more capable employees, to parents who envy their children for doing the things they wished they had done but couldn’t. It wouldn’t be surprising then to find future humans motivated to band together to keep androids from forcing some humans into the secondary roles they once occupied. Moreover, it isn’t unthinkable that the humans would be better at politically organizing than the minority androids, so that they remain in power over the even if they had cognitive disadvantages.

Second, humans likely won’t generally trust androids. (This doesn’t bode well for future societal prosperity: societies with high levels of interpersonal trust tend to be far more prosperous than societies with low levels: see Why Culture Matters Most, David C. Rose, 2018.) Indeed, there is something unnerving about being stared at by an android. Psychological research on human-android interactions reveals that humans are highly sensitive to subtle changes in gaze that even being slightly off can trigger a sense of unease. This is perhaps because gaze is often an unwitting guide to the gazer’s goals and aims. This is lacking in the android gaze. So this sense of unease or alienness is likely to be a large obstacle to robust relationships between humans and androids.

This point dovetails nicely with the ‘uncanny valley’ effect: robots that don’t resemble humans at all aren’t unlikeable; but as they become more humanlike, while still being distinctly non-human, they are viewed as increasingly unlikeable, before they eventually resemble humans enough that their likeableness rebounds. As a couple of AI researchers discovered:

“[As] faces become more human than mechanical, they began to be perceived as frankly unlikeable. Finally, as faces became nearly human, likeability sharply rebounded to a final positive end point… although the most human-like robots may be more likeable … they may occupy a precarious position at which small faults in their humanness might send the social interaction tumbling… the Uncanny Valley is a real influence on humans’ perceptions of robots as social partners, robustly influencing not only humans’ conscious assessments of their own reactions, but also able to penetrate more deeply to modify their actual trust-related social behavior with robot counterparts”

(‘Navigating a Social World with Robot Partners: A Quantitative Cartography of the Uncanny Valley’, Cognition 146, Maya B. Mathur and David B. Reichling, 2016, my emphasis).

One obvious solution to human-android interactions would be to make androids more humanlike; but there remains the issue of what to do when we’re in the lower parts of the uncanny valley. If an android has enough cognitive sophistication to have a comparable moral standing to humans, it would be a moral tragedy to discriminate against it on the basis of how it looks.

Even after passing through the uncanny valley, humans face further difficulties in adjusting to social interactions with androids. Just knowing that an individual is an android will likely be enough to put many people on edge. Even if we can adjust to regular interactions with androids, this adjustment will likely be slow. We then face the challenge of treating androids fairly in the meantime.

Android by Cecilia Mou 2025

Countering Instinctive Biases

We aren’t blameworthy for our psychology any more than we’re blameworthy for our height, and our foreseen distrust of androids would be so deeply rooted in evolutionary processes that it will likely be difficult to overcome. And if we lack control over something, it is difficult to see how we could be culpable for it. As Kant writes, “[If] the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings” (Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 1793, trans Allen Wood and George di Giovanni). Kant is stating a principle that philosophers have dubbed ‘ought implies can’: to say that we morally ought to do something implies that we have an ability to do it. It makes no sense to claim that humans have a moral obligation to solve global hunger by snapping our fingers, for instance. By the same token, we cannot claim humans morally ought not discriminate against androids, since it appears we will be incapable of this because of our evolutionary history and subsequent psychology. However, one way – though not the only way – we can fulfill our moral obligations to androids with similar moral standing to humans is by an indirect route: weak affirmative action for androids.

Even putting aside issues of justice in the debate over weak affirmative action for androids, employers would have a reason to prefer android candidates over equally qualified human ones: they probably overcame a great number of obstacles to even be in contention for the job in the first place. Consider: if candidates Adrian and Brian look equally qualified on paper for a position, but Adrian had to overcome greater obstacles to gain those qualifications, then Adrian would likely be better at the job than Brian, since to overcome the bias he faced, Adrian would have to have been that much better. As Dan Moller explains, when faced “with a pick of accountants at a firm, sound epistemology overwhelmingly suggests barreling past attractive, polite workers and urgently seeking out the ugliest, shortest, most boorish one available” (Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2), 2013).

There is empirical evidence showing that factors like attractiveness and height impact people’s judgments about merit and ability to an amazing degree, and furthermore, that these qualities are often (though not always) irrelevant to one’s job duties and should be discounted. Once we discount them, it is clear that job candidates lacking these qualities but having equivalent achievements likely are better qualified for the job than their more outwardly appealing competitors. The same applies to androids. So not only are issues of fairness at play to suggest weak affirmative action for androids may be justified – when job candidates are equally qualified, but some come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, there are practical reasons to think that the disadvantaged candidates are better qualified, further justifying weak affirmative action for androids.

There is a further reason that may support weak android affirmative action: we have stronger moral obligations to androids than we would otherwise, due to the fact that we have caused them to exist. This is for the simple reason that parents brought them into existence. The same logic applies to androids because they were created by humans, and yet face their discrimination.

© Dr Jimmy Alfonso Licon 2025

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Arizona State University.

Digital Philosophy

Is VR Meaningful Escapism?

Amir Haj-Bolouri enquires into possible meaning through technology.

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is considered the perfect technology for extending the experiences we have in the physical world. Through it, we can represent and simulate the past, the present and the future. And through the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, modern VR experiences are not only realistically convincing, but also smart. As such, IVR experiences can increasingly be a creative product of human imagination. Moreover, the IVR experience is ‘immersive’ in the way that it turns the user into a ‘being-in-the-virtual-world’ – that is, an embodied avatar, dynamically present, and capable of accomplishing ‘magic’ – teleportation across virtual worlds, walking through walls, hiding inside furniture, or generally, exercising the god-like power of being able to define the (virtual) reality around us. The immersive effect is arguably dependent on the sensory configuration of IVR technology, in that it provides an enclosed visual field for the user, headphones that cancel out the sound of the outside world, and haptic devices that can provide sensory feedback loops of touch, pain, heat or cold.

However, with the possibilities that IVR increasingly affords us also come existential questions, and thoughts about the distinction between what’s real and what is a layer of illusion. One might wonder where reality begins and ends, especially when IVR experiences will begin to extend the world we engage with on a daily basis. David Chalmers argues in Reality+ (2022) that virtual reality is genuine reality because we can live meaningful lives there; and increasingly, we will. Subsequently, Chalmers invokes questions such as: What is reality, anyway? How can we live a meaningful life? And how do we know there is an external world independent of human experience?

Of course, through the ages, philosophers have questioned our conceptions of reality. One famous example is provided by Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981), of a ‘brain in a vat’. Here he raises the possibility that your world is a simulation created by some powerful technology controlled by a mad scientist. Other contemporary philosophers, such as Nick Bostrom, actively argue that we are living in a simulation – a hypothesis that, among other things, questions the tendency to rely upon a materialistic worldview that identifies ‘reality’ through its tangibility and perceivability.

I don’t think we’re living in a simulation. Nor do I buy into the idea that we should be concerned about what is real or not, since, at the end of the day, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it in his 1927 masterwork Being & Time, we are all ‘being-in-the-world’ – that is to say, we’re already engaged with what we perceive real enough, in order to live a meaningful life.

Something that reinforces this claim is the fleeting feeling we all have when we want to escape reality due to unwanted experiences, uncomfortable feelings, pain, anxiety, boredom etc. This desire is generally referred to as ‘escapism’ – it urges us to engage with a broader ‘imaginary’ world that allows our mind to travel beyond ‘reality’. This is arguably an inborn human need – to escape the world in order to search for meaning, or create meaning, in worlds that matter to our self-perceptions. IVR facilitates such fantasy worlds. But are IVR experiences truly meaningful or not; and if they are, how?

Meaningfulness in the ‘World’

Before addressing the question whether or not the IVR experience is meaningful escapism, first I intend to do what academics do best, that is, to provide definitions of the words central to their argument. I will start by defining the words ‘meaning’, ‘meaningfulness’, and ‘world’, all of which I frame within a phenomenological perspective.

Exploring the Universe in VR © NASA/Chris Gunn Creative Commons 2

Phenomenology, a philosophical approach invented by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), focuses on our lived experiences as a way of understanding the world. Husserl’s disciple and successor in the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger (1889–1976), coined the German term Dasein (‘being there’) to refer to people, in order to stress our immersion within our world. ‘World’, in turn, Heidegger claimed, refers not a singular place, but to many specific worlds – for instance, the world of practices, the world of family relations, the world of imagination, and so on. According to Heidegger, we create and find networks of meaning that are fit for the practices in which we engage. According to this perspective, meaning is an aspect of our practices, as that which makes our experience of our actions intelligible to us. In other words, ‘meaning’ is the intelligibility to Dasein of an experience situated within a given world.

Following the phenomenological tradition, I will agree that ‘meaningfulness’ is the subjective quality of experienced meaning. However, in order for it to be meaningful, the experience cannot simply be intelligible : the experience must also matter to us. The experience must be significant for the ‘lifeworld’ of the person. The lifeworld of a person consists of all those things about which they have feelings, emotions, and concerns – all of which comprise the person’s mood. According to Heidegger, ‘mood’ is the various ways in which Dasein (a person) can experience meaningfulness. As Heidegger points out, the starting points of inquiry into meaningful experience should be what Dasein cares about when worrying, and what Dasein celebrates when rejoicing. An experience becomes meaningful for a person when their mood and the experience are aligned with their lifeworld – with what they care about. In other words, a meaningful experience is something that is of specific concern for Dasein, something that someone cares about – for example, what matters to him/her personally, or to his/her practice. As such, both care (being concerned for something) and mood disclose how an experience is meaningful for a person within their world. However, how we experience meaningfulness across worlds or within different worlds is not totally clear. And now IVR offers new worlds, and new ways of escaping the world we’re situated in.

Escaping the World

Attempting to escape the world in which we find ourselves is a phenomenon witnessed across all media. For instance, in the sci fi action movie Escape from New York (1982), we follow Kurt Russell’s character, Snake Plissken, an ex-soldier and current federal convict who is given twenty-four hours to rescue the President of the USA from a New York now turned into a prison filled with violence and chaos. Plissken wants to redeem himself by rescuing the President, but he must escape NY to do so. As such, the movie provides an excellent illustration of how difficult yet simultaneously urgent and tempting it is to escape the world!

The urge for escapism is, as I say, arguably an intrinsic feature of Dasein. The word ‘escape’ has its origin in the Latin excappare, which literally means ‘to get out of one’s cape’ – in other words, leaving your pursuer holding just your cape. Escapism is often thought of as a mental diversion from unpleasant or boring aspects of life, typically conducted through imagination or entertainment.

According to a ‘negative’ view of escapism, people run away from the reality at hand due to low life satisfaction. In this vein the psychologist Andrew Evans (This Virtual Life: Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World, 2001) classifies escapism as a type of avoidance of real world problems in a way that may lead to procrastination, denial, addiction to what we escape to, a psychosis of confusion between what is real and what is not, and possibly even suicide. On the other hand, there’s also a ‘positive’ view of escapism, which sees how imagination and technology allow people to escape from a narrow world into a broader one, allowing their minds to travel to places their body cannot go.

The stereotypical view of the negative form of escapism is that it occurs when people escape into a safer world to avoid difficult decisions or actions but this isn’t the whole story. Sometimes it’s healthy to provide a safe non-real space to escape to. A good example of this is when people escape from the physical to the virtual world for training purposes – for instance, in learning how to pilot a plane, or a submarine, or to perform medical procedures.

For more art by Cameron Gray, please visit parablevisions.com and facebook.com/camerongraytheartist

Escaping to the Virtual World

The success of a virtual world can be determined by the degree of the sense of being-there it allows. A good virtual world experience provides people with a sense of belonging, and activities that are worthwhile, while being in forms that transcend the constraints of the physical world. Here people find themselves free to explore and express themselves without being restricted by the laws of physics.

There are many examples of how IVR can enlarge a person’s experience, whether it’s in the freedom of falling from a building without any injuries, to forms of community that feel meaningful for people affected by loneliness in the physical world. IVR can also positively change human behaviour by enabling safe spaces to allow users to experiment with their identities, thoughts, and ideas without risking embarrassment or adverse consequences. This includes avatars for people with disabilities, or activities reducing prejudices and increased empathy towards others – such as intensifying compassion for homeless people by living as a homeless person in the virtual world. Moreover, IVR enables people to shift from mindlessness in the physical world to mindfulness in the virtual world, to calm down and momentarily forget about difficulties and unwanted feelings. It’s when users disconnect themselves entirely from the physical world that escape to the virtual world can have downsides, such as an unhealthy addiction to VR, or an alteration of one’s perception of what’s real. On the other hand, VR fascinates people because it means they can escape their physical world identities and experiment with alternatives. But what would characterize the IVR experience as meaningful escapism?

Virtual Dasein: Being-in-the-Virtual-World

One way of answering the question of what characterizes the IVR experience as meaningful escapism is by extending Heidegger’s notion of Dasein to the notion of ‘Virtual Dasein’, or ‘Being-in-the-virtual-world’.

Brain in vat © Was a bee Public Domain

Escaping to the virtual world does make it possible for us to extend our feelings, perception, and reality. As such, in a limited Heideggarian sense, we are ‘thrown into’ the virtual world of IVR. It’s a world that allows us to feel present, embodied and active, while being able to override some of the constraints of the physical world. The feeling of virtually ‘being-there’ is associated with being engaged with and familiar with the virtual world. In that mode of being, the IVR experience can be characterized as a meaningful escapism. More specifically, we can get close to meaningfulness through how we ‘sense’ the IVR experience as meaningful. If the user feels that the IVR experience is meaningful, , the user ‘senses’ and so experiences how it is meaningful for him or her.

I propose that the characteristics of a meaningful IVR experience are:

• A Sense of Content. This refers to the quality of meaning that’s attributed to the IVR experience through the exhilarating feeling of escaping a social world, and breaking free of some of the constraints of the physical world (such as walking through walls, teleportation, flying, not dying from impacts, etc). It also includes the feeling of flow that emerges through the abundance of power to affect the environment in IVR.

• A Sense of Familiarity. This refers to the network of meanings that extends our sense of familiarity to the IVR experience. New networks are discovered in a new world where we recognize new meanings, through re-orientation in the syntactic dimension (signs and symbols), the semantic dimension (language), and in the pragmatic dimension (IVR actions and practices).

• A Sense of Mood. This refers to meaning depending on the moods we have in the IVR experience. On the one hand, the enacting of meaning is through how we imagine the IVR world (here we bring a mood into the IVR experience). On the other hand, escaping a world into one in which we’re empowered stimulates our imagination (here we bring a sense of mood from the IVR experience).

• A Sense of Care. There is an actualization of meaning through the agency possibilities of a world (known as its affordances). But how agency possibilities can be actualized through IVR is interwoven with a sense of care for the IVR world, in terms of how that world matters to us, including how by escaping the physical world we can actualize meaning in ways that are not possible in the physical.

Escaping Virtual Reality?

Poster © AVCO Embassy Pictures 1981

In Escape from New York, Snake Plissken wanted to escape federal prison by entering a second prison, New York City, from which he had to escape in turn. We may one day find ourselves in a similar dilemma: we escaped one world just to enter another which we might wish to escape from in turn.

The idea of a life lived online, as being-in-the-virtual-world, outside of regular society, is seen by most as dangerous and unhealthy. Yet, as virtual reality becomes a part of peoples’ lived experiences, more and more people will prefer to spend a majority of their time in virtual worlds, and thus reinforce Virtual Dasein, until they’re unhealthily addicted to the escapism. As Evans points out, when escapism goes too far, it has negative effects on the essential fabric of real life, which effects make us want to escape the escapism. In other words, we might come to want to escape Immersive Virtual Reality. But where do we escape to? What are our options, when we might not want to become trapped in the physical world again either – the place we decided to escape from to begin with?

Perhaps this question cannot be answered through a scholarly inquiry, but instead through a Snake Plissken spin-off movie called Escape from Immersive Virtual Reality ?

© Dr Amir Haj-Bolouri 2025

Amir Haj-Bolouri is a Full Professor of Informatics with a specialization in work-integrated learning at University West, Sweden.

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Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar’s Paradox

Slavoj Žižek uncovers political paradoxes of lying.

The so-called Liar Paradox – statements like ‘everything I say is false’ – has been endlessly debated by philosophers from Ancient Greece and India to the twentieth century. The paradox is that if this statement is true then it is false (everything I say is not false), and vice versa. Instead of getting lost in the endless network of arguments and counter-arguments, I will turn to Jacques Lacan (1901-81), who offers a unique solution by way of distinguishing between the content of an enunciation and the subjective stance implied by this enunciation: between the content of what you are saying and the stance implied by what you are saying. The moment we introduce this distinction, we immediately see that a statement like ‘everything I say is false’ can itself be true or false. ‘I am always lying’ can either correctly or incorrectly render the subjective experience of my entire existence as inauthentic, a fake. However, the opposite also holds: the statement ‘I know I am a piece of shit’ can in itself be true in its content, but false at the level of the subjective stance it pretends to render, since even saying it implies that I somehow demonstrate that I am NOT fully ‘a piece of shit’ – that I am at least honest about myself… But our reply to this should be a paraphrase of the well-known Groucho Marx line: “You act like a piece of shit and admit that you are a piece of shit, but this will not deceive us – you are a piece of shit!”

Why lose time with such endlessly debated paradoxes? Because in our ‘post-truth’ era of Rightist populism, the practice of relying on this paradox has reached its extreme. So today’s political discourse cannot be understood without the distinction between the enunciation and the enunciated.

Let’s jump in medias res [Latin for ‘in the midst of things’, Ed]. After Trump was reelected in 2024, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who retained her seat in Congress) publicly appealed to those of her voters who also voted for Trump to explain why they made such a strange and inconsistent vote. She was told that the predominant reason was that compared with the manipulative calculations of Kamala Harris and other Democrats, she and Trump both appeared more sincere. This is also why, when Trump is caught in inconsistencies or outright lying, such disclosures only help him: his partisans take even his lies as a proof that he acts like a normal human being who does not just rely on his expert advisers but bluntly speaks his mind. In our terms, the very inconsistencies and lies in the enunciated content of Trump’s statements function as a sign that, at the level of the enunciation’s stance, Trump speaks as an authentic and sincere human being. This proves that the implied stance of enunciation can also be a fake.

Strategic Lying

Subjective truth is opposed to factual truth in a way similar to the opposition between hysteria and obsessional neurosis: the first one is a truth in the guise of a lie, and the second one a lie in the guise of truth. A hysteric tells the truth in the guise of a lie in that what is said is not literally true, but the lie expresses in a false form an authentic complaint; while what an obsessional neurotic claims is literally true, but it is a truth which serves a lie.

Today, both Rightist populists and liberal-Leftist advocates of Political Correctness practice these two complementary forms of lying. First, both groups resort to factual lies when these lies serve what they perceive as the higher Truth of their Cause. For instance, some religious fundamentalists advocate ‘lying for Jesus’: in order to prevent the horrible crime of abortion, say, one is allowed to propagate false scientific ‘truths’ about fetuses and the medical dangers of abortion; or, in order to support breast-feeding, one is allowed to present as a scientific fact that abstention from breast-feeding causes breast-cancer. Anti-immigrant populists shamelessly circulate non-verified stories about rapes and other crimes by refugees in order to give credibility to their ‘insight’ that refugees pose a threat to ‘our way of life’. All too often, PC liberals proceed in a similar way for the opposite purpose: they pass in silence over actual differences between the ways of life of refugees and Europeans, since mentioning them might be seen as promoting Eurocentrism. And recall the case of Rotherham in the UK where, a decade or so ago, police discovered that a gang of Pakistani youths had been systematically grooming then raping over a thousand poor white young girls: the data were initially ignored or downplayed in order not to trigger Islamophobia.

The opposite strategy is also widely practiced on both poles. Anti-immigrant populists not only propagate factual lies, but also cunningly use bits of factual truth to add the aura of veracity to their racist lies; and PC partisans also practice this lying with truth in their fight against racism and sexism; they mostly quote checkable facts, but often give them a wrong twist. The populist Right displaces onto an external enemy their authentic frustration and sense of loss, while the PC Left uses its true points (detecting sexism and racism in language) to re-assert its moral superiority (and thus prevent true social-economic change). The supreme irony is here that the populist Right practices historicist relativism much more brutally than the Left, even though they condemn it in their theory (if their self-justification deserves that word). However, the correct stance is not simply to stick to the factual truth: in some sense, there are ‘alternate facts’ – although not, of course, in the sense that the Holocaust did or did not happen. (Incidentally, all Holocaust-revisionists that I know of, from David Irving on, claim to be verifying data in a strict empirical way – none of them evokes postmodern relativism!)

Data present a vast and impenetrable domain, and we always approach them from what hermeneutics calls a certain ‘horizon of understanding’, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that – stories – which is to say, combinations of selected data into consistent narratives, rather than photographic reproductions of reality. For example, an anti-Semitic historian could easily write an overview of the role of Jews in the social life of Germany in the 1920s, pointing out how entire professions (lawyers, journalists, artists) were numerically dominated by Jews – all more or less true, but clearly in the service of a lie. The most efficient lies are lies with truth – and especially lies which reproduce only factual data.

Take the history of a country: one can tell it from a political standpoint, focusing on the vagaries of political power; or one can focus on economic development; on ideological struggles; on popular misery and protest… each of these approaches could be factually accurate – but they are not ‘true’ in the same emphatic sense. There is nothing ‘relativist’ about the fact that human history is always told from a certain standpoint, sustained by certain ideological interests. The difficult thing is to show how these interested standpoints are not all equally true – some are more ‘truthful’ than others. For example, if one tells the story of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of the suffering of those oppressed by it – that is, if we are led in our telling by an interest in universal human emancipation – this is not just a matter of a different subjective standpoint: such a telling of history is immanently ‘more true’, since it describes more adequately the dynamics of the social totality which gave birth to Nazism. All ‘subjective interests’ are not the same, not only because some are ethically preferable to others, but also because ‘subjective interests’ do not stand outside social totality, but are themselves moments of social totality, formed by active (or passive) participants in social processes. That’s why there is no ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ reporting on the Middle East war, nor on the Russian aggression against Ukraine: one can tell the truth about it only from the engaged standpoint of a victim. The title of Jürgen Habermas’s early masterpiece Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) is today perhaps more apt than ever.

Jürgen Habermas and Mladen Dolar by Venantius J. Pinto

Passive & Active Lying

To further elaborate this dimension, we should mobilize another notion which plays a crucial role in the analysis of today’s ideology: the notion of interpassivity, introduced by Robert Pfaller.

Interpassivity is the opposite of Hegel’s notion of List der Vernunft (the ‘cunning of Reason’), in which I am active through the other: Hegel’s notion is that can remain passive, sitting comfortably in the background, while the Other does it for me. Instead of hitting the metal with a hammer, the machine can do it for me; instead of turning the mill myself, water can do it. Here I achieve my goal by way of interposing between me and the object on which I work another natural object. But the same can happen at the interpersonal level. Instead of directly attacking my enemy, I can instigate a fight between him and another person, so that I can comfortably watch the two of them destroying each other.

In the case of interpassivity, on the contrary, I am passive through the other: I concede to the other the passive aspect – the enjoying – of my experience, while I myself remain actively engaged: I can continue to work in the evening, while the VCR passively enjoys the TV for me; I can make financial arrangements for the deceased’s fortune while the weepers mourn.

This brings us to the notion of false activity: people not only act in order to change something, they can also act in order to prevent something happening, so that nothing will change. Therein resides the typical strategy of the obsessional neurotic: he is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening. Say, in a group situation in which some tension threatens to explode, the obsessional talks all the time in order to prevent the awkward moment of silence which would compel the participants to openly confront the underlying tension. Similarly, in psychoanalytic treatment, obsessional neurotics talk constantly, overflowing the analyst with anecdotes, dreams, insights. This incessant activity is sustained by the underlying fear that if they stop talking for a moment, the analyst will ask them the question that truly matters. In other words, they talk in order to keep the analyst immobile. Even in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate, even if unproductively. People intervene all the time, attempting to ‘do something,’ academics participate in meaningless debates; the truly difficult thing is to step back and to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence – to engage us in a dialogue just to make it sure our ominous passivity is broken. The endless emphasis on the necessity to act, to do something, often betrays the subjective stance of not doing anything. The more we talk about the impending ecological catastrophe, the less we are ready to do. Against such an interpassive mode, in which we are active all the time to ensure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step in opposing it is to withdraw into passivity and refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity – for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

Things get even more complex with the process of apologizing. If I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer him a sincere apology; and the proper thing for him to then do is to say something like, “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!” The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the entire process of offering it: ‘you owe me no apology’ can only be said after I do offer an apology. So although formally nothing happens – the offer of apology is proclaimed unnecessary – there is a gain at the end of the process: perhaps, even, the friendship is saved. An apology succeeds precisely through being proclaimed superfluous. A similar strategy is at work in apologizing when a quick admission can serve as an excuse to avoid a real apology (“I said I’m sorry, so shut up and stop annoying me!”).

The Chinese Communist Party (among many other political agents) provided a similar model of manipulating the gap between enunciated and enunciation. It learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: that full public recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ of the regime will only bring the entire system down. Those crimes thus have to remain unacknowledged. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ are denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the devastating famine that followed; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role as 70% positive, 30% negative, is enshrined as the official formula. But this assessment deliberately functions as a formal conclusion which renders any further elaboration superfluous: even though Mao was 30% bad, the full symbolic impact of this admission is neutralized, so that he can continue to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote.

We are dealing here with a clear case of fetishistic disavowal: although we know very well that Mao made massive errors and caused immense suffering, his figure is kept magically untainted by these facts. In this way, the Chinese Communists can have their cake and eat it, and the radical changes brought about by economic liberalization can be combined with the continuation of the same Party rule as before.

The procedure is here that of neutralization (or, rather, what Freud called Isolierung – ‘insulation’): you admit horrible things, but you prohibit all subjective reactions to it (horror at what went on). Millions of dead become a neutral fact. When, today, Israeli (and some Western) media report on the destruction of Gaza, do they not practice a similar neutralization? Hamas terrorists torture and kill, while the victims of IDF are just liquidated or annihilated…

Image © Miles Walker 2025 Please visit mileswalker.com

Rumours & Lies

Then there are rumours, which function in a strange way with regard to truth: the factual truth of a rumour is suspended, or, rather, treated as immaterial (“I don’t know if it is true, but this is what I heard…”), while the content of the rumour retains its full symbolic efficiency – we enjoy it, retelling it with passion (I rely here on Rumours, by Mladen Dolar, 2024). So it’s not the same as the fetishist disavowal, which is more like, “I know very well it’s not true, but nonetheless, I believe in it”, but, rather its inversion – something like, “I cannot say that I believe this is true, this really happened; but nonetheless, here’s what I know.”

With regard to the exercise of power, the space of rumours is ambiguous. ‘Dirty’ rumours can sustain power and its authority (from Ataturk to Tito); but rumours also play an often decisive role in unrests and upheavals, including anti-immigrant riots (as mentioned, Europe is now full of rumours of immigrants raping our women, and of how authorities censor news about these rapes). There are also what one may be tempted to call ‘good rumours’ – those which are needed to trigger a revolutionary explosion, say. An historical example is the Great Fear (la Grande Peur), the general panic that took place between 17th July and 3rd August 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.

I cannot resist adding to this list a unique case from cinema history. A tension between a Communist political commitment and a fascination with the ‘incestuous Thing’ characterizes the unique cinematic work of Luchino Visconti. In his movies the incestuous Thing has its own political weight; it is the decadent jouissance, or pleasure-in-pain, of the old ruling classes in decay. The two supreme examples of this deadly fascination are the obvious Death in Venice (1971), and the less known, but much better, earlier black-and-white masterpiece Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (or in English, Sandra, 1965), a chamber cinema gem. What both films share is not only a prohibited passion which ends in death (the composer’s passion for the beautiful boy in Venice, the incestuous passion of brother and sister in Vaghe stelle); but also, in both cases, the duality of the artist’s Leftist political commitment ( up to his death, Visconti was a member of the Italian Communist Party) and his fascination with the decadent jouissance of the ruling class in decay. This functions here as a simple split between enunciated and enunciation, as if Visconti, in the best mode of prudish puritanical revolutionaries, publicly condemns what he personally enjoys and is fascinated with, so that his very public endorsement of the necessity to abolish the reign of the old ruling class is ‘trans-functionalized’ into an instrument of providing decadent pleasure-in-pain, in the spectacle of one’s own decay. Does the same not hold even for dystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale ? Are we not secretly fascinated by its detailed descriptions of the oppression of women – which we, of course, all condemn?

Rumours seem to fit perfectly today’s predicament, which many people characterize as ‘the death of truth’ – a characterization which is obviously wrong. The implication of those who use this term is that previously (say, until the 1980s), in spite of all manipulations and distortions, truth did somehow prevail, so that the ‘death of truth’ is a relatively recent phenomenon. But a quick overview tells us that this was not the case: how many violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes remained invisible, from the Vietnam war to the invasion of Iraq? Just remember the times of Reagan, Nixon, Bush… The difference was not that the past was more ‘truthful’, but that the ideological hegemony was much stronger, so that, instead of today’s greater melee of local ‘truths,’ one ‘truth’ (or, rather, one big Lie) basically prevailed. In the West, this was the liberal-democratic Truth (with a Leftist or Rightist twist). What is happening today is that, with the populist wave which unsettled the political establishment, the Truth/Lie which served as the ideological foundation of this establishment is also falling apart. And the ultimate reason for this disintegration is not the rise of postmodern relativism, but the failure of the ruling establishment in being no longer able to maintain its ideological hegemony.

We can now see what those who bemoan the ‘death of truth’ really deplore: the disintegration of one big Story more or less accepted by the majority which brought ideological stability to a society. The secret of those who curse ‘historicist relativism’ is that they miss the safe situation in which one big Truth (even if it was a big Lie) provided the basic ‘cognitive mapping’ for all. In short, it is those who deplore the ‘death of truth’ who are the true and most radical agents of this death: their implicit motto is the one attributed to Goethe, “besser Unrecht als Unordnung” – better injustice than disorder – meaning, better one big Lie than the reality of a mixture of lies and truths.

So when we hear claims that with the ongoing ‘collapse of the information ecosystem’ our society is falling apart, we should be very clear about what these claims mean: not just that fake news abounds, but that the Big Lie that until now held together our social space is disintegrating. The ‘death of truth’ thus opens up the possibility for a new authentic truth… or for an even worse big Lie. Is this not happening today with the retreat of liberal democracy, which is step by step being overshadowed by multiple figures of the new Fascism, from neo-feudal populism, to religious authoritarianism?

© Slavoj Žižek 2025

Slavoj Žižek is, among other things, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University, and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department of Philosophy.

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What Simone de Beauvoir Got – And Didn’t Get – About Motherhood

Nura Hossainzadeh argues that motherhood is both physical and transcendent.

It is often said that becoming a parent is a profound transition. This transition feels different to everyone, since it occurs within the particular context of each person’s life. For me, it felt like a jolt from the abstract to the concrete; from the philosophical to the everyday; from the freedom to speculate, to the need to make decisions. When I had my first child, I was teaching political theory at Princeton, and when I had my second, I was teaching in a ‘great books’ program at Stanford. So I moved abruptly from spending my days thinking about the big ideas – justice, freedom, Islamic theories of government, love in Christian mystic writings, love in medieval Italian poetry – to dwelling in the more physical dimensions of life: changing diapers at what often felt like 1,000 times a day; experiencing the inevitable lack of sleep that comes with having a newborn; and asking my body to nourish this growing lifeform with breastmilk.

In the midst of being caught (as it often felt) in the physical components of motherhood, the words of the twentieth century French existentialist and feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir have often come back to me. She writes about both womanhood and motherhood in The Second Sex (1949), which I taught at Stanford. Beauvoir, who was never a mother herself, except insofar as she once adopted a protégé who was in her thirties, often has unflattering things to say about motherhood, and she looks down on the physical nature of it. Experiencing motherhood has helped me to understand Beauvoir’s concerns; but it has also helped me to see where her arguments fall short – where she doesn’t quite grasp how the parts of motherhood that seem simply to be physical toil and sacrifice can be something greater. Those parts of motherhood that are deeply physical–such as breastfeeding and pregnancy itself–lead to spiritual growth precisely because of, and through, their physical nature.

Simone de Beauvoir by Gail Campbell

Breastfeeding is Authentic

Beauvoir draws on the existentialist distinction between ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ to depict motherhood. A person flourishes most fully, she says, when they do things that facilitate their transcendence. This means, freely engaging in projects of their own choosing and creation. In this way, they ‘expand’ their existence. On the other hand, immanence, the opposite of transcendence, involves lapsing into doing things that maintain instead of expand life, oriented by the ‘same-olds’ of life: same-old aims, same-old principles that one never questions or elaborates, and, on a more mundane level, same-old tasks that one must perform in order to stay alive, or to keep others alive. Simply keeping one’s baby alive – an end dictated by nature – is certainly not a project of our own creation. The end the mother works for is mere existence (or survival), and not the expansion of existence. So to Beauvoir’s mind, motherhood seems to be associated with a most basic form of immanence – with fulfilling tasks that are necessary to keeping one’s child (and, from a broader perspective, the species more generally) physically alive.

The emphasis for Beauvoir is on the physical, even animalistic, dimensions of motherhood. Even at puberty, she says, a woman’s body seems ‘possessed by outside forces’ that aim at perpetuating the species. Various physical processes – menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding – are integral to the broader process by which the human species is maintained. In these processes, the woman does not ‘affirm’ herself in an existentialist manner – she does not create anything new and individual. Rather, she participates in the maintenance of existence, and does not transcend basic existence to create – to engage in projects that bear the mark of her individual being. “From puberty to menopause,” writes Beauvoir, “she is the principal site of a story that takes place in her and does not concern her personally.” She says of breastfeeding, for example, that it is “an exhausting servitude… the breastfeeder feeds the newborn to the detriment of her own strength.”

This is not wrong. Breastfeeding can be incredibly taxing. But Beauvoir focuses exclusively on the difficulties of breastfeeding, which prevent the woman from acting freely in the world, without speaking of the ways that breastfeeding itself can be freeing. For instance, what if, through the intimacy of breastfeeding, one is able to comprehend feelings one has not experienced before?

It is physically tiring to breastfeed. It’s tiring for the body to make the milk, and it’s tiring to breastfeed throughout the day and often at night. But the sense of calm that washes over a baby’s body when he is breastfeeding is a sight to be seen. I have never seen such calm elsewhere. So breastfeeding teaches me what calmness is, both by allowing me to witness it on his face, and by allowing me to experience it as a result of giving it to him. Both mother and baby rest in this state of calm together. And if the mother is experiencing this mental, perhaps spiritual, state through the experience of breastfeeding, can it be said to be just ‘animal’? As she engages in this very physical act, isn’t the mother also transcending the physical?

Beauvoir might reply that breastfeeding isn’t a new and individual ‘project’, and therefore isn’t a source of transcendence. Surely women and babies have felt calm during breastfeeding throughout time; what’s new? . We don’t put anything unique and individual in the world by breastfeeding. However, the feeling of calm inaugurated by breastfeeding is unique insofar as it is experienced by this particular woman, and this particular baby; a bed of repose juxtaposed against the worries of their particular lives. Calmness doesn’t everywhere mean the same thing or have the same significance; values, experiences and feelings exist in contexts. Martin Luther King Jr. taught the importance of sympathy, with reference to African Americans in America in the middle of the 20th century. While sympathy for the oppressed is a perennial value, and sympathy is a perennial feeling, his promotion of sympathy in his context surely constituted a unique and worthwhile “project.” A mother’s application of “calm” to her context and her life is also a unique and worthwhile project.

Of course, women who never become mothers may achieve equally meaningful and uplifted states of being through other experiences – one need not be a mother to understand calmness. But Beauvoir does not see breastfeeding even as one potential path to gaining transcendent insight. Certainly it is a difficult physical, even to a degree animal, act that consumes the time and energy of the mother like few others in life, but it has significant payoff in that, precisely because it is a physical act, it helps both mother and child enter a new state of being.

This isn’t just an ode to breastfeeding. Mothers who do not breastfeed also experience difficulty feeding their babies – preparing bottles, responding to hungry cries, worrying about how much they’ve eaten – and also witness the transformative calmness of a fully fed baby.

Pregnant Pause For Thought

Pregnancy, like breastfeeding, can, in and through being a physical experience, also be a catalyst for the mother’s transformation, or in Beauvoir’s word, transcendence.

In the chapter of The Second Sex titled ‘The Mother’, Beauvoir, in brief moments, seems to recognize that pregnancy is profound. She says that it is an act of creation that makes a women feel “as vast as the world” – but at the same time, “this very richness annihilates her.” So, Beauvoir seems to see pregnancy as a profound spiritual experience but a fleeting one, as pregnancy does not allow a woman to dwell indefinitely in this feeling. Ultimately, the pregnant woman sinks into the sphere of the physical and animal: she is ‘annihilated’ as an individual by the burden she bears for the species.

“The mother… does not really make the child,” Beauvoir further writes, “it makes itself within her, her flesh engenders flesh only.” The point seems to be that the fetus is not shaped purposefully by a mother seeking to promote a value by creating him. Rather, his creation happens without the design and creativity of the woman: the pregnant mother “engenders [the child] in the generality of his body”. She doesn’t create the particular person the child will go on to be, or the particular values that the child will promote and embody. She doesn’t create the kind man, the just woman, the doctor, the teacher. Specifically, she doesn’t promote any particular values that are defined by her individually, through the uniqueness of her being, by having a baby. And for Beauvoir, creation has to bear the mark of the individual to be meaningful, authentic, transcendent.

When she says that pregnancy makes a woman feel as ‘vast as the world’, Beauvoir seems almost to recognize that a woman can be excited by the fact that she carries life within her. However, in Beauvoir’s view, this feeling is misplaced; a woman would do well not to mistake the natural biological process that unfolds within her as having anything to do with her. Yet a mother does participate in the creation of a person who will articulate and act upon values in the world: who will choose to be kind or just, who will choose to be a doctor or a teacher. She is not simply the vehicle for the unfolding of a purely biological phenomenon. And this is where pregnancy, like breastfeeding, can become a source of fulfillment for her. When life is recognized for the profound phenomenon that it is, for the immense potential that it has, for its capacity to promote values, the feeling of the slow growth of life within her can be fulfilling. And when the woman perceives the creation of life as more than just a simple animal phenomenon, the physical sensations that go along with pregnancy become more meaningful, too. She actively observes and feels the slow creation of life inside her, and recognizes the tremendous potential this life has, feeling pleasure through being a witness of, and a vessel for, this slow growth. So with pleasure she senses the first stirrings of movement at the beginning of her pregnancy, and more exuberant movements later on: movement that is significant not only because it indicates the presence of physical life, but because this very being will later move in the world in ways that will change it, hopefully for the better. These legs, this mouth, these hands – all will continue to move outside the womb in meaningful ways. When a woman contemplates the humanity of her fetus, and the fact that her baby will become a force in the world that creates value, pregnancy becomes profound. Movement and growth become more than just physical. And this all leads her to experience a fulfilled state of being. A physical experience leads to a non-physical, spiritual transformation.

Just as breastfeeding teaches a woman about calm, and allows her to feel a sense of calm, so pregnancy teachers her about satisfaction, and allows her to feel it from observing and participating in the creation of human life, and having a closer-than-front-row seat to the miracle of growth of a now human being.

Mother with Child by Mikuláš Galanda, 1932

Beauvoir’s Insights

At this point I would like to pause to ask this: If Beauvoir missed so much about the ethical, spiritual, and emotional benefits of pregnancy and breastfeeding, why should a mother read her writings at all? Are her words simply a foil against which we celebrate the beauty of motherhood?

No. Even if she did not fully comprehend the ways in which motherhood is transformational, Beauvoir teaches us a great deal about motherhood, and about how mothers should be treated.

The truth is that motherhood, even while freeing, is, indisputably, also constraining. It is not as constraining as Beauvoir says it is, but it is constraining. So she is correct to draw our attention to the physical investment involved in motherhood. Even while breastfeeding teaches us what calmness is, it also draws us back to our babies, or to a pump, every few hours. Skip feedings, and the woman feels engorged, and eventually, loses her supply. It can feel like being on a leash. And pregnancy teaches us about the miracle of life and about satisfaction, but it also is physically impairing. Try teaching a class while feeling nauseous during the first trimester – as I did; or try writing an article, as I also did, while feeling more tired than you’ve ever been in your life, during the last trimester. Like so many things in life, motherhood is a mixed bag – you’re weighed down in some moments, uplifted in others.

Beauvoir famously writes that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” She argues that society defines womanhood in ways that benefit men – and then shuts down debate by claiming that this definition simply captures who a woman is naturally. But throughout her writings, Beauvoir also reminds us of the ways in which women are born as women, and how constraining, and difficult, it can be to be a woman physically, even before we become mothers. She comprehends the vast extent of our physical investment when we do decide to become mothers. In short, she reminds us that in order to understand who is a woman, we must also understand, in Nancy Bauer’s words, “the experience of having a body with sexed features and not just the experience of having one’s society impose gender norms on that body” (‘Simone de Beauvoir on Motherhood and Destiny’, 2017).

Political Implications

One problem is that, too often, people (men in particular) don’t understand this ‘experience of having a body with sexed features’ in all its beauty and all its difficulty, the way Beauvoir understood it. This is reflected politically in maternity leave policies around the world.

The International Labor Organization (ILO), a UN agency that sets standards for fair labor practices, recommends that new mothers be guaranteed at least 14 weeks of paid leave. According to a recent ILO recent report, 120 countries meet or exceed this standard. However, 64 countries fall below it – meaning that in one in three countries around the world women do not have the ability to take the recommended time off. But even meeting the ILO standards may not be enough for many women. First, these 14 weeks are rarely fully paid; the ILO stipulates that salary during maternity leave be at least two-thirds of a woman’s regular salary. And for many women, even 14 weeks may not be an adequate length of time, given the compounded burdens of physically recovering from childbirth, sleep deprivation, breastfeeding, and regaining psychological well-being in a new and difficult reality (postpartum depression affects women within a year of childbirth). Moreover, the World Health Organization recommends that infants be breastfed for at least 6 months. Breastfeeding is notoriously difficult once a woman goes back to work, so going back after 14 weeks might jeopardize a mother’s ability to make it to the 6-month mark.

If you’re American it’s even worse. While many industrialized nations have generous maternity leave policies, the United States is an outlier: it is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee paid parental leave for its citizens.

While even women who are employed full time in stable careers don’t have access to adequate maternity leave benefits in the US, the problem is especially acute for those who work in temporary or ‘gig’ positions. When I got pregnant with my second baby, I was teaching at Stanford in a four-year position. I asked the administration to put the four-year clock on ‘pause’ so that I could have a position to return to when my baby was a little older, instead of returning to work just months before my term ended, which would have put me in the impossible position of looking for a new position and tending to a very young baby. But although the teaching staff and faculty in my program supported this plan, the higher-ups in the administration said that the clock must keep ticking, even though I was not asking to be paid in the meantime. This shows that there’s no institutional waiting on a new mother; no giving her time to regain her energy after her sacrifices to the species as Beauvoir would say; no giving her time to press the pause button on life and gain transcendent insight from moments spent with her baby, as I would add.

Conclusions

Simone de Beauvoir’s illumination of the ways in which the female body constrains – or, in her word, ‘annihilates’ women – underscores the need for laws that level the playing field for mothers in the workforce. It also underscores the need for a cultural change, so that individuals who aren’t mothers themselves understand the physical struggle of motherhood and so exhibit more sympathy toward expectant and new mothers. A lack of this sympathy, coupled with a narrow concern with financial gain, often leads to discrimination against women in the workforce, even when employers do provide generous maternity leave on paper. A recent lawsuit against Google, for example, alleges that the company fired women who were on maternity leave.

Women need, and deserve, the option to take a generous maternity leave. Beauvoir would have understood that. Our lawmakers, and anyone who cares about supporting mothers, should read her in order to better understand the tremendous physical sacrifice that goes along with becoming a mother. What Beauvoir will not tell them, however, is how this physical sacrifice can be a source of fulfillment. While she did perceive how the individual female body is swallowed up into the quest of the species simply to stay alive, she did not understand that we are never simply animals even when fulfilling this instinct. But motherhood is in fact a Beauvoirian ‘project’ that we may actively take on even as our bodies act as bodies do, and even through our bodies acting as bodies do.

Our attentiveness to our physical experiences as mothers can uplift us spiritually. We feel the physical drain of breastfeeding, we prepare and wash bottles hundreds of times over; but at the same time, we witness and comprehend the calm that we’re able to create by feeding our babies. We feel the physical drain of pregnancy, but at the same time, we feel the first signs of movement, contemplate the significance of this movement, and feel satisfaction that we’re helping to create movement in the world. We must come to a place culturally where we understand both the burden, and the meaning and significance, of motherhood, so that we give mothers both the support and the respect that they deserve.

© Dr Nura Hossainzadeh 2025

Nura Hossainzadeh earned her PhD in Political Philosophy from UC Berkeley, and is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State Uni.

Articles

Young & Meaningful

Elise Beal notes a Japanese philosophy of finding pleasure in the small things, and matches it with an online trend.

“Our generation is so screwed.” I hear it everywhere on social media, and whispered in-between the lockers at the high school (I am a sixteen year old girl who thinks a lot, and notices more). As we read the headlines and succumb to the fearmongering, the endless nihilism stemming from the infinite trove of bad news that teenagers are exposed to online seems suffocating. I observe my friends and peers as they turn on their phones in the morning, faces blank despite the absurd amount of content we consume: social media, online articles, and various types of messages from both the loved and unloved, all read in the blink of an eye with a passive glance. It is impossible to deny the impact this technology has had on the younger generation’s minds. I even researched this article on my phone – reading studies while mindlessly following my sister through the airport, never appreciating the fact that an abundance of mental stimulation is available to me.

Snow on Ayase River Shōtei Takahashi 1915

With my generation of young adults, we are seeing how modern trends reflect a reformation in traditional philosophical thinking in response to societal change. And so, through quietly observing and spending long nights thinking and staring at the ceiling, I’ve come to notice patterns in how the young people around me perceive their existence, and how they have their own novel ideas about the world and their place in it.

Despite my own ramblings, I can assure readers that the average teenager is averse to thinking about philosophical concepts and wider issues of the universe, lest they have an existential crisis at sixteen. There is simply too much to think about, between school and sports and whatever else my friends choose to fill their days with. However, there is a simple way to discuss how this demographic copes with the existential undertones caused by the endless bad news.

In the midst of a technological revolution, our minds are flooded by an abundance of negative stimuli. Teenagers between thirteen and eighteen spend an average of eight and a half hours online, daily (The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021), with the potential to be exposed to the worst kinds of content. It’s so prevalent, that society has coined a term for mindlessly scrolling past post after post of depressing content: doomscrolling. Teenagers now inhabit echo chambers of doubt and uncertainty, doomscrolling away, and this is a large part of what’s causing us to be increasingly nihilistic.

A Core of Hope

However, seemingly in response to this influx of bad news, teenagers are turning to new ways of coping with the suffocating pessimism of their social spheres. Interestingly, these coping strategies are spread by social media, the very mechanism responsible for fostering the negative viewpoints to begin with. (The juxtaposition of how social media perpetuates negativity and how it also offers coping mechanisms to combat it highlights the complex nature of social media.) These online trends share striking similarities with traditional Japanese philosophical concepts that were created to help one find one’s purpose in life.

Though social media has long been the bearer of bad news, many people have taken to creating under the hash-tag ‘Hopecore’ – a term first coined around March 2023, which continues to increase in use.

Hopecore builds on the many trending ‘core’ style/aesthetic ideas that have cycled through social media: other popular examples include ‘cottagecore’ (the romanticization of rural, ‘cottage’ life) and ‘kidcore’ (characterized by primary colors and feelings of nostalgia for a 90s childhood). These aesthetic types have been popularized online, and are used by the younger generation to express ourselves. The main difference between hopecore and other online aesthetics is that hopecore seems to be the manifestation of an optimistic philosophy that’s been created in response to the mounting tension and negativity online.

‘Hopecore’, as its name suggests, is an aesthetic focusing on hope. Often while scrolling through the hopecore hashtag, one will find simplistic pictures, say, of rabbits asleep in fields, accompanied by inspirational quotes like “Lovely things come and go, but they come” scrawled atop the image. “Slow down. Appreciate the little things” now appears on a glowing screen amidst the mess of online content. Following this advice, one might pause and take a break from the endless scrolling…

The intention of such posts is to get the audience to appreciate the little things, to pause and feel the warm feeling that rabbits in fields and words of affirmation give us. Hopecore centers on humanity and positivity, often focusing on everyday interactions, and on romanticizing the little things: the way sunlight filters through the window, or the smell of coffee on a rainy day, for instance.

Small & Beautiful

Interestingly, hopecore shares a striking resemblance to the Japanese philosophical concept of ikigai.

To understand their similarities, first, we must debunk some misconceptions about what ikigai is and why it was created. Translating roughly to ‘a reason to live’, ikigai has its roots in Buddhist philosophy and traditional Japanese values.

At its core, it’s simple, and if you asked any older person in my Japanese American community what it meant to them, you would get a straightforward response: it’s seeking joy in the little things. That is to say, ikigai is somewhat ambiguous, but quite one-dimensional in comparison with other (Western) philosophical ideals. More expansively, ikigai implies that the meaning of life can be found through purpose, and that purpose can be found by starting small.

Western interpretations of ikigai are very different. In Western media, ikigai is often depicted through a Venn diagram, as an uncomplicated way of finding happiness and purpose in life, whereby if you find something to focus on that satisfies a whole range of needs (beauty, emotional resonance, etc), you will find meaning, and thus purpose.

The question why the concept has been misinterpreted so grievously is a complicated one; but to answer it one must take differences between East Asian and Western cultures into account. Japan, at heart a collectivist society, places its highest values in the community, whereas Western societies such as the United States, being individualist, place their highest value on individualism and individually ‘getting ahead’. This is why in Western culture ikigai is often depicted as an endpoint – an overarching goal of finding everyday beauty that, once reached, will reward the person with a concrete sense of purpose. Yet by comparing the differences between the two cultures’ interpretations of ikigai, we can better understand both the concept and the cultures. I think the pressure to succeed has caused much of the West to interpret ikigai as a destination, something to be found, rather than the concept that it was originally: finding small joys. Basically, ‘finding’ ikigai isn’t something grand and monumental, but rather consists of many, many little moments that each make you appreciate life. The idea is that it is from this appreciation that purpose is born. It is from this latter, traditional definition that we can draw similarities with hopecore. In essence, both ikigai and hopecore are simple: The little things make life worth living.

Understanding hopecore’s similarities with ikigai, and recognizing its birth from a place of psychological instability, gives us a unique perspective on the younger generation and how we deal with complex topics. Being exposed to so much online content with negative existential undercurrents has changed the way my peers and I perceive life, but it’s being combated with yet more online content, now utilized in a positive way, in the form of hopecore and other trends, to offer purpose and structure at a time when it’s direly needed. Sparked by the nihilism caused by echo chambers of bad news, hopecore is a stand against the bad in the world, and is one of the younger generation’s unique ways of countering the nihilism to which we’re so often exposed.

A Last Little Bit of Hope

However much society and culture changes with time, I am confident in one thing: humanity’s unyielding hope. There has always been hope, manifesting in billions of ways among billions of people: by drawing horses and other animals on cave walls, in the hope that the day’s hunt would be bountiful; burying a king beneath a vast pyramid of stone in the hope that he may go to a place of eternal happiness; putting a post on the internet in the hope that others may stumble upon it and begin to dream again; and, creating a philosophy to appreciate the mundane in the hope that this will grant you meaning.

With that, I leave you with, not the ending, but the middle of a million peoples’ story. Only when I’m old and gray and looking back at my teenage years, will I be able to draw a semblance of a concrete conclusion about how humanity’s philosophies have evolved with technology. Until then, I will continue to scroll on social media, eyes bleary and constantly looking for something to satisfy my addiction. And occasionally, in between the clips of cute dogs and news stories about the latest atrocity, I will read a line or a poem that reminds me to pause. To appreciate the small joys. And maybe, with that, I will find a tiny bit more meaning in my life.

© Elise Beal 2025

Elise Mayumi Beal is a high school student based in San Jose, California.

Brief Lives

Anand Vaidya (1976-2024)

Manjula Menon on the short but full career of a ‘disciplinary trespasser’.

In a 2016 interview, my husband, the philosopher Anand Vaidya, reflected on his future: “I would like to see myself twenty years from now as someone who has pursued a deep engagement with core debates in analytic philosophy, especially the epistemology of modality, but also someone who has helped develop cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary philosophy in a serious way.”

Anand did not live to see those twenty years. He passed away in October 2024 at the age of forty-eight, after a battle with cancer. But in his too-brief life he fulfilled much of his vision.

I have written about my grief elsewhere; in this article, I want to focus on celebrating Anand’s many professional accomplishments. A self-proclaimed intellectual ‘trespasser’, Anand was never content to let philosophy’s subfields remain isolated, as he believed that rigid disciplinary boundaries hindered true understanding. In keeping with this principle, his work spanned multiple fields, including modal epistemology, Indian philosophy, experimental philosophy, philosophy of mind, and more recently, artificial intelligence, just to name a few.

Taking The Philosophical Path

Born in Chicago to Indian immigrant parents, Anand spent much of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, with frequent stints in Europe and India. Of these formative years, he wrote, “I made a few friends at my international school with whom I played football and soccer, jammed guitar in a heavy metal band, and rode my motorbike in the desert.” This early exposure to diverse cultures likely fuelled his desire to explore ideas from multiple traditions.

When the First Gulf War broke out in 1990, he moved with his mother to Southern California. For college, he first attended Humboldt State University, which he described as “one of the most beautiful campuses I’d ever seen, nestled deep in the redwood forests.” He transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, at the end of his sophomore year, driven by his interest in logic. He wrote, “I found myself attracted to the content as well as the method of doing philosophy. It felt honest: I was being encouraged to search for the truth, to be precise, and to challenge my classmates to present and defend an argument… I liked inspecting the deductive status of arguments: validity and soundness. I also liked thinking in terms of basic logics, such as first-order predicate logic. It didn’t matter what the arguments were about.”

Anand’s first philosophical love was modal epistemology, which concerns how we know what is possible and what is necessary. He wrote, “It was my interest in the work of David Chalmers on conceivability and consciousness that led me to pursue graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara” (‘The Story of One Male Asian American Philosopher’, 2020). After completing his dissertation on the epistemology of modality, focusing on the work of Stephen Yablo, David Chalmers, and Timothy Williamson, much of his later work explored how knowledge of essence informs judgments about what is possible and necessary (something’s essence is whatever makes it the thing that it is, without which it would not be that thing). He critically examined prevailing theories in the field, notably conceivability-based approaches, which argue that we gain knowledge of possibility by reflecting on what we can coherently conceive; and counterfactual approaches, which explain knowledge of possibilities as being rooted in the same cognitive capacities that allows us to imagine alternative scenarios to past events. He was also interested in how intuitions shape what we find possible or necessary, proposing a ‘disjunctive-social account’ of intuition-based justification in modal knowledge. This view emphasized that our intuitions about what is possible are not just private mental events, but are shaped by our social interactions and our shared language.

The Gettier Intuition is that someone who has a belief that is both justified and true that x is the case may still not ‘know’ that x is the case. Some people have this intuition, others do not, and its purported differing prevalence across cultures has been studied using statistical methods. Anand was fascinated by such studies, which spurred his research in experimental philosophy, which eventually led him to Indian philosophy. He then worked to integrate classical Indian systems of logic into contemporary philosophical discourse, particularly from the Ny ā ya school of around the sixth century CE, known for its rigorous analysis of inference and claims to knowledge. Leveraging Ny ā ya philosophy, Anand proposed a framework called Multi-Factor Causal Disjunctivism, which emphasizes the role of multiple causal factors in distinguishing between veridical (accurate) and non-veridical (inaccurate) perceptual experiences. He wrote extensively about similarities between the work of Ny ā ya epistemologists and the ‘knowledge first’ tradition advocated by the contemporary philosopher Timothy Williamson, which treats knowledge as basic, as opposed to trying to explain it in the standard philosophical terms of knowledge being ‘justified true belief’.

Anand also wrote and lectured about connections between Indian philosophy and what David Chalmers has called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Noting a resurgence of interest in panpsychism – the view that everything is conscious to some degree – he advocated for integrating insights from traditions like Advaita Ved ā nta and Yog ā c ā ra Buddhism into the discussion. In advocating for Indian philosophy, he wrote, “I do not want to imply that these traditions are better than other traditions. Rather, I cannot defend the idea that there is a principled reason to exclude them: neither their method nor their intellectual excellence seemed any different from what I had studied.” (‘The Story of One Male Asian American Philosopher’, 2020).

Anand Vaidya

Philosophy Through Science-Fiction

Anand was devoted to philosophy, and passionate about making it accessible. We also shared an interest in science fiction. Recognizing that both philosophy and science fiction engage in structured thought experiments, we, along with the philosopher Ethan Mills, co-founded the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society to investigate how far speculative fiction could be a legitimate way of doing philosophy. Although Plato banished poets from his ideal Republic, we wondered whether that was necessary. Indeed, from Arthur C. Clarke’s meditations on cosmic consciousness to Iain M. Banks’s explorations of artificial intelligence, science fiction has long wrestled with the sort of questions that occupy philosophers: What is consciousness? How do we know what we know? Are we alone in the universe?

Anand used science fiction to write about philosophy of mind, especially as it extended into AI. Self-aware machines like Data from Star Trek, Hal from 2001, or Roy Batty from Blade Runner, may still be far in the future, but AI capabilities are rapidly evolving. Anand argued that determining AI’s moral status is urgent as we move closer to artificial general intelligence or AGI (this is AI with general problem-solving capabilities). The traditional view is that having moral standing is conferred by sentience, including the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. Anand instead argued that possessing intelligence tied to preferences is sufficient for moral standing. Like the Star Trek crew, who are routinely tasked with understanding alien minds, he examined whether Large Language Models such as ChatGPT can possess mental states. He concluded that while they do not ‘think’ like humans, they exhibit a distinct form of cognitive behavior. Further, he argued that the output of LLMs might fit within Harry Frankfurt’s concept of ‘bullshit’, which differentiates lying (intentional falsehood) from bullshitting (disregard for truth). Under technical philosophical analysis, the question arises as to whether chatbots can be described as ‘bullshitters’. Anand also argued that by focusing on the cognitive aspects of emotions rather than their phenomenological (sense experience) or physiological (brain and body) correlates, AGIs could be said to have emotions – thus opening the door to the possibility of emotionally intelligent machines.

A Too-Brief Summation

Anand’s teaching philosophy mirrored his scholarly pursuits. As a professor at San Jose State University and a visiting professor at UCLA, he emphasized critical thinking and the importance of cross-cultural perspectives. He believed that exposing students to diverse philosophical traditions enriched their understanding and fostered a more inclusive approach to philosophical inquiry.

Anand was as passionate about life as he was about philosophy. Once a week, he would hurry to the farmers’ market to select the freshest ingredients for the meals he loved to cook. He played guitar often; it helped him relax. He was a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, and out of loyalty to a friend, a supporter of France for the FIFA World Cup. He had a rotating cast of favorite T-shirts, each carefully selected for its connection to his many interests. He walked almost every day in San Francisco, a city he loved and was grateful to live in. He took me hiking up mountains, through forests, to the rims of bubbling volcanoes, and across gleaming glaciers. He was a trained yoga teacher, and frequently attended musical performances. But what he loved most of all was people. He was a warm and generous presence, who listened to all without judgement, and who supported the striving of others with genuine enthusiasm. He made friends everywhere he went – friends whose lives he touched in profound ways and who wept when they learned of his passing. He was a special human being.

More than a prolific scholar, Anand was a weaver of ideas. He had a gift for spotting connections where others saw barriers, drawing together thinkers from disparate traditions and disciplines. He challenged philosophy to expand its horizons, and his ideas continue to trespass into new and uncharted territories, just as he would have wanted. He was also a warm, constructive presence, always eager to contribute, and enthusiastic to make genuine connections. His impact was not only in what he wrote, but in the communities he built, nurtured, and loved. His loss is immeasurable; but, I’d like to think, so is his legacy.

I will add a final note. Anand worked till the very end, and his work continues to be published posthumously. For those interested in his last works, updates will be available on his website, anandvaidya.weebly.com and shared through his social media at facebook.com/anand.j.vaidya.

© Manjula Menon 2025

Manjula Menon is a writer. She has degrees in astrophysics and electrical engineering and is the co-founder of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. She lives in San Francisco.

Interviews

- Stephen Fry

Interview

Stephen Fry

Perhaps unshockingly for someone who is an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer, Stephen Fry has a deep interest in words and how we use them. After hearing him lecture on that subject, Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis asked him about Artificial Intelligence and how it connects with the extraordinary lure of language.

Recently at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre you gave a lecture called: ‘Words, Words, Words: The Lure of Language’. Where did your interest in the sound of words come from?

Well, I answer that very question in the lecture! Indeed most of it is taken up with telling the story of the time I happened on a line that hit me over the head like a sandbag when I was 11 or 12. A line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. This love of language was reinforced by reading and rereading my WWW of early literary heroes: Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh.

Your lecture was a great showcase of its subject and, leaving, there was real excitement about using language. Clearly, it’s something we can all appreciate. Nonetheless, even in academic studies of literature, we have to approximate, use technical terms to discuss particular instances, and can never seem to address the thing itself; what do you think makes ‘the lure of language’ so difficult to pin down or talk about?

I feel it’s because we take language for granted and consider it somehow pretentious to dive deep into it. But words can be like jewels, like living creatures – words can repay the closest study. They contain the wisdom of our ancestors. Take a word that can seem dull, abstract and obvious – education, for example. We think we know what it means, but it can tell us more if you take it apart. It has a Latin root … educere. Ducere means to lead, to draw in the sense of pull, as in a horse drawn carriage; e or ex in front of a verb gives a sense of ‘out’. So educere is to draw out, to lead out. Education is not a putting in, it’s not stuffing a head, it’s drawing out from a student what is already in them. Encouraging, enabling …. If only (some) educators were more aware of that!

If AI Large Language Models produce texts whose aesthetic character is informed purely by what has already been written and by critical discussions about it, that would mean their writing is powered by the solidified end result of the lure rather than by the lure itself. After all, machines, lacking consciousness, cannot feel it. Does this result in any detectable difference between AI writing and human writing? What does our aesthetic feeling towards words actually do?

We can’t be too cocky, I feel, about how we humans write and produce text. It might be that our faculty is almost as stochastic, as Bayesian in origin and method as machines’. I mentioned in the lecture the journey of one’s autograph signature from a studied, artificial thing to its becoming absolutely of oneself. And how that is an analogue of the ‘style’ we develop. The mask doesn’t conceal a real face, it is the real face. I once mentioned to an LLM that I had just been to the funeral of a friend – I wanted to ask a question about funerary rites – and it began its response with the phrase “I’m so sorry to hear about your friend’s passing.” Ignoring its use of the ghastly euphemism “passing” (millions of humans are guilty of that, after all) I asked if it really was sorry. “Of course not,” it replied. “I am a machine and incapable of feeling sorrow. But I know that this is the right thing to say.” “Ah,” was my response, “but when I say to humans that I’ve just been to a funeral they too will say ‘sorry’ and I know that their reply is just as much a formulaic response as yours. So you can call your response as human as many.” We then got into one of those rather extraordinary philosophical discussions that they are intriguingly good at. Sometimes ‘as if’ intelligent is as good as ‘truly’ intelligent. But in answer to your question: the real difference, so far as I can tell, is that we feel – because our relationship with the world is physical, at least as much emotional as it is epistemic, rational, cognitive, because it comes from touching, tasting, seeing, hearing and unconsciously processing through memory and experience it gives us impulses, desires, fears, hopes, terrors and ecstasies that motivate and actuate our writing and all our language. However, plenty of humans with different neurological wiring do not achieve ‘theory of mind’ and are not wired to feel empathy, fellow feeling, remorse and so forth. It isn’t an absolutely necessary and sufficient condition of full humanity to be neuro-normal – as if there is such a condition!

LLMs seem not to have a stable voice – they latch on to any hints of tone or register to produce writing which matches that of the prompt. To an extent, of course, people do this too, particularly writers or actors. In your lecture, you explained the importance and joy of finding a personal style. How do you, either in writing or acting, manage to adapt to a given character while remaining unmistakably in your style?

I’m pretty much the same at most social gatherings too! I “latch on to any hints of tone or register to produce writing conversation which matches that of the prompt interlocutor.” And as for literary art:

“And feeling, in a poet, is the source

Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars,

And take all colours – like the hands of dyers.”

That’s Byron in Don Juan, which inspired Auden’s brilliant lectures on Poetry published under the title The Dyers Hand.

And, as answered earlier, I think the development of a style is the result of the mask becoming the face, the practised autograph becoming the real signature. In acting it’s interestingly (and frustratingly) different from say, musicianship. A violinist has their violin, it isn’t them. Any practised music loving ear can tell the difference between Kyung Wha Chung and Isaac Stern say, two great practitioners. That can only be their style, their ‘voice’. But an actor is their instrument. Our body, eyes, voice, every particle of us is our instrument. And, despite a popular misconception, actors are not hired for their magical ability to transform themselves into a total other. Sometimes that’s a good trick, but take any favourite stage or movie actor. They wouldn’t be hired as a star if you absolutely didn’t recognise them every time. You go to see them. Impressive that they change bits of themselves, accent, walk etc, but if every time they were unrecognisable they wouldn’t be a star, they’d be a freak show or a trick.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called verse written while not in the mood of inspiration ‘Parnassian’: the sort of thing you would expect that particular poet to write. Is the best of AI poetry essentially Parnassian of the person who input the prompt?

It is now. And even the best poets occasionally wrote Parnassian stuff. Compare Keats’s Fancy with his Ode to a Nightingale or On a Grecian Vase. “Even Homer nods” as the saying has it… i.e. loses sight of the ball, drops off to sleep, seems formulaic, fails to hold. But the most important thing to remember is that AI now is as primitive as it will be. Which is true of all technology. It will never be this primitive again, is a better way of putting it. And to judge what AI is and means as a technology by how it works now is a grave mistake. Looking at Karl Benz’s first motor car in 1895 wouldn’t give one a sense of what was to come. The motorways, ring roads, motels, multi-storey car parks … the whole life of humankind utterly transformed by commuting, terrible crashes and a whole new culture and design language. And cars are nothing to what AI will be.

The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, seen from Broad Street. Photo: Julian Herzog, Creative Commons 4

What often gets lost in discussions about AI writing is the reader, for whom it is hard not to anthropomorphise the written word. Even the impersonal print on a cheque seems to have a voice. Does this mean that for the reader, the distinction between human and AI writing is purely functional and not an aesthetic one?

While on the comparison we anthropomorphise cars too. Or used to. It was much more common when I was a child that car owners would have nicknames for their cars – cf Disney’s The Love Bug (Herbie) and the British film classic Genevieve. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that when a machine communicates with us, no matter how much we know it’s a machine, it activates the same emotional juices that writing activates, whether or human or machine origin. Look at how audiences first reacted to silent, black and white, grainy jerky cinema footage. They screamed with terror when a train seemed to approach them. It’s how you react to something moving towards you. It took us time to accustom ourself to the fact that it wasn’t ‘real’. But film is real, it’s just a different sort of real. And fortunately our astonishing brains can cope with different types of real. Photographs, video, 3-D spatial imaging. We very quickly turn a symbol into reality. Hold a fifty pound note which is just a piece of paper promising to be redeemed for goods and services of real value, but we imbue that paper with an absolute value. As we do with so much that is symbolic and metaphoric in our human created world.

Have you ever read an AI generated poem that you enjoyed? Imagine you come across a poem you really appreciate aesthetically and in terms of meaning, and you then find out that it is not the result of a human mind, but an LLM, would it spoil the aesthetic experience for you?

Only enjoyed as an experiment, not as poems. But that’s true of 90% of human poems too of course. That’s the point, if any human could write a poem that really touched, moved, impressed meant … well, poetry would be less than an art. Less than a craft, even. I will admit that (for me) they can do haikus that impress no less than real haikus: but then I’ve never really ‘got’ the haiku as a poetic form in the way I ‘get’ the sonnet. Haikus never seem that human to me, they are so objective and distanced from what they attempt to penetrate that I’ve never been moved by one. Doubtless a fault in me, but it does mean I couldn’t for a second distinguish one by a great master and one by an LLM.

Are AIs original comics? Has one ever made you laugh?

No indeed. But then again I know a few humans who have no ability to make me laugh. Indeed, there are good actors who are fantastic in some roles but couldn’t raise a laugh if they pulled a squirrel out of their arse. In terms of jokes they haven’t advanced enough yet to craft one that is any good at all. But then neither have composers of Christmas Cracker gags.

You recently made a series of videos for the BBC called Fantastic Philosophy. They are aimed at encouraging primary school children to think philosophically about ethical questions. What do you see as the main value of this?

I should have hoped it was self-evident! Whether one is a consequentialist or more in the Kantian or in the Social Contract mould, ethics works as a framework for the development of morality, personal and public. The thought experiments and paradoxes which ethical teaching offer can open the mind up to the complexity, variation, surprise, opacity and ambiguity that strict religious or ideological indoctrination denies. To be awoken to the excitements and surprise of ethics might give us a generation that – unlike our current leaders – is awake to the beauty of now forgotten words like Honour, Grace and Probity…

• Renowned as an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, and writer, Stephen Fry is also a Patron of SAPERE (soon to be called Thoughtful) the charity for philosophical enquiry. His books include The Ode Less Travelled: A Guide to Writing Poetry (2005).

• Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis is an undergraduate at Oxford University studying English Language and Literature.

Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Humane Responses • A Journey Around Tallis • Capital in the Capitol • Caves, Chambers & Bubbles • Poet’s Corner

Humane Responses

Dear Editor: In response to James R. Robinson’s ‘Empathy & Sympathy’ in Issue 167, I contend that empathy is essential to a moral philosophy, both in theory and practice. For example, it’s implicit in Confucius’s rule of reciprocity, “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself” and Jesus’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.” Empathy is a requisite for the implementation of either. And as both a reader and writer of fiction, I know that stories wouldn’t work without empathy. Indeed, one study revealed that reading fiction improves empathy. The tests used ‘letter box’ photos of eyes to assess the subject’s ability to read the emotion of the characters behind the eyes (New Scientist, 25 June 2008).

The dependency between empathy and sympathy is implicit in the examples Robinson provides, like the parent picking up another parent’s child from school out of empathy for the person making the request. In most of these cases there is also the implicit understanding that the favour would be returned if the boot were on the other foot. Having said that, many of us perform small favours for strangers, knowing that one day we could be the stranger.

Robinson also introduces another term, ‘passions’; but based on the examples he gives – like pain – I would call them ‘sensations’ or ‘sensory responses’. Even anger is invariably a response to something. Fiction can also create sensory responses (or passions) of all varieties (except maybe physical pain, hunger, or thirst) – which suggests empathy might play a role there as well. In other words, we can feel someone else’s emotional pain, not to mention anger, or resentment, even if the person we’re empathising with is fictional.

The opposite to compassion is surely cruelty. We have world leaders who indulge in cruelty quite openly, which suggests it’s not an impediment to success, but which also suggests that there’s a cultural element that allows it. Our ability to demonise an outgroup is the cause of most political iniquities we witness, and this would require the conscious denial of sympathy and therefore empathy, because ultimately, it requires treating them as less than human, or as not-one-of-us.

Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne

Dear Editor: A dialogue on empathy:

Elon Musk: “ The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

Dennis Palumbo, Sherman Oaks, California

Dear Editor: While I seriously doubt there are many people in the PN crowd who would unleash the Kraken on Creigan for his ‘Hope: Blessing or Curse’ in Issue 167, surely there are many out there who would assume that, despite Creigan’s reservations, hope is the only option, and that capitulation to doubt is a surrender to failure, and, therefore, a flaw of character. But yeah, Creigan is right that hope can be an alibi for inaction. It can be even more insidious – oppressive, cruel even. and at its worse, it can be self-destructive. It can be oppressive by making any bad situation, such as that of poor people living in inner cities or developing countries, seem like it can only be the result of their negative attitudes towards producer/consumer capitalism (think the prosperity gospel of Joel Olstein). It gets cruel when, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out in Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, women with breast cancer are trying to explain their struggles and are dismissed with “Well… maybe you’re not being positive enough.” Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) points to the self-destructive denial at work in hopes of a technology that will magically fix the climate problem, or that Jesus will take the good people away in the Rapture before the consequences of their overconsumption come through.

But let’s not succumb to hopelessness. That only lands us with either the impotence of conceding to bad outcomes (‘Climate change has always occurred and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway’), or the more aggressive approach, that, based on the notion that all politicians are corrupt, leads to a call to tear the whole thing down. It’s always a mixed package, and we need to treat it so, just as Creigan suggests. Sentimentality isn’t just about big-eyed puppies and children, or Helen Rice Steiner’s poetry (an expression of hope); it’s about anything that elicits a response it fails to justify. As Tennyson noted: distrust any poem that blackens the eyes or holds out its lips to be kissed. Our only hope is the sophistication of embracing complexity and nuance.

D.E. Tarkington, Nebraska

A Journey Around Tallis

Dear Editor: I’d drafted a review of Tallis’s new book before I saw your review in PN 167. You may feel another review is not appropriate, but here it is anyway for your consideration:

Prague 22 is remarkable. Not only could I not put it down till I finished it, I immediately began a re-read. It seems to turn the brain into a sort of squeeze-box from which emanate thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories in a myriad of combinations, molding the self into a series of dynamic sizes, shapes, and textures in a kaleidoscope of moving colour, with sound of continuing change in pitch, intensity, and harmony! I have never before felt as if I was travelling inside someone else – and not a stranger, but a friend of fairly long acquaintance, with whom I have shared interactions in the past. It’s a journey of exploration, not only of the city of Prague (of which I have fond memories), but of the organic nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion, and it blends the present with the past, and reveals the many ways in which we construct reality and wrestle with the environment and our place in it. The journey is jerky, with its changes in focus and ranges of associations and experience of the host’s many facets and reflections, glimpses of the environment, its inhabitants and their activities, ranging from the capturing of inspiring images, both historical and immediate, and is sprinkled with repeated concerns regarding graffiti, the Zizkov TV tower, and the significance of the lower sphincter and its products (which would keep a psychoanalyst in pocket for a year or two).

In conclusion, although it is difficult knowing where best to place Prague 22 in one’s library, it is an outstanding illustration of existential philosophy as a lived human experience of the world around us, and how we construct it.

Chris J. Main, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, Keele Uni

Dear Editor: In PN 167, Raymond Tallis remains flummoxed about the ‘mind-brain identity thesis’. Perhaps an analogy will help. Consider these two facts: (1) Put an apple in a bowl already containing one apple, and it will contain two apples. (2) Add one to one and we get two. Is there an ‘identity’ between these facts? In other words, are they really the same fact? There is clearly a close connection between them, as the truth of the first can be predicted from the truth of the second. And yet their subject matters are utterly unalike. In particular, the first is a material, empirically verifiable fact, while the second is an abstract fact deducible from axioms. So it is better to say that (1) and (2) are congruent facts but exemplify different kinds of reality. Likewise, mind-facts and brain-facts can be congruent while being facts in different ways.

How could this happen? One promising approach is explained by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring: that our brains contain two linked but quite different structures capable of modelling aspects of the world that have evolved at different times for different purposes. The evolutionarily much older structure is based around our brain-stem, and models our relationship to our immediate environment, originally in order to identify threats and opportunities. It is thus a model intrinsically oriented to the ‘self’, and gives rise to ‘feelings’. The newer modelling structure, our cortex or grey matter, models everything we have learnt as a huge mesh of associations, in order to be able to make and share predictions about what will or could happen. It’s what gives rise to ‘thinking’.

So is consciousness founded on ‘feeling’, as Solms, Damasio, and a few others claim, or on ‘thinking’, as most investigators, such as Tonini, seem to assume? It seems more useful to me to identify consciousness with the interaction of feeling and thinking, and hence arising from a sort of constant dialogue between the two modelling regions of the brain.

On this account, ‘brain’ facts are examples of facts registered by our grey matter, and are understood by being incorporated in its mesh of associations. By contrast, ‘mind’ facts are incommunicable, but directly registered by our brain-stem before they can be reflected upon or classified by our grey matter.

Roger S. Haines, Ealing, London

Dear Editor: I always enjoy reading Raymond Tallis. However, his article in 167 worries me. When the answer to a philosophical question contains a contradiction, it usually means that the question is meaningless or inappropriate.

Tallis acknowledges that “consciousness is, or seems to be, fundamentally different from the activity of the brain.” He then raises the question of how to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable facts: that brain activity is a necessary condition for consciousness; and that brain activity is totally different from consciousness. He also asks, how do we explain the difference between the material object that is the cerebral cortex being conscious, and other material objects, such as stones, acorns, or the cerebellum, being nonconscious?

The answer is that the material brain itself is not conscious. Brain activity belongs to the material world; but consciousness is specific to human beings and conscious animals. Psychological powers such as perceiving, thinking, feeling, planning, and intending, are attributes of human beings, not of their brains. It makes no sense to replace those psychological explanations with neurological explanations. Our brains aren’t conscious, we are. Ludwig Wittgenstein averred that “Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it sees, is blind; is conscious or unconscious.”

Human beings and conscious animals depend on psychological and environmental factors, and are not defined by brain activity, even though it may be necessary for consciousness. Mental states are instead essentially relational and world-involving. It makes no sense to locate them anywhere, but even more so within the skull, as much of our thinking spreads into our social and physical surroundings, and is engaged in experiences outside our bodies. What makes our experiences the kind they are is not neural activity by itself, then, but its dynamic interaction with our external world.

Dr Lucien Karhausen, Bruxelles

Dear Editor: Raymond Tallis’s column in Issue 166 about how lucky he feels to be alive in this world is honest, sincere, and thoughtful. The luck he feels is our sense of the ‘accidental’ nature of our existence, leaping out of nowhere, as it were. More generally, we might call it a sense of awe and wonder. Many do.

To his credit, Tallis does not explain away our ‘luck’ by attributing some external higher purpose to our existence. Thrown back on his own resources to explain the ‘meta-fact’ of the contingency of his existence: “the luck of being at all that is a condition of having good or bad luck,” he integrates into this an acknowledgement that he has been gifted with an ‘absurdly privileged’ – existentially lucky – life. It is also to his credit that he concludes his column expressing gratitude. That being said, we are tempted to yell, “It’s not enough, Raymond!” Beyond his secular perspective on things, we might say that Tallis is ‘thanking the gods’ for his absurdly privileged life. Who else is there to thank?

Perhaps we do not ‘create’ our own luck, but perhaps we do ‘act out’ our luck. Our ‘absurd privilege’ might be to be an active part of the world, an active component, rather than to be an uncommitted calculator trying to account for the unaccountability of our life.

W. Faulkner, Diamond Valley, Alberta

Capital in the Capitol

Dear Editor: I was disappointed to find that Stephen Martin Fritz and Denise Morel’s examination of the roots of democracy in Issue 166 was really an apology for laissez-faire capitalism. But while capitalism has proven to be compatible with democratic government, and may have helped in some cases to bring it about, allowing our Carnegies and Fords to do exactly what they want has not, in fact, guaranteed ever-increasing wealth, health, independence and security for all. Moreover, the global warming crisis demonstrates the need for governments to regulate the actions of corporations when they are opposed to the public interest.

As a Canadian, I couldn’t help but laugh at one of Fritz and Morel’s more outlandish assertions. They claim that because Americans are ten percent richer than Canadians, they have more choices than Canadians. In fact, Americans need to be richer than Canadians, because they don’t have a comparable government-funded health care system. An American who can’t afford medical care can ‘decide’ not to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it; but is that a free choice?

Peter MacCallum, Toronto

Dear Editor: In Issue 166, Fritz and Morel provide a thorough, practical, and reasonable defense of the fundamental need for free trade and free exchange of ideas within a functioning democracy. They emphasize that what matters more than a broadly educated populace is how easily each person can specialize in trade with others. This is a refreshing, non-partisan take on the current state of democracy in a time of such division, where we are seemingly unable to come together to hear each other’s perspectives. In particular, their concluding paragraph on how democracies die (or rather, are murdered) contains an important line: democracies “are strangled when society changes its focus from production and trade in peace and prosperity to endless war and the redirection of industry to socially-destructive ends.” A timely statement indeed, and something we must not lose sight of in the coming years.

Christina Leach, Alberta, Canada

Dear Editor: I found Fritz and Morel’s article ‘The Material Creation of Freedom’ elucidating precisely because of the emphasis that’s indicated by the title. Their understanding that “the expansion of commerce alters the relations among citizens, and shapes them to match the psychology of the shopkeeper”, and that the tolerance thus engendered by commerce brings choice and possibilities of social mobility in its wake rings true. Nevertheless, I was reminded that freedom bestowed from above can easily morph into freedom allowed, and that even in democratic societies, freedom allowed may not be freedom at all.

Over a hundred years ago John Dewey noted that within any hierarchical society those who exercise power encourage thoughtless routine in others and only “subsidize such thought and learning as are kept remote from affairs.” By praising subjection while reframing it as loyalty, they aim to maintain a status quo while “denouncing as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought.” According to Dewey, societal renewal – “breaking down old rigidities of habit and preparing the way for acts that re-create an environment” – depends on “the personal subjective aspect of morality” evident in resistance to these procrustean forces. Such ‘bottom up’ freedom is much closer to seeing the emperor naked than taking advantage of choices allowed by rulers. It must be worth adverting to in a society such as ours, which not only anaesthetizes discontent, but has an economy dependant on doing just that.

Andrew Perkis

Caves, Chambers & Bubbles

Dear Editor: Sean Radcliffe (PN 165) correctly points out similarities between the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic and social media echo chambers. However, not everything that is similar to an echo chamber is an echo chamber. So as well as internet echo chambers there are what C. Thi Nguyen calls ‘epistemic bubbles’ (in for example, Episteme, 2020), and what Eli Pariser called ‘filter bubbles’ (in for example, The Filter Bubble, 2011). According to Nguyen, an epistemic bubble is what happens when insiders aren’t exposed to people from the opposite side, while an echo chamber is what you get when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside.

A filter bubble is a special type of epistemic bubble. According to Nguyen, you are in a filter bubble when you’re there not as a result of your own decision but a decision by something else. An obvious example of this something else is an algorithm that determines the information sources you’re provided with.

Since the individuals in Plato’s cave are not there by choice, they might be in a filter-type epistemic bubble, or nonvoluntarily in an echo chamber. Which is it? For most of Plato’s description of the cave, it sounds like they’re not in an echo chamber but an epistemic bubble, as they aren’t directly exposed to anyone or anything outside the cave. But what happens at the end of his account perhaps means they’re better counted as being in an echo chamber: One of individuals trapped in the cave escapes, is exposed to the world outside, changes all his beliefs, and then returns to the cave to tell those still in the cave about it. They completely distrust what they’re told.

What difference does the label ‘epistemic bubble’ or ‘echo chamber’ make for the cave situation? Nguyen says that the difference matters when it comes to getting people out. Individuals trapped in an epistemic bubble can get out of it by exposure to people from the opposite side. So if the cave story describes an epistemic bubble, those left in the cave should have been able to get out by being exposed to what the person who left the cave had to say. But for those caught in an echo chamber, something more dramatic is needed – an epistemic reset or reboot to factory settings of the kind that Descartes says he performed in Meditations on First Philosophy. Those left in the cave can only escape by each and every one of them somehow doing the same thing as the individual who escaped and revised all of his ideas about reality.

Leslie Burkholder, Vancouver BC

Poet’s Corner

Existential Food

Jean-Paul Sartre’s morning tea

Pain au raisin d’etre.

Epistemology

We argue with premises stated

That can be agreed or updated;

Deductive conclusions will always look fine,

While inductive samples don’t always align.

Mathematics was totally sorted by Frege –

Helping Bertrand by making the numbers less vaguer.

But for absolute knowledge we really can’t beat

The wisdom of WhatsApp, dark web at our feet.

Stephen Timperley, Carterton, New Zealand

Columns

- Excusing God

- Helvétius (1715-1771)

- Philosophers on Holidays

- The Importance of the Purple

Tallis in Wonderland

Excusing God

Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil.

This is the third time in this column I have written about – or more specifically, criticised – Philip Goff’s ideas. In Issue 135, I demonstrated (at least to my own satisfaction) that panpsychism, as set out in Professor Goff’s 2019 book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, did not make sense. Then in Issue 162, I argued against the claim advanced in his Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023) that the intrinsic improbability of a planet able to support life was evidence for a cosmic purpose. Now I am at it again. You may think that this amounts to literary stalking, or even persecution. That may be the case. But it is also a tribute to the intrinsic interest of Goff’s ideas, the lucidity with which they are expressed, and their power to widen the horizon of the thinking even of those who, like me, ultimately reject them.

This time my focus is on something more specific claimed by Goff, in a recent article in this magazine, ‘A God of Limited Power’ (Philosophy Now 165). Here he addresses the difficulty often invoked by infidels such as myself “of reconciling a loving all powerful God with the terrible suffering we see in the world.” The argument is that if God truly is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent – ideas central to Judeo-Christian belief – then he would not wish, nor indeed allow, that there should be suffering in the universe. So why is there so much suffering?

Indeed, the scale, intensity, ubiquity, and irremediability of that suffering is easy to under-imagine unless one is in the grip of it. But the constant possibility of suffering is built into our organic nature. Our vulnerability extends from external catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, and fires, reaching down to our individual bodies with their many ways of going off course, and, as a result, imposing pain as the price of continuing existence. Moreover, the evolutionary mechanism the non-survival of the less-than-fit that has led to exotic megafauna such as humans, is a tale of predation, starvation, and often protracted, painful death. Darwin’s admission that he could not persuade himself “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars” (in a letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860) can be extrapolated to a lot of what happens in the natural world. And then, of course, there is man-made evil (AKA ‘moral evil’). This is the suffering we inflict on each other as we pursue our individual interests or those of the communities to which we belong: the endless human story of oppression, criminality, and war. The usual theistic defence is that our special status as the apple of God’s eye requires that we should have free will, which implies the power of choosing between doing good and doing evil, and some choose evil.

However, to me this response seems frivolous when I think of the pain inflicted on innocents by those who choose evil. The recent testimony of Professor Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who led an emergency medical team in central Gaza at Al-Aqsa Hospital, speaks for itself:

“One child I’ll never forget had burns so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving but there was no morphine to give her. So not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony. And there was nowhere for her to go, so she died on the floor of the emergency room.”

An omnipotent God would, it seems, have some explaining to do to.

Problems with Limited Solutions

For Goff and some theologians, the explanation is to be found in the idea that the deity, though benevolent, has limited power. So, as much as God would wish to eradicate suffering, it lies beyond his capacity to do so.

This defence is not persuasive. It seems unlikely that a being capable of creating a universe out of nothing, and setting in motion those processes by which life in all its astonishing variety emerged from lifeless stuff, and by which conscious life woke up out of insentient life, should be unable to meet the seemingly lesser challenge of making life pain-free, or of adjusting the order of things such that its crowning glory – human beings – should be universally kind, thoughtful, and truthful, committed to making life better for their fellows. Is it really easier to make a universe out of a void than making a pain-free life, or consistently good people?

The problem of suffering sits on a deeper problem: the mystery of sentience. Why would a benign God create a universe that ultimately generated entities susceptible to endless, sometimes unbearable, distress, inflicted on them by nature or by their fellows? Goff’s God may not be omnipotent, but he surely must have been able to anticipate these consequences of his act of creation. And if this future were not foreseeable, one might still expect the Creator to have some insight into the limits of his knowledge, and be prudent enough to mobilise the precautionary principle, and so hold back on the creation of conscious creatures, given that, with embodied consciousness, there comes at least the possibility of suffering. Or did he have no insight even into the limitations of his knowledge? Has he been surprised and disappointed by how things have turned out?

I am reminded of an analogous problem that has arisen with the increasing power of humanity as a result of technological advance. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger fears that we may be able to create conscious computers. As readers of this column may recall, I believe this is a fantasy (see ‘The Fantasy of Conscious Machines’, Issue 152). But the improbability of conscious machines is, for Metzinger, beside the point. In ‘Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology’ (Journal of AI Consciousness, 2021), he argues that, so long as it is even remotely possible that artificial consciousness might emerge, there should be a ban in the medium-term on all research that directly aims at or knowingly risks this outcome. Central to his argument is the strong possibility that conscious machines might be obliged by humans to experience states they find unbearable. The moratorium may not need to be permanent; but, Metzinger argues, it should not be lifted until it has been tied “to an ever more fine-grained, rational, evidence-based, and hopefully ethically convincing set of constraints.”

To some it may seem arrogant, even blasphemous, to suggest that the Creator should have looked before he leaped, and hesitated before switching on a universe with properties that eventually gave rise to sentient creatures so vulnerable to dreadful suffering. Some apologists, however, have defended God’s choice on the grounds that the suffering is redeemed, possibly justified, or even to be regarded as a hidden good; for instance, on the grounds that it is character-building, or that it gives us the opportunity to devote ourselves to alleviating the suffering of our fellow humans. This type of explanation, however, hardly applies to the suffering experienced by most non-human organisms; and it also seems irrelevant to the point of obscenity if it’s invoked in relation to those humans like Professor Maynard’s little patient who spent the last hours (or days) of her short life in unrelieved agony on the floor of an emergency room. The evil that caused this hideous suffering is in no way redeemed by the opportunity it provides for the exercise of goodness.

Wasp © Alvesgaspar 2008 Creative Commons 3

The Imbalance of Good & Evil

Goff’s ‘God of limited power’ is at least benign. But then there is Steven Law’s ‘The Evil God Challenge’ (Religious Studies, 2010, 46:3). Law reminds us that there are, after all, good things in the world – beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness – which may allay the suspicion that the universe has been created by an ‘all-evil’ omnipotent God. As Law points out, however, it does not support the notion of a god who is all-good. In general, any attempt to rest the answer to the question of the benevolence of God on a ‘felicific calculus’ performed to determine whether the sum total of goodness or happiness exceeds that of evil or suffering, must fail. Firstly, we cannot add up the quantity of happiness and the quantity of suffering over the history of the universe in order to see which is the greater. To put it mildly, we lack the data. And in any case, happiness and suffering cannot be quantified on a single scale, so the relevant sums cannot be performed.

The Bible tells us that God himself passed judgement on his creation. According to Genesis 1:31, he “saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Marking his own homework, he concluded that it was perfect. The excuse that this would have remained the case had it not been for the Original Sin of the first humans does not work: given that man is God’s creation, it is not clear that the responsibility for things going awry can be distanced from God. It also seems unfair to extend the punishment visited on humanity to non-human sentient creatures.

It seems therefore that those who want to reconcile the fact of suffering – which seems fated to accompany the emergence of conscious physical beings – with the notion of an omnibenevolent God, may not be entirely reassured by the idea of a God of limited power. Why, moreover, should we believe that a God who is prevented by the laws of nature he has himself created from making that nature free of appalling suffering, or who sees the pain of the evolutionary process as an acceptable price to pay for the emergence of beings with free will, will be able to secure his favourites a decent after-life? While it may seem plausible that, as Goff says, “a loving God would want to preserve our conscious lives after death and would want to move us towards a better world”, it is equally plausible, on the basis of his performance in this world, that this will beyond his limited powers.

Goff’s claim that life after death and a cosmic purpose are ‘a reasonable hope’ does not therefore stand up. God’s performance in this world does not give me confidence as to the quality of the next one. After all, we cannot imagine that, in creating the world as we know it, he wasn’t trying hard enough or was deciding not to exercise the powers that would be necessary to create an afterlife – an afterlife, incidentally, not available to someone like me, whose gaps in understanding do not seem to be shaped to accommodate a god. A limited God who has the power to create a universe, but who is unable to protect its most innocent inhabitants from suffering that’s ended only by death, cannot be relied upon to deliver on the promise of an eternal life of unalloyed joy.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2025

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is now out from Philosophy Now.

Philosophical Haiku

Helvétius (1715-1771)

by Terence Green

All born to reason

Passion incites inquiry

Virtue through pleasure

Helvetius by Pierre Michel Alix

Claude-Adrien Helvétius was born into a family of physicians – his father was doctor to the Queen of France – but at the age of twenty-three, canny Claude opted to pursue a different avenue and took up tax-collecting instead. A smart move, as this highly remunerative work allowed him to live the high life without actually working. He was fond of literature and philosophy, and soon began to hob-nob with the pre-revolutionary literary and intellectual elite of Paris.

In 1758, Helvétius published his most famous, and scandalous, work, De l’esprit (On the Mind). Here he argued that pleasure is the highest good, and that we’re all born with the same intellectual potential – a most democratic idea, which implied that it was only luck that separated the successful from the miserably poor. Our intellectual development comes about as a result of the stimulation of our passions: in order to learn, quite literally, we need to be passionate about learning. And most importantly, tedious moralising will never make people good. Instead, virtuous behaviour should be rewarded – and here comes the real scandal – even with sexual gratification!

As you can imagine, the book caused a furore among the guardians of the public morals (including aristocracy and royalty), who deemed it a threat to public health and safety. It was condemned by both the church and the state as yet another example of the danger of free inquiry.

The rather spineless Helvétius had no interest in being a martyr to the cause of Enlightenment – he just wanted to be famous – so he hastily penned a number of grovelling retractions. Unimpressed, and wanting to set an example to any other smarty-pants with dangerous ideas, the authorities had the book burned by the Paris hangman (because hanging a book just looks silly). On the upside, this blaze of publicity increased sales no end as people lined up to be scandalised and it was translated into the many languages of Europe.

© Terence Green 2025

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

Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Holidays

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.

It’s time to pack the sunscreen. Don’t forget to take out the travel insurance. Excited? Undoubtedly. Whether it’s a five-star weekend break, a budget getaway, or glamping at Glastonbury, most of us look forward to a bit of time away. Some philosophers, however, have taken a dim view of vacations. Emily Thomas, in her book The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (2020), recounts for instance how Francis Bacon (1561-1626) claimed that “travel would bring about the apocalypse” (p.2).

That prophecy, we can reliably say, did not materialize. Still, many philosophers were of the same opinion on holidays as the 1st Viscount St Albans (Sir Francis’s other title). Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), for one, took a similar view when he contemptuously wrote that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953, p.132). Holidaying must have been an issue that exercised him a fair bit, for he later used an example of an exchange which suggests that his excursions were rather stressful occasions for all concerned. How else can we interpret the following?: “I am asked: ‘How long are you staying here?’ I reply: ‘Tomorrow I am going away; it’s the end of my holidays’.” (Ibid, p.281).

Others had happier memories. Wittgenstein’s Austrian compatriot Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) recalled a vacation in 1932 ‘in the beautiful Tyrolese hills’: “We had a happy time, with plenty of sunshine, and I think all tremendously enjoyed these long and fascinating talks” (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963, p.253). Popper and Wittgenstein were notoriously bitter rivals, so it is perhaps to be expected that the two also differed on the enjoyment of holidays.

Popper was also not a fan of Plato (428-347 BC), and his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) was among other things a long diatribe against the ancient Greek philosopher’s politics in the Republic. Still, on one matter Popper and Plato agreed: they both liked holidays, since the Greek wrote late in life that, “No one was to be praised more than ‘holiday-makers’. The person who organised vacations should be highly esteemed and deserves to be awarded the first prize” (The Laws, 658).

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) – among other things, a classicist – would have agreed. She relished the relative anonymity that travel can bring. As she put it, “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows your name and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time. In the opacity of foreign places all specific references to yourself are blurred” (Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, 1957, p.138). Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) put it equally well:

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,

To gain all while you give,

To roam the roads of lands remote,

To travel is to live.”

(The Fairy-Tale of my Life, 1871, p.330)

Happy Holidays!

© Prof. Matt Qvortrup 2025

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

The Art of Living

The Importance of the Purple

Massimo Pigliucci looks for threads of integrity in a morally compromised world.

In the tumultuous political landscape of ancient Rome, few stories better illustrate the ideal of moral courage than that of Helvidius Priscus, a Roman senator who faced Emperor Vespasian with remarkable fortitude.

During Vespasian’s reign (69-79 CE), Priscus found himself in a direct confrontation with imperial power. When ordered not to attend a Senate meeting in order not to potentially embarrass Vespasian with a public confrontation, Priscus responded with characteristic clarity: “You have the power to disqualify me as a senator, but as long as I am one, I’m obliged to attend meetings.” The Emperor, seemingly willing to compromise, permitted his attendance, but demanded his silence. Priscus, however, understood that his duty transcended mere physical presence: “Don’t ask me for my opinion and I’ll keep quiet.” When Vespasian insisted he would be expected to seek his counsel, Priscus replied, “And I’m bound to say what seems right.” The exchange reached its dramatic climax when Vespasian threatened execution. Priscus’s response exemplifies an acceptance of mortality and commitment to virtue: “Did I ever tell you that I was immortal? You do your job and I’ll do mine. Yours is to send me into exile and mine to leave without grieving. Yours may be to put me to death and mine to die without fear.” Priscus understood that his role as senator carried responsibilities that transcended even the emperor’s commands.

Vespasian by Rubens

The exchange showcases the essence of Stoic philosophy, which is the recognition that while external circumstances lie beyond our control, our response to them remains entirely our own. The Stoic teacher Epictetus (c.50-c.138 CE) summarized the point of the story thus: “So did Priscus do any good? After all, he was just a single individual. But what ‘good’ does the purple do the toga? All it does is stand out in it as purple and serve as a model of beauty for the rest of the threads” (Discourses, 1.2.22). So, like a thread of purple through a white toga that stands out brilliantly among the common cloth, Priscus’s moral example serves as an enduring model of integrity. His story reminds us that even a single individual, committed to principle rather than to personal safety, can illuminate the path of virtue for generations to follow.

What was the disagreement between Priscus and Vespasian? The Emperor wanted to manage the state finances directly, but Priscus, in his role of Praetor (a high level magistrate), reminded Vespasian that the power of the purse, as we call it today, rested with the Senate, not the Emperor.

Priscus was not new to having a principled opposition to power. During the reign of Nero he had declared his sympathies for Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar as an emerging tyrant on the Ides of March 44 BCE. That kind of declaration amounted to questioning the very authority of the Emperor – as a result of which Priscus was sent into exile in 66 CE. He was recalled to Rome two years later by yet another emperor, Galba. But soon he managed to run afoul of Vespasian and be sent into exile for a second time. Shortly thereafter, he was assassinated on Vespasian’s orders. In his Discourses, Epictetus (who was in turn exiled by the Emperor Domitian, Vespasian’s son), tells us that what Priscus did was simply to properly play two of his roles in life: that of a Roman senator, and that of a member of the human cosmopolis. Both roles compelled him to reject the arbitrary actions of the emperor, even at the potential cost of his own life.

One doesn’t become like Priscus overnight. Growing moral fiber requires time and effort – what Epictetus calls our ‘winter training’, referring to the exercises Roman soldiers carried out during the winter in order to get ready for their military campaigns in the spring. A bit less dramatically, we may draw an analogy with practicing in order to prepare ourselves to run a marathon. If we did nothing for months then all of a sudden started running, we would not be able to complete the forty-two kilometer challenge. It’s only by building up our strength and endurance little by little that we may hope to get ourselves in the necessary shape. The same is true for our moral fortitude. Some of us may be naturally prone toward acts of heroism, but I’m guessing most are not. Nevertheless, we can practice courage by nudging ourselves to speak out whenever we see injustice, even though it may be uncomfortable and perhaps invite retaliation from strangers, colleagues, or bosses. As Epictetus tells his students: “The only thing you need to take into consideration is the price at which you sell your integrity. Listen, man, whatever else you do, don’t sell it cheap!” (Discourses, 1.2.33).

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2025

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 Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at massimopigliucci.org.

Reviews

- Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Levebvre

- Determined by Robert Sapolsky

- Perfect Days

Books

Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Levebvre

We search for freedom this issue, as Kevin Currie points out the many varieties of liberalism.

“That’s because you’re a liberal!” my self-identified ‘progressive’ colleague said to me with slight contempt. We were talking about the importance of the right to conscience even when it means the right to hold noxious – maybe racist or sexist – views. As a liberal, I loathe sexism and racism just as she does; but equally, as a liberal, I loathe putting moral restrictions on what people may believe or enact in their private lives. Yet to my progressive colleague, these views are antique and liberalism is akin to not taking a stand on much of anything, thus letting individual rights run roughshod over social justice.

She’s not alone. Liberalism is encountering pretty serious resistance these days. Liberals expect it from the conservative right, of course, but it’s now also coming from the progressive left, as my colleague exemplifies. Books are being written with titles like After Liberalism and Why Liberalism Failed. Yikes!

Not so fast, says Alexandre Levebvre in his new book Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024). The title describes its contents perfectly. The book celebrates liberalism not just as a type of political order centered around individual freedom, but as an attitude towards the world. Moreover, Lefebvre suggests that liberalism has been so successful in the Western world that it is now a primary source of how we come to understand our situations. For instance, if you’re suspicious when people trade their individuality for group identity; if you presume opportunity inequality to be a bad thing; or if you believe that everyone should have a fair shot in life regardless of their background, then you are a liberal – maybe even without realizing it. As Levebvre would say, you’re a fish so surrounded by liberal water that you don’t realize how wet you are.

This argument – that we live in such a liberal culture that we often forget just how liberal we are – forms Section 1 of the book. Lefebvre uses great examples here, like the sitcom Parks and Recreation, which centers around a team trying to provide a public good to a community who often puts more value on individual rights – a liberal theme through and through. Or there’s the emerging ethos in comedy that morally speaking, one can’t ‘punch down’ – meaning, get laughs by poking fun of, or using slurs against, members of vulnerable groups. This is a liberal way to think. And for my progressive colleague, I’d add another example: Critical Race Theory, which is often incorrectly derided as ‘illiberal’. However, it is (almost invisibly) premised on liberal ideas: a hatred of unjust (white) privileges and (black) disadvantage; and an individualism which recognizes that race labels (‘white’, ‘black’) are social constructs that get in the way of people being treated as individuals. Critical Race Theory may reach so-called ‘progressive’ conclusions, but I couldn’t imagine it finding any purchase in a society that wasn’t sympathetic to liberal ideals.

Rawlsian & Other Liberalisms

Now we come to Sections II and III of the book, where it disappoints to a degree.

Section II is entirely about the liberalism of John Rawls. Rawls changed the game in political philosophy and indeed liberalism with his now classic 1971 book A Theory of Justice. In it he argued for a type of welfare-state liberalism that respected individual rights for all, but justified inequality only in those cases where it worked to the benefit of the least well-off. For Rawls, this is the type of society we would choose if we set society’s rules from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, meaning, without any knowledge of who we would be or what role we would occupy in the society we were creating. Put differently, these are the principles that Rawls thought would ensure fairness and decency.

A different kind of liberal: Robert Nozick

Rawlsian liberalism is the kind of liberalism Lefebvre thinks most of us swim in. And he’s sort of right. If you live in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, or one of countless other liberal places, then you live in and were educated into a society that respects individual rights while trying to make sure that the least-well-off are cared for. My big problem with this section (and as we’ll see, Section III) is that Lefebvre talks as if Rawlsian liberalism is the only decent sort of liberalism there is. However, three years after Rawls wrote his surprise bestseller, fellow philosopher Robert Nozick (who had the office next to him) wrote an equally successful response to him called Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). This advocated a much more minimal liberalism, promoting free markets over a Rawlsian welfare state. Any college political philosophy course that discusses Rawls pretty much has to discuss Nozick too. But there are zero mentions of Nozick in this book.

In fact, there are many flavors of liberalism: pluralistic liberalism (Isaiah Berlin); agonistic liberalism (William Connolly); more socialistic styles of liberalism (G.A. Cohen); and ‘classical’ or libertarian liberalism (F.A. Hayek), just to name a few. While we shouldn’t expect Lefebvre to defend Rawls against all liberal competitors, those who read Lefebvre’s book as an intro to liberalism could get the false impression that Rawls is the only true liberal.

Principles in Practice

Because Lefebvre sees liberalism a way of life rather than ‘just’ a politics, Section III recommends three ‘practices’ that liberals can cultivate in their daily lives. Just as religious people have certain rituals that help them live out their beliefs, Lefebvre thinks liberals should cultivate their liberalism by engaging in regular liberal practices. These practices he also gets from Rawls.

The first practice is to imagine human society from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, where we appraise society’s rules with an eye toward whether we’d endorse them if we didn’t know what our place in that society is or would be. The second practice is ‘reflexive equilibrium’, another Rawlsian term, meaning, we always seek to interrogate our beliefs with an eye toward rooting out contradictions and striving for internal consistency. Third is the Rawlsian practice of ‘public reason’. This means framing our views in terms that others could understand, and accept; and the reverse: understanding others’ views by imaginatively couching them in terms we ourselves could accept. Lefebvre argues that these three practices will increase our liberal sense of justice, coherence, and tolerance respectively.

John Rawls by Athamos Stradis 2025

You may have guessed that while I’m a liberal, I do not consider myself a Rawlsian. (For anyone interested, I’m drawn both to the pluralistic liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the agonistic liberalism of William Connolly). Likely because of that, I find Section III only mildly compelling. All three exercises are interesting, and I think they can add to our liberal sensibilities. But they are also limited, in ways most evident to non-Rawlsians.

Let’s start with the third practice, ‘public reason’. Remember, the claim is that an ability to tolerate and even rejoice in difference can come from trying to understand others’ views in terms that might be more compelling to us. I did this above with Critical Race Theory. If a liberal decries Critical Race scholarship as ‘illiberal’, they will be less able to open-mindedly examine it; but if they frame it in a more liberal way – for instance, “Ah, it’s saying that race leads to unearned privileges and oppressions, both of which we’re against!” – then they’re better able to understand and appreciate it (even if they don’t endorse it). Practicing this type of public reason, Lefebvre argues, increases tolerance.

Okay, fine. But it can also limit tolerance, insofar as it implies that we can or should only tolerate things that can be put into terms that we can understand. Yet maybe a more expansive and virtuous type of tolerance is the skeptical kind: the kind that recognizes that because our understanding is limited, we can and should also tolerate certain things despite not being able to understand them.

Or take practice two – the idea that we should always strive for ‘reflexive equilibrium’ , meaning, aspire to root out contradictions in our beliefs. Lefebvre argues that doing this will lead us to increasingly thoughtful and good beliefs. But I don’t buy it. When we interrogate and reform our beliefs – which we should do, I agree! – as often as not we find that the world contains or elicits a plurality of values: that the world, and the rules we must use to navigate it, aren’t as simple as we thought. So, far from rooting out contradiction, I’d argue that sometimes we should embrace contradiction, and consider that maybe no consistent set of rules can be found for navigating as complex a world as ours. I’d even add that standing in awe before contradiction and ambivalence may be as deeply important a practice for liberals as trying to root them out.

To my self-proclaimed progressive colleague, I proudly own that I am a liberal. And to agree with Lefebvre’s point, I think she might be more liberal than she realizes. But I’d hesitate to give her this book as a way to back up that claim. Many liberals are in effect Rawlsians, but many are not. While this book is interesting, especially in how it frames liberalism as a way of life more than a politics, it is of limited value to those not already Rawlsian.

© Kevin Currie 2025

Kevin Currie is a Teaching Professor in East Carolina University’s College of Education. He generally focuses on the philosophy and history of education, and is the author of the book Education in the Marketplace (Palgrave MacMillan).

• Liberalism as a Way of Life, by Alexandre Levebvre, Princeton UP, 2024, £12.99 pb, 304 pages

Books

Determined by Robert Sapolsky

Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism.

Robert Sapolsky is that rare thing in modern academia, a true polymath. This is evidenced by his multiple and simultaneously held professorships, which range from Anthropology to Neurology, as well as his willingness to stick his nose into what philosophers often consider to be their business. In this case, that business is the debate around free will. Sapolsky espouses a ‘hard’, if non-reductive, form of determinism – the idea that all physical activity is determined by previous physical activity, including in the brain, and so there is no free choice.

From the outset, Sapolsky dismisses outright the classical notion of ‘free will’, which is typically associated with a ‘dualist’ metaphysics – the claim that reality consists of both a causally-determined physical realm and a non-physical mental realm in which events are not causally determined. Instead, for Sapolsky, the real opposition to determinism, at least these days, comes from various forms of ‘compatibilism’ – the idea that free will is compatible with determinism.

Sapolsky has written us a big book (almost 500 pages, including footnotes), but it would have been nice if he’d given us at least a potted idea of why the ‘two-world’ dualist view is so problematic, as well as a greater engagement with the historical context of the debate. Immanuel Kant gets little mention, and the originator of the compatibilist view, David Hume, none at all. Perhaps the reason for this is that modern compatibilists (who do feature in large number) base their arguments on different grounds than Hume’s. For Hume, free will is compatible with determinism as long as our actions are not compelled by forces outside of us. In other words, if I hit you in the face then I am responsible for the act if the impetus for the action came from within me.

For Hume, the antecedent causes of my urge to violence were impenetrable; but not for a person equipped with the insights of modern neurology. Indeed, work by some specialists in the field, especially Ben Libet in the 1980s, suggests that events in my brain can sometimes be used to predict my actions before I am even aware of the urge to act.

Hard Compatibilism

If you claim, as the modern compatibilist does, that the world is governed by the laws of physical cause and effect and, yet at the same time, that I am responsible for my actions, then you need to find to find some crack in the armour of hard determinism for responsibility to emerge through. As Sapolsky demonstrates, that’s not an easy thing to do. For him, life is essentially about luck, in that who and what we are is the outcome of factors utterly outside of our control. Genetic factors may predispose us to psychopathy, depression, creativity, or compassion, but they do not do so in a vacuum, and environmental factors play a huge role in deciding which of our genetic predispositions are realised in the structure of our brain and the behaviours which follow. To be specific, if I am well-nurtured, well-nourished, live a life in which others are not a constant source of threat, and don’t imbibe too many neurotoxins, I am likely to end up with good impulse control, because my prefrontal cortex is well-developed and well integrated with my limbic system (these are the areas of the brain which, respectively, think about our responses to the world, and which feel things emotionally). By contrast, poverty, pollution, racism, and other destructive conditions will make my genetic hand much harder to play (even this metaphor grants too much, with the idea that we might ‘choose’ how to play our hand). In a brilliant passage, Sapolsky asks us to consider the difference between a Harvard Graduate and the guy at the back of the Harvard graduation hall charged with picking up the litter. He argues that in every respect, chance, and nothing but chance, makes the difference between those lives.

Lots of people aren’t going to like that conclusion, but it’s the same one that the political philosopher John Rawls came to: that the rich and powerful owe their position to luck rather than merit (I’m sure Sapolsky loves Rawls). Yet even some hard-headed materialists such as Daniel C. Dennett find this idea so unpalatable that they resort to feeble attempts to rescue the idea of merit – for instance, in terms of the ‘grit’ necessary to overcome adversity; as if ‘grit’ is itself not a product of the same genetic and environmental factors. Even less impressive are arguments which attempt to recover a space for free will by claims about ‘complexity’ (the fact that we can’t understand what the causes of a particular event are is no argument for it not being caused), or about quantum indeterminism (if quantum effects are occurring in the brain, this suggests randomness rather than responsibility). As Sapolsky suggests, even if we decide, as so-called ‘property dualists’ do, that consciousness is ‘simply’ an emergent property of brain activity, this is no argument that it is not an entirely determined result of it.

Bea Ysolda 2025

Artwork © Bea Ysolda 2025. For more art by Bea please visit http://yink.art

Chance, Crime & Causation

If someone hates Sapolsky’s conclusions about the lack of merit, they’ll be incensed by the implications of his arguments for the treatment of criminals.

Here, again, the logic of determinism is inescapable. To put it simply, something external makes the paedophile the way they are; and something external made Hitler and Stalin and every other monster the way they were or are, too. Obviously, it would be a good thing if we could figure out what it is and prevent people being exposed to it (t here are indeed a range of risk factors associated with both paedophilia and psychopathy). Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us much about what we should do with offenders. Sapolsky favours what he calls the ‘quarantine’ model: like Typhoid Mary, these folk shouldn’t be allowed to mix with others, but that’s no reason for doing nasty things to them. And yes, some people are beyond reform and their ‘quarantine’ must be permanent. Sapolsky recognises the evolutionary benefits of punishing those who betray our trust (there is a nice detour into game theory at this point), but also points out the excessive, visceral satisfaction some people seem to get from punishing others. In the US and the UK, this means that politicians fight shy of focusing on reform and rehabilitation in the penal system. But the same isn’t true everywhere. In the Netherlands, for instance, some argue prisons are like hotels, yet the dwindling number of criminals that country produces are less likely to end up back in one than is the case in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Brilliant Imperfection

At times, this book is a brilliant antidote to the incoherence of our thinking about things like good and evil. For instance, Sapolsky resists the urge to portray our considerate frontal cortex as the ‘angel’ on our shoulder by pointing out that moral motivation is essentially emotional, and so compassion lives elsewhere in the brain. Moreover, his employment of a time-scale for the causes of our actions, going from seconds (the firing of neurones and the secretion of hormones), to minutes and hours (low blood sugar, or the depletion of serotonin occasioned by a poor night’s sleep), to years (did dad hit you and beat up your mum?), to centuries (what kind of culture do you live in?), to eons (evolutionary history), is quite brilliant. There is therapeutic merit, too, in his message that the melancholic tendencies some of us endure are not, in the end, any fault of our own.

Of course, no book is perfect, and it would have been nice to have seen a few links to wider philosophy. For example, there is a rather interesting passage about the way we can become habituated to doing the right thing that might give a neurological basis to Aristotle’s virtue theory. Also, and despite his protestations in On Liberty (1859) that the book is not about free will, J.S. Mill’s comments about the “conditions necessary for us to grow, like a tree, according to the inward forces that make us living things” are absolutely in line with Sapolsky’s biologically-based holism. There are more modern thinkers and researchers who also deserve Sopolsky’s attention. For instance, Karen Wynn at Yale has enlightened us about the way that gut feelings about fairness to the individual (which might well serve as the basis of ethics) are ‘hard wired’ by evolution. Social psychologists such as Sheriff taught us as far back as the 1950s how being encouraged to co-operate in childhood might rewire the amygdala – the neurological seat of our fears or other feelings about the ‘other’.

In the end, pointing out these omissions is quibbling about a magnificent book, but I have one substantial worry about Sapolsky’s argument. For all the plausibility of his rejection of compatibilism in favour of a meritless determinism, it can’t be denied that there still needs to be some vocabulary to distinguish a brain like mine which (admittedly by chance) has the capacity to moderate its emotional responses, from one that has not, leading to antisocial behaviour. Indeed, when we recognise the efficacy of interventions like CBT on certain brains, and the capacity of rational argument to change our minds (just as my mind was changed about determinism by one of Sapolsky’s earlier books), then perhaps the concept of compatibilism isn’t entirely redundant after all.

© Philip Badger 2025

Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology, and social policy with philosophy. He teaches in Sheffield.

• Determined: Life Without Free Will, by Robert Sapolsky, Bodley Head, 2023, 528 pages, £10.99 pb

Films

Perfect Days

Thomas E. Wartenberg focuses on a path to happiness.

Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), the Japanese toilet cleaner protagonist of Wim Wenders’ 2023 Academy Award Winning Film Perfect Days, is the anti-Sisyphus.

Sisyphus, you may recall, is the hero of Albert Camus’ philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). According to the Ancient Greek myth Camus draws up on, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to rolling a huge stone up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down to the bottom of the hill each evening. Annoying, right?

For Camus, Sisyphus’s unflagging yet futile attempts to hoist that rock to the summit represents the essence of human life, which is its absurdity. For Camus, life’s absurdity is the result of a conflict between our need for meaning and the world’s indifference to us. ‘Absurdity’ signifies our collective inability to find a way to make our lives meaningful.

Having to face a difficult futile task on a daily basis only to see all of your efforts amount to naught might make you depressed, even suicidal. Yet Camus does not draw that obvious conclusion from his account of the absurdity of life. Surprisingly, Camus characterizes Sisyphus as the absurd hero par excellence, and concludes his essay with a startling sentence: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This assertion stems from Camus’ view of Sisyphus as scorning the gods and the fate they’ve assigned him. Sisyphus’s contempt results in his triumph over them, for, as Camus says, “there is no fate that can’t be surmounted by scorn.” He asks us to imagine the scornful Sisyphus raising his fist in triumph at Zeus as he watches his rock tumble back down the hill, forcing him to resume his thankless task.

Film images © DCM/Bitters End 2023

Hirayama’s days are portrayed in Perfect Days as similarly occupied by unending repetitive tasks, even if they do not demand the same toil. From the moment he rises, stores his tatami (floor mat) and futon neatly in a corner, and goes to trim his beard and brush his teeth, Hirayama’s days are filled with routine chores. What’s surprising is that he doesn’t resent having to do such mundane things continually; instead, he pursues them in an almost ritualistic manner. As he leaves his sparsely furnished home (the only furnishing we see aside from his mattress is a bookshelf of second-hand books) he always stops at the machine that dispenses the can of coffee he drinks as he drives his van to work cleaning toilets in Tokyo. His days are filled with toilet cleaning – even as people barge past his sign that says that the toilets are closed for cleaning. As they use the toilets, he waits patiently until he can resume the performance of his task.

Even though Tokyo features high tech, beautifully constructed toilets – the film originated in an attempt to publicize them – cleaning toilets is about the lowliest job imaginable, something most of us would abhor having to do; and people who do it for a living are regarded as low class by many. The people using the toilets often pass Hirayama without even noticing him and his deferential behavior as they disrupt his work. One young mother goes so far as to completely ignore him even though he rescued her young child from being trapped in a toilet.

It's not only strangers who treat Hirayama with disdain. His own estranged sister, Keiko (Yumi Asô), expresses her contempt for his work when she comes to his apartment to pick up her daughter Niko (Arisa Nakano), who has run away from home and come to stay with him. “Do you really clean toilets?” she asks him in astonishment, and with not an insignificant amount of disgust.

Despite these peoples’ attitudes, Hirayama takes great pride in his job. He pays close attention to the cleanliness of the toilets, going so far as to use a mirror on a long stem to examine the undersides of the toilets to be sure they’re spotless. His devotion to his work even puzzles his co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who asks him how he can be so committed to doing a perfect job when the toilets will be soiled soon thereafter. Why clean them so fastidiously when the next person who uses them will hardly notice their cleanliness, and will likely leave them filthy?

Hirayama’s joyful performance of the mundane and sometimes disgusting tasks he performs stems from the attitude he maintains throughout his day. Unlike Sisyphus, Hirayama brings focused attention to every aspect of his life. Each day, as he emerges from his house, he stops and looks at the sky and trees. A winning smile emerges on his face as he then proceeds to the business of living his life.

Wenders repeatedly films Hirayama as he proceeds on his daily routine. On most days, nothing happens to disrupt it: waking when the old woman who sweeps the street comes by; folding up his bedding; shaving and brushing his teeth; emerging from the house; buying his coffee; driving to his job; and so on. Most days, Hirayama has almost no human contact, refusing to engage in banal conversation with his co-worker Takashi, and not speaking to the chef who serves him dinner, and not exchanging more than a perfunctory comment to the barkeep, ‘Mother’ (Yuriko Kawasaki), who clearly likes him.

An unusual feature of Hirayama’s life is his avoidance of digital devices. For example, when he has to call his sister to tell her that her daughter’s with him, he has to use a payphone; and in his van he listens to cassette tapes with songs from the 60s and 70s, such as Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl and the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes. He’s so clueless about digital media that he even asks his niece where Spotify is, thinking it to be a physical store. To show how unusual Hirayama’s anti-digital stance is, the film shows a number of people riding in his van who are not able to manage the simple task of putting a cassette into the audio system, so unfamiliar are they with the outmoded technology.

As we repeatedly watch Hirayama performing the tasks that constitute his daily routine, we slowly come to realize that his simple life is filled with great joy. What’s particularly striking is the pleasure he takes in looking at and photographing the large trees in the park where he eats his lunch every day. Wenders uses point-of-view shots to convey what Hirayama sees as he looks up at the trees. The Japanese word, komorebi (which was the original title of the film) means ‘sunlight leaking through trees’, and Hirayama marvels at the beauty of that phenomenon on a daily basis. Few of us would take the time to sit on a park bench each day, look up at the komorebi, and record what we see in a photograph. But Hirayama has a profound connection to the trees, and, in fact, all of the world, and keeps a photographic record of the changes he sees, using a simple film camera to do so.

When Keiko arrives in a chauffeur-driven limousine to pick up Niko, we become aware that Hirayama has chosen to live as he does. He came from an upper-class family, and his father, now dying, was apparently furious over Hirayama’s rejection of the life he was supposed to live. Keiko cannot understand how Hirayama can live and work in the manner he does, either. But Niko is more observant, and spends enough time with Hirayama to understand what his life offers him, and, indeed, that his simple life is preferable to the life she lives with her mother despite its material rewards.

Hirayama’s ability to experience joy in mundanity is a result of his being completely present to the world and everything it contains. The notion of being present – also known as mindfulness – means focusing your mind on nothing other than your current experience. You don’t think about what needs to get done, but instead are only aware of the sensations present to your consciousness in the moment, no matter what you are doing. Hirayama is portrayed as nearly always present. Indeed, his limiting his life to only the barest necessities aside from the books he reads is intended to eliminate everything that would distract him and keep him from being present.

The joy that being present unleashes in Hirayama forms the counterweight to the scorn that Camus emphasizes in his account of Sisyphus. The toilet cleaner’s motto might be this implicit response to Sisyphus: “There is no fate that cannot be overcome through presence.”

The philosophical importance of Perfect Days lies in its illustration that a life lived with a focus on the present is able to overcome the feeling that life is absurd. This does not involve rebelling in defiance at the absurdity of the terms we have been given for living our lives, which is the response that Camus suggested. Rather, a person who is fully present to everything he does and experiences is shown to be contented with their life even though, or, better, because there is no big concern to fill it with meaning. With concerns come distractions, the enemy of presence and mindfulness. Meaning, we learn from Wenders’ film and Hirayama’s example, is not something that one gains through projects and plans, but simply by acts of conscious awareness. Such a different, and more successful way to live, than with one fist defiantly raised to the heavens.

© Thomas E. Wartenberg 2025

Thomas E. Wartenberg is film editor of Philosophy Now. His latest book, Thoughtful Cinema: Illustrating Philosophy Through Film, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.

Fiction

- It’s Just A Joke

- René Descartes Loses His Phone

Poetry

It’s Just A Joke

by Christine Jefferys

So, the other day I told a joke

Which they said wasn’t woke:

I thought, ‘It’s my right to speak my mind.

Even if it’s not completely kind!’

When does banter go too far?

Do we need a Comedy Czar?

The absurd, the dark, or satire,

If someone laughs, does it matter?

Before we cancel in great amounts,

Is it only intention that counts?

It isn’t just humans; as far as we can tell,

Primates are wired to laugh as well.

Science and philosophy theorise,

Is that always necessary or wise?

Is comedy just a form of recreation;

Or solace in an awful situation?

A way of building connection;

Familial bonds and affection?

An antidote to power and vanity;

An excuse to indulge profanity;

Or a confection of surreal insanity?

A way of diffusing spite and hate?

Is its absence a psychopathic trait?

Therapeutic or subversive,

One thing’s for sure, it’s not coercive.

And though it may well be anti-hierarchic,

Plato was wrong to dismiss jokes as anarchic.

Releasing endorphins, a neurological hit

And a wondrous addition to our human toolkit.

© Dr Christine Jefferys 2025

Christine Jefferys is a founder member of the lively Monday Philosophy Club (MPC) in Wilmington, Kent: cejefferysmondayphilosophyclub@gmail.com.

Fiction

René Descartes Loses His Phone

Judah Crow follows Descartes as he seeks that which one must have always.

I remember when René Descartes lost his cell phone. He’d come up to visit us in Port Townsend, Washington, where we’d been living for a few years. Descartes liked the quiet of the town: he liked seeing deer in the street instead of cars, and that the few cars were driven by grayhairs, who drive very slowly. He also liked the spring rain – which was frankly driving me crazy after a long, gloomy winter. But then he lost his phone.

“But you hate your phone,” I said. He was always complaining about it.

We were at the breakfast table. Descartes was still getting used to modern American clothes. Like all the other guys in Port Townsend, he was wearing black Carhartts and a fleece sweater. He was trying to hang on to his lace ruff, though – so he couldn’t wear a hoodie, as there’s no way to combine a hood and the ruff. He’d started washing his hair every Saturday, and it looked way better; but the ruff just made him look like a clown.

“The cellular, it is something terrible,” Descartes replied. “But in this world, to be without such a thing… it is, in effect, impossible.”

He had been staying with me and Molly for a couple of weeks. He said he was looking for an apartment, but he didn’t have a job, and he didn’t have any money that I could see, so we let him use our office as his bedroom. It was okay with me. He was a good house guest. Except he never went to sleep. If I woke up at two in the morning, Descartes would still be creeping around the house, using the bathroom, or getting himself a bowl of cereal.

Anyway, he couldn’t stop fussing about that phone. He said: “Ask me, if you please, in which place I was, when I held it last.”

I said: “Why don’t I just call your number? Then you’d hear your phone ring, and you’d know where it is.”

His face fell. “But no. The sound – it is execrable. I turn this off, always.”

“You leave the ringer off? How you do you know when somebody’s calling you?”

“If there is someone with whom I wish to converse, then I should call that person. Yes. But now you must help me. Ask me, if you please, where I was, and at what time, when I had my phone the last time.”

It sounded so poetic that way, like he wanted to write a sad song about his last time holding something he loved. But he meant it literally: he wanted me to literally ask the question. He said he’d remember better if the question came from someone else. Descartes is a very smart guy, but all the time I’ve known him he’s always had funny ideas. So I asked him.

“It was yesterday,” he answered, squeezing his black eyebrows together, “Or it was the day before yesterday, when we were in your car, perhaps. We were en route to the hardware store.”

We searched the car. Nothing. He had already turned the whole office upside down. He’d also walked all around the yard, in case he’d dropped the phone while he was mowing the lawn, though that was back on Saturday.

I took Descartes down to Water Street for sandwiches. I said, “You can use my phone if you want to call somebody.”

Descartes grimaced, and responded, “It is not that I wish to call some person! Who is it that I should call? There is nobody. It is a question of the cellular, which one must have always.” That’s right – the phone he hated.

To cheer him up I suggested we stop at the bookstore.

He went straight to the Philosophy section, of course. He was sad to see that the store had only one of his books – an old Penguin Classics edition of his Meditations – while it had any number of expensive hardbacks of a guy called ‘Foucault’ – down by the floor. Descartes didn’t like having to crouch on the floor to see them.

“He is extraordinarily popular,” Descartes grumbled, as we headed home, “this philosopher Foucault. Why is it that his thoughts find such favor? I opened these books of his. I could not understand even one sentence fully.”

“I wondered the same thing. I flipped through one of his books too. I really have no idea what he’s talking about.”

“He does not write with clarity and distinctiveness!” declared Descartes. He rolled down his window and looked at the rain.

“Maybe he’s writing as clear as he can, though. About things which are just hard to explain?”

“That is impossible,” said Descartes. “If one can hold a clear thought in mind, then one can express it in words which are framed with clarity.”

He unbuttoned his ruff from the back. It had got wet in the rain and was dripping water down the back of his neck. Now he looked like a carpenter, or maybe a guy who used to work on boats – who happened to have a wet lace ruff in his lap, like a small white dog.

He was taking the phone loss badly. He couldn’t stop fretting about it. “The essence of the matter,” he said to Molly after dinner, as they were washing dishes, “the essence is – the phone must be in some place.”

“Are we sure that’s right?” asked Molly. She liked Descartes, but she wasn’t used to his funny ideas .

“But of course,” said Descartes. “It is certain. It is most certain. The cellular is a physical thing, so it is in one place, one place alone. If I should look in that place, then I shall find it. If I fail to look in that place, I shall not find it.”

Molly was too polite to laugh: “You mean, your phone is in some place, whether you ever find it or not? Well! I never thought of it that way.”

She looked up at me, then, smiling. She was wearing yellow rubber dish gloves. Descartes was wearing the pink ones, because they fit his hands.

Molly looked happy. She liked my crazy friend Descartes. To try to cheer him up she told him: “You know, maybe the reason the bookstore has so many books by Foucault, and only one book of yours, is that nobody wants the Foucault books, so they’re still on the shelf? But people buy your books, and take them home! Since they can only be one place at a time.” She laughed then, her voice going up and down the scale as she laughed. I loved her for that. I don’t know why. It had been a long time since I’d remembered how much I love Molly.

After dinner Molly and I did the Wordle together. Descartes couldn’t sit still. He took the cushions off the couch to see whether the phone had slipped down between them. “But it is idiotic,” he growled. “I have looked there already. More than one time! There is no reason to look again. I could not stop myself. I am like a child.”

“Did you check all your pockets in all your clothing?”

“But yes, certainly.”

“Did you check back at the hardware store?”

“I have asked the manager, face to face.” He was now digging through the shoes at the bottom of the hall closet.

“Sorry it’s so dark in there Descartes. I meant to get a new bulb. Maybe try looking in the daytime, when there’s more light. Why don’t you look in the laundry room?”

“My cellular could not be in the laundry room,” said Descartes, “because I myself have not been in the laundry room in two weeks. For what reason should I look in the laundry room?”

“Because more light,” Molly and I both said at the same time. She said “Jinx!” and then we both guessed the Wordle at the same moment. It wasn’t ‘LIGHT’, but it was ‘RIGHT’.

On Tuesday I called Molly from Jonno’s Auto Body. I was getting a dent hammered out of the Civic. I said: “Guess what. I found Descartes’ phone! It was under the seat in the car.”

Molly laughed. She said: “Well guess what. I found a phone too! It was in the laundry room, on the shelf. He must’ve been down there for some reason.”

“Poor guy. Now he has two phones to hate.”

Finding it twice – at the same time! It seemed lucky, like seeing a rainbow. But that night, Descartes burst in, a little late for dinner, carrying something in his hand that looked like a little box of mud. He said, “The mystery, now it is finished. I have found the cellular, though alas it has gone entirely to ruin. It was in the mud at the frog pond. I must surmise that it fell from my pocket, at the time we were visiting there after church last Sunday.”

Molly and I tried in vain to hold back our laughter as we told him we had a surprise, then we showed him the phones we’d found. Now not one phone, but three! Wouldn’t you just know it? We put them all side by side on the kitchen counter and ate our tacos.

After dinner Descartes stared at the three phones for a long time, without saying anything. He looked grumpy.

René Descartes by Stephen Lahey 2025

Molly asked: “Everything okay?”

“Which one is authentic? Only one can be mine, truly.” He looked like he was still chewing dinner but there wasn’t anything in his mouth. He was working himself into a crappy mood.

Molly said: “Well, if only one can be right, which one looks the way you remember?” But Descartes said he couldn’t remember the details of his phone, which he hated. He said they all looked alike to him.

Molly called his number, but none of the phones rang. The muddy one was trashed, so that was no surprise. Descartes couldn’t remember a password for the phone from under the car seat. The phone from the laundry room didn’t need a password. It had a few phone numbers stored in it: my number, and Molly’s, and numbers from a few other people none of us knew. But it didn’t ring when Molly called him.

The next day Descartes was up at dawn, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a pot of chamomile tea, and waiting for me and Molly to wake up. He was dressed in his old clothes from the first day he’d come to town: a shabby cloak of black velvet, the lace ruff, little pointed shoes with buckles. His hair was greased down again. He even smelled the way he’d smelled at first – like neither he nor his clothes had been washed for some while. He was waiting for us to take him to the bus station. His black leather satchel was at the door, no doubt packed up with yellow papers scratched with words and diagrams.

Molly drove him down to the station. When they were gone, I noticed that he’d left all three phones behind. I think they’re still in the closet, somewhere.

© Judah Crow 2025

Judah Crow is … what?

Cartoons

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: June/July 2025

Editorial

AI Think Therefore AI Am

News

News: June/July 2025

Humour

Is Laughter Liberating or Cruel?

The Functions of Humor in Writing

Digital Philosophy

Ethics for the Age of AI

Rescuing Mind from the Machines

Studying Smarter with AI?

Affirmative Action for Androids

Is VR Meaningful Escapism?

Articles

Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar’s Paradox

What Simone de Beauvoir Got – And Didn’t Get – About Motherhood

Young & Meaningful

Anand Vaidya (1976-2024)

Interviews

Stephen Fry

Letters

Letters

Columns

Excusing God

Helvétius (1715-1771)

Philosophers on Holidays

The Importance of the Purple

Reviews

Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Levebvre

Determined by Robert Sapolsky

Perfect Days

Fiction

It’s Just A Joke

René Descartes Loses His Phone

Cartoons

Guto Dias’ Cartoon

Lao Maintenance

Jon Carter’s Cartoon

Simon & Finn

Sanko and Gibson’s Cartoon