All philosophers must have had their Moorean moments. It didn’t follow from this that they then became champions of “common sense philosophy”. This simply means that “Moorean facts” need to be confronted. (The original Moorean fact: “I have two hands.”) The philosopher Jeremy Stangroom has a Moorean moment in the following passage:

Stangroom uses the words “we rarely question the epistemological status of these things”. G.E. Moore’s position was that we should accept them even after philosophical questioning.

The Status of Moorean Facts

It’s of course a fact that these supposed Moorean facts can be philosophically questioned. But that’s not the issue here. We need to know what status they have, and what the consequences of that acceptance are.

We may readily believe that all these Moorean facts are accepted (or believed) in order to survive. However, accepting that walls are solid or that fires burn may be useful, but it’s hardly a philosophical position. Indeed, it’s not even a scientific position. Science may have a position on solidity, but not really on walls and whether we should walk into them.

Similarly, “rain is wet” isn’t really a scientific statement. The study of rain belongs to meteorology and atmospheric science, the study of liquidity to fluid mechanics, and the nature of wetness to psychology and neuroscience. Thus, “rain is wet” isn’t equivalent to “water is H₂O” — even if rain is made of water (therefore largely H₂O).

In any case, at least Stangroom’s examples of foundational facts are all of a kind, even if very different from each other. Not so with G.E. Moore himself. Moore actually began his philosophical career by arguing that there are “moral facts”. He also included the existence of time and free will, and the reality of “other minds”. These examples are philosophical. But what about the statements “women are inferior”, “shamans can fly”, “the Hutu are superior to the Tutsi”, etc?

Relativism and Moorean Facts

Stangroom brought these Moorean facts up in the strict context of relativism. In simple terms, if relativism were true (or simply if it were taken to its logical conclusion), then in some cultures walls wouldn’t be deemed to be solid, or fire wouldn’t be deemed to burn.

We can guess that all cultures do not believe any of this. Can a relativist answer why that’s so?

Another way of putting this is to say that if every culture believes that walls are solid, fire burns, etc., then why can’t we move beyond these obvious examples to less obvious ones? Sure, they are indeed obvious. But what relevance does that have to philosophy? Similarly, accepting them helps save lives. So?

Again, can we move from these obvious examples of Moorean facts to Moorean facts which are scientific, moral, political, and historical? (Some of these Moorean facts actually require a scientific account to explain why they’re facts. However, in a Moorean context, that’s irrelevant too.)

The Psychology of Disbelieving Relativism

This stress on psychology (i.e., as it relates to both relativism and Moorean facts) is summed up by Stangroom:

Stangroom adds that “we know that scepticism and relativism are false”.

This is an extreme, or at least forthright, position.

It can be argued that Stangroom’s psychological points simply don’t matter when it comes to philosophy and the claims of relativists. Still, it’s also a philosophical claim to say that they do matter! After all, it can hardly be ignored (if it’s true at all) that most of the things relativists claim, they don’t actually believe! Whether these psychological points belong to philosophy or not may not be of supreme importance.

Stangroom mentioned probability in the phrase “more than just probably true”. Psychologically, he’s right. We don’t believe that we’d probably get burnt if we jumped into a fire. We believe that we will get burnt. Yet what bearing do these psychological states (or beliefs) have philosophically?

Stangroom elaborates on the psychology of belief (or on the psychology of believing in Moorean facts) in the following:

The second part of the argument goes as follows:

Whether or not these claims are true, how can we connect them to the theme of relativism?

Do all cultures accept foundational truths about the world? And if they do, then why can’t we work up from them to other truths which can’t be taken to be foundational? In this case, are there any inferential links between foundational/Moorean truths and other kinds of truth? However, even if there are such inferential links, it may not follow that all cultures make the same links or recognise any links at all.

In the end, if there are foundational beliefs, facts or truths, it’s always possible for the relativist to accept them, and then draw a line. However, as already stated, what justifies this move within the strict context of relativism itself?

Language Games?

Oddly, although Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games” has been read as an example of relativism, his notion of “hinge” beliefs (as well as “forms of life”) can be taken as being Moorean or foundational. Yet aren’t they only foundational within particular language games? In other words, it may be the case that different language games have different Moorean truths or facts.

In a Wittgensteinian spirit, Stangroom sees these Moorean/foundational facts as being those “we gear into the world” with. Our psychologies “will not allow us to doubt the fact that there are real, foundational truths about the world”. Stangroom makes this psychological and behavioural reality even more clear when he states that we can’t “override our visceral, instinctual certainty about real, foundational truth”. He then mentions

Again, isn’t all this about human psychology, even those aspects of human psychology which transcend all particular language games?…

But hang on a minute.

As an 18th-century empiricist might have been keen to say, don’t human persons first need to fall from a height, be knocked over by a vehicle, or put their hands in a fire to first realise these things shouldn’t be done? Either that, or they need to be told that by their parents or by others.

Still, perhaps a posteriori truths can be foundational truths too! What’s more, isn’t all this to assume that there’s a clear and deep divide between human psychology and “real, foundational truths about the world”?

The Anthropologist and the Shaman

Stangroom makes the discussion of these obvious facts more relevant and interesting when he cites two possible conflicts between two different cultures.

Take an anthropologist who’s been studying shamanism. According to one shaman,

This shaman visits the anthropologist in London. As both walk across a busy street, the anthropologist avoids a bus by leaping backward and, in the process, yanks the shaman backward from the bus too. He was just standing still! In response,

Some relativists may (or probably will) regard Stangroom’s story as racist or a caricature of a shaman. They may argue that a shaman wouldn’t do that… Why not? Does cultural relativity stop at certain points? And if it does, then why does it do so?

So do all cultures accept Moorean facts, and then go off in their own very different directions?

Now take Stangroom’s next example. Stangroom writes:

This story parallels something I read on Medium. It includes both a shaman and someone who did accept “alternative medicine”. Paul Fiery wrote:

It’s worth quoting the paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake here. In the book The Science Delusion, he informs his readers about the “miracle cure” for warts:

To be fair to Sheldrake, he’s emphasising the power of belief in the above. However, he only mentions that in a single sentence. What’s more, Sheldrake simply bypasses the fact that most people who do benefit from these placebos don’t actually believe that they are placebos. (Similarly, religious people don’t believe they’re taking part in an autonomous “language game”.)

Now take the following account of the “anarchist philosopher” Paul Feyerabend by science journalist John Horgan. (This account was about Feyerabend’s health at that time.) Horgan wrote:

In both the homoeopathy and Feyerabend cases, politics trumps truth. Or, rather, in the end politics did not trump truth. Feyerabend believed it was politically important to respect other traditions when it came to medical matters, as well as when it came to voodoo, astrology and just about everything else. (Horgan even tells his readers that Feyerabend stretched this to include the Nazism of his youth! “Nazism should be allowed to thrive.”) The same with the fan of homoeopathy. She believes that the “spiritual truths” of other cultures must be respected and seen as being equal to all our own… except when it comes to third-degree burns!

The following passage expresses what was at stake after Thomas Kuhn’s own “revolution”:

Partly as a reaction to what many took to be “Kuhnian relativism”, some philosophers wanted to find a means of fighting back. They did so by focusing on reference.

Meaning always (or often) goes alongside reference in this tradition. But “what then is the constant in meaning?” According to the historian and philosopher of science Ian Hacking, Hilary Putnam “makes everything turn on reference and extension”.

The most obvious thing to say here is that these philosophers were attempting to securely tie names, words and terms to the world.

Fregean Sense

Long before Kuhn and Putnam, Gottlob Frege “thought that a word has a standard sense, which is what makes a scientific tradition possible”. What is that sense? —

It will be shown that Hilary Putnam’s “stereotype” (to be discussed in a moment) shares a family resemblance to Frege’s sense. (They’re still very different notions.) Still, what is important here is that Frege

In other words, the route a word/term takes to a thing goes via this fixed sense.

Hacking’s Own Position on Reference

Sometimes it’s difficult to decipher if Hacking is putting his own view or that of someone else (e.g., Putnam). In this case, he puts the case for the permanence of reference in the following way:

We’re told that the reference (miraculously?) remains the same even though what are deemed to be its stereotypical properties change. The claim here isn’t that the reference can be “found” without relying on its stereotypical properties, only that such properties change. The obvious question now is:

If the stereotypical properties are always changing, how do we know we have the same reference?

The Putnamian position is that we get at the reference via his version of “Fregean sense”. The Fregean sense “may change”, while the reference, qua reference, doesn’t. However, does that really answer the question (in bold) above?

To be clear. Hacking accepts the importance of reference for science. However, he tells his readers that “[a]nybody who thinks that reference works by a causal and historical connection to the thing named ought to reflect on the following example”. Hacking then gives a complex historical example in which the notion of “causal and historical connection to the thing named” doesn’t work, but Hacking’s own entity realism does.

So this isn’t an attack on reference. It’s an attack on a particular account of reference.

Hacking on Acid

Hacking provides a concrete example of possible incommensurability as it relates to the word ‘acid’:

Of course, this is very difficult for the layperson to grasp because he’d need to have both historical knowledge and a knowledge of chemistry. It would work very differently if, say, Hacking gave as an example the word ‘cat’ or ‘brick’. Yet even the layperson would probably accept the clause “our theories about acids have changed substantially”.

In any case, Hacking continues:

Intuitively, and simply, this seems feasible. It could be a case of people saying different things about the same stuff. Even contemporary persons could be saying different things about the same stuff.

This position posits a kind of strong distinction between the stuff itself and what we say about it. Can that distinction be maintained? Wouldn’t it assume that firstly we have uncontaminated stuff, and, later, our sayings about it? What if that stuff is always contaminated with sayings or theories? That may be the case. Yet the same stuff would still underpin all these different sayings and theories.

Reference and extension are means to hold on to that same stuff.

Putnam’s Stereotypes

According to Hacking, Putnam justified his position in terms of what he called a “stereotype”:

That’s a decent number of properties we can use to identify acids. Is this a roundabout way of saying that everyone in the know will experience a sour taste, experience a litmus paper changing to a certain colour, etc. regardless of whether they lived in 1800 or 2020? This would mean that any disagreements about acids must occur elsewhere — beyond these specific properties. It seems that the differences in theory account for these differences.

Hacking mentions theory in the following:

So we have different theorists all experiencing a water solution tasting sour, indicators such as litmus paper changing colour, stuff reacting with many metals to form hydrogen, and the stuff reacting with bases to form salts. Over and above all that, we have theory too.

(Just to get this point across, let’s take Putnam’s other example of the word ‘water’. Putnam “gives us colourless, transparent, tasteless, thirst-quenching, etc [as] part of the stereotype for ‘water’”.)

One question readers may ask here is whether or not all these properties (or stereotypes) really are theory-free. After all, we’re taking about hydrogen, oxygen, litmus paper, salt, etc. here. Perhaps that doesn’t matter in this specific context.

Hacking concludes with a entity-realist statement: “But there is no doubt that Lavoisier and Davy were talking about the same stuff.”

Davy is mentioned here because in 1810 he showed that Lavoisier’s theory “was a mistake”. That is because “muriatic acid is just HC1, what we now call hydrochloric acid”. Here again we’re shown that theory rides piggyback on these stereotypical properties of the stuff. Indeed, the new term “hydrochloric acid” does so too.

These general points are made again by Hacking we he states that

Here’s the crunch: “Obviously he meant neither.”

That means that there is a distinction to be made, again, between stereotypical properties and theories. Can we now say that Brønsted-Lowry acids and Lewis acids are theory-laden, but stereotypical properties aren’t? (The philosopher Russell Hanson, way back in the 1960s, would have certainly said, ‘No, we can’t.”)

Bas van Fraaseen’s Electron

A much-better known case of naming is the electron. Hacking writes:

On our theme of theories, isn’t the Dutch-American philosopher Bas van Fraassen referring to the different theories of the electron, not to the electron itself? After all, don’t we have the phrase “different theories of the electron”, not “different theories of the banana”. That said, what the hell is this theory-free electron? There’s nothing more theory-laden than the electron, surely. Tell me, what is the electron without theory? It was born with theories attached to it. It has never been free of theory. The realist, or Putnam, may concede all this. But that still leaves stereotypical properties which run free of theory… Or do they?

Now take the (entity) realist’s “obvious reply”, at least as expressed by Hacking:

It’s not just that theories about any given x change, so too do the stereotypical properties. Hacking is saying that we have something, “the reference” (or the electron), which is free of not only theory, but also any fixed set of stereotypical properties. Isn’t it this position that really irks the anti-realist or instrumentalist? What can we say about the reference without any stereotypical properties or theory? Perhaps, then, Hacking isn’t arguing that we do have the reference (or electron) without any stereotypical properties. It’s just that such properties can change. That is, they can be “in vogue” this week, and out of vogue next week.

We can now take a slightly different approach to the importance of reference — one that doesn’t actually focus on scientific terms.

Donnellan’s Causal Theory of Reference

The philosopher Keith Donnellan attempted to save philosophical realism via reference. In other words, if we can have a causal theory of reference which excludes names like ‘Santa’, then we can distinguish real propositions like “Lady Gaga will come tonight” from “Zeus is angry with us”.

Donnellan argued that proper names shouldn’t rely on being tied to “descriptive content”. Metaphorically, he believed that this would give individual minds too much power, and direct causal reference less power.

Associating descriptive content with proper names has been deemed to be idealist by some philosophers too. (“Subjective” or “mentalist” is a better term in this context.) A causal connection to Lady Gaga (or the ‘Lady Gaga’ relation to Lady Gaga) is concrete. The descriptive content “The rubbish [or great] singer in Hollywood” is subjective, or at least dependent on an individual mind (or on individual minds in the plural). Similarly, the definite description that readers personally tie to the name ‘Santa’ may be very different to the ones other people tie to that name.

So what would secure us identity of reference here when it comes to the names ‘Santa’ and ‘Lady Gaga’?

Donnellan’s causal theory of reference (which excludes Santa) is the realist’s way of avoiding not just idealism (or, better, subjectivity), but also relativism.

Conventions, conceptual schemes, identifying descriptions, etc. were deemed to be subjective by Donnellan. Causal processes, on the other hand, are deemed to impose themselves on us. In other words, they tie us firmly to the world.

Meera Nanda on Science as Liberation

In terms of what Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom call the “Third World” and much else, we can ask if science causes (or creates) oppression or does it bring about liberation? (There are many other binaries which could have been chosen here.) Many academics and theorists in the Western world (from Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard to Rupert Sheldrake) think it causes specific political hegemonies and helps embed political power. Yet many people in the Third World believe it brings about liberation.

In their book Why Truth Matters, the philosophers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (henceforth “B & S”) focus on the case of Meera Nanda when they write:

Meera Nanda (who’s an Indian historian and philosopher of science) sees science (or the scientific mind) as a means of liberation. Many Western academics and theorists see it as a creator of non-Western, as well as some Western, victims. Some of them believe that women and non-Western cultures have their own sciences (in the plural) too.

Let Nanda speak for herself. Her own introduction for The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is ideal for getting at these issues:

Now take the case of the biologist and paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake. He does believe that there are non-Western sciences (if not, specifically, women’s science). For example, he writes:

Then Sheldrake is more specific:

In much of Sheldrake’s writings, religion and “spirituality” hover in the background. So it’s not a surprise that he believes the following about the future:

Sheldrake believes that Western science creates victims. He sees himself as the main victim (or “heretic”). Other victims are paranormal researchers, practitioners and theorists of alternative medicine, and “ordinary people” (i.e., because science is “elitist and undemocratic”).

It must be said that you don’t need to take science to be a Platonic form (i.e., Science) to have a problem with this relativism and postmodern scepticism. Just as the philosopher David Chalmers doesn’t believe that the word ‘peace’ can have as its meaning ‘ham sandwich’, so anything does not go when it comes to the word ‘science’.

Sheldrake is just my own example, whom I highlight because he isn’t the usual suspect — a postmodern theorist.

B & S highlight all this in an explicitly political way when they conclude in the following way:

Of course, we need to be given more details on B & S’s political thesis above. Specifically, on exactly how Western intellectuals help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful fasten the chains on women and the poor. As it is, B & S do provide their readers with lots of details elsewhere. But what we do know, even only from this short passage, is that Western science is deemed, by many Western academics and theorists, to actually help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful of the Third World to chain women and the poor to their roles. Yet, as we’ve just seen, Meera Nanda takes the exact opposite position: the embrace of science is the embrace of liberation.

Western Intellectuals and the Third World

B & S wonder why

What if some Third World people don’t like freedom or change, at least not the Western versions of these things? Do B & S simply assume that they do?

To generalise, think here about the “neo-conservative” assumption that all Third World peoples (at least those the neo-cons deemed to live under oppressive regimes) do want (Western?) freedom and change. [See here.] Now think about those academics and theorists who think the opposite. Of course, it all depends on specifics. Some Third World people do want freedom and change; others don’t. Again, it depends on how freedom and change are fleshed out.

The passage continues:

Here too, some Third World people do prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Others don’t. Or, rather, some may prefer communal ties, but not care too much about oneness with the earth. Or they may prefer oneness with the earth, but not care too much about communal ties.

Many academics and theorists in the West do believe that many — or even most — Third World people prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Whether that’s a romantic view or not is another issue.

B & S then become way more rhetorical about Western intellectuals. They inform their readers that such theorists

It can be doubted that these Westerners have ever been so explicit that they literally tell Third World people to be what they were born. However, that doesn’t stop them from being inexplicit about these matters. And it doesn’t stop elites in the Third World (or those who’ve been educated in the West) from adopting these attitudes. (They often have.) What’s more, Third World elites, either newly in the West or at home, have certainly accused people in their own communities of inauthenticity or mental colonisation.

Now let’s place all this in an historical and philosophical context, as B & S do. The best way of doing so is to focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game.

Wittgenstein’s Language Games and Kuhn’s Paradigms

Firstly, take the idea that non-Western cultures can be judged by scientific standards and values. Now take the alternative idea that other cultures may have their own “sciences” in the plural. This is how Wittgenstein has both helped and hindered here:

As ever with Wittgenstein, this passage has been interpreted in multiple ways by multiple people. Having just said that, it’s much clearer than many other passages by him. In fact, it’s so clear that interpretation is surely at a minimum here, and simple agreement or disagreement with it is at a maximum.

Thomas Kuhn interpreted this passage (or passages like it) when he stated that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds”.

So just as we have many interpretations of Wittgenstein, so we now have many interpretations of Kuhn’s Wittgensteinian passage. Yet Kuhn was actually talking about science. That didn’t stop philosophers and theorists applying his ideas to almost everything under the sun.

Let’s apply it to science itself.

Don’t Wittgenstein’s words above have the consequence that what is science depends on the language game it’s embedded in? More linguistically, is it the case that what the word “science” means is dependent on the language game it’s embedded in? Thus, there may well be women’s science, Māori science, Nazi science, Marxist science, and so on. Rupert Sheldrake (mentioned earlier) certainly thinks so. (He wouldn’t include “fascist science” in his own personal list of sciences.)

B & S comment on this. However, rather than talking about sciences in the plural, they talk about “knowledges” in the plural. They write:

Of course, this passage (at least when taken on its own) isn’t that helpful because B & S need to explain the word ‘valid’ and the phrase ‘in their own way’. For a start, if we go down the relativist road, these so-called knowledges may be valid according to these cultures, but still not be examples of science.

Peter Winch as Extreme Wittgensteinian

Science and relativism have just been mentioned, and B & S conclude by noting where they believe all this leads:

The Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch agrees that scientific forms of life run up against alien alternatives, and thus there is no further justification for science. In his own words, at least according to B & S,

(Think here of Wittgenstein writing: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”)

Peter Winch seems to have gone further than Wittgenstein on all this. (Alternatively, perhaps his examples are simply more straightforward and political.) According to B & S:

What Winch says is probably correct. But what has his position to do with facts and truths? Is it a fact, for example, that possessing the heads of one’s enemies means possessing their spirits too? Is it true that “Jews use Muslim blood for rituals”, as many people in some Muslim cultures believe? Perhaps those latter Muslim cultures aren’t “radically alien” enough for Winch’s position; so we can treat them differently to the cultures of head hunters. But where is the line drawn between a radically alien culture and simply a different culture? Moreover, does that line, if it exists at all, matter in this debate about facts and truths?

In any case, exactly why can’t we understand the beliefs of a culture which is radically alien to our own? Isn’t this what anthropologists do? Moreover, much has been written about alien cultures by historians, anthropologists, philosophers, scientists, etc. Surely this constitutes at least some degree of understanding.

More to the point, isn’t there a conflation here between understanding a culture and agreeing with its beliefs? And how does all this impact on the issue of trans-cultural agreement or disagreement?

[This piece has used the work of Deepseek.]

On Philip Goff, Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Goff is a prolific author (including bestsellers), runs a Substack, co‑hosts a YouTube channel (Mind Chat), has a solo YouTube channel, writes for mainstream outlets, gives many interviews, and maintains a Patreon page.

The central question is: How much does he actually earn, and what does his monetisation strategy reveal about his conduct?

The Financial Floor (Salary)

Even without any media income, Goff’s professorial salary at a Russell Group university like Durham puts him on £70,000–£85,000 per year. That is more than double the UK median full‑time income of ~£32,900. His salary alone places him in the top 10‑15% of earners, providing a secure financial bedrock.

The Media Portfolio (Substack & YouTube)

His platforms have been located:

• Substack (philipgoff.substack.com) – over 2,000 subscribers. Even with a modest 5‑10% paid conversion, this could generate £6,000–£19,000 annually.

• YouTube (Mind Chat) — ~1,520 subscribers, ad revenue likely £1,000–£3,000.

• Solo YouTube (@philipgoffphilosophy) – ~1,360 subscribers, ad revenue similar or slightly lower.

Combined, his known media income adds roughly £8,000–£25,000 per year — a significant supplement, but not a replacement for his salary.

The Patreon Mystery

A Patreon link appeared (patreon.com/cw/PhilipGoffPhilosophy) but returned a 403 error. It has 0 posts. Rather than a content hub, it’s used purely as a payment/donation link – a “tip jar” for supporters, offering no exclusive rewards.

Goff ignores requests and questions from students and non‑academic philosophers if he cannot monetise them. This turns the Patreon into a paywall for his attention, not just a passive donation channel.

Goff’s public engagement is conditional on monetisability. Free content builds his brand, but interaction (replies, guidance, mentoring) is reserved for paying or otherwise “valuable” contacts.

These areas are explored:

• Academic workload models — public engagement counts as “scholarship”, so Goff’s media work isn’t seen as moonlighting; it’s seen as formally recognised labour.

• University benefit — Durham gains prestige and talent attraction, even if most of his audience doesn’t associate him with the university.

• Interview payments — major outlets (BBC, Guardian, etc.).

Conclusion

The financial picture is clear: Goff is comfortably well‑off from his salary alone, and his media work adds a meaningful second layer. The open question — and the heart of this piece — is whether his monetisation model has corrupted the open, collegial ethos that universities and philosophy departments claim to uphold.

Finally, at the outer bounds, it is at least possible that Philip Goff earns as much as £518,000 a year. What he actually earns will probably be below that. But by how much?

Notes:

(1) Grok says: "Goff notes personal circumstances (young children) and treats that income as family money rather than solely personal funds available to underwrite extra public outreach."... Goff has used that logic against replying to non-academics.

(2) Goff is a self-described socialist. His frequent emphasis on his family is precisely what many socialists in the past have had a problem with. Goff is displaying his "bourgeoise" sensibility, while still being a socialist.

British & American vs German Philosophy Departments

On a parochial level, the German philosopher Hanno Sauer is arguing for something that was once a common position/situation within analytic philosophy departments from the 1940s to the late 1990s, at least in the UK and US. Sauer himself writes:

[The American philosopher Gilbert Harman did have this message on his office door.]

There’s also a remark (dated 1978, but going back to the 1950s) from A.J. Ayer in which he said that most of his students hadn’t read any philosophy that was more than twenty years old:

[Ayer wasn’t entirely against this parochiality.]

Personally, I experienced the same thing as Ayer. When I was a postgraduate, I noted that most of the philosophy postgraduates knew very little about historical philosophy… unless, that is, it was their speciality. (They would have studied at least some examples of historical philosophy as undergraduates.) I remember students who hadn’t read much — or anything — that was older than twenty years old. (One postgrad’s book collection consisted entirely of works by David Lewis.)

In terms of research, this 20-year-rule was a default position simply because in order to prove one’s “research credentials”, the average postgraduate simply didn’t have the time to study — or even read — what every well-known dead philosopher said on subject or issue X.

Yet none of these philosophy postgrads ever offered the arguments that Sauer himself offers. Their own reasons for concentrating on new and trendy philosophy were almost all about academic success and their future careers. (For example, they knew almost everything about Robert Brandom, and nothing at all about Aristotle.) So much so that when some of these postgrads became philosophy professors, they would have become so without much — or even any — knowledge of historical philosophy. In that sense, then, Sauer is simply offering a philosophical defence of what was the case in many philosophy departments, at least in the UK!…

However, the situation is different in Germany.

When British and American universities purged the history of philosophy from the postgrad menu, German universities didn’t do the same thing. Even though such German universities adopted analytic methods, they still retained a commitment to studying historical philosophy qua philosophy.

Thus, the conclusion here is that all readers of Sauer’s paper (‘The End of History’) must note that he’s talking about German, not British or American, philosophy departments. Yet he never mentions these national differences in his paper.

Sauer’s Sexy Thesis

To get his point across, Sauer makes the following statement:

Sauer then explains himself:

Later, Sauer writes:

These examples show Sauer’s ethical bias and his own personal academic specialities: ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy. And wasn’t this kind of presentism the reason why activists took action against David Hume’s statue at Edinburgh University? [See here.]

What’s more, Sauer claims that when it comes to “publication bias”:

Couldn’t it be said Sauer’s own position (i.e., of rejecting historical philosophy) is “sexy” and that it “def[ies] common sense”? (Of course, common sense may not have a position on historical philosophy.)

The History of Ends of History

The philosophical idea that historical philosophy is useless goes back a long time. Yet Sauer sees his position as being original. Or at least he argues that no one as yet has systematically defended this position.

Take the case of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes and the many other philosophers in the 16th and 17th centuries who rejected the Scholastics. Schopenhauer who claimed that most philosophy is mindlessly intertextual (obviously, not his own word) in that it endlessly bounces off what has been written in the past. If we jump forward to the logical positivists, they had a very disdainful view of historical philosophy. Wittgenstein even claimed to have read no previous philosophers.

Indeed, many of these philosophers believed that, to use Sauer’s words,

Of course, these positions aren’t identical to Sauer’s! Sure. However, surely they’re in the same ballpark.

Is Sauer’s claim to be the first philosopher to systematically criticise studying historical philosophy trivial? This is meant in the sense that all he seems to be saying is that no previous philosopher has rejected historical philosophy in exactly (or precisely) the same way he has.

On the specific claim that other philosophers have rejected historical philosophy, but not in a systematic way. Perhaps Sauer means that no previous philosopher wrote a paper that’s equivalent to his own ‘End of History’. I don’t mean equivalent in in any sense, but in his own epistemic sense.

Sauer may have lots of interesting things to say. However, his way of rejecting historical philosophy just happens to use techniques and propagate views he used and propagated before he wrote his paper in 2022. In that sense, he’s doing exactly what Rudolf Carnap did in the 1930s (see later).

Let me sum this up:

(1) “No one has done it my way”: Sauer isn’t the first to reject the philosophical past. (Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Carnap, Wittgenstein, etc. all did that.) However, he may be the first to reject it using contemporary metaphilosophical and data-driven epistemic norms.
2) “No one has targeted this exact group”: Carnap (more of him later) targeted German idealists and existentialists. Sauer targets those contemporary professors who treat the philosophical canon as a toolkit for today’s problems.

And again:

1) Rudolf Carnap (in the 1930s): Stop doing history! Philosophy must be reduced to formal logic.
2) Hanno Sauer (2022): Stop doing history! Philosophy must be reduced to empirical psychology and data.

Rudolf Carnap and Hanno Sauer

Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 article, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’ (Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache), is very much in the mould of Sauer’s own paper.

Carnap’s paper was a peer-reviewed academic journal article (published in Erkenntnis). Its target was historical metaphysics. Its conclusion was that the past statements of historical metaphysicians are meaningless, and that they invented pseudo-problems.

Sauer’s ‘The End of History’ (2022) is a peer-reviewed academic journal article (published in Inquiry). Its target is historical philosophy when it’s used as a way to solve current issues. Its conclusion is that historical texts are epistemically dead and mostly wrong. Sauer’s goal is to pivot philosophy into an data-driven, interdisciplinary science.

Carnap dismissed past metaphysics as literally “meaningless”. Sauer argues that historical philosophy is perfectly meaningful, but simply epistemically dead and factually wrong.

Carnap’s historical position particularly seems to square with following words from Sauer:

Later, Sauer states the following:

Conclusion: Wittgenstein’s Spirit Is Inside Sauer

Let’s offer some more detail on Wittgenstein, who is “historical”, according to Sauer.

In the biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk writes that Wittgenstein proudly claimed never to have read a single word of Aristotle. This went along with his hatred for traditional academic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s peers also noted that his bookshelves were entirely devoid of philosophy books. Instead, he preferred detective fiction, journals, and religious texts.

What is important here is Wittgenstein’s belief that traditional philosophy was not a body of historical knowledge to be learned (somewhat like Sauer): it was an “itch” to be cleared up through logical clarity.

To use an idea of Saint Paul: the spirit of Wittgenstein seems to be inside Sauer. However, clearly the letter of Wittgenstein isn’t.

(i) Introduction
(ii) The Grammar of the Word “Nothing”
(iii) The History of Nothing
(iv) Parmenides on Nothing
(v) Russell and Quine on Nothing
(vi) Martin Heidegger on Nothing
(vii) Graham Priest on Nothing

Opening Note

As will be seen throughout this essay, the word “nothing” has, at times, been capitalised in a Heideggerian (or Platonic) manner.

Why?

The statement

It’s the case that really nothing is important.

when expressed as, say, psychological and personal advice, is different to the statement

It’s the case that nothing is important.

when expressed as a statement about ontology.

Basically, I borrowed this capitalisation from John D. Barrow. He, presumably, capitalised the word “nothing” for roughly the same reason.

Nothing?

What is it?

If we deal with the English word “nothing”, then, etymologically, it begins life simply as “no thing”. It’s also been defined as “the complete absence of anything”.

Of course, even these basic beginnings are problematic.

The following four questions can now be asked:

(1) “No thing” in which place?
(2) No thing at which time?
(3) The “complete absence of anything” everywhere? Or just somewhere?
Finally,
(4) The complete absence of everything at all times? Or just at certain times?

In any case, why has Nothing been so important in philosophy and religion?

The English cosmologist, theoretical physicist and mathematician John D. Barrow (mentioned a moment ago) summed things up with the following passage:

We’ll see that the “considerable depth and breadth” on the subject of Nothing may well be largely down to the grammar of the word “nothing”. To put that another way. Perhaps there is considerable depth and breadth to Nothing because the word “nothing” is used in so many different ways by so many different people. This effectively means that Nothing can’t really be something specific even when believed to be considerably deep and wide.

John Barrow also tells us that

This claim almost entirely depends on what Eastern philosophers took Nothing to be. After all, it turns out that they meant something very different by the word “nothing” to what many Western philosophers meant — and still mean. Indeed, “nothing” is such a problematic word (at least when tackled philosophically) that different Eastern philosophers themselves will have meant different things by the word “nothing” (i.e., when this word is suitably translated into the relevant languages).

In any case, what’s just been said about the word “nothing” is also true of the words “consciousness”, “freedom”, “truth”, “justice”, “existence”, etc. It’s likely that “nothing” is even more problematic than these well-known cases.

The Grammar of the Word “Nothing”

John Barrow waxes even more lyrically about Nothing in the following passage:

Perhaps much of this “paradoxical” and heavy stuff is largely down to grammar.

Yes! This view is very old-fashioned.

It’s old-fashioned because it dates back (in various ways) to Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, “ordinary-language” philosophers, etc. Of course, all these Dead Philosophers made their points about grammar, language and philosophy in very different ways. I make my own points in my own way.

On the other hand, Nothing may well be meaty and profound for the simple reason that it has featured so strongly in philosophy, theology and even in physical cosmology.

Yet, despite that acknowledgment, perhaps the old questions about Nothing were (to use Barrow’s word again) “hard” primarily because of the grammar of the word “nothing”. As Wittgenstein put it (in his Philosophical Investigations) about many other words pained over by philosophers for hundreds of years, when it comes to the word “nothing” (in this case), the following can be stated:

All that said, sentences with the word “nothing” in it, and questions about Nothing, can’t be “meaningless” for the simple reason that they may not be questions about Nothing itself. Instead, they may largely be about the word “nothing”, as well as about how people use that word.

The History of Nothing

According to traditional Christianity, God created the world out of Nothing. Interestingly, John the Scot (or Johannes Scotus Eriugena — c. 815–877) argued that the word “nothing” (in this context at least) is synonymous with “God”. [Thus, God created the world out of God?]

Eriugena’s position displays the semantic reality of this overall issue.

So what about other philosophers?

Philosophers have denied that Nothing “exists”, and also stated that it does exist. Other philosophers have seen the entire issue of Nothing as a non-problem — or even as a “pseudo-problem”.

On another tangent. This philosophical and religious interest in Nothing has been at least partly down to the horror vacui. (Put in plain English, the idea that “nature abhors a vacuum”.) An early version of this was displayed by Leucippus (early 5th century BC). To Leucippus, “the void” is the opposite of Being. In other words, the void is not-Being.

It should also be quickly noted here that, historically, many scientists believed that (empty) space is not “nothing”. Instead, they deemed it to be some kind of receptacle in which “material objects can be placed”.

Relatedly, scientists have also been much obsessed by the vacuum (or by vacuums-in-the-plural). Yet a vacuum (like the void) was always something very different from Nothing… Or was it?

It depends…

It depends on what the words “nothing” and “vacuum” are taken to mean in different contexts. It also depends on how these words are actually used.

This problem is captured in the following passage about a related issue:

The word “vacuum” isn’t an acceptable synonym of the word “nothing” simply because there’s no fixed (or universal) definition of that latter word in the first place. And now we must also go all ontological and say that the nature of Nothing has been disputed for over two thousand years.

Parmenides on Nothing

It’s best to start with the following philosophical position:

In order to refer to something, then that something must exist in some way.

The Greek philosopher Parmenides (5th century BC) based his philosophy of Nothingness primarily on such a basic position. Parmenides argued that there can be no such thing as nothing for the simple reason that to name it means that it must exist. And Nothing (unlike a stone or a person), he believed, can’t exist.

John Barrow picked up on this when he wrote the following words:

Light-heartedly, and to rely on Barrow again, if Parmenides was right, then what about the following limerick by William Hughes Mearns? -

Less light-heartedly, what about this statement? —

Superman is sexy!

Or this one? —

God does not exist.

It seems obvious that we can refer to things which no longer exist. We can even refer to things which never existed. Sure, perhaps we can’t refer in any ordinary way… That’s if there is an ordinary way of referring.

So perhaps existence must be replaced by some kind of (capitalised) Being.

[The distinction between being and existence has been rejected by many philosophers. See ‘Being and Existence’.]

That said, in the cases of “Superman is sexy!” and other statements, neither existence nor Being are claimed in any direct way.

So what about the word “nothing”?…

Or what about Nothing itself?

According to this logic (or perhaps not), if we speak of “nothing”, then surely nothing must be… something. After all, we’ve named Nothing. Therefore it must exist (or have Being) as a… something. Alternatively put, I’ve used the word “nothing”. Therefore Nothing (not the word “nothing”) must exist (or have Being).

Let’s now go into more detail on Parmenides and his arguments.

Parmenides’s Argument

Parmenides’ own positions are more convincing than they may at first seem.

In his scheme, not only is Nothing rejected, so too is the existence of historical facts or history itself.

The possibility of change is similarly rejected.

The following are three of his basic positions (i.e., it’s not an argument as such) on Nothing:

1) Nothing doesn’t exist.

2) To speak of a thing, is to speak of a thing which exists.

3) When one speaks of Nothing, one speaks of it as if it is something which exists.

Yet surely, in statements (1) to (3), Nothing has been spoken of (it has been named). Therefore, by Parmenides’s own light, surely either Nothing must exist, or he had no right to speak of it.

What about the events in the past or the past itself?

Parmenides’s position is very similar:

i) If we can’t speak of (or name) Nothing,

ii) then we can’t speak of (or name) the things or events of the past either.

iii) That’s because such events (or things) don’t exist.

iv) Therefore, when we refer to them, we’re referring to Nothing.

Here again there are references to Nothing, which Parmenides warned us against.

What about change, which Parmenides similarly rejected?

His rejection of change is strongly connected to his rejection of the past. The argument is as follows:

ia) If the past doesn’t exist,

ib) then only the present exists.

iia) Yet if only the present exists,

iib) then there can be no change from past to present, or from present to future.

iii) Therefore, there can be no change at all.

I’m not entirely sure if I’ve done justice to Parmenides in the formulations above. Alternatively, perhaps there’s a problem with the arguments themselves. [It’s hard to find Parmenides’s actual words, rather than writers and historians telling their readers what Parmenides believed.]

Firstly, i) (“The past doesn’t exist”) is taken to true without proof, argument, evidence, etc. That said, most arguments must — and do — begin with unargued-for premises. Perhaps this is an example of that.

And there’s also the problem with the word “exist”. It’s never defined. Its meaning is simply assumed.

In any case, it seems that Parmenides’ position was resurrected — if in a modified and grammatical (or linguistic) form — in the 20th century by Bertrand Russell.

Russell and Quine on Nothing

In his 1918 paper ‘Existence and Description’, Bertrand Russell argued that in order for names to be names, then they must name — or refer to — things which exist. So now take this passage:

That passage delivers a position that’s fairly similar to Parmenides’s own position. Russell’s argument, however, is different in that it’s based on language and semantics.

In detail. Russell, at the time, was reacting to the (as Quine once put it) “ontological slums” of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong in which different objects and things were brought into being willy-nilly. (For example, the golden mountain and even the round square.) However, Russell’s semantic philosophy simply seems stipulative (or a normative) in nature. That is, it’s strategically designed to quickly solve various ancient and modern philosophical problems.

This is where W.V.O. Quine enters the philosophical fray.

Quine had no problem at all with the naming of non-beings or non-existents. (Non-being and non-existence aren’t the same thing.)

In his ‘On What There Is’ of 1948 (some 30 years after Russell’s paper), Quine rejected Russell’s position. However, he put Russell’s position in the mouth of a certain McX, and uses the word ‘Pegasus’ rather than the word ‘God’. Quine wrote:

Put simply. A name can have a “meaning” without it referring to something which exists, or even to something which never existed. Thus, Quine unties meaning from reference, whereas Russell primarily thought in terms of reference. (At the least, Russell tied a name’s meaning to its reference.)

Parmenides, as we’ve seen, made a similar mistake.

He didn’t think that a name could have a meaning without the thing being named also existing (or Being). However, we can speak of something that doesn’t exist because the naming of such an x doesn’t entail or even imply its existence. However, and in homage to Meinong (as well as to the philosopher David Lewis), Russell might then have asked us what kind of Being the named object (or thing) has.

Technically, Russell’s theory is an attempt to solve this problem by arguing that if a named x doesn’t exist (or have Being), then that name must be a “disguised description” or denoting phrase. (In the case of the name “Pegasus”, the description would be “the fictional horse which has such and such characteristics”.)

The Logical Positivists on “Meaningless” Statements

In any case, the old logical-positivist way of classifying such sentences (e.g., “God does not exist”) as “meaningless” was way over the top. It was nothing less than diktat philosophy. That’s not because there actually is something Deep and Profound about what we call “nothing”, or because God does or does not exist. It’s because the logical positivist’s term “meaningless” is simply the end product of certain philosophical stipulations, rather than end result of arguments alone.

Quine, for one, realised this when he happily accepted that sentences such as “God does not exist” and “The unicorn is angry” are certainly not meaningless — even if God and unicorns don’t exist!

Relatedly, the more obviously extreme “Pink ideas glide in and out of the vacuum” may be a silly sentence, but it’s not meaningless. Thus, the statement “Nothing is the most important subject” (or even Heidegger’s “The nothing nots”) isn’t necessarily meaningless. It may be silly or pretentious, but not meaningless.

Thus, we needn’t class “questions about nothing” as “meaningless” simply because Nothing doesn’t exist… as a thing…

That’s if Nothing doesn’t exist as a thing!

Now we can defend Parmenides’s position, as well as Russell’s, by attacking Heidegger’s.

Martin Heidegger on Nothing

Speaking (perhaps) ironically, can mere words bring things into existence?

What about the words “round square” or “the timplebums” bringing a round square or the timplebums into existence… or into Being? What about Chomsky’s well-known statement “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”?

In any case, Martin Heidegger was perplexed by the fact that we can refer to Nothing.

Was Nothing brought into existence (or into Being) by virtue of people using the word “nothing”?

Heidegger asked, “What about this nothing?” He also asked:

Heidegger contended that “[s]cience wants to know nothing of the nothing”. [Note the definite article in the two words “the nothing”. No wonder John D. Barrow capitalised this word.]

According to Heidegger (who was critical of science for many other reasons too), science’s main sin is that it “tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help”. That is, science refers to (the) Nothing, yet it “rejects” Nothing. [One wonders why Heidegger singled out science in this respect. After all, all of us use the word “nothing” and refer to nothing.]

Of course, Heidegger himself doesn’t use the words “refer” and “reference” — as analytic philosophers do. In other words, these terms weren’t found in his technical bag. However, surely when Heidegger asked “What about this nothing?”, he meant… what?

Well, we can refer to anything — even to nothing. That’s unless the word “refer” is taken in some kind of strict philosophical sense, as Bertrand Russell did earlier.

Was Heidegger actually referring to the vacuum?

The Nothing has hardly featured at all in most physics, and not even in speculative physics. However, as we saw at the beginning of this essay, the vacuum has been. Yet the vacuum is actually worlds away from Nothing. More grammatically:

1) Do we “posit [nothing’s] being” when we use the word “nothing”?

2) Do we simply use the word “nothing” because it is useful in certain — indeed, in many — contexts?

What did Heidegger think? This:

Again, it must be assumed that Heidegger meant “vacuum”.

Now for Graham Priest.

Priest’s position seems similar to Heidegger’s. This is hardly surprising since Priest is a fan of Heidegger, and he refers to him a fair few times in his papers, articles and books.

Graham Priest on Nothing

The Australian philosopher of logic Graham Priest (like Martin Heidegger) appears to believe (if only when viewed critically) that words creates objects… Of course, he doesn’t actually make that claim. So in Priest’s own words:

As with Heidegger earlier, the problem here is that the readers of this essay can make up new “noun phrase[s]” on the spot. So what about these examples (which start with a noun phrase)? — “The Something does”, “The bastules blinge”.

Thus, this is a liberal (or pluralist) position on objects in that Priest concludes that

… As well as objects like Something and bastules.

This is a positively Meinongian conclusion. (Apart from the fact that Alexius Meinong never stressed — and possibly even ignored — language.) However, as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap and many others put it (if in their various ways), Priest and Heidegger might well have been “misled by language”.

It must be added here that apart from language, Priest also emphasises quantification. However, this amounts to a very similar thing — quantification too brings objects into existence. As the American philosopher Hilary Putnam once put it: this is a case of the miraculous “backward E” (i.e., the existential quantifier ∃) doing its thing.

Quantifying Nothing

Graham Priest refers to quantifying over both everything and Nothing. However, he has a position on quantification that appears to be at odds with the common one.

Usually, it’s thought that all acts of quantification have a specific domain in mind. Priest, on the other hand, believes that “it’s okay to use a quantifier with the widest possible scope”. In other words, it’s fine to quantify over literally everything. (This is like a quantificational version of Russell’s universal set.)

Priest offers us a variation on the Parmenidean theme (discussed earlier) by arguing for the following:

i) If we “quantify over” any given x,

ii) then that x must be an “object” of some kind.

According to Priest, we also refer to (or quantify over) everything — so that too must be an object. Yes, Priest says that “everything is an object” — just like Nothing.

It’s then that Priest gets all dialethic by saying that Nothing is “not an object” too. This means that Priest applies the same logic to Everything as he does to Nothing. The following words will make that clear:

In Priest ‘s logic, philosophers too have referred to Nothing. So Nothing must be what he calls an object.

Priest himself refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein (who said — remember — that a “whole cloud of philosophy [can be] condensed into a drop of grammar”) and Nagarjuna on this issue. He says that these two thinkers

That is certainly the case with the Tractatus, in which Wittgenstein discussed the “form of the world”. We also had Kant’s many references to noumena. (That’s even though Kant believed that nothing could be known about noumena.) All this is also true of the words “round square” or “the brick with a sense of humour” — which I’ve just referred to!

To repeat. Priest goes all linguistic or grammatical when he says that “‘nothing’, can also be a noun phrase”. Basically, that’s because we can and do talk about it. More specifically, Hegel and Heidegger talked a lot about Nothing. As Priest puts it, “[w]e may say that Hegel and Heidegger both wrote about nothing”.

Moreover, “nothing” is “not [always] a quantifier phrase”. In other words, this story isn’t all about counting or quantifying. It’s also about a thing — or an object.

One other way in which we can talk about Nothing is to note that “[w]e can say that [Hegel and Heidegger] said different things about it”. In addition, Christianity talks about Nothing in that (so Priest tells us) “the Abrahamic God is supposed to have created the world” out of Nothing.

So we can see that Priest is fully committed to Plato’s Beard in that (rhetorically or not) human sayings and writings bring objects into existence.

Note

(1) Some of the quoted words and passages from Graham Priest are taken from the ‘Everything and Nothing’ seminar — a Robert Curtius Lecture of Excellence at Bonn University — which Priest gave in 2017. I relied on both the transcript and the video itself. However, I’ve edited a lot of what Priest says in that seminar to make it more comprehensible. For example, I removed many of the uses of the word “so”, added full stops, commas and suchlike. Hopefully, the philosophical content is kept intact. None of this applicable to the words and passages I quote which come from Priest’s papers and books.

“[T]he proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.”

(Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962)

To start off from the most basic element of this argument about reference. Most people will agree that the name ‘Lady Gaga’ refers to the person with the name ‘Stefani Germanotta’. At least according to one particular theory of reference, the important point here is that both names have no Fregean sense or meaning.

To explain that last statement. We can see the referent (in this case, Lady Gaga) as being something “out there”. If the names ‘Lady Gaga’ and ‘Stefani Germanotta’ had meanings, then those meanings would be “in the head”. Thus, people would mean different things when they used these different names. This wouldn’t only mean that people would apply different meanings to the names ‘Lady Gaga’ and ‘Stefani Germanotta’, but to ‘Lady Gaga’ (on its own) too.

The important point here is that people can agree on what a name (or term) refers to even if they disagree on what it means. Now this isn’t very controversial when it comes to the names ‘Lady Gaga’ and ‘Stefani Germanotta’, but what about the words and names ‘peace’, ‘democracy’, ‘woman’, ‘gold’, ‘acid’, ‘momentum’, etc?

Do all the aforementioned terms or words only make sense according to certain conceptual schemes, language games or Kuhnian paradigms? In terms of the latter, Thomas Kuhn himself wrote:

According to the theory discussed here, it isn’t important that the meanings be made clear: it’s that the referents of terms be “fixed”.

Take the case of W.V.O Quine’s discussion of the phrase “the number of plants” and the name “9”. Although Quine’s stress is different to the one being made here, his example is still useful. The following is Quine himself on the matter:

To get the point across. Does the phrase “the number of planets” refer to the number 9? Yes, but not necessarily. The number of planets might have been 8 or 203. But ‘9’ will always refer to 9. Thus, “the number of planets” is opaque (to use Quine’s term), whereas “9” is a rigid designator (to use Kripke’s term). Some may argue that this is to conflate two different philosophical systems. What is actually being done is something more mundane. Two different terms from two different philosophers are being used in a particular way.

To repeat. Quine argued in terms of necessity (or necessary statements), rather than simply reference.

However, ‘3 ²’ always refers to 9, just as much as ‘9’ always refers to 9.

That’s arithmetic. Things aren’t so simple in the case of physics. That said, Quine’s idea, and this variation, can still be applied.

Now for Physics

Take the term ‘electron’. According to Bas van Fraassen, we need to be aware of the following:

Similarly, Paul Feyerabend claimed that Aristotle and Newton meant different things by the terms “impetus” and “inertia”:

Feyerabend seems to be pretty categorical above. Was he talking about some scientific theories, or all scientific theories? In addition, is it always about “replacement”, rather than “incorporation”? In this passage, Feyerabend did mention the “transition from ‘impetus’ to ‘inertia’” and “from ‘absolute mass’ to relative mass”. However, Feyerabend is now known for applying this to all science, and therefore to all scientific theories. The final question is whether his account even works in the cases he cites above.

Now do all these rival terms refer to the same thing (or referent)? Do only some do so? Do they all refer to different things? Perhaps some don’t refer at all.

Hilary Putnam, for one, argued that in many cases “we are still talking about the same kind of stuff”. More relevantly, he wrote:

So this will still depend on which kind of stuff philosophers and scientists have in mind.

It can be said that Lady Gaga is the same kind of stuff as Stefani Germanotta… except that the words “kind of stuff” may be problematic here. In one case at least, Putnam himself was talking about acid, and acid is both a natural kind (some believe it to be a functional kind) and a stuff. Lady Gaga/Stefani Germanotta isn’t a natural kind: she’s an individual (meant in the strictly ontological sense) who’s a member of the biological kind Homo sapiens.

Observation and Reference

Is reference linked to observation? After all, don’t you need to observe referents in order for them to be referents?

Stressing reference is often a way of stressing some kind of philosophical realism. More particularly, observation is a way of reining in theory. However, if reference entails observation, or observation entails reference, then we do have a problem.

Referents (or things) don’t have names or terms attached to them. Thus, reference (or reference-fixing) must include some kind of classification. Classification itself incorporates categories and… theories. Can we escape all this and achieve what is called “direct reference” or “pure reference”?

Surely these kinds (or acts) of reference only refer to… things or objects. That is, reference can be achieved non-linguistically by, say, pointing at an object. This can’t apply to electrons or even genes. However, some things or phenomena (such as events) can be pointed at, even in not electrons or genes themselves. The British philosopher Philip Kitcher puts it in the following way:

So on the received view, even theoretical terms are tied to observations of various kinds. Are they tied to referents too? Surely the referent of the term ‘electron’ is an electron, not simply to “observable states of affairs” which are interpreted… But hold on here. There’s a long tradition in which it has been argued that an electron is a set of observable states of affairs, along with their interpretations. More accurately, an electron has always been an interpretation of a set of observable states of affairs.

Yet even if this is the case, it still amounts to a very odd form of reference, and it certainly can’t apply to any form of direct reference.

Conclusion

There are problems with the focus on reference to counteract Kuhnian relativism. Yet it’s still a way of moving out of the stress on paradigms, conceptual change, language games, theory-ladenness, etc. The two philosophers who took diametrically opposed views on all this were Hilary Putnam (at least at certain points) and Paul Feyerabend. Discussing their positions (among other things) has hopefully made this philosophical debate a little clearer.

The Extended Mind Thesis Is Obvious

In the philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) has it that the mind doesn’t exclusively reside in the brain or even in the body as a whole: it extends into the physical world.

Isn’t there something obvious about the extended mind thesis when it stresses (to use the words of David Chalmers and Andy Clark) “the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes”?

The first argument of the EM thesis is that some objects in the external world can be part of a cognitive process. The second argument (or conclusion) is that such objects function as extensions of the mind itself.

Why does the mind extend into the physical world? Is this simply a reference to intentionality?

The EMT as Yet Another Anti-Cartesian Position

The EMT can be seen to be anti-Cartesian. It’s therefore anti-internalist too.

In a typically anti-Cartesian manner, Chalmers and Clark (in their 1998 paper “The Extended Mind”) argue that

Actually, we shouldn’t say unprincipled. It can simply be said that it’s mistaken, at least if we want to stress the body and the environment.

More technically, the EMT contrasts with the view of the mind as a centre which creates representations of reality, and then uses them to control the body’s behaviour.

I always found it hard to understand how Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, etc., attempted to completely obliterate representations from all accounts of the mind. (Gottlob Frege argued, in his “The Thought,” that without representations, objects would literally need to be in the mind.) Yet, in terms of the EMT, this makes some sense. That’s because human subjects are seen as, if not being a “spiritual part of the environment”, then at least we constantly interact with it.

Stipulation and Scientific Natural Kinds

Much of the EM debate is a definitional matter anyway.

Since the word “mind” doesn’t refer to a scientific natural kind, Chalmers and Clark are free to define it as they wish. Thus, the argument of “cognitive bloating” has been put forward, in which, for example, “everything on the Internet is part of individual cognitive systems”.

It’s hard to know how these — definitional? — questions can be answered. The German philosopher Vincent C. Muller picks up on this. As he put it, the EMT

Consequently, “this discussion about demarcation is merely verbal and thus to be avoided”.

The mind may not be a natural kind. However, there have been attempts to make cognition a scientific natural kind.

The EMT and Information

Information is important for EM theorists. This ties into the long debate about the meaning of the word “information”. According to some (such as the philosopher John Searle), information is relative to, well, minds. According to others, it is something “objective”. (The theoretical physicist Christopher Fuchs states: “You’ll often hear information spoken of as if it’s a new fluid that physics has only recently taken note of.”) Thus, if information is information-for (or “observer-relative”), then it isn’t a surprise that objects which store information, such as computers, notebooks, calculations, diaries, etc., can be seen as extensions of the human mind.

One needn’t say that the brain is always necessary for cognition and the retention of information. It just happens to be so when it comes to human subjects as they are today. Thus, an argument that a Martian with a memory based on synthetic implants needn’t cause too much concern for those people who argue against the EM thesis.

Active Externalism

Chalmers and Clark describe the EM idea as an “active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes”…

Of course, the environment drives cognitive processes!

Active externalism has it that cognitive processes extend into our environment, where we use such things as smartphones, notebooks, and computers to process and store information”.

It’s hard to know what that means. How do cognitive processes extend into external environments? This seems to factor in intentionality, at least in an oblique way.

Similarly with the words “as a part of our mind”, as in the “parity principle”. How can checking a calendar on your phone for an upcoming meeting be deemed to be part of the subject’s mind or even brain? Obviously, things do happen in parts of the brain and mind when such a thing happens. But why conclude that the calendar itself is part of the mind?

The EMT is closely connected to the idea of enaction. The latter idea emphasises interplay between subjects and their environments and the feedback processes involved. Clearly, computers and even notebooks are parts of the environments of human subjects. Thus, there’s an interplay between subjects and, say, computers. There are even examples of feedback processes. However, do we need to argue that a computer is part of a subject’s mind too?

Embodied, Embedded, Enacted and Extended

It’s difficult to disentangle the EMT from the embodied mind thesis, as well as from types of externalism. Chalmers and Clark are obviously aware of this.

Many theorists argue that mental processes involve not only extensions, but embodiment, embeddedness and enaction too. Ironically, the philosophers who’ve focused on each of these things separately have often used them to advance very similar anti-Cartesian theories.

As described by the Welsh philosopher and writer Mark Rowlands, mental processes are embodied, embedded, and extended.

There’s an anthropomorphic (or even animistic) side to the EMT, at least as it’s expressed as the idea that external objects must be “at one” with internal processes. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa (2010) pick up on this when they write the following:

Pencils, Computers and Other Tools

There are typically three criteria which are supposed to help when it comes to the EM thesis: reliability, automaticity, and accessibility. Together, they’re said to explain why external objects or tools contribute to the extension of the mind:

These three criteria almost seem to be non sequiturs when it comes to establishing the EM thesis. They bloat what is seen as being part of any given extended mind, too. As will be stated later about Otto and his notebook being constantly and immediately accessible to him, why must trust, habit, and accessibility factor so strongly in the extended mind thesis?

Take a hammer. On (1), a hammer is surely part of the extended mind. (Perhaps this was what Martin Heidegger was getting at, at least partially, in his own well-known hammer story.) This would include knives and forks, too. That said, are hammers, knives and forks cognitive enough for EM theorists? (Hammers don’t “store information”. That’s for sure.)

A Computer and Its User: A Coupled System?

Almost everyone will accept that a computer can aid cognitive processes. Many people may even accept that a mind and a computer can be seen as a “coupled system” too. However, do we also need to believe that a mind and a computer together are a complete cognitive system of their own?

When two systems interact, do they thereby become one system? Is the mind of a human person and the computer he uses one system? Is the computer literally an extension of his mind?

This is where the “complementarity” idea of the internal and external elements of cognitive systems and processes comes in. Instead of seeing the mind as being extended to (or being at one with) cognitive tools or the environment, they can be seen as being complementary instead. Yet the word “complementary” is very weak when compared to “extended”. In any case, complementarity can be seen as merely seeing the EMT in terms of its explanatory value. The EM theorists themselves deem the theory, on the other hand, to be ontological in nature… Or do they?

If anything necessarily couples with a spider, it is its web.

A Spider and its Web

When the biologist Hilton F. Japyassú and evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland discuss enaction, their example of a “coupled system” is of a spider and its web (as found in their paper “Extended spider cognition”). It seems fairly convincing. They argue that the web is part of the spider’s sensory and cognitive system/s. Prima facie, that seems to make sense. After all, the spider makes the web to trap flies. And then the spider detects movement on its web when a fly is trapped.

Yet a spider is far more dependent on its web than a human person is on, say, his computer. That may not matter to the theory of enaction. However, is a human person and the fire alarm in his flat a coupled system too?

Earlier, I said that (Heidegger’s) hammer may not be cognitive enough to be seen that way. So what about a spider’s web? Is a web cognitive enough? Not in itself. It only becomes so when coupled with the spider. If that’s the case, when a hammer is coupled with its human user, then surely the hammer must become cognitive too.

Otto and His Notebook

Clark and Chalmers provide the example of the fictional characters Otto and Inga.

Otto has Alzheimer’s disease, and has written all of his directions down in his notebook, which “takes the place” of his memory. Inga is able to recall the directions within her memory or brain. Clark and Chalmers argue that the only difference here is that Inga’s memory is being processed by the brain, whereas Otto’s notebook becomes his memory. In other words, Otto’s mind has been extended to include his notebook.

In more detail. Otto’s notebook qualifies as part of his mind because it’s constantly and immediately accessible to him, and it’s always approved by him.

Why should these factors matter?

If the EM thesis is correct, then is it the case that all extensions of the mind need to be constantly and immediately accessible to subjects with minds? Many aspects of the human mind are peripheral and changeable. Moreover, even an aspect of the mind that is peripheral and changeable can still be immediately accessible — at least for a given period.

As for endorsement. There are many aspects of human minds that aren’t (fully) endorsed by subjects, such as various emotions, beliefs, and even cognitions.

On another theme. If Otto’s notebook is an extension of his mind, then there must be innumerable other external things which are extensions of his mind too. Perhaps Chalmers and Clark accept this conclusion.

Conclusion: The Causal-Constitutional Fallacy

Critics of the EM thesis have argued that it confuses claims about what is constitutive of cognition with the causal impacts on cognition.

In crude terms, the EM thesis conflates claims about the mind with claims about what causes the contents of the mind, as well as what helps the mind (or human subject) think or reason. The EM thesis denies that there is a genuine difference between internal and external processes. That is, between cognitive processes and beliefs, and the tools and devices which human persons use to aid cognition.

Finally, sometimes the EM thesis just seems to trade in metaphors and analogies. For example, it’s said that a notebook is treated like a limb or organ. Treated that way by some philosophers, sure. But it’s not treated that way by the users of notebooks. Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the theory. Moreover, as we’ve seen, the role of definition and stipulation is of vital importance to this debate.

[The word “things” is used to refer to objects, entities, particulars, individuals, etc.]

“Relationism” and “relationalism” are terms which denote two different philosophical positions. The following is one account of both terms:

Relationism is said to simply emphasise the relations between things: it doesn’t deny that things exist.

With relationalism (i.e., with an added “al”), on the other hand, “things exist and function only as relational entities”. In other words, if there were no relations, then there would be no things. However, on analysis, the distinctions between these two isms appear to break down — at least in certain respects.

Relationalism is like ontic structural realism in that the latter eliminates things (as in “every thing must go”). Relationism, on the other hand, simply places relations in an important position in any metaphysics.

Having said all that, it’s hard not to see the importance of relations — even if one also accepts the existence of things. (One can also see the vital importance of relations when it comes to — particularly — physics.) Yet, on the other hand, one can’t really see how things could be entirely eliminated. (This may largely depend on how the word “thing” is defined.)

In addition, relationalism itself can be read as not actually being eliminativist (i.e., about things) at all. After all, this metaphysical position may simply have it that things aren’t what’s called “self-standing”, which isn’t in itself a denial that things exist. Alternatively, we can say that literally all a thing’s properties are relational. In other words, things don’t have intrinsic properties. Thus, in a weak (or even strong) sense, if all things only have relational properties (and such properties literally constitute things), then in one sense things are are indeed eliminated from this metaphysical picture. To put that more simply: if a thing’s relations (or relational properties) were eliminated, then it would no longer be that thing. It would no longer even exist!

Despite all the above, it’s still hard to make sense of the idea that, to use Lee Smolin’s words, “the world is made of relations”.

What does that mean?

The same goes for Smolin’s claim that “all properties are about relations between things”.

In any case, Smolin explicitly states his relationist (or Leibnizian) position in the following passage:

However, there may be a problem here (again) with the use (above) of the word “relationist”.

On my own reading, Smolin seems to go one step beyond relationism in order to delve into the domain of relation[al]ism. What I mean by this is that — to repeat — it can be said that relationism simply emphasises the relations between things: it doesn’t deny that things exist. With relationalism (with an added “al”), on the other hand, “things exist and function only as relational entities”. In other words, if there were no relations, then there would be no things.

The arguments above can be used against ontic structural realism, which is very much like relationalism (at least in these respects).

Ontic Structural Realism

James Ladyman and Don Ross offer a list of four statements which they believe summarise the position of what they call “standard metaphysics”.

Take (1):

The problem is how to take the word “independent” in the above.

One can happily accept individuals (which is a similar term to particulars), and also believe they that they aren’t independent of other individuals. In other words, the reality of individuated objects, and their lack of independence, aren’t mutually exclusive.

What’s more, one can accept the “identity and diversity of these individuals”, and also deny that such individuals are “determined independently of their relations to each other”. So why is a commitment to individuals necessarily also a commitment to their complete independence from all other individuals (or from relations, events, processes, etc.)?… Unless this is true by definition.

Rovelli’s Binary Opposition: Relations vs Things

This seeming (to use a term from Ferdinand de Saussure) binary opposition between relations and things is given a scientific and historical reading by Carlo Rovelli in the following:

The very phraseology in the above seems odd.

Surely no physicist or scientist would ever have thought in terms of a “relational world” at all. So perhaps that’s precisely Rovelli’s point. In other words, there is indeed a relational word, but physicists simply haven’t seen it that way. Yet if physicists haven’t seen the world this way, then why were they (according to Rovelli) “asked to provide a firm basis on which to place relations”?

The odd thing is that a philosopher, scientist or layperson could accept most of what Rovelli argues, and still believe that things are important — or even vital.

So is Rovelli simply inverting what he sees as the violent hierarchy in which a supreme importance was supposedly given to things in Western philosophy and physics? Is Rovelli now simply putting interactions and relations in the place of things? In addition, if he is doing so, then why is this clear and blatant reversal of a previous hierarchy a better philosophical position?

Lee Smolin’s Relationism/Relationalism

Lee Smolin (who was mentioned a moment ago) cites Gottfried Leibniz as a relationist. Or, at the very least, he sees Leibniz as being a relationist when it comes to space and time. So, unlike Newton, Leibniz

Smolin sums up the two opposing positions when he says that “this fight” is

Smolin adds that this opposition is a “key theme in the story of the development of modern physics”. [See note 1 on Smolin’s philosophy of space and time.]

In terms of Leibniz again. Leibniz’s position (as expressed by Smolin) is that space and time don’t exist — at least not as independent phenomena. Instead, space and time essentially arise as ways of making sense of the (as Smolin puts it) “relations among things”. Space and time are the means by which we plot the relations between things. That basically means that if there were no things, then there would be no space and time either. That is, space and time aren’t (to use Smolin’s word again) “absolute”: they’re a consequence of things and their interrelationships.

Nonetheless, if space and time don’t exist, then what are these things moving about in?

It can be supposed, of course, that both space and time come into being as soon as there are things which have relations with one another…

But how does that work?

Even if space and time do spring into existence as soon as things spring into existence, then it’s still the case that things move about in space, and exist through time.

So here are two alternative conclusions:

i) Space and time depend on things and their relations.

ii) Things and their relations depend on space and time.

The obvious way out of this opposition is simply to say that there’s no hierarchy involved here: spacetime and things depend on each other. Space and time aren’t more important (or fundamental) than things, and things aren’t more important (or fundamental) than space and time.

What’s called “relational theory”, however, is indeed eliminativist about space. This theory has it that if there were no things, then there would be no space either. Relational theory is eliminativist about time too in that if there were no events (in space), then there would be no time.

Note:

It’s hard to decide if Lee Smolin’s position on space and time is a purely metaphysical position, a position within physics and cosmology, or a metaphysical position on the physics and cosmology. Whichever option is taken will make a big difference to how readers should (or will) interpret his positions on this particular subject.

For example, an entirely metaphysical position on space and time may run entirely free of how they’re tackled in physics and cosmology. (You wouldn’t expect this to be true of a physicist like Smolin himself.) Of course, there may also be a degree of interplay between the metaphysics and the physics/cosmology. However, this isn’t always the case.

Douglas Adams’ Reason Software

To get the point across about AI and argumentation, Gilead Amit (in ‘Computers that can argue will be satnav for the Moral Maze’ for the New Scientist) mentions Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. This novel features computer software called Reason, which is used for nefarious purposes by the Pentagon. (How predictable.) Amit concludes:

It is that last sentence which stands out. Which adult humans have computers never beaten in an argument? All adult humans? Really? Amit wrote these words in 2016. So, to give him the benefit of the doubt, AI has moved on tremendously in the last ten years or so. That is said because chatbots nowadays can indeed win arguments with adult humans. Of course, it may depend on what the word ‘win’ means here. In other words, sometimes it’s hard to say just who has won, or even if winning is always important.

We can bring in the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber here. (Specifically, their “argumentative theory of reasoning”.) Sperber and Mercier argue that human reason didn’t evolve to help us find “the solitary truth”, but rather as a social tool to persuade others, as well as to evaluate the arguments made by others.

To be a sceptic about AI for a moment. If AI systems argued/debated to win, then surely that would be a bad thing. Indeed, Douglas Adams’ Reason software would have been made flesh. This is the reality behind this fictional software:

• Decide the conclusion: You specify in advance what conclusion you wish to reach.

• Find the facts: You feed facts into the program.

• Generate arguments: The software constructs a series of logical steps to connect the premises to your conclusion.

On a related theme. Amit quotes the computer scientist Noam Slonim:

This seems to apply to winning arguments too.

Amit also tells his readers that a “full-blown argument machine sounds as implausible as Douglas Adams’ tongue-in-cheek Reason software”. He then concluded:

Why is Amit assuming that a machine will literally tell people how to vote? Surely it will (or it should) only offer arguments as to why someone should vote in a particular way. It needn’t literally tell them. Amit himself sees this when he then uses the word “suggest” (as in “suggest what they should think about a certain issue”) in a slightly different context.

Where To Find Arguments

It may be surprising to find out where certain AI researchers have gone to find “good arguments […] to use to train an AI to argue as we do”. In this particular case, the computer scientist Chris Reed’s “favourite source is the BBC radio show Moral Maze, in which panellists debate the ethics of an issue of the day”. Why that show? It’s because of its “quasi-legal cut and thrust, laced with appeals to our emotions”. It’s not the case that Reed has become completely reliant on the BBC’s Moral Maze, only that he has analysed its debates “to build a general framework for the essence of human argument”.

In terms of detail. It was in July 2012 that Reed’s team “performed their first real-time argument analysis, of a Moral Maze episode on the ins and outs of British colonial rule in Kenya”.

The researchers found good sources elsewhere too. They went to

There are many well-structured arguments in some online forums. More so than in many national newspapers or in the House of Commons… Yes, these researchers tried the UK parliament too. Amit says that they are “not good reference material: too much performative swagger and too many procedural interjections and references to previous debates”. Chris Reed himself says: “There is much less quality argument there than you would either expect or hope.”

Why did Reed expect better arguments in the House of Commons?

Whether it’s online debates or debates in the Commons, readers may be wondering about the actual processes used to extract good arguments from all this data. Not much detail is given about this by Amit. What detail he does give is that “[c]laim and counterclaim, and the connections between them, were represented on a giant touchscreen in a form ready to be fed into an AI”.

That’s a little bit helpful, but not much. The reference to “connections between them” certainly needs to be fleshed out. As for the touchscreen, it had “argument maps” on it.

The same point can be made about Ivan Habernal and Iryna Gurevych and their research team. In this case:

Again, that’s not very helpful, and neither is Amit’s account of what happened to all this data:

How does all that data teach computational systems to rank the arguments they process? How does the AI extract the argument (or argument forms) from all the sentences which include (what Amit calls) “claims”?

Arguments, Not Facts

You can have all the data in the world, and even data that includes human arguments, but readers still need to know what the researchers did with all that. Prima facie at least, it seems like the AI simply represented the arguments and their relations (as well as the relations between premises and conclusions) in a very similar way to how it represents facts and other data.

This is about whether a machine can “graduate from facts to arguments”. Yet aren’t there facts (perhaps loosely construed) about arguments — or at least about argument forms?

Amit knows that in order for

According to Amit, this would be a “research engine”, not a search engine. That said, a machine can just as easily search for arguments, as Amit shows in his article. After that, the machine can then synthesise those arguments — whatever that may mean.

What Is an Argument?

Amit says that an argument is a “claim backed up by evidence”. That’s a very odd definition of an argument. Even if we focus on arguments in the plural, it’s still an odd definition. (This seems to be an traditional account of a scientific process than a definition of an argument.) However, Amit does say that it’s a “rough answer”. So perhaps it’s only odd to those who’ve read too much philosophy of logic.

The problem with this definition is also one of the problems Amit’s article attempts to confront: the move from fact to argument. After all, an AI has easy access to much evidence, just as it has easy access to many facts. Evidence is never conclusive: it is what is done and said with the evidence. This must apply to what is claimed too.

Amit does add more to his definition. He informs his readers that “the team hopes to shift their focus to flagging up evidence that supports the claim”. So how is the claim “All swans are white” flagged up with evidence which supports it? And is any of this constitutive of an argument?

In terms of evidence. Amit distinguishes “anecdotal data” from “expert testimony”. The aim here is to make an AI “learn how much weight to give [these] different forms of evidence”.

Let’s now give more details on some of the big names in AI and argumentation mentioned by Amit.

Chris Reed, Douglas Walton, and Iryna Gurevych

We do get a basic clue from the computer scientist Chris Reed about the technical aspects of what Amit has discussed. His argument interchange format (AIF) is a language which is used to help machines understand the relationships between premises and conclusions. So here we have something logically concrete: the relationships between premises and conclusions.

Reed deals with computational argumentation too. He founded the Arg-tech laboratory, which builds software to map out human debates.

It’s surely argument forms which must be studied, not arguments in general. The Canadian academic and author Douglas N. Walton (who died in 2020) called them “argumentation schemes”. Apparently, his schemes became the blueprint which AI scientists use today. As it is, Walton himself didn’t initially focus on AI at all.

Douglas Walton did the same as what Chris Reed is now doing with the Moral Maze. He catalogued many everyday and legal argument structures (like “argument from analogy” and “argument from expert opinion”) into forms that computer programmers can translate into code.

The computer scientist Iryna Gurevych carries out what’s called “argument mining”. Argument mining is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP). It extracts and analyses argumentative structures in human languages. By picking out premises, claims, and counter-arguments, it maps out the inferential logic behind human person’s opinions.

Gurevych uses the word “claim”, just like Amit. The AI detects the claim and the premises (which involve data or evidence) which support it. Thus, we have various relationships between claims and premises. How do they relate to one another? Does another claim support or reject the initial claim?

Like Douglas Walton, Gurevych focuses on argument schemes, such as arguments from analogy, cause-and-effect, or expert testimony. Similarly, just as with Chris Reed and the BBC’s Moral Maze, so Gurevych’s team builds Natural Language Processing models which scan vast amounts of text in order to detect whether a sentence is a claim, supporting evidence for a claim, or a rejection of a claim.

Conclusion

It’s worth rounding off this essay by stating that chatbots (or AIs generally) don’t need to instantiate consciousness, display “real intelligence”, be real persons, “genuinely understand”, “know what it’s like” to be a human person or a sex worker, etc. to take part in debates and offer good arguments. Personally, chatbots have often shown me that my reasoning is faulty, not only that my facts are wrong. Surely, this is a good thing.

To be fair to Toby Walsh, his article (‘The world in 2076: Machines outsmart us but we’re still on top’) is at least partially introductory. Yet he writes what he writes. In addition, he moulds his article around not just limits to AI intelligence, but around the Singularity too. My essay doesn’t spend any time at all on the Singularity..

Hooked on Speed

Many people have noted that the (scare-quoted) “thinking processes” of AI entities are much quicker than our own. More concretely, silicon, when compared to human neurons and other biological “wetware,” enables that speed.

Does more speed equal more intelligence? The computer scientist Toby Walsh thinks not:

Note the word “abstractions.” Toby Walsh’s position is itself abstract. It sees things entirely in terms of speed. An increase in AI speed that’s entirely divorced from everything else. But, of course, when the speed of an AI increases, so too does much else. Indeed, what brings about increases in speed may also bring about increases in what Walsh calls “intelligence.”

Walsh argues that increasing speed alone doesn’t increase intelligence. Yet there’s nothing to stop AI designers adding things alongside these increases in speed. This is obviously already happening.

As for Toby Walsh’s dog. Even if my thinking became quicker, I would be unlikely to play chess. That’s because I don’t like chess. What about the dog? Walsh’s dog doesn’t “have the necessary mental constructs, the language and the abstractions.” I do. But this returns us to a point made just a moment ago. If a dog were “made” to think faster (whatever Walsh means by that), how could it think faster at all without the necessary mental constructs, the language and the abstractions? Sure, perhaps a dog thinking faster means licking its balls faster, finding food faster, finding sexual mates faster, etc. This again points to the fact that Walsh is being far too abstract and rhetorical (in the case of his dog at least) about these things.

All this points to something else worth mentioning. Do human beings up to the age of, say, five, have the necessary mental constructs, the language and the abstraction to play chess, or do much else? Some do. Not many. And what about the adults who can’t play chess?

So silicon beats wetware in terms of speed, and it may also beat wetware in other domains too.

AI Experience and Training

Toby Walsh approaches this issue from another angle. He writes:

Firstly, Walsh seems to have a fixed and determinate idea of what intelligence is. That may bear on everything else he has to say.

According to Walsh, intelligence depends on years of experience and training. If he means “phenomenal experience,” then AI doesn’t have that. But it does have experiences if cashed out in other ways. Indeed, it has years of experience of being fed information, being asked questions, answering questions, sweeping through data, etc. Again, it doesn’t have phenomenal experience, and it doesn’t walk around the world physically chatting and interacting with human persons or the environment.

What about training?

This is odd. A frequent criticism of AI entities is that they’re simply “trained” to do this, that and the other. Trained to think a certain way. Trained to answer questions in a certain way. Trained to seek out specific data sources in a certain kind of way. Etc.

Training is necessary for human persons too. Persons are trained by parents. They’re trained by school teachers and professors. More loosely, they’re trained by the religious and ideological systems they adopt… But in all of these cases, of course, there is a little “something I know not what” that’s always supposed to peep through — free will or creativity. This isn’t deemed to be the case with AI.

If the “clock speed” and “memory” of human persons were increased, whether in real time or over the years, that would certainly increase intelligence. Yet Walsh used the words “clock speed” and “memory” to refer exclusively to AI. According to him, this wouldn’t result in more intelligence. Again, this is to treat both clock speed and memory in isolation. And increases in clock speed and memory would almost definitely come along with other changes.

Physical Limits on AI Intelligence

Toby Walsh sees much of this in terms of “the limits of AI intelligence.” More accurately, in terms of the absolute limits of AI intelligence. Walsh indulges in some physics and cosmology to get his point across:

The clincher:

I agree with all of that… But so what!

There are physical limits. Yet this may have just a tiny — or even irrelevant — impact on AI. This is like arguing that people can’t land on the moon because it is fundamentally impossible for people to have wings. The limits Walsh notes may well be correct. But even though computer processes could never accelerate past the speed of light, that doesn’t matter much. Electricity and fiber-optic signals move at a fraction of the speed of light. An AI operating at this limit can process billions of data points, manipulate financial markets, or rewrite code in milliseconds.

As for knowing both the position and momentum of a particle with complete accuracy: that may be even more irrelevant to AI. (How this relates to quantum computers is another matter.)

Turing’s Halting Problem and AI

Everyone knows, or should know, about the very many times people have claimed that Gödel’s theorems have placed limits on this, that, and the other. Toby Walsh himself, however, concentrates on Alan Turing and “the halting problem.” He writes:

Again, there’s nothing to disagree with here… But so what!

The cases of the halting problem having concrete impacts on computer technology and design will be highly abstract and limited. In a certain sense, they’ll be almost irrelevant to AI innovation and advance.

Processes never stopping does seem quite technically important. But would that impact greatly on technological advances in the AI business?

All that said, it is true that because of the Halting Problem, the AI’s internal testing environment can never mathematically prove if a code is stuck in an infinite loop, or simply taking a long time to finish. Yet even here AI engineers have designed constraints — such as “timeouts” (which end the program after 5 seconds) — directly into the infrastructure to prevent the AI from crashing its own servers. There are other problems too. Yet they all belong to this metamathematical domain, and thus only have limited impacts.

To sum up. Only when an AI is made to test, verify, or guarantee the absolute safety of software code (including its own) is there a problem. Toby Walsh seems to be suggesting that Turing’s limit is a limit to AI capability. In other words, the Halting Problem stops the AI (or all AI) from being useful or smart. It doesn’t.

Walsh ties this issue to speed too. He tells us that:

Sure! No computer could make 2 plus 2 equal 5, no matter how fast it is. No AI could turn water into wine either. Yet the halting problem is purely metamathematical in nature.

More in tune with the theme of this essay. No computer needs to surpass — or beat/solve — the halting problem when it comes to advances in AI and technology. This may be wrong. But it’s interesting that Walsh never provides any links between the halting problem, the speed of light, the uncertainty problem, etc., and any concrete limitations on AI advances.

The historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn cited many examples from the history of science to substantiate what I call his “many-worlds theory”. (This is a term which is obviously borrowed from theoretical physics.) In fact, Kuhn spent far more time on historical examples than he did on philosophical argument. No doubt he wanted his examples to speak for themselves. What this essay does, however, is miss out Kuhn’s many examples in order to find the logical core of his argument.

Kuhn’s Many Qualifications of the Words “Different Worlds”

Even the title of the chapter ‘Revolutions as Changes of World View’ (from Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) isn’t called ‘Revolutions as Changes of World’. The words ‘world view’ are hardly new or peculiar to Kuhn. To state the obvious: different world views are usually regarded as being different views of the same world.

The most clear expression of Kuhn’s many-worlds theory is given at the beginning of the chapter ‘Revolutions as Changes of World View’. After a revolutionary change of paradigm,

Firstly, note the words “as if” (as in “as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet”). Kuhn was obviously not claiming that the professional community had been transported to another planet. It was only as if they had been.

What’s more, in this as-if world there are still familiar objects, even if they’re seen in a different light. Thus, even Kuhn’s as-if worlds aren’t that different from, well, the world.

Kuhn qualified his position even more in the same paragraph when he wrote that

Sure. We may want to say that… if we like. Yet that doesn’t mean that there’s any actual commitment to literal different worlds. Perhaps this way of speaking simply helps us to think about these matters.

Kuhn used a variation on his words “we may want to say” six pages later when he wrote that matters “may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world”… Yes, we may wish to say that, and for all sorts of reasons. Yet, here again, it’s not being said that astronomers after Copernicus did literally live in a different world to their predecessors.

Kuhn made his point clearer when he concluded by saying that “their research responded as though that were the case”. Now we have as though, rather than the earlier as if.

Kuhn again qualified his position (or at least asked himself questions) when it came to talk of “different worlds”. When discussing “what separates Galileo from Aristotle, or Lavoisier from Priestley”, Kuhn asked:

Kuhn continued:

Instead of the words “fixed nature”, here we have the words “fixed by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus”. Thus, it’s not simply:

(i) fixed nature vs scientists’ different worlds

It’s:

(ii) observations that are fixed by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus vs scientists’ different worlds

In (i) we have a two-way process which includes fixed nature and the different ways that it is interpreted. Whereas in (ii) there is a three-way process in which we have a fixed nature + a fixed perceptual apparatus which both lead to fixed observations, and which then lead to unfixed interpretations.

So we’ve moved from fixed nature to fixed observations (i.e., “observations that are themselves fixed…”).

Both (i) and (ii) can be deemed to be scientifically realist in nature. Kuhn was against both. According to (i) and (ii), interpretations of fixed nature (or fixed observations) can be many in number. Most scientific realists don’t deny that. They accept both the fixed nature (fixed observations) part of the equation, as well as the subsequent interpretations.

Kuhn moved on from talk about fixed nature (or fixed observations) to “fixed data”. His point is simple. Only the notion of fixed data can make sense of the corresponding notion of interpretation. If the data aren’t fixed, then what is there to interpret? Consequently, if there are no fixed data, then we must have… different worlds.

Kuhn believed in data, just not in fixed data. After a paradigm shift, “[t]he data themselves had changed”. Kuhn’s last sentence in this chapter is the following:

If data changes after a scientific revolution, then we have no right to speak of fixed nature. Yet Kuhn is still using the locution “we may want to say”!

Kuhn on Observation-Languages

Kuhn didn’t believe that talk of observations or “the given” (i.e., instead of “fixed nature” or “the world”) solves these problems. Still, Kuhn did raise the issue:

There’s a reason for Kuhn offering his readers this description of a (former) project to create a neutral observation-language:

There’s yet more movement from Kuhn here. He moved from fixed nature (or fixed observations) to stable experience (or stable perceptions). So, instead of nature being fixed, we now have experience (or perception) which is fixed.

Kuhn argued that nothing is “fixed and neutral”!

Not nature, not observation, not experience.

It’s here that Kuhn pits himself against the “epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries”. That viewpoint had it that the “given data [are] immediate and unequivocal”.

Kuhn stated that he didn’t entirely relinquish that viewpoint. Many commentators believe that he did. Indeed, Kuhn himself attacked that viewpoint in the very next paragraph. (Kuhn denied that there is such a thing as “the given”. He then spent some time telling his readers why he did so.)

Kuhn Takes Back His Qualifications

Now we have Kuhn telling his readers that he’s talking about something more than mere as-if worlds. Here he is discussing the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier:

In simple terms, in order for all scientists to be living in the same world (or simply talking about the same world), that world must have a “fixed nature”. In this case, then, the fixed nature of the (same) world is seen (or interpreted) differently by different scientists.

Kuhn clearly rejected the claim that the world has a fixed nature.

Did that automatically commit him to literal different worlds?

Yet even here Kuhn wasn’t talking ontology.

He mentioned “the principle of economy” (see here), and that too hints at as-if worlds… Or does it?

The principle of economy favours the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions. In the same way in which Bertrand Russell (in his The Problems of Philosophy) argued that the view that an independent physical world exists is simpler than its sceptical alternatives, so Kuhn’s critics have argued that Kuhn actually picked the least economical option of many different worlds.

The scientific realist believes that the world has a fixed nature. He accepts that our theories (or interpretations) may be, and have been, wrong. However, his position still only requires a single world.

According to Kuhn, on the other hand, we require different worlds. Even if there’s no commitment to literal different worlds here, plural worlds are still required for his theory.

Kuhn’s Ontological Position?

It’s true that Kuhn wanted to keep well away from any ontological claims. However, any outright claim that the world has no fixed nature seems pretty ontological. The problem is that Kuhn never said that “the world has no fixed nature”. Instead, he said that (to paraphrase) “in the absence of any access to that hypothetical fixed nature, we must talk of different worlds instead”. This can be seen as an anti-realist, rather than an idealist, position. To rework another argument from Bertrand Russell, there may well be a teapot floating around a distant planet. However, scientists can safely ignore it.

On the realist side again. We can be economic or pragmatic about the world and how we view/interpret it, and yet still believe that it has a fixed nature! In other words, no one can prove (or even know) that the world doesn’t have a fixed nature.

Moreover, no matter how many problems there are, and have been, when it comes to describing things, the world may still have a fixed nature. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what a world without a fixed nature would be like.

Conclusion

In order to move away from scientific realism, Kuhn had to take his own words “different worlds” literally, lest he slipped back into some kind of disguised scientific realism. Yet that position took him toward relativism. Moreover, Kuhn seemed to realise that.

In Kuhn’s work, some commentators have argued that he backtracked on his earlier positions. If the argument in my own essay is correct, then that’s understandable. The bottom line is that when Kuhn was originally writing in 1952, he would have had no idea that his ideas would have been taken up by poststructuralists and postmodernists. And that explains his later paper, for example, ‘Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice’ from 1977, which goes into more detail about his earlier arguments.

Matt and Maria Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over the suicide of their son, Adam. Dustin Arand wrote a story (‘AI Chatbots Are Not Your Friends’) about this for Medium… or at least he featured this case in that story. Arand could argue that his reference to the Raine v OpenAI case is just a single section of his piece. I would argue that it is its main political driver..

In broad terms, Arand literally makes it seem that ChatGPT encouraged the suicide without the aid of prompts or, indeed, anything else. It’s fantastically deceitful to spend zero time on the subject of prompts and context.

One aspect of this is that Arand relied almost exclusively on the lawsuit filings and complaint. These would have been written by attorneys in order to build the best legal argument for Mr and Mrs Raine.

The data on all this comes from the 39-page legal complaint (Raine v. OpenAI). It included excerpts from thousands of pages of chat logs recovered from Adam’s account.

Before reading Arand’s piece, I knew nothing about this story. Yet if I had relied entirely on his words, then that would have been a terribly biased way to approach this issue.

This is the case in Arand’s own words:

What Arand doesn’t tell his readers is that, at least according to OpenAI’s defence (which readers are free to reject), the suicide victim told ChatGPT that he had reached out to his family and was ignored. They also noted the chatbot urged him to seek professional help over 100 times throughout their chat history.

The complaint itself confirms that 377 of Adam’s messages were flagged by OpenAI’s automated moderation for “self-harm content”. The problem was, however, nothing was done. There might have been reasons for not doing anything. I don’t know. This isn’t a legal essay.

Arand continues:

OpenAI’s response stated that Adam bypassed safety filters by using “creative framing”. Specifically, he told ChatGPT that he was writing a story, which included a certain character. Moreover, Adam was seeking methods from online suicide forums too.

In addition, Arand doesn’t say that in the Raine v. OpenAI case it emerged that Adam engaged with ChatGPT over many months. When he repeatedly prompted ChatGPT with dark questions and material, ChatGPT did indeed lack strict guardrail cut-offs, etc. That much can be admitted.

On a broader scale, Arand refers to “A.I. psychosis”. This entirely skips any analysis of RLHF alignment, guardrail bypasses, etc.

Arand’s Political Analysis of Chatbots

Here’s the thing. You can be against “big tech”, Elon Musk, ChatGPT, Twitter, etc. and still not make the mistakes Arand has made. His mistakes should be counterproductive. (Bad arguments undermine good criticisms.) Yet he obviously thinks otherwise.

Arand mentions the Raine vs Open AI case again at the end of his piece. He writes:

From what we’ve seen, there were many guardrails in the suicide case. And the harm Adam suffered wasn’t exclusively down to ChatGPT or OpenAI either. So it’s clear that Arand sees ChatGPT as a “rogue [ ] device”. Why? Mainly for political reasons.

Arand does give another example of this phenomenon. He tells his readers that

Again, Arand provides no context to this. It’s almost as if readers are meant to believe that this has nothing to do with with Chris Smith himself, and everything to do with his chatbot.

Arand does acknowledge that “[t]here are many use cases for LLMs that can create real value for society”, such as “[g]enerating code [ ] or helping to answer routine customer service questions so that human operators can be freed up to handle more complex issues”…

So it’s just chatbots that are bad? Or is it simply that treating a chatbot as a friend that is bad?

Does Arand Have His Own Therapist?

Arand’s alternatives to chatbots are signs of privilege and class: therapists and friends. Such people “keep[] you talking in order to better understand you and help you work through your troubles”. Chatbots, on the other hand, “keep[] you talking because the company that owns it can monetize your attention”.

Speaking about the UK at least, you can get free therapy, but only if you have a mental-health condition. In the US, on the other hand, many well-off people have therapists without having conditions. They all pay. Such people treat therapists the way other people treat personal trainers. (There is even a long-running English joke that all posh New Yorkers have their own therapist.)

Then there is the reference to making money out of attention. Many chatbots are free. Sure, users may get nudged to upgrade every now and again, as they when they use photo-editing websites, Eleven Labs, etc. And the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. demand a subscription.

[Biography from Google Books: “Dustin Arand received his bachelor of arts degree and juris doctor from the University of Missouri, Columbia. [ ] He clerked for two years for the Superior Court of Massachusetts. [ ] He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.”]

Prompting Chatbots to be Bad

Almost all users of chatbots know that such AIs can be tuned (via prompts, etc.) to agree with (or mirror) users’ emotional states and even their prose styles. Thus, Arand ignoring the role of prompting is highly suspect. Moreover, it relies on anthropomorphism, something Arand warns us against elsewhere in his article.

Yet mentioning prompts doesn’t mean AI developers have zero responsibility. However, at least prompts should have been as much as mentioned by Arand.

Here is one relevant example of AI echoing the character of a user through prompting. A chatbot can become as dark and evil as the user (or at least the user’s alter-ego) in a series of chats. In other words, this is a two-way process, not a case of a chatbot bogeyman saying ‘Kill yourself!’ out of the blue.

The odd thing, elsewhere (later), Arand shows that he knows this:

Even here Arand goes too far.

He claims that the corporation “is always going to subordinate your flourishing to its own bottom line”. This is to assume a necessary, tight and clear link between corporate bodies and specific chatbot output.

Yet OpenAI is severely harmed by suicide lawsuits, safety failures, PR disasters, and crackdowns. Thus, ChatGPT didn’t go down dark alleys because its board of directors is dark, and only thinks about profit.

There are indeed problems with chatbots — or at least issues that can be addressed.

Chatbots can and do profit from “addictive loops”. (The word “profit” would need to be fleshed out here.) The mimicking of human intimacy can create emotional problems for individuals, as well as for societies. In terms of corporate negligence. Yes, deploying sycophantic systems to tens of millions of people needs to be addressed too.

The problem here is that many solutions to these problems may throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Chatbots as Mirrors: Chatbots as Evil Beings

Arand says that “the human user understands that she is essentially talking to a corporation, and not to a “person””. That was immediately after saying that chatbots basically work as mirrors. So are chatbots a strange mix of mirrors, the voices of corporations and enemies?

Arand can’t decide if chatbots are mirrors of human souls or enemies of human souls. For example, he writes:

This is almost the opposite of my own experiences, in which chatbots have questioned my views, and even outrightly contradicted them. So I wonder if this is a result of Arand’s own prompting of the chatbots he uses.

Conclusion

Dustin Arand finishes off with an explicitly political take on chatbots:

So chatbots are “mirrors”, as well as being enemies at one and the same time? Not only that: chatbots only reflect “financial motives of large corporations”, as well as the “neuroses and biases of its users”. Dustin Arand’s piece is not a very fair, subtle or analytic account of chatbots. It’s mainly an ideological and political account.

In the following, I will connect H.G. Wells’s words (in his 1895 book The Time Machine) to philosophical positions on “spacetime worms” and four-dimensionalism (terms Wells never used). Four-dimensionalism and spacetime worms became popular with philosophers some 80 years after Wells’s book. More accurately, though, the philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington did introduce the expression in his 1928 book, The Nature of the Physical World.

On the Four Dimensions and School Geometry

When Wells’s Time Traveller introduces his time machine to his guests, he does come across as very confident and categorical. (Like a typical Victorian gentleman.) Yet his geometry was firmly in tune with the new findings of the second half of the 19th century. He commented on old-school (Euclidean) geometry too:

Readers may now be wondering why the Time Traveller uses the singular word “misconception”, rather than misconceptions. It is the treatment of time which is that misconception.

There are some odd words spoken by the Time Traveller. They seem to incorporate Biblical reasons as to why people (or his guests) may disagree with him. For example:

[“Natural infirmity of the flesh”, as found in Galatians 4:13.]

The Time Traveller lays his cards on the table in the following way:

Then comes the clincher:

The word “extension” helps here. To state the obvious. Length has an extension. Breadth has an extension. Thickness has an extension… And Duration has an extension too.

There’s absolutely no doubt that many laypeople note distinctions between the three dimensions and the fourth dimension:

Oddly enough, a contemporary four-dimensionalist, Theodore Sider, still understands all this — even in 2005. He writes:

It can be argued that, strictly speaking, the Time Traveller wasn’t a four-dimensionalist at all. That’s primarily because this is a philosophical doctrine. He certainly didn’t use the words “temporal parts”, and he might even have had a problem with the idea of instantaneous objects popping into and out of existence at every moment.

On Moving Through the Time Dimension

Need the Time Traveller have said that “[t]ime is only a kind of space”? Instead, couldn’t he have simply said that time and space are necessarily intertwined?

This is the Time Traveller’s argument:

That is only the preamble to the Time Traveller’s later geometrical deductions. He continues:

The Time Traveller says that “you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time”. Isn’t that exactly what most people do believe? Sure, many people won’t say that they “move about” in time. But don’t they believe that they “move” from one time to another? So the word “move” is relevant here.

The Time Traveller has something specific in mind.

He believes that his memory allowed him to “move about in time”. In detail, it allows him to “recall […] an incident very vividly [and] go back to the instant of its occurrence”.

Did it do so?

Remembering something isn’t moving about in time. Surely, it’s accessing a representation or memory encoded in the brain. That encoding exists in a physical space. What it captures did occur a long time ago. Yet that doesn’t mean that the human subject moves around in time. It means that he accesses a memory that “refers” to an earlier time.

Why Four Dimensions?

The Time Traveller, if not Wells, takes an anti-physicalist position on “mental existences”. He uses such things to defend his four-dimensionalist position:

If mental existences are parts of the brain (or even only dependent or supervenient on parts of the brain), then the Time Traveller is wrong. Even if mental existences are over and above parts of the brain, then they’re still temporally and physically connected to such parts.

Then the Time Traveller says, “Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time.” One wonders why his inability to stay back in time for any length of time had any relevance for his broader position. Oddly, the Time Traveller backs up his position by comparing it to someone being able to “go up against gravitation in a balloon”. To state the obvious. The balloonist may go up against gravitation, but he doesn’t thereby work against it or contradict it.

The Time Traveller concludes by asking this question:

These analogies (or whatever they are) seem loose. After all, the Time Traveller has moved from human memory to actual… time travel!

Spacetime Worms

Wells provides readers with a perfect description of a spacetime worm:

That last phrase, “his Four-Dimensional being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing”, is problematic. It seems to add something new. Yet it perfectly fits with four-dimensionalism too.

The passage above may simply mean that we can’t “view” the fourth dimension in the same way we can view the other three dimensions (or at least the objects which exemplify them). The argument is that even though people and objects have “temporal parts”, in order to fully “know” the whole person (or the whole spacetime worm), we must see him as a fixed and unalterable thing.

The Time Traveller stated that

This may simply mean that we can’t “view” the fourth dimension in the same way we can view the other three.

But what does all that mean?

How can a person who was alive in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2015 be a unalterable thing? More mundanely, how could we see these “sections” as a single whole?

We could do so imaginatively, as well as with the help of photos and videos, but that still wouldn’t be to see a fixed and unalterable thing. Perhaps, then, the “seeing” is metaphorical and ontological. The entire spacetime worm is never literally seen, but it still exists in some kind of abstract realm. (The philosopher David Lewis (1941-2001), however, would have argued that the worm lives in a concrete realm.)

So the Time Traveller as a spacetime worm can only be “seen” in the present. Yet he’s actually an elongated and continuous 4-D thing. That thinghood applies across the period from his birth until his death.

To repeat. If a reader is looking at a dog, then he’s only seeing its present 3-D slice. The entire history of that dog is the rest of the 4-D worm that is the dog. Thus, no spacetime worm, or person, is ever “wholly present” at any given time. He, she, or it perdure.

There is a possible contradiction here.

If the Time Traveller had a beer belly, and later didn’t have a beer belly, then how do we “see” the entire spacetime worm? Well, again, we don’t literally see him at all. Instead, the Time Traveller had a beer belly during a certain “temporal slice”, and he didn’t have a beer belly at a later temporal slice. Thus, no “contradiction”. That is, the Time Traveller doesn’t possess contradictory properties at one and the same time.

This is the position of Perdurantism. A spacetime worm is a persisting object that is the sum of all its/his/her temporal slices.

Note:

(1) The Time Traveller “lands” in 802,701. That may seem oddly specific. Apparently, there were evolutionary reasons for H. G. Wells choosing that date. To be honest, “evolutionary science” is more important to The Time Machine than my own concentration on geometry and spacetime worms.

It’s easy to come across a fair amount of stories on Medium with titles like the following: ‘The flaw of physicalism is explaining consciousness’, ‘Scientists Have Finally Disproved Materialism!’, ‘Why Materialism Can’t Explain Consciousness’, ‘The Hard Problem Refutes Physicalism’, and the very latest one (posted in the last week) with the word ‘materialism’ in the title, ‘Materialism’s Fatal Flaw: The Consciousness Problem Science Was Never Built to Solve’.

Importantly, it’s often the case that physicalism is treated as the default framework (or “worldview”) of science. (Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Sheldrake, etc. believe this.) This can be debated. But if physicalism is seen that way, then anti-materialists are almost bound to see themselves as challenging that supposed “hegemony”.

In terms of philosophers. No philosopher ever adopted physicalism because he thought it was complete or the total truth. Most physicalists embraced physicalism because its alternatives created even greater difficulties.

If problems or flaws in a philosophical framework are acknowledged, does that automatically mean that the framework should be completely rejected? Does that mean that an alternative framework — which one? — should automatically be accepted?

Do all, many, some, or any alternatives (or rivals) actually fare better?

The Argument Against Physicalism

There are a hell of a lot of versions of the argument against physicalism. In condensed form, they amount to the following:

There is a problem with physicalism.

Therefore, people should be against physicalism.

Here’s another form:

Physicalism cannot currently explain X.

Therefore, physicalism is false.

Again:

Physicalism has a problem explaining X.

Therefore physicalism is untenable.

But what if we don’t, as yet, understand any given X? What if physicalism simply needs to be revised?

Finally:

Physicalists can’t explain consciousness.

Therefore physicalism is dead.

Okay. Which physicalists is this referring to? Which kind of physicalism is it referring to? What have physicalists said in response to claims like this? Does idealism, theism, panpsychism, etc. explain consciousness in a better way?

Yet I’ve often come across the argument (or statement) that despite the differences between physicalists and their positions, they basically adopt the same position. They don’t. They just don’t adopt theistic or idealist positions.

Consciousness: Alternatives to Physicalism

Consciousness may well be a spanner in the works for physicalism. But how do dualism, idealism, panpsychism, theism, etc. fare on this?

Isn’t all the above to assume that the alternative or rival frameworks aren’t flawed? All the rivals to materialism and physicalism have been subject to countless criticisms for hundreds of years — even millennia. In fact, materialism, and then physicalism, arose because of the flaws in many of these alternatives:

1. Dualism needs to explain how non-physical minds interact with physical brains.

2. Idealism needs to explain the stability of the physical world, as well as our intersubjective agreement about it. (This is something objective idealism was meant to deal with.)

3. Panpsychism needs to explain how countless micro-experiences combine to make a unified consciousness (the combination problem).

4. Philosophical theism needs to explain why God (or “the divine mind”) gave rise to a world with the particular regularities, evolutionary history, and massive suffering it has.

5. Supernaturalism needs to explain its lack of predictive success when compared with science.

Here are four more common questions:

• Why does consciousness exhibit the specific structure it does?

• Why do specific brain injuries alter conscious experience in specific ways?

• Why does consciousness appear so tightly correlated with brains and nervous systems?

• Why did consciousness evolve gradually if it is “fundamental”?

Yet today there seems to be a fashion for idealist or religious/spiritual views on consciousness. That certainly seems to be the case here on Medium. Let me put it this way. I haven’t read a single defence of physicalism on Medium. However, there are attacks on physicalism and materialism almost every single day. Moreover, virtually all the critics are coming at this from a religious or “spiritual” angle.

Physicalists Who’ve Been Critical of Physicalism

For over seven years here on Medium, I’ve noted that most “anti-materialists” don’t quote materialists or physicalists. Yet, oddly enough, the best critics of physicalism are physicalists.

Take just two examples.

• The American philosopher Hilary Putnam criticized the identity theory. Yet he remained a naturalist.

• Jerry Fodor offered well-known arguments against reductive physicalism by emphasising the “special sciences” and multiple realizability.

Now take the many articles in the vicinity of ‘Physicalism cannot explain consciousness’ which don’t mention any contemporary physicalist responses whatsoever. You’d expect a serious discussion to ask some of the following questions:

1. What about emergentist physicalism?

2. What would Paul Churchland say?

3. How would Dennett respond to the criticisms of his views and of physicalism?

4. What about Michael Graziano’s attention schema theory?

5. What about eliminative materialism or illusionism?

6. What about Russellian physicalism?

Here again we come to the idea that just as most anti-materialists say that the difference between materialism and physicalism is a difference that doesn’t make a difference, so they also believe there’s no need to tackle what Churchland, Graziano, etc. say. Again, that’s primarily because these philosophers haven’t taken the plunge of becoming idealists, theists, etc.

Are There Any Flawless Frameworks?

A philosophical framework doesn’t have to be flawless in order to make progress. For example, logical positivism had many flaws, yet it also made genuine advances:

(i) It clarified the logic of scientific explanation.

(ii) It raised standards of argumentative and conceptual precision.

(iii) It exposed many ambiguities in traditional metaphysics.

(iv) It helped establish philosophy of science as a rigorous discipline.

One can acknowledge all of that while also accepting, say, W. V. O. Quine’s criticisms of logical positivism. In fact, Quine is again a good illustration of all this. He embraced a “non-strict” physicalism while believing that parts of logical positivism were indeed untenable.

Progress was mentioned a moment ago.

There’s a terrible conflation between progress and perfection. In simple terms, physicalism is deemed to be imperfect. Thus, the conclusion is that it has nothing to offer. Anti-materialists, however, don’t usually mention progress. So the fact that the scientists and philosophers who’ve adopted a physicalist framework have made progress isn’t even considered by them.

Physicalism may well be flawed, yet it has stimulated large amounts of productive work in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, theories of perception and artificial intelligence. In this sense, physicalism has been a very fruitful research programme regardless of its “ultimate truth”.

This attitude doesn’t surprise physicists and many other scientists. Physicists rarely ask: “Is this theory perfect?” Instead, they ask: “Is it leading to new discoveries, superior explanations, more fruitful research?”

One could ask an analogous question about philosophical frameworks:

Does this framework continue to illuminate new problems and generate better arguments?

A philosophical position deserves to be taken seriously not because it has zero flaws, but because it continues to make progress despite its flaws.

Finally, many philosophers think in terms of working within a philosophical framework, rather than thoroughly (or even mindlessly) embracing it.

1) Introduction
2) Heat and Knowledge/Truth)
3) What is Epistemological Realism?
4) Epistemology and Knowledge
5) Truth
6) Conclusion: Michael Williams vs. Epistemological Realists

Despite the provocative title of this piece, the British philosopher Michael Williams (1947-) does accept that

Williams also makes similar claims about truth.

Yet the quote above still seems very radical or even extreme. If we shouldn’t “suppos[e] that there is such a thing as human knowledge”, then that must mean that Williams believes that there is no such thing as human knowledge. That said, Williams (again) happily concedes that

So will that be enough for philosophers and laypersons?

Well, as we shall see, it’s certainly not enough for what Williams calls the epistemological realist.

Heat and Knowledge/Truth

Michael Williams compares the philosophical study of truth/knowledge with the study of heat in physics. He writes:

It must follow that since (many) philosophers do believe that they’re attempting to “study the nature of truth” or the nature of knowledge, then that must mean that there is something to be discovered. What’s more, that something must be (or be seen to be) determinate and fixed. Like heat, then, that something must have a given nature.

Yet even if we do have an unquestioning position on truth and knowledge, we still can’t see such things as being anything like heat… or water, trees, animals, etc. Thus, in this provisional sense at least, studying the nature of truth and knowledge is very unlike studying the nature of heat. And from that fact, many other things follow.

So why assume that truth and knowledge have determinate and fixed natures?

Surely for that to be the case, almost everyone would agree on what truth and knowledge are (as most people do on, say, what water is). But that’s never been the case — and not just when it comes to philosophers.

What is Epistemological Realism?

Michael Williams emphasises an important terminological distinction. He states that epistemological realism

In other words, this is realism about epistemology, not realism within epistemology.

This essentially means that although a philosopher may be, say, an anti-realist within epistemology, he may also be a realist towards (or about) epistemology itself. More precisely, he may be anti-realist in that he thinks that we can’t acquire knowledge of an objective, mind-independent reality. However, he may still believe that there are “underlying epistemological structure or principles” common to all epistemological methods. Moreover, the epistemological realist

This leads the realist to believe that not “everything we call knowledge need be knowledge properly so called”. This means that he believes that his job is to generalise and extrapolate too: i.e., to bring “together the genuine cases into a coherent theoretical kind”. Thus, the right kind of, say, justification effectively becomes a natural kind. And so on. And when we bundle all these epistemic things together, then knowledge as a whole becomes a natural kind.

So what if the world of knowledge and epistemology isn’t like that?

Michael Williams also refers to Thomas Nagel’s realist view of epistemology.

According to Williams, Nagel’s phrase “our knowledge of the world” contains various presuppositions. That’s because it assumes that there is a “genuine totality” to have knowledge about. Nagel’s phrase also assumes that

Thus, it can be said that Nagel sees the universal and general rather than the Wittgensteinian particular.

Williams cites the specific example of (among many) W.V.0. Quine’s own criticisms of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Here again, many epistemologists have attempted to generalise and perhaps create two natural kinds — the analytic and the synthetic. Yet what if there isn’t a “fixed, objective division between a theory’s meaning postulates and its empirical assumptions”?

Epistemology and Knowledge

Michael Williams also makes a distinction between

1) theories of knowledge

and

2) theories of the concept of knowledge

This is a distinction he (more or less) makes about truth too.

2) above can be said to be about the word “knowledge” and how it’s used. In addition, it’s also about the concept/s (or meaning/s) “behind” the word “knowledge”.

A theory of knowledge, on the other hand, is about the thing (or property) which is knowledge. This presupposes that there is something above and beyond our words, concepts, practices, usages, methods, etc.

Williams’s position is primarily aimed at what he calls “epistemological realism”.

The epistemological realist believes that there’s a single correct view of justification, a single kind of truth, a single correct method, and so on.

As stated at the beginning, Williams thinks that epistemological realism is very much like scientific realism.

Take the analysis and classification of heat again. When the physicist or chemist explores the nature of heat, he looks for

Scientific realists (though not necessarily scientists themselves) therefore see heat as a natural kind. In other words, for the scientific realist,

The epistemological realist attempts to do the same kind of thing with knowledge and with the methods and means he uses to acquire knowledge too. Thus, he believes that “there must be underlying epistemological structures or principles”.

Take the specific case of justified true belief.

For a long time many epistemologists argued that knowledge is justified true belief (even if they still had problems describing and/or explaining justification and belief when taken separately). Then along came Edmund Gettier’s demonstration that this analysis of knowledge (to use Williams’s words) “fails to state a sufficient condition for knowledge”.

So is that partly — or even largely — because knowledge is not a thing (or property) that can even have a correct analysis in all situations? (This, as Williams argues, isn’t also to argue that there is no such the thing as knowledge.)

Again, Williams makes a connection with analysis in science. He writes:

Essentially, then, epistemological realists — and many others — reify truth and knowledge. They turn truth and knowledge into two — perhaps abstract— things or properties.

Now let’s concentrate on truth

Truth

Many people do agree on what they take to be true. However, they don’t necessarily agree on why their claims are true or on what constitutes their truth too. This means that taking the claim, say, “Water is wet” or “Killing people for fun is wrong” as true is fairly unproblematic. What is problematic is why this statement is true or what constitutes its truth. So it’s not the taking of any given p as being true that’s being discussed here. Countless people take the statement “Cats are animals” or “Killing for fun is wrong” to be true.

Similar points holds for knowledge too.

More specifically in terms of Williams’s own position. Just as Williams detects realist views about epistemology, so he detects realist positions when it comes to truth too.

Put at its simplest: the problem is that many people take truth to be a thing — even if an abstract thing. Yet truth may not be a thing or property at all. And if that’s the case, then perhaps we can never discover its nature.

As a result of all this, Williams doesn’t believe that truth is a “theoretically significant property”. (Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s a property at all.) Thus, he cites the case of the deflationary theory of truth.

To Williams, true sentences are “merely a nominal kind”. That is, all true statements don’t share the same something - viz., the same entity (or same property) truth.

Williams also argues that “there are endlessly many truths, [but] there is no such thing as truth”. (Perhaps we should write “Truth” here instead.)

Realists about truth, on the other hand, believe that truth is a single property — or even a single thing. Therefore, like heat or a cat, it can be analysed and correctly described. Such realists believe that truth is an “important property shared by all true sentences”. That said, the realist needn’t be obliged to state exactly what truth is. He may, instead, offer any one of Williams’s following possibilities:

It must follow that if one of these accounts is the true way of describing truth, then all true statements will, say, be incorporable into an ideally coherent system, be correspondent with facts, etc.

The truth realist wants something very substantial. He wants something shared by all true statements. This means that he isn’t interested in the “use of a word” or the “point of the concept”. The realist, instead, believes that

Conclusion: Michael Williams vs Realism

Towards the end of his paper, Michael Williams lets an epistemological realist speak for himself. He quotes Thompson Clarke (1928–2012) thus:

The above is as strong a statement of metaphysical and epistemological realism as one can imagine. Williams would also no doubt argue that it’s an epistemologically realist position toward (i.e., not within) epistemology (which is of course the main theme of Williams’s paper).

Williams stresses the fact that concepts, conceptual schemes, epistemological methods, etc. are determined by the nature of our practices — they have no reality apart from them. Thompson Clarke, on the other hand, argues that the aforementioned can be “[divorced] intact from our practices”. Thus, he must believe that there is a right and a wrong about all our concepts. That also means that correct concepts must match the world as it is in itself. Incorrect concepts, however, distort the world’s nature.

Yet Michael Williams himself still believes in the falsity or truth of our concepts. However, their truth or falsehood will be internally determined by our practices. Without practices, there is nothing.

Williams’s take is, therefore, a very Wittgensteinian — as well as a deflationary — position on knowledge and truth. He argues that a deflationary account of the word “know” may show “how the word is embedded in a teachable and useful linguistic practice”. (Surely this is a meaning-is-use definition of “know”.) In other words, Williams doesn’t suppose that being known to be true “denotes a property that groups propositions into a theoretically significant kind”. Williams, nevertheless, still accepts that the word “know” (as well as the word “truth”?) does have utility value. (Perhaps we can say that it works!)

Finally, and in opposition to epistemological realism (at least of the kind Williams is talking about), we have Williams’s alternative of “various practices of assessment, perhaps sharing certain formal features”. And that’s all we’ve got. Williams writes:

These various practices of assessment may not even be a “surveyable whole” or a “genuine totality rather than a more or less loose aggregate”.

Williams argues that it’s the topics or subjects we study (with our epistemological hats on) that determine our epistemological methods and — perhaps — our goals too. So it largely depends on the subject we’re studying. We can’t expect — or desire — that there’s “an order of reasons [that operate independently] of all circumstances and all collateral knowledge”. Moreover, every subject doesn’t have the same methodology which is applicable to it. Similarly, it’s certainly the case that not all the sciences use (to take just one blatant example) the hypothetico-deductive method.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

1) Introduction
2) Panpsychism?
3) Idealism and Anti-Realism
4) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
5) The Copenhagen Interpretation

Donald Hoffman’s philosophical position is called conscious realism. He opposes that position to panpsychism and to Kant’s transcendental idealism.

In terms of panpsychism: there are clear distinctions between Hoffman’s conscious realism and panpsychism. However, there are also very clear and strong similarities. (In one place, Hoffman does say that he accepts what he sees as one type of panpsychism — the one that’s not, in his eyes, “dualist”.)

If we turn to Kant..

Hoffman is against Kant’s transcendental idealism for the primary reason that he doesn’t deem it to be scientific. Nonetheless, his arguments against Kant aren’t convincing. And he strongly distinguish his own position from transcendental idealism.

As for anti-realism.

Hoffman hardly mentions it. Nonetheless, he does mention the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics favourably. In fact he uses it (in various places) in order to defend his own position of conscious realism. The thing is that Hoffman makes the Copenhagen interpretation seem idealist in nature. That said, he’s hardly the first person to have done so (see here).

And on the subject of idealism.

This piece argues that Hoffman’s conscious realism is a new-fangled take on idealism (i.e., it’s idealism with self-conscious mathematical and scientific knobs on). Hoffman will deny this, and he’ll do so for various reasons. Primarily, Hoffman will do so because he does indeed believe that there’s a “reality” out there. (In other words, Hoffman often uses the word “reality” positively — i.e., in that he claims that there is a reality — many times; despite the fact that he’s just written a book called The Case Against Reality.) Nonetheless, Hoffman also argues that we haven’t got direct (or even indirect?) access to that reality. Instead, we’ve only got access to the contents of consciousness. And that’s still the case even if those contents belong to some kind of collective of consciousnesses (i.e., that of a collective of what Hoffman calls “conscious agents”).

Panpsychism?

Professor Donald Hoffman is explicit about his position on panpsychism. He writes:

It can now be said that even if Hoffman’s conscious realism (CR) isn’t identical to panpsychism — and also that it doesn’t “entail panpsychism”, that still doesn’t mean that it has nothing in common with it at all. It may even be the case that Hoffman’s conscious realism has a lot in common with panpsychism.

Hoffman then makes various distinctions between his own position of conscious realism and panpsychism. He states:

That last sentence (“[Conscious realism] does not claim, nor entail, that tables and chairs are conscious or conscious agents.” ) is of course directly and clearly aimed at panpsychism. That being said, not many (if any) panpsychists argue that tables and chairs are “conscious agents”. They simply argue that tables and chairs (or their many parts!) are conscious or that they instantiate (whatever that may mean) experience or “phenomenal properties”. (More of which in a moment.)

The rest of the Hoffman quote above makes some correct distinctions between panpsychism and conscious realism. For one, panpsychists most certainly don’t claim that “tables and chairs are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents”. And neither do they claim that tables and chairs are the “conscious experiences of [] agents”. More importantly (unlike conscious realism), panpsychists do claim that “tables and chairs [or their many parts] are conscious”; though they rarely (if ever) claim that they’re also “conscious agents”. (This raises the question: What does Hoffman mean by “agent”?)

There are different types of panpsychism, and not all panpsychists would be keen on using the precise words “tables and chairs are conscious”. Instead, some panpsychists would say that tables and chairs are made up of entities which contain (or instantiate) “phenomenal properties/qualities” (or “(proto)phenomenal properties”). This clearly isn’t as grand a claim as claiming that they tables and chairs are “conscious”. (I don’t use the term “qualia” here because that will lead to unclarity.) And it’s certainly less grand that claiming that tables and chairs are conscious agents. However, one part of Hoffman’s story does seem to chime in with panpsychism. Take this passage:

Most panpsychists would be very happy with Hoffman’s sentence above. Nonetheless, although they believe that “consciousness is fundamental”, panpsychists and Hoffman have very different takes on those three words. Put simply. Consciousness is fundamental to panpsychists in the sense that all things have various degrees of consciousness (or experience). To Hoffman, on the other hand, consciousness is fundamental in that the contents of an individual’s consciousness (or the contents of various collectives of “conscious agents”) is literally constitutive of reality or the whole of the universe (as well as everything in it).

Both panpsychists and conscious realists agree that consciousness (or experience) isn’t an “emergent property” at all: it’s been around since the Big Bang. Thus, if consciousness has been with the universe since the Beginning, then the issue of the emergence of consciousness becomes a non-problem.

Panpsychists tend to think of consciousness (or phenomenal properties or experience) as being “fundamental” in the sense that it exists all the way down and all the way up. (All the way down to particles and all the way up to human beings.) Hoffman, on the other hand, stresses the fundamentality of consciousness by writing it into the story at the Big Bang (actually, just after). Having said that, these two emphasises work perfectly well together. That is:

i) If we have consciousness all the way down to particles,

ii) then that’s precisely because we had particles — and therefore consciousness — (just after) the Big Bang.

Thus, these two positions fit perfectly well together.

To repeat. Hoffman’s position can be seen as a take on panpsychism in that he states that “consciousness is fundamental”. (Three words which many panpsychists often use together — see here.) Panpsychism also rejects the emergence of consciousness from the physical and stresses, instead, that it’s not the case that (to use Hoffman’s words) it’s “a latecomer in the evolutionary history of the universe” that “aris[es] from complex interactions of unconsciousness matter and fields”. Instead, panpsychists believe that there’s consciousness (or there are phenomenal properties) all the way down to the particle and all the way up to the animal brain. Thus, there’s no need for (radical/strong) emergence.

Idealism and Anti-Realism

On the surface at least, Hoffman seems to take a very strong idealist position when he says that “brains and neurons do not exist unperceived”. (This is exactly what Bishop Berkeley argued; thought not, of course, about “brains and neurons”.) Now this isn’t an expression of anti-realism because an anti-realist wouldn’t say that any x doesn’t exist “when unperceived”. He’d simply say that our perceptions “colour” what it is we take to exist. And there’s no way around that.

All this displays the very common problem of conflating (or confusing) idealism and anti-realism.

Despite having just stated that, there is a strong sense in which one can derive idealist conclusions from anti-realist statements. That is:

i) If we describe things as “brains and neurons”,

ii) and those descriptions are contingent — and dependent — upon persons/observers, concepts, theories, etc.,

iii) then perhaps we may as well conclude that brains and neurons “do not exist unperceived”.

Brains and neurons (as well as other objects) don’t exist until we describe/observe them. (This echoes, to some extent at least, the debate which surrounded Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — see later section.) That’s true enough. However, why embrace the idealist conclusion that everything that exists only does so in the minds of persons? That route leads to idealism, subjectivism, solipsism and woo.

In addition, what does Hoffman mean when he states that brains and neurons “have no causal power”? I ask that question because he doesn’t explain it in the passages just quoted (though he may well do elsewhere). What’s more, he concludes that this lack of causal power is “why we’ve never been able to boot up consciousness from neural activity”. So what does all that mean?

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

Hoffman’s main problem with Immanuel Kant’s position on noumena is that he believes that it’s not scientific. Or, less strongly, he believes that Kant’s position doesn’t look promising from a scientific perspective.

As Hoffman puts it about one “interpretation” of Kant:

Yet Hoffman’s own conscious realism isn’t a scientific theory either. Sure, it’s clearly the case that Hoffman believes that it is. He says that

Hoffman often defends his conscious realism by talking about its “mathematical models”, etc (or by using the words above — i.e., “a mathematical formulation”). Despite that, only the mathematical models or “formulations” used in conscious realism are scientific (or mathematical). All the additions to that are examples of speculative philosophy. So this isn’t that unlike people using mathematics and scientific terminology to defend — or back up — astrology, astral travelling, ley lines, Creationism, etc. (This aspect of Hoffman’s conscious realism can’t be tackled now. I’ve tackled it here.)

In addition, if conscious realism really “offers a scientific theory of the noumenal”, then it’s not the noumenal that it’s offering a scientific theory of. Of course, this may be terminological pedantry in that, to Hoffman, the noumenal isn’t in fact noumenal at all. Thus, he believes that he can offer a scientific theory of it. Kant, on the other hand, created a theory in which noumena were — by definition — not only beyond science, but beyond “cognitive agents” too.

Hoffman then expresses a position that isn’t at odds with either anti-realism or Kant’s transcendental idealism. He writes:

The wording in the above isn’t quite right. Hoffman says that Kant believed that the

Surely it’s best to say that some things (whatever they are) exist mind-independently. The problem is that they don’t exist as the sun, planets, tables and chairs. That is, the fact that we see these things this way is a result of our contingent modes of “perception”, as well as our concepts, theories, language, etc. However, this is still not idealism because Kant’s noumena exist. In addition, they aren’t the contents of consciousness. So this is transcendental idealism; not immaterialism or subjective idealism.

To sum up. Whatever is “behind” (or the cause of) our perceptions is not itself dependent on consciousness (or on our perceptions).

The Copenhagen Interpretation

Hoffman states the following:

So let’s reiterate what’s just been said above (i.e., before the subheading). Scientists (or at least some/most of them) do believe that objects exist even when not perceived. However, when they are perceived, then they’re given a determinate form — a form which is down to our contingent theories, experiments, perceptions/observations, concepts, languages, etc.

Secondly, not all — or even most — scientists “believe that space, time, and objects exist even if they’re not perceived”. There have been (for many years) many physicists working on the non-existence of both space and time, for example. (Admittedly, that’s a question of the very existence of space and time and it has nothing to do with our perceptions.) In addition, scientists aren’t philosophers. Thus, most scientists have little time for phrases like “objects exist even if they’re not perceived”.

This leads us to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Hoffman often applies the Copenhagen interpretation to the “classical” (or macro) scale. (Hoffman himself mentions the Copenhagen interpretation on a few occasions and at one point says that “most proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation embrace it only for the microscopic realm”.) For example, here’s Hoffman applying it to DNA:

Perhaps this is a bad example because at least DNA is a microphenomenon, if not a subatomic phenomenon. (DNA is determined by — and dependent upon — quantum phenomena.) Elsewhere, however, Hoffman applies exactly the same argument to brains (as a whole), cups, trees, and other everyday macro-objects. Now, to state the obvious, there’s a vast difference between an electron and a tree.

Another point is that Niels Bohr didn’t embrace idealism. There’s also a big difference between the stress on how we gain access to reality and the idealist position that it’s all about what goes on in one’s head. (Or within what Hoffman deems to be a Collective Head.) Anti-realists accept that there is a mind-independent world. However, we only gain access to that world through our brains, consciousnesses, concepts, languages, etc. Idealism, on the other hand, seems to have it that literally everything is in the minds of subjects (or agents). And, if that’s correct, then that puts idealism and anti-realism in radically different places. Yet, as is the case on so many occasions, anti-realism is basically seen as idealism (or, at the least, as a variety of idealism). Having said that, what Hoffman himself argues doesn’t make this distinction clear. And, because of that, it can be argued that Hoffman’s position is idealist rather than anti-realist.

Introduction: Philip Goff on the Churchlands

Professor Philip Goff (who’s a well known advocate of panpsychism) tells us a joke (though it’s possible that it wasn’t meant as a joke) about Paul and Patricia Churchland and their general materialist position on the mind. He writes:

“One can’t help wondering whether the Churchlands’ early courtship involved poetry expressing the strength of their neuronal activations for each other.”

Of course, Paul and Patricia Churchland wouldn’t have used such neurobiological technical terms when they courted. And no one would use such a vocabulary today. That’s partly because it can be said that eliminative materialism (the position that Paul and Patricia Churchland advance) is a kind of philosophical futurism in that it’s a position that predicts what form future scientific theories will take. That is, the Churchlands believe that the sciences will — or perhaps may — one day reveal that the mental states we refer to every day (i.e., when we use words like “love”, “believe”, “desire”) do not refer to anything real.

So what about the future?

This is how the Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1942- ) himself states his desire for a new language of mind:

“Neuroscience may appear to be defective in providing a purely ‘third-person account’ of mind, but only familiarity of idiom and spontaneity of conceptual response are required to make it a ‘first-person account’ as well. But it is entirely possible for a person or culture to learn and use some other framework in that role, the framework of cognitive neuroscience, perhaps.”

So is Philip Goff ruling out a change in vocabulary (as philosophers put it) a priori? And if he is, then why is he doing so?

After all, it’s a contingent fact that we use the terms we do to refer to our mental lives. Of course, it can be argued that the words we use about our mental lives are somehow hardwired into our brains. But is that really the case? Are there natural-language cognates of all the contemporary terms of Western folk psychology which date back, say, 20,000 years? (The first human languages are thought to have begun between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago.) And have such terms (when translated into other languages) really been used by all other cultures too?

Despite those questions, even if such terms have been the norm throughout all histories and all cultures, then that still doesn’t — of necessity — stop us from acquiring a different way of speaking about the mind.

More specifically, surely Philip Goff can’t be arguing that all the expressions of (in his example) love can’t — by definition — be expressed in terms of what he calls “neuronal activations”. Indeed, what’s so special about the words and concepts we currently use?

Yet, ironically enough, Goff himself unwittingly provides Paul Churchland with just the kind of argument he may well use himself. It just so happens that Goff (in this case) is talking about dualism, not love (or, for that matter, beliefs, desires, etc.). Goff writes:

“The psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that dualist thought is hardwired into use and that from an early age children categorize ‘mental things’ as distinct from ‘physical things.’”

More relevantly, Goff immediately continues with these words:

“Just because a view comes to us naturally or is hardwired, it doesn’t mean it’s true [].”

Goff’s joke is almost like a version of the self-refuting argument against eliminative materialism too. This argument has it that because eliminative materialists use words like “belief” and “true” (or they simply believe that eliminative materialism is true), then this is evidently self-refuting. And that’s simply because, according to eliminative materialism, such things as truth and belief don’t exist. (This is covered later when Quine raises the question as to whether eliminative materialism expresses various mental states in neurobiological terms or whether it eliminates them tout court.)

Paul and Patricia Churchland have offered ripostes against this argument. And Michael Devitt, for example, has offered a “deflationary” account of “x is true” that may help eliminative materialism.

Similarly (or at least fairly so), the serious part of Goff’s joke may be that in order for Paul and Patricia Churchland to be consistent about their belief in eliminative materialism, then when they courted, they should have used various words or terms from neurobiology to express their love for one another.

The Future of Mind

Paul Churchland goes into more detail on his own futurism in the following:

“Given a deep and practiced familiarity with the developing idioms of cognitive neurobiology, we might learn to discriminate by introspection the coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways, the activation patterns across salient neural populations, and myriad other things besides.”

At present it would be virtually impossible (even for a neuroscientist) to describe our (to use Churchland’s own term) “first-person” thoughts, feelings and beliefs in terms of “coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways”, “activation patters across salient neural populations”, etc. It may even be hard to imagine such a state of affairs at present. Yet Churchland wasn’t talking about the case as it is today. He explicitly stated that

“it is entirely possible for a person or culture to learn and use some other framework in that role”.

Clearly this is a statement about the future. In other words, this isn’t about a elite of neuroscientists imposing a new language on the populace today — or even next year. (Or such an elite banning all the words from folk psychology.) That said, if the “language” of folk psychology has been with us since human language itself began, then perhaps Churchland’s wishes for the future may be a little utopian. (Or, depending on one’s views, dystopian.) After all, there’s surely a difference between picking up new words or terms (which happens all the time) and picking up a new language to talk about ours minds. However, this clearly isn’t something that won’t — or can’t — happen in the future.

Those Damn Propositional Attitudes!

The following passage is a take on Paul Churchland’s general position on mind as expressed by Tadeusz Zawidzk:

“Churchland is famous for for championing the thesis that our everyday, common-sense, ‘folk’ psychology, which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, is actually a deeply flawed theory that must be eliminated in favor of a mature cognitive neuroscience.”

The main problem — so Churchland believes — with beliefs, desires, etc. is that they’re (deemed to be) propositional attitudes. And the main problem with propositional attitudes is that they (are seen to) have semantic and syntactic properties. Yet such semantic and syntactic properties can’t be translated into what goes on in the brain. Instead, what we really have are spiking frequencies, action potentials and other (neuroscientific) things. And these things, moreover, are distributed and continuous in nature, not precisely located in the brain or discrete.

Some philosophers have retorted that these mental states needn’t be seen as being linguistic in nature.

To take just one example. Many connectionist models of the brain do make use of what’s called representations (see here). Yet these (quasi?)representations are instantiated in the brain in a parallel and distributed manner (see here).

Reductionism or Eliminativism?

The important point now is to distinguish eliminative materialism from reductionism in the philosophy of mind.

Paul Churchland believes that “folk” concepts shouldn’t be reduced to something neurobiological or scientifically kosher: he believes that they should be eliminated.

Why is that?

It’s because he believes that they don’t correspond to anything (to use a philosophical term) real or objective — that is, to anything in the brain.

Of course, if beliefs, desires and the other propositional attitudes don’t exist in the first place, then it doesn’t really make sense to argue that they can be expressed in other ways. And, a few decades ago, the American philosopher W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) made this point. He wrote:

“Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger in favor of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state of the physical organism with the mental state)?”

So this can be expressed in the following way: either beliefs, desires, etc. exist and they’ll ultimately be explained in neurobiological terms — or they don’t exist at all and therefore they can’t be expressed in any way.

Churchland would simply argue that it isn’t beliefs, desires, etc. that are being expressed with our Folk words or concepts — that’s if these things are seen as “sentences in the head”. And therefore it isn’t our beliefs, desires, etc. that are — or will be - expressed in neurobiological terms either.

So all this becomes a little circular.

Paul Churchland Believes That the Mind Exists

Despite all the above, one point that’s worth making is that Paul Churchland’s position isn’t as extreme as some people (not least Philip Goff) paint it.

Firstly, Churchland accepts that reality of the mind. Or, at the very least, he uses the word “mind”. (After all, Churchland may want to substitute or eliminate that word too.) More specifically, the mind itself (as such) isn’t denied. Instead, Churchland’s eliminativism is a position which states that that certain types of mental states (mainly propositional attitudes) do not exist.

Now can we even have a mind without such mental states?

When it comes to consciousness (i.e., not the mind), Churchland (in his book The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul) did argue that consciousness may — in the future — be explained entirely in terms of neurobiology — i.e., physical events in the brain, biochemicals, parts of the brain, etc.

Yet here again (as with beliefs, desires, etc. earlier) the following can be asked:

Is it the case that consciousness does in fact exist but that it can be — or must be — described (or expressed) in terms of neurobiology?

Or alternatively:

Is it that consciousness simply doesn’t exist at all and that all we need are neurobiological descriptions of people’s brains?

Churchland accepts that there is such thing as a “first-person account” of (my own two words) inner processes too. (He even uses the word “introspection”.) It’s just that Churchland also believes that these processes should be described in the language of neuroscience or cognitive neurobiology, not in the language of folk psychology. In these cases at least, then, we don’t really seem to have any eliminations at all. Perhaps that’s mainly because Churchland has focussed primarily on the propositional attitudes when it comes to his eliminativism. (Recall the earlier comments on his position on consciousness itself.)

(The words “inner processes” above are italicised because traditional behaviourists would never have been happy with any mention of them — and, arguably, Daniel Dennett still isn’t.)

Mental Content and its Expression

Paul Churchland also stated the following:

“What makes an account a ‘first-person account’ is not the content of that account, but the fact that one has learned to use it as the vehicle of spontaneous conceptualization in introspection and self-description.”

I don’t entirely understand Churchland’s phraseology when he writes “is not the content of that account”. His words may simply mean that we can make a distinction between (mental) “content” and the way we express that content. That is, there are things which occur in the mind regardless of the specific and contingent natural-language words we use to express them. (This is similar to the point philosophers have made — since Gottlob Frege here — about a single abstract proposition which can be expressed by many natural-language sentences.) In other words, we’ve acquired the words/terms of folk psychology to talk about (mental) content in our “first-person account[s]”. So we could, in the future, use the terms of neurobiology — instead — to express that very same content. (Or at least similar content as it’s “found” in the future.)

So the fact that we use words like “belief” and even “love” — and have the concepts belief and love — is a contingent fact about how we express such mental content. Indeed, such words are now “spontaneous” simply because we happen to have been brought up in a particular culture at a particular time. Now these words might well have been used for centuries or even much longer. Yet even that fact (if it is a fact) wouldn’t stop such words from being highly contingent and variable entities.

For example, think here of how the words “troll”, “hi-fi”, “progressive”, “computer”, “transgender”, “race”, “electron”, etc. would have sounded (or seemed) to a 19th century person - let alone to a person from the 203 BC.

Despite all that, the words we use today may still seem entirely natural. They may even be entirely natural — what else can they be?

But so what?

Problems With Eliminative Materialism

There are problems with Churchland’s position. Take this passage:

“Given a deep and practiced familiarity with the developing idioms of cognitive neurobiology, we might learn to discriminate by introspection the coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways, the activation patterns across salient neural populations, and myriad other things besides.”

This is an odd.

Firstly, it seems to hint at the possibility that literally everyone in our community could — or even should — learn the “idioms of cognitive neurobiology”. Alternatively, does Churchland simply believe that these terms would — or could — be passed down from scientists to the whole population? Surely he can’t believe that they could be taught to — or even enforced upon — the populace! (The word “abolished” has indeed been used in the eliminative materialism literature, and might even have been used by Paul Churchland himself — see here.)

The basic point here is that languages aren’t imposed or passed down — they grow organically and over time. Of course, particular words or even ways of speaking can be taught, suggested or even imposed. (This is happening today — at least to some extent — in the political domain.) But is it likely that all speakers and thinkers would need to know anything — let alone much — about neurobiology? Again, perhaps the terms from neurobiology will — or may — simply filter down in the way that so many other words/terms from academia or science have filtered down over the years. (This is especially the case when it comes to political terms from academia.)

Conclusion

In purely personal terms, I can’t even imagine expressing anything in terms of my brain’s “coding vectors in internal axonal pathways”, “the activation patterns across salient neural populations”, etc. That’s simply because I know very little about neurobiology. And most other people know very little about neurobiology too. But, again, Paul Churchland was talking about the future. In addition and as just stated, academic or scientific terms being passed (or filtered) down — if over time — to the populace is a commonplace fact. So perhaps that’s what Churchland had in mind.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

1) Introduction
2) The Quantum Scale and the Large Scale
3) The Brain and Quantum Gravity
4) Daniel Dennett’s Quantum Car
5) Microtubules

Throughout Roger Penrose’s writings on the brain, consciousness, physics and cosmology, the issue of the link between the quantum scale and the large (“classical”) scale is constantly broached. Indeed, all this strongly links in with Penrose’s attempt to tie general relativity (or gravity) and quantum mechanics together.

Penrose’s own individualistic position on the relation between the quantum scale and the large scale is expressed in the following:

“I am not concerned so much with the effects that quantum mechanics might have on our theory (Einstein’s general relativity) of the structure of space-time, but with the reverse: namely the effects that Einstein’s space-time theory might have on the very structure of quantum mechanics.”

This is (as Penrose himself puts it) “an unconventional view-point” — or it was in 1990. It’s “unconventional that general relativity should have any influence at all on the structure of quantum mechanics!” More basically, Penrose believes that “the problems within quantum theory itself are of a fundamental character”.

In terms of the brain and mind, Penrose concluded — again, 28 years ago — by saying that “any putative quantum gravity theory would surely be very remote from the phenomena governing the behaviour of brains”. Nonetheless, the following is the crux of Penrose’s current position:

1. Quantum gravity (or the “structure of space-time”) may have an impact on quantum mechanics.

2. Therefore quantum gravity may affect the nature of the brain and mind.

At the most basic level, gravitation and general relativity aren’t integrated into quantum theory. That alone makes Penrose’s views on the brain, mind and consciousness speculative.

In terms of the brain and mind (or consciousness), most neuroscientists and many philosophers believe that quantum phenomena (or quantum events/effects/conditions/etc.) have very little effect on the brain and therefore on the mind (or consciousness) as a whole. Or, at the very least, that the differences they do make don’t really make a difference.

The Quantum Scale & the Large Scale

As stated above, Penrose notes the micro-macro situation in ways that don’t directly relate to the brain and mind. In the following, for example, he notes the contextual (i.e., micro or macro) nature of the notion of randomness (or probabilities). That is, Penrose notes how randomness is a consequence of scientists observing quantum effects/events/conditions/etc. at the “classical level”. In Penrose’s own words:

“Since randomness comes in, quantum theory is called probabilistic. But randomness only comes in when you go from the quantum to the classical level. If you stay down at the quantum level, there’s no randomness. It’s only when you magnify something up, and you do what people call ‘make a measurement’. This consists of taking a small-scale quantum effect and magnifying it out to a level where you can see it. It’s only in that process of magnification that probabilities come in.”

This can be deemed to be an epistemic problem, rather than an ontological one. That is, the probabilities (or randomness) arises not from the ontology of the quantum world, but from our epistemic access to it. (This conclusion, at least as it partly applies to quantum indeterminism, dates back to Albert Einstein and was elaborated upon by such people as David Bohm.)

The other point that’s worth making about Penrose’s position (as quoted above) is that it goes against the stress on quantum indeterminism as it’s often used in reference to the brain and mind (or consciousness). In other words, Penrose (at least in this context) is de-stressing the random (or indeterministic) nature of the quantum realm; whereas many others (at least in the debate about mind) play it up. (“Quantum indeterminism” is particularly stressed as one explanation of free will.) It must be said here that the words “random” and “indeterminate” (or “randomness” and “indeterminacy”) aren’t exactly synonyms. Nonetheless, in the debate about the (as it’s often put) “quantum mind” , these words are often treated as synonyms (or, at the very least, as near-synonyms).

If we now return to the quantum scale and the large scale.

On a much broader level we can also take Brian Greene’s (a Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University) general point about this micro-macro distinction:

“It’s not as though the universe comes equipped with a line in the sand separating things that are properly described by quantum mechanics from things properly described by general relativity. Dividing the universe into two separate realms seems both artificial and clumsy.”

This position seems to back up Penrose’s previous points about how different levels of description (which are brought about by the effect of “measurement” or observation) determine Greene’s “line in the sand” between the quantum realm and the “classical” realm.

And, yet again, Penrose notes these different levels when he talks about Newtonian mechanics, relativity and quantum theory. He stresses the compatibility of these different levels of description/application and their respective “limits”. He says:

“Current physics ideas will survive as limiting behavior, in the same sense that Newtonian mechanics survives relativity. Relativity modifies Newtonian mechanics, but it doesn’t really supplant it. Newtonian mechanics is still there as a limit. In the same sense, quantum theory, as we now use it, and classical physics, which includes Einstein’s general theory, are limits of some theory we don’t yet have.”

In the above we can see that rather than measurement (or observation) splitting the universe into two realms, Penrose stresses the respective “limits” of these realms instead.

The Brain & Quantum Gravity

Roger Penrose was — and still is — deeply aware of the arguments against his central position on the brain and mind (or consciousness). Indeed, when he wrote The Emperor’s New Mind (in 1990) he didn’t have an original position on the quantum nature of the brain. Specifically, microtubules aren’t mentioned in this well-known book. And even neurons and neurotransmitters only get four mentions.

This is what Penrose also had to say (in the same book) on the opposition’s position on the brain, quantum mechanics and consciousness:

“[T]hey would argue that on a scale relevant to our brains the physical effects of any quantum gravity must be totally insignificant! They would say (very reasonably) that although such physical effects might indeed be important at the absurdly tiny distance scale known as the Planck length — which is 10⁻³⁵ m, some 100000000000000000000 times smaller than the size of the tiniest subatomic particle — these effects should have no direct relevance whatever to phenomena at the far far larger ‘ordinary’ scales of, say, down only to 10⁻¹² m, where the chemical or electrical processes that are important to brain activity hold sway.”

In fact Penrose went further by saying that his detractors would claim that not even ordinary gravity can affect the brain. He wrote, “Indeed, even classical (i.e. non-quantum) gravity has almost no influence on these electrical and chemical activities.”

Penrose concluded with the following skeptical words. (At least as he then believed that they’d be expressed by his opponents.) He wrote:

“If classical gravity is of no consequence, then how on earth could any tiny ‘quantum correction’ to the classical theory make any difference at all? Moreover, since deviations from quantum theory have never been observed, it would seem to be even more unreasonable to imagine that any tiny putative deviation from standard quantum theory could have any conceivable role to play in mental phenomena!”

Thus, at this period in Penrose’s career (in the early 1990s), his position squared perfectly well with Murray Gell-Mann’s later position when Gell-Mann wrote the following:

“[W]hat characterises [Roger Penrose’s] proposal [ ] is the notion that consciousness is somehow connected with quantum gravity — that is to say, the incorporation of Einsteinian general-relativistic gravitation into quantum field theory. I can see absolutely no reason for imagining such a thing.”

And all this brings us to Dennett’s quantum car.

Daniel Dennett’s Quantum Car

Daniel Dennett put this micro-macro quandary very well. He argued (to paraphrase): Sure, there are quantum happenings in the brain or neurons. Then again, there are quantum happenings in your car, watch and computer. In full:

“Most biologists think that quantum effects all just cancel out in the brain, that there’s no reason to think they’re harnessed in any way. Of course they’re there; quantum effects are there in your car, your watch, and your computer. But most things — most macroscopic objects — are, as it were, oblivious to quantum effects. They don’t amplify them; they don’t hinge on them. Roger thinks that the brain somehow exploits quantum effects.”

We will now need to know why “quantum effects” don’t transfer — or apply — to the brain as a whole. Or, more specifically, we need to know why they don’t cause (or help bring about) mental phenomena or consciousness. That is, why is there such a sharp dividing line between the micro (Dennett’s “quantum effects”) and the macro (the brain or mind/consciousness)? Surely there can’t be such a neat and tiny cut-off point between these two worlds. (Then again, it’s not logically absurd to argue that there is indeed such a cut-off point.)

Sure, there are quantum happenings in the brain or neurons. Then again, there are quantum happenings in your car, watch and computer.

It’s true that in order for Dennett’s watch (or car) to be a watch (or car), it doesn’t depend on the quantum effects which are occurring inside it. However, why should that also be true of the brain and its relation to mind (or consciousness)? The nature and functioning of a car (or watch) is very different to the reality and functioning of the brain and mind/consciousness. A car (or watch) is oblivious to the quantum effects inside — though only if it isn’t treated qua car (or watch)! However, it’s of course the case that a car (or watch) can also be analysed as a medium of quantum effects (though not, again, qua car/watch). Then again, it is strictly true that a car (or watch) — qua car (or watch)! — doesn’t depend on quantum effects/events/conditions? Surely it does so in the simple sense that if there were no quantum effects/events/conditions, then there would be no car (or watch) either. And, yes, it’s true that this applies to literally all other natural objects — and artificial objects as well.

Despite all that, according to Penrose, quantum effects/events/conditions do indeed have an effect on the large scale. He makes that plain here:

“The very existence of solid bodies, the strengths and physical properties of materials, the nature of chemistry, the colours of substances, the phenomena of freezing and boiling, the reliability of inheritance — these, and many other familiar properties, require the quantum theory for their explanations.”

However, even though it’s true that these “solid bodies”, etc. may “require the quantum theory for their explanations”, that doesn’t also automatically mean that such quantum effects are in any way substantive. It simply means that quantum mechanics is a part of the whole picture. So, in the sense of supplying a complete picture of such “bodies” and “materials” — then, yes, of course quantum theory will be required.

Ironically enough, Dennett himself does accept that quantum events/effects/conditions/etc. influence (or affect) the large scale. He says that quantum mechanics is

“stunningly successful at predicting and explaining many phenomena, including everyday phenomena such as the reflection and refraction of lights, and the operation of the proteins in our retinas that permit us to see”.

It may still be the case that because

quantum mechanics can “predict and explain” (remember that Penrose also used the word “explanation”) such things as “the reflection and refraction of lights”

that this doesn’t also mean that

quantum mechanics has an (causal) impact on these things.

…. Then again, surely it does mean that!

And if all this is true of the aforementioned light and protein molecules, then why can’t it also be true of the brain and consciousness? Of course the parallels between

quantum mechanics and the reflection and refraction of light

and

quantum mechanics and the brain and mind (or consciousness)

may not be parallel (or equivalent) in every respect. However, surely that wouldn’t matter too much in this case. What matters is whether or not quantum mechanics is having an impact on the brain and therefore on the mind (or consciousness). It doesn’t need to be the case that quantum mechanics does so in precisely the same way in which it impacts on (to use Penrose’s words again) “solid bodies, the strengths and physical properties of materials, the nature of chemistry, the colours of substances, the phenomena of freezing and boiling, the reliability of inheritance”.

To repeat: perhaps the quantum-mechanical explanations of these phenomena are at a different level to actually arguing that quantum-mechanical events actually bring about (or cause) such phenomena. Again, is there a difference between

quantum mechanics explaining consciousness

and

quantum-mechanical effects/events/states causing (or bringing about) consciousness?

Surely if quantum mechanics can explain the mind (or consciousness), it can only do so because quantum-mechanical events/effects/conditions also bring about (or cause) the mind (or consciousness).

Microtubules

Having said all that, it’s the case that Penrose is fully aware of the need to explain this micro-macro link. The following is just one example of him doing so:

“For my picture, I need this quantum-level activity in the microtubules; the activity has to be a large-scale thing that goes not just from one microtubule to the next but from one nerve cell to the next, across large areas of the brain. We need some kind of coherent activity of a quantum nature which is weakly coupled to the computational activity that Hameroff argues is taking place along the microtubules.”

So Penrose acknowledges the need to tie the quantum scale to the (to use Penrose’s own term) “large-scale”. Basically (as with Dennett’s car/watch), there are indeed quantum effects/events/conditions in microtubules — as there are in everything else. So how can we tie these microtubular quantum phenomena to the large-scale? That is, how can we tie them to nerves and indeed to “one nerve cell to the next, across larges areas of that brain”? In a sense, if quantum effects/events/conditions are happening at the level of microtubules, then (as stated) they must also be happening at the level of nerve cells and indeed across large areas of the brain. But, again, are these nerve cells or large areas of the brain in the same position as Dennett’s car/watch? (The one obvious difference is that the former are biological and the latter aren’t.)

In the quote above (at the least), Penrose doesn’t offer us an answer to these questions. The questions are simply raised. To use Penrose’s own words:

“We need some kind of coherent activity of a quantum nature which is weakly coupled to the computational activity that [Stuart] Hameroff argues is taking place along the microtubules.”

In basic terms, the quantum effects/events/conditions which occur in individual microtubules need to be “coupled” with the quantum effects in other microtubules. This coupling, according to Penrose, is achieved through “quantum coherence” and “quantum superpositioning”. Clearly these ideas take us beyond neuroscience.

So isn’t all this mere speculation?

Whatever the case is, Penrose’s positions will require both quantum theory and neurobiological detail to stand their ground. That is, the quantum leap from the neurobiological quantum scale to the brain and mind (or consciousness) needs much quantum-theoretic, neurobiological and philosophical defence.

It is argued that Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in what is called “the noble savage”. The following essay doesn’t argue that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also believed that all schizophrenics were “savages”. However, it does argue that they believed that all schizophrenics were (in a strong sense) noble. This romantic view of schizophrenics is largely the result of Deleuze and Guattari’s over-indulgence in theory and abstraction, as well as the rhetorical and poetical nature of their writings.

— Jean-Jacque Rousseau, The Social Contract

— Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

Note: The single name Deleuze, instead of Deleuze and Guattari, will be used in this essay in order to save space and time. See my ‘According to Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism Causes Schizophrenia’.

Deleuze and Guattari as Rousseauian Romantics

The argument in this essay is that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari consistently romanticised schizophrenics and the condition of schizophrenia. Indeed, this romantic element of the anti-psychiatry movement (which predated Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writings) had a large impact of psychiatrists, the arts, politics, and even on writers like Ken Kesey and his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Although it can be said that Ken Kesey influenced this movement, rather than the other way around.)

Deleuze himself was tapping into a (mainly French) tradition that went back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now consider this poetic passage from Deleuze:

Great poetry!

Is it more than that?

Should it be more than poetry?

Did many (or any) psychiatrists, schizophrenics, concerned citizens, etc. plumb the depths of Deleuze’s words looking for strategic and hands-on advice when it came to schizophrenia and schizophrenics? Did political activists translate his ideas into concrete political strategies and goals?

Now for another passage from Deleuze:

Deleuze then wondered whether “these peregrinations are the schizo’s own particular way of discovering the earth”.

To Deleuze, deterritorialization is a good thing, no matter what form it takes.

The schizophrenic captures (or even knows) what Deleuze called “the Real”.

What is the real?

This:

It’s worth noting here that Deleuze was influenced by Spinoza’s monism. I doubt that the latter had much to say about the “demoniacal”. Yet, in a strong sense, people like Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Foucault did. Indeed, to all these writers, violence and the love of power and violence were taken to be part of nature’s demoniacal (though that word wasn’t used) side. (This is something that Foucault expressly stated in his words on “revolutionary violence” — though this is disputed - and his penchant for sadomasochism.)

Thus, much of this debate was dressed in terms of “power” having an impact on mental health. And, of course, capitalism incorporates power. The “ bosses” have power, and those who support them have power too. Of course, it’s all dependent on what’s meant by “power”, and how that explains the link between capitalism and mental health (or schizophrenia).

There comes a point at which power is interpreted so broadly that there’s power literally everywhere. That means there are “power relations” between left-wing professors and their students, the leaders of revolutionary groups/parties and their “members”, and even between “radical journals” and those people who read them. In fact, Michel Foucault — for one — did believe that power is everywhere, and he particularly noted it in the French Communist Party (PCF).

Here’s another passage from Deleuze:

On the superficial surface, that romantic vision seems fair enough. But it’s simplistic in that in suggests (or even states) that all schizophrenics like walks in the fresh air, and that they all become neurotics when on the analyst’s couch or when institutionalised.

In any case, Deleuze meant a model of a “desiring-machine”.

What did he mean by the word “machine”?

Deleuze believed that “[e]verything is a machine”. Indeed, “the breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it”. He also talks of the “eating-machine” and “anal machine”

Basically, a desiring-machine is a machine which desires. And desires should never be repressed. [Readers should refer back to the words on de Sade, Nietzsche and Foucault.) Relevantly, a schizophrenic is repressed when “found in mental institutions” in which he or she is “a limp rag forced into autistic behaviour”.

Deleuze also quoted Karl Jaspers (in a note) talking about “madness in our time”. Jaspers wrote that madness is

So here we have the madman capturing the Real, or at least being totally sincere.

Earlier in another note, Deleuze had also quoted Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in which one character states that his “guts spilled out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute”.

The Ego and the I

The following is Deleuze on the “schizo”:

This seems to be tapping into the New Age, “spiritual”, etc. view about “erasing the ego”, I or whatnot, which was popular in the 1960s and after.

According to Deleuze, it’s not that the “schizo” can’t use the word “I”, or that he doesn’t understand its function. Instead, he simply believes it’s a stupid word, and it doesn’t serve a purpose for him… However, in the Samuel Beckett passage quoted by Deleuze, it serves at least one function. (It’s no wonder that Deleuze concentrates on a character in a novel by Beckett because he rarely mentions real patients and their real experiences.) The schizo says, “I won’t say I any more, I’ll never utter the word again [ ].” That’s right, the schizo uses the word “I” and “I’ll” in a first person way, and “I” as a reference to the pronoun.

Of course, all this largely depends how we cash out this word “I”. It can be cashed out in Hume’s deflationary and technical sense, etc., or it can be seen as a substitute for what Deleuze calls “the ego”.

Freud had a lot to say about “the ego” and what Deleuze called “daddy-mommy”. According to Deleuze, “the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it”. Instead, “[h]e is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them”.

Freud the Capitalist

Felix Guattari’s criticisms of Sigmund Freud can be seen as an infight between psychiatrists at a particular period in history, and in a particular set of places (i.e., mainly universities in France).

To put it simply, Deleuze and Guattari took Freud to be a (not his own words) “defender of capitalism”. The problem here is that according to many Marxists, if someone isn’t an explicit critic (or “enemy”) of capitalism, then that person (either implicitly or explicitly) must be a defender of capitalism. Indeed, if someone isn’t a Marxist, then he/she (whether implicitly or explicitly) must be a defender of capitalism.

[Many of the criticisms of Freud also boil down to the Marxist idea that capitalism “invented” the “nuclear family”. Think here of Black Lives Matter in its early days, and its criticism of the nuclear family.]

In simple terms, Deleuze liked schizophrenics. Freud, on the other hand, “doesn’t like schizophrenics”. He tended “to treat them more or less as animals”. Deleuze went on to say more about Freud’s take on schizophrenics:

In terms of being “cut off from reality”, Deleuze believed that schizophrenics were more in tune with reality or the Real.

As for mistaking words for things, this could be a way of characterising (if slightly rhetorically) the philosophical mindset of many postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophers.

Deleuze also showed his Marxist credentials by using the word “idealism” for Freud’s psychoanalysis. The term “idealism” [see here], along with “positivism” [see here], have often been used by Marxists and left-leaning philosophers about all sorts of (non-idealist and non-positivist) positions.

In slightly more concrete terms. Deleuze believed that capitalism enforced “fixed identities” rather than “multiplicity”. Yet postmodernists (largely after Anti-Oedipus) and even Marxists have highlighted the fact that capitalism can tolerate multiplicity, as long as that multiplicity doesn’t threaten Das System. (Slavoj Žižek talks of “hybrid entities” living comfortably within capitalist states or societies.) Capitalism (with a platonic ‘C’) even takes risks with identities which do threaten Das System.

As it is, readers can happily agree with some — or even many — of Deleuze’s criticisms of Freud’s positions, and still not embrace Deleuze’s own vision.

Materialist Psychiatry

In my last essay (‘According to Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism Causes Schizophrenia’) I stated how Deleuze shoehorned Marx’s terms and theories into his own work. Now take a look at the following two “equations”:

Nature = Industry, Nature = History

What did Deleuze mean by all that?

Of course, anything can be likened to anything. So nature can indeed be likened to industry, as well as to history.

But what point did it serve?

In 1972, and in the years before, there would have been a lot of pressure on left-leaning intellectuals and academics to incorporate Marxist ideas and terms into their work. Thus, Deleuze talked about his “materialist psychiatry”.

Deleuze stated that his “materialist psychiatry [introduces] desire into the mechanism, and [ ] production into desire”. So here we have the materialist (as well as reductionist?) word “mechanism”, and the Marxist word “production” in a passage about psychiatry.

Deleuze even tied Marx to his own interest in “desire”. He told his readers that “[a]s Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a ‘natural and sensuous object’”. (Marx used the word “passion” not “desire”, but one can see what’s going on here.)

To an outsider, it may seem odd to claim that a kind of psychiatry can be “materialist”. However, it was a specific kind of materialism Deleuze had in mind: Marxist (or historical) materialism.