I’m going to begin by stating something I hope is relatively uncontroversial: a morality is a standard according to which actions are judged as right or wrong, what we ought to do or ought not to do.1 I’ll be mainly focusing on moral realism and moral relativism in this post, and I think it fits well enough with both of these views at least.

Now initially, this might seem to pose a challenge for moral realism, since it is commonly defined as the idea that moral truths are “stance-independent”. What is a stance except a standard, and what is a standard except a stance? The realist has an answer however: “stance” is being used to refer to the standards, values, attitudes, cares, etc of some person(s). The realist is not saying that morality is independent of moral standards (which would be contradictory), but that they are independent of whether or not anyone actually holds those standards.

That is a fine answer. But what’s odd is, a relativist can see moral truths as stance-independent in this way too. This is because they do not need to relativise moral statements to persons, but can instead (and with no substantial loss) relativise them to moral standards, taken in abstraction from all considerations of personal stances. There is no significant difference between saying “X action is wrong relative to MY moral standard Y” and just saying “X action is wrong relative to moral standard Y”. Who holds the standard makes no difference to the truth conditions of the claim. The “my” is just an indexical, picking out which standard is being discussed.

Et voila! Relativism is now realist. Moral statements are objectively true or false in a completely stance-independent way. They are not standard-independent, but then we have already seen that this is untenable and not required for realism.

So for example, let’s assume that murder predates all moral concepts, and imagine that an asteroid destroyed all life on earth after the first murder but before moral concepts ever developed. It would still be true that murder was wrong (relative to the standard we are working in), even though no one in all of history ever judged it to be wrong. Similarly, the truth-conditions of slavery being wrong, whichever standard we are considering, are completely independent of people’s moral stances. Of course, if we didn’t hold a standard we would be less likely to be applying it, but this is true for the non-relativist realist too.

This is like how plants were green long before any animals evolved to perceive colour, and it would still be true even if no creatures ever did evolve colour vision.2 Or how it would still be true that “the rings of Saturn are made of ice” even if the English language never developed and no one ever conceptualized “rings” or “Saturn” or “made of” or “ice”. Or that “all cubes have 8 vertices”, even if no cubes were even made or even imagined. These statements all rely on their own conceptual schemes, but we can evaluate them in complete abstraction from anyone ever actually possessing these concepts.

Similarly, we can treat moral standards as a kind of abstract object. They are each a possible way of conceptualizing and judging actions, taken in abstraction from anyone actually applying them. And for any such standard, there are stance-independent truths concerning how things are judged, relative to that standard.

But Which Moral Standard Is Correct?

However, the moral realist typically wants more from their realism. They want to know which moral standard is “the real one”, the “true morality”.

Firstly, why think there has to be just one real moral standard? I suspect the reason this seems intuitively correct to us is that morality is meant to tell us what to do in a situation, and we can only ever do one thing. For example in a trolley problem, deontology may tell us not to pull the lever while utilitarianism tells us we must, and we can’t both pull it and not pull it. We have to choose one course of action. But this does not mean that there is only one true moral standard, giving the definitive answers to what we should or should not do. We must choose one course of action, but there can be infinite different standards by which we might choose or judge a course of action, and there is no standard-independent way of judging between them.

And secondly, what could make a standard “correct”? When we say that something is correct, we are judging it according to some standard and finding that it meets that standard. There are, then, essentially two possibilities:

(1) The standard is justified relative to some other standard.

(2) The standard is not justified by any other standard, but by its own standard. Or equivalently, it requires no justification.

Option (1) is OK, but it passes the problem along to the next standard, and does not give any absolute justification. We either get an infinite regress of standards, or a circular mutually justifying loop, or eventually terminate with a standard which takes option (2). Whichever one we go with, no absolute and standard-independent justification has been given. And similarly with option (2), no standard-independent justification is given. It may justify itself by its own standard, but then any standard can do that.

Properties, Reasons, And Facts

One way they may attempt to escape this is by saying that the “real” morality is the one that tracks an objective “wrongness” property, that really exists out there in the world.

The problem is that such a property is actually just the standard being viewed from a different angle. For any moral standard X we may have, there are accompanying properties of being “X-wrong” or “X-obligatory” that it applies to actions. These properties are normative judgments that constitute and are constituted by standard X, not something separate and independent of it.

It is like saying that true theory of physics is the one that tracks the true physical properties. But physical properties, insofar as they are meaningful at all, are defined by the roles they play in our theories. E.g. we can have no concept of “mass” without a concept of its role in gravity and inertia. Or we might say that as soon as we have a meaningful concept of the properties, we already have the theory. Whatever the true properties are, they both define and are defined by the content of the true theory.

In defining the real morality as the one that tracks the real moral properties therefore, we are actually just judging our hypothetical “true” moral standard against itself. This cannot justify singling out one standard, because all moral standards can similarly pass the test of tracking their own wrongness properties.

The relativist can grant that there are moral properties. In fact, I think we should grant it liberally, granting a property for the judgments of every possible moral standard. Properties are cheap. The world is chock-full of properties!

The same point may be made regarding the claim that the real morality is the one which corresponds to the “moral facts”. Whatever moral facts there are will be the judgments of a moral standard. The standard constitutes the facts and the facts constitute the standard. They only differ in that the standard is taken in abstraction, while the facts are its application.3

Similarly for the idea some have put forward, that there are fundamental stance-independent “reasons” that undergird the true morality. This is again just restating the standard, although this time from the other end, looking at the starting points or “axioms” that constitute the standard.

When we normally speak about the “reasons” for an action, we want to know what it is that motivates or explains the choice. The answer may either be given in instrumental terms, referring to a reason that relies on a further reason (such as stealing in order to get money in order to...), or in terms of an end goal (such as stealing for the thrill of it). It is these end goals which we might describe as “fundamental”.

Now we also have certain end goals defined within a moral standard, and may fairly call these “fundamental reasons”. But they are only fundamental within that standard. For example, increasing happiness and reducing suffering are fundamental reasons within utilitarian ethics. In this sense, every moral standard naturally comes with its own fundamental, stance-independent reasons, abstracted away from all facts about whether or not anyone actually adopts them. They are the goals of the standard.

So then, we can grant that there really are stance-independent fundamental reasons. Every moral standard has them! But they have no power to justify a moral standard externally, because they are not something apart from it. They are its fundamental “axioms”.

Reality

Now, the realist/monist may want to insist that there is nevertheless a difference between the “real” moral standard and all the rest. But if there is... what is it? They are all stance-independent, they all track their own wrongness-properties, they all have their own moral facts and fundamental reasons. What is the difference between the “real” morality and the “unreal” moralities? And please do not say that the difference is that it is “real”. We need to know what we actually mean by “real”.

To be clear, I am not just asking how we can know which one is real, but what it means for it to be real. As an analogy, if we had two identical banknotes, one real and the other a perfect forgery, it would be impossible to know which is real and which is fake, but we know that the real one is whichever one was printed in legitimate circumstances. There is a fact of the matter, even though we might never know it. I want to know what makes one morality “real” and another counterfeit.

This is similar to a problem that faces mathematical platonism, the idea that mathematics is true by corresponding to some nonphysical “realm” of mathematical entities, and the correct mathematical axioms that exist within that realm. The problem is, how are we supposed to distinguish between the real mathematics with its real axioms, as opposed to those which are merely our own constructions? And for that matter, what does it actually mean for it to “exist in a platonic realm”?

Some take this difficulty for platonism as evidence that mathematics is not real, arguing for views such as mathematical fictionalism. Another response is plenitudinous platonism, which is a form of mathematical platonism that is maximally liberal with “reality”, allowing that all possible mathematical objects are really real, meaning that there is no privileged set of true axioms, but rather, every possible set of axioms is equally real (including sets that contradict one another). And another view (my preference) is modal structuralism, which sees mathematics as concerning what is true IF certain axioms are true, and so looking at the space of possible structures. It therefore also sees all axioms as equally real too, but real as real possibilities.

We can view our moral standards similarly, treating them as another kind of abstract object. And we can then take a fictionalist approach, saying none of them “really” exist, or a plenitudinous Platonist approach, granting full existence to all4, or (my preference again) see them as possible structures of normative judgments. These are all pluralist accounts, not setting up any one moral standard metaphysically above the rest, and so allowing us to sidestep the difficulty of saying what “real” means in this context.

Another issue is that, even if we grant the real vs unreal distinction, why should we privilege the metaphysically “real” standard? For comparison, suppose we discovered that mathematical platonism is true, with arithmetic and the natural numbers being platonically real, and everything else being merely possible structures we have constructed. Given this, should we stop doing all the non-platonic maths? Of course not! Why should it have any impact on our actual mathematical practice at all? So then, why should one moral standard being “real” give it any rights over the others? If you found out that the metaphysically privileged morality made it obligatory to bathe with a cat and torture puppies, would you do it? Of course not!

In fact, since it is still unclear what “real” means here, why shouldn’t we just as well privilege its negation, ruling out the “real” morality in favour of those which are “unreal”? Until we have some account of what “real” actually means, we cannot answer this question.

Conclusion

So, it seems I am technically a realist? And yet... also a relativist. If we want a monistic realism, I am going to need to see a better account of what “real” would mean and how it would distinguish between different moral standards.

It seems to me that stance-independence is not particularly significant. We can think about morality stance-independently just by abstracting it away from people’s stances. What we can’t do (and what appears to me to be incoherent) is to see morality as standard-independent — morality is standards.

I also think taking morality as stance-independent in this sense is a good idea for relativists. Nothing is substantially changed, it fits with common use of moral language, and it allows us to move past some frustrating discussions concerning stance-independence, properties, reasons etc (at least I hope it might).

We might also take this as reason to reconsider how we divide the meta-ethical landscape. If stance-independence can come so cheaply, I think we should stop considering it the major divide. A better way might be to divide positions into normative monist vs pluralist views, where the monist believes there is one moral standard that’s (somehow) uniquely objectively valid, and the pluralist believes there are more than one, all on an equal footing.

If you like, all this makes me a moral realist. It’s just that realism is a lot cheaper than it sounds.

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P.S.

I got the idea for this post after reading this excellent post from , looking at the idea of whether or not Kantian constructivism and moral realism could both be true simultaneously, creating a situation in which there are two objective moralities (although only one is stance-independent). I recommend checking it out, as well as his other stuff!

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I think this is a confused way of thinking about both the nature of things and consciousness, so I’m going to lay out my response in this post.

Mereological Nihilism and Material Causes

Throughout the examples he uses to illustrate his point, he assumes a certain kind of answer to the question “What is it?” Namely, he is looking to know what components or “stuff” the thing is made of.

So even if you ask [scientists] a trivial question like you know what is a what is a table made out of? They might tell you well it’s made out of wood. And that’s all very well and good. But if you don’t know what wood is, then you’re going to ask them, well what’s wood? And they’re going to describe some kind of chemical composition which I do not know. And then you ask them, yeah, but what’s that? What is that thing? What is that made of? They say, “Oh, well, it’s made out of atoms.” Okay. What’s that? Well, protons and electrons. Okay. Well, like what is an electron? Well, it’s kind of a kind of a fundamental particle. Okay. But like what is it? Well, it’s a negatively charged particle. Okay. What’s negative charge? They’ll tell you what it does. They won’t tell you what it is. [starting at 10:13]

He wants to know what a thing is “made of”, and that is how he understands “what it is”. And when we reach electrons and such an answer can no longer be given, he feels we have no idea what it actually is. In Aristotelian terms, this kind of answer is known as the “material cause” — what parts or elements a thing is made of — and stands in opposition to the “formal cause” — what those parts or elements are made into. As an example, a composer creates a piece of music by combining many separate notes (the matter of the piece) into a unified musical composition (the form of the piece). The composition of the whole is the form, and the parts it may be decomposed into are the matter.1

This approach, taking “what it is” as referring to the matter, makes some sense given that O’Connor has elsewhere expressed his belief in mereological nihilism, the view that objects with parts do not actually exist, only their component parts do.2 Given that, what a thing “actually is” must be none other than its ultimate material cause.

But the problem we run up against when we take the material cause as what a thing actually is, is that you can always ask a further, “Okay. What’s that?” It’s not clear when or where we ought to stop. We can either decide to stop at some point where it seems we can go no further (such as electrons), and then use some other way of characterising what that thing is, or we can go on asking what it is made of forever, never being satisfied. Since O’Connor is apparently not satisfied with stopping at the entities of fundamental physics, it is unclear what kind of answer could ever satisfy him (besides consciousness, but we’ll get to that).

Although one option to consider, if we are looking for an ultimate material cause, is Aristotle’s idea of “prime matter”. At each point as we go down a chain of material causes (eg trees → chemicals → atoms → subatomic particles, and so on) we are setting aside the form/composition, and looking only at the components. Now these components have the potential to be combined in many different forms. For example, when we look at a house as being so many bricks, we set aside that these bricks form a house and look only at the bricks, which have the potential to form bridges, tunnels, walls, and much more. Therefore as we proceed along the chain and abstract away the forms the elements are in, we are left with something progressively more and more formless, with greater and greater potentiality. For example, at the point where we describe something as protons, neutrons, and electrons, we could be speaking of practically any material entity in the universe! So then, if we were to take the material cause to its ultimate limit, we would arrive at something that was a perfectly formless pure potentiality. This is what Aristotle termed, “prime matter”.

If we want an ultimate material cause, I think this is the best candidate. Unfortunately for O’Connor, prime matter, being pure potentiality and entirely formless, cannot exist as such in actuality (since it has no actuality). It does exist, but it exists in the actualized forms of everything else. It is the potentiality which every material thing is some actualization of. But for a mereological nihilist, this will not do, since it is the ultimate material cause alone that is actual, and not the forms it takes.

Of course, he could take the penultimate material causes (those just before prime matter) as what everything “actually is”. But this would require accepting that we must speak of these entities as something besides their matter, such as their form, or what they do, which he has already rejected. He has implicitly made the material cause the sole fact of “what it is”, setting aside other ways of analysing a thing’s nature, such as how it behaves, what its history is (e.g. when he asked “what is wood?” another answer could define it by its origins in the body of a tree), or its function or purpose (e.g. a hammer is defined by its function of hammering things, or a heart by its function of pumping blood). That is not to say that he rejects these entirely, but he does not see them as “what it is”.

By rejecting these other ways of approaching the nature of a thing, he has trapped himself with a question he cannot answer.

Consciousness

Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “cannot” be answered, since he has himself proposed that what things actually are — their ultimate nature — is consciousness.

The problem with this is, consciousness seems almost uniquely poorly suited to being a material cause. How can a thing be “made of” consciousness? What would that even mean? If you have any suggestions, please, let me know in the comments.

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Now, to be fair, O’Connor didn’t suggest that it’s a “material cause” per se. He only suggests that it’s “what it is”, the “ultimate nature” of things, etc. But given his mereological nihilism and the fact that the examples he’s using all rely on material causes, I think this is a reasonable way of reading his argument. And if we stop thinking of “what it is” as some kind of material substance, it is no longer clear why we should not be happy to accept that an electron is what it does.

Another problem is that, even if we accept that things are in some sense “made of” consciousness, why should we not follow up with yet another round of “Okay. What’s that?” The appeal of consciousness as an answer is that we (supposedly) know the nature of consciousness directly, from our own immediate experience. But even if we accept this, that does not mean that it could not be composed of something else. I would say that we know the nature of trees, but that does not preclude them from being made of cells and of atoms.

And the biggest problem, I believe, is that I don’t see any reason to think of consciousness as an “is” rather than a “does”. It does not seem to me like a thing or a substance so much as a process, and I think when we reify it into an object we make it meaningless. To be conscious is to perceive and interpret the world. It is an active ongoing process in which the organism “takes in” the world in order to make sense of it and determine its response. It is a living thing, a doing, not a static object or property.

It is also worth noting here how opposed this idea of consciousness and mind is to the idea of a material cause. The mind and consciousness is perhaps characterised more than anything else by its holism, the fact that its different parts and faculties and perceptions are brought together to form and operate as a single unified whole, and that it seeks out such holistic unities and patterns in the world too. It is a principle of composition, not of decomposition.

And the qualities we experience too, are not experienced as intrinsically existing “qualia”, existing separately from their causal relations to the world. That is a theoretical model certain philosophers came up with, and only find “intuitive” after serious theorizing has shaped their thinking. No, we experience the qualities of the world as moving us. They influence our thoughts, desires, words, actions. They are even influencing these words I am writing! And if we remove all of these influences, I do not see that we are left with anything meaningful at all.

This point is actually something O’Connor discussed in an episode of his podcast, with guest . Frankish made the point I made above, using the example of the experience of a migraine, that once we remove all of its effects on us, such as our feeling nauseous, our dislike of it, it grabbing our attention, and so on, there is (it seems) nothing left over at the end. O’Connor’s response was that in removing all of these effects, it seemed to him that Frankish had sneakily removed the qualia itself, since those all seem like further qualitative experiences. And on this point, I think he is correct. They are qualitative experiences. But that should tell us that our qualitative experiences are effects. They are not intrinsic entities or substances. They are a doing, not an is.

This is where I actually part ways with Frankish, and perhaps illusionism more broadly too, as well as from qualia realists.3 His response to O’Connor was to say that we are under a “very strong illusion” of such qualitative experiences, and so it’s to be expected that O’Connor would feel and respond as he does. My response is that our experiences are what they do. They are a certain confluence of effects they have upon the experiencer. Much like how the electron is what it does, and we do not need to posit any further substance underneath. We do not need “qualia”, conceived of as such entities, but we also do not need to call our qualitative experiences “illusions”. Much like how rainbows are real and not illusory, even though we now know they are an appearance caused by the refraction of sunlight in water droplets in the air, rather than being a solid physical entity with a precise location, boundaries, mass, etc.

Conclusion

An interesting aspect of this is that the confusion seems to come from the same mistake being made in two different places. The first is assuming that “what things are” must ultimately be some kind of basic “stuff”, which leads to the problem that, by this definition, we cannot arrive at what things actually are at all. And the second is applying the same assumption to consciousness, and so turning it into some kind of pseudo-material intrinsic substance, rather than a holistic process of interaction with the world. And when these two mistakes are combined, we can end up with the strange idea that an electron is, somehow, “made of consciousness”.

But if we set aside this assumption of what counts as “what it really is”, the problem dissolves. We do not have to set up a hard boundary between “what a thing does” and “what it is”. We can understand the nature of a thing from multiple different angles, including what it is made of, what form it is in, how it interacts with other things, its history, its function, and many more.

And, funnily enough, we can start gaining some clarity on what consciousness “is” too.

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What is the meaning of life?

This may be the most stereotypical philosophy question there is. And yet, it is not obvious what the question even means. What is the “meaning” of life? I don’t know, what’s the meaning of a tree? What kind of a question is that?! We might even be tempted to say that the question is pseudo-profound nonsense. I think that’s a mistake, but before we can ask what the meaning of life is, we need to first answer, ‘What is the meaning of “the meaning of life”?’

‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ makes this point memorably by telling how an alien species built a supercomputer called ‘Deep Thought’ to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, and after seven and a half million years of computing it found the answer was... forty-two.

‘I checked it very thoroughly,’ said the computer, ‘and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’

‘But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!’ howled Loonquawl.

‘Yes,’ said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, ‘but what actually is it?’

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

‘Well, you know, it’s just Everything … Everything …’ offered Phouchg weakly.

‘Exactly!’ said Deep Thought. ‘So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.’

The Meaning of Meaning

Still, we do seem to have some idea of what the question means. Enough for it to trouble a good number of thoughtful people. I think we might paraphrase the question as, “What is my life for? What is it about? What difference does it make? How should I live my life? What does it matter?”

With these paraphrases, I think we can attempt some clarification of what is meant by the “meaning” in “the meaning of life” (and more broadly too). I would suggest for our purposes that a thing’s meaning is the difference it makes (or ought to make) to how an interpreter of the thing relates to the world.1

So for example, if I see and hear a neighbour running down the road crying “Fire! Fire!”, that means (to me at least) that there is probably a fire down the road which they are running away from, since I am now relating to the world as if that were true. There may or may not be a fire, but either way I have been moved to relate to the world as if there is. Similarly, if I see a rising column of smoke in the distance, I may say that that means there is a fire, since again I infer a fire from the smoke and relate to the world as if there is a fire there. I may be mistaken, but this does not change what the smoke means to me. Or at least not until I find out there is no fire. At that point the meaning of the smoke changes for me, perhaps becoming instead a sign of a smoke machine being present. Similarly if I found out my neighbour was lying and there was no fire, at that point the meaning of their cries changes, becoming a sign not of a fire but of a liar.

The meaning in this sense is not limited to the inferences we make concerning the facts of the world, as in the above examples. We might for example be passively watching as a catastrophe unfolds, until we hear someone cry out for help. At that point, without changing our understanding of the objective facts of the situation, we may be moved to act in order to do what we can to help those in need. The situation has not changed, nor even our idea of the situation (considered objectively anyway), but our relation to it has changed.

What about the parenthesis I included in my rough definition above, “the difference it makes (or ought to make)”? I included this because there is a real sense in which we can misinterpret things, attributing meanings that are “wrong”, as with the mistaken inferences of fire above. We can understand this in two ways, either saying that it really did mean there was a fire to me, even though that was mistaken, or we could instead say that it did not really mean that, since I shouldn’t have interpreted them that way after all, since neither was really caused by a fire, but by something else. These are just two ways of describing the same situation, and I don’t think there is any strict need to choose between them. But this does mean that there is a sense in which meaning is comparatively “objective”, since there are standards by which we might say that it is wrong.

Where does this comparatively objective meaning come from? I would say that, like our other uses of the term “ought”, it is measuring it against our standards and expectations for that thing (I argue for this more fully in this post). So where do those standards and expectations come from? First of all, from us. We are the ones who say that a certain thing ought to be interpreted a certain way and ought to make a certain difference to a person, and so the “ought” is itself another interpretation of ours which we are applying and attempting to make authoritative. And secondly, we determine them by our goals and by reference to our other standards. We aim to interpret things in a way which allows us to live effectively in the ways we wish to live. For example, we want to be rational, and so we say that we ought to attempt to interpret things in a way which is consistent with our beliefs and knowledge. We also want to know the truth, and so we say that we ought to interpret things in a way which gets us to the truth (we do not want to interpret smoke as meaning fire when there is no fire). We also want to be a good interlocutor, and so we ought to interpret things charitably and in a way which conforms with our partner’s intentions.

Even still, it may be that the same event ought to mean different things to different people. For example, we might say that two people responding to the same thing with different background information rationally ought to see the same thing as meaning two very different things and respond differently. Or as another example, a woman suddenly falling sick ought to mean one thing for her children, and something very different for her doctor.

The Meaning of Life

So then, what is the meaning of life? The question remains too vague, in two ways. Firstly, the meaning of whose life? All life in the universe, including aliens, plants, insects, and microbes? What about viruses? Or the meaning of all human life, taken together as a whole? Or a generic human life? Or is it the meaning of my own life, in all its particularity, that we are interested in?

If we look back at the paraphrases I offered above, I think what we are most interested in is that last one, the meaning of my own life in all its particularity. As interesting as the other questions may be, we are not nearly as concerned with these abstractions and lofty ideas as we are with the particular and concrete reality of our own lives. My own life is what I am confronted with each and every day. It is the inescapable reality and task that is set before me.

And secondly, the meaning of my life to who? Its meaning within my culture? To my company, or my family, or friends? To God? To the universe? To myself? The same life might mean something radically different to different people. For example, the life of St Francis may be to a Catholic a paradigmatic example of a life well lived, while to an antitheist it might be the perfect of example of how religion leads to wasted lives and potential.

I think the meaning that really matters here, and which makes the question so difficult to answer, is the meaning of my life to myself. If we want to know the meaning of our lives to others, we can basically just ask them. But the meaning of my life to myself is something which I myself must create. I have to look at my life, with all its facts and all its possibilities, and interpret it for myself. No one else can do this for us.

This capacity to reflect on and interpret and change our own lives is what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It makes us free in a unique way. The other animals cannot ask themselves about the meaning of their lives or reflect on and interpret their lives in the way that we can. They simply live their lives, going from day to day, moment to moment, taking each thing as it comes.

This makes us free, but in doing so, it also makes us fundamentally responsible for our own lives. And this responsibility is, basically, terrifying. We do not want to be responsible for our lives and decisions. We want someone else to give us the answers, to tell us what to do and what to think and what to believe. And even if they are wrong, we can comfort ourselves that it is not our fault, we were just following orders, just going with the crowd. It was not me that did it, I was just a cog in a grand machine. We do not want to have to own our choices, our actions, our thoughts. For this reason, looking for the objective meaning of one’s life, or its meaning for our culture or our family or for God, is often a form of avoiding responsibility. We look for its meaning outside of ourselves as a way of avoiding the burden of deciding its meaning, creating our lives, for ourselves.

This does not mean that these other points of view should not form a part, or perhaps even the whole, of the meaning we give to our lives. We can, if we choose, decide to interpret our lives via God’s interpretation, or our parents, culture, etc. The point is not to rule out any of these interpretations. The point is that we have to embrace this fully as my own choice, and own that choice. Even if I choose to my life away entirely to another, I must fully own that as my free choice, not as an abdication of freedom. In fact it is only in this way that such a gift is meaningful at all.

Similarly, we might choose to live more like the animals, living day to day in simplicity and harmony with nature, without all this existential worrying. This is an option that we should not rule out. But again, if we choose to live this way, we must recognise that this too is our own free choice.

The Meaning of My Life For Me

So then, what is the meaning of my life for me? Let’s apply the rough sketch of meaning I gave earlier: “My life’s meaning is the difference it makes (or ought to make) to how I, as its interpreter, relate to the world.” That is, I decide what my life means by looking at my life — my self, my history, my hopes and desires and fears, my future possibilities, and everything else — and deciding in the light of what I see, how I choose to relate to the world, how I choose to live, going forwards. It is not an answer I can give that can be written down or spoken aloud. It has to be lived out. The question is a few simple words, but the answer must be nothing less than my life itself.

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P.S.

You likely noticed there’s a good deal of influence from the existentialists in this post. That’s probably thanks to me recently finishing listening to ‘No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life’ by Robert Solomon on Audible, which I’d highly recommend.

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Notions like ‘rights’, ‘wrongs’, and ‘duties’ are leftovers from a pre-scientific age in which dogma and myths ruled over evidence and reason. And much like unicorns, gods, and other fairy tales, they should be consigned to hell.

This is... frustrating.

His primary target is moral realism (which he helpfully defines as “the view that there are moral facts, that there are objective moral properties out there in the world”), which he rejects for being unscientific and based in philosophers’ intuitions. That’s fine and I’m not here to defend moral realism.

My objection is that morality is real, despite moral realism being false. To say that morality does not exist at all, and that moral language should be scrubbed from our language, just because it does not exist independently of us, is a leap too far.

To illustrate my position, imagine if someone had made the same arguments about the idea of “economic value”:

Notions like ‘value’, ‘cost’, ‘wealth’ are leftovers from a pre-scientific age in which dogma and myths ruled over evidence and reason. And much like unicorns, gods, and other fairy tales, they should be consigned to hell.

This sounds silly, but just as there are moral realists, there have been many real people throughout history who have believed in what I’ll call “value realism”1. For example in medieval society, merchants were often viewed as doing dishonest work, since they make profit without producing anything, and so (the reasoning went) they must be paying producers below the real value and charging customers above. We see similar reasoning in certain socialist critiques of profit as necessarily exploitative. There have also been many attempts historically to legally fix prices to their “true” values.2

But just because many mistakenly take the value of a good as something that exists objectively, does not mean that the value of a good is no more than a pre-scientific superstition that should be “consigned to hell”. It’s still real, it’s just not real in the way that some imagined it to be. The common, everyday use of the word “value” does not need to change, we just need to recognise that the reality it’s referring to is better understood not as the thing’s objective value, but its market value.

The market value of a good is a real feature of that good, existing in relation to the purchasing preferences of buyers and competition from other sellers in the market. The market value of a good effectively captures key information concerning that good, that allows us to better predict and understand its behaviour within the market. It’s a relational aspect of the good which has real causal power in the world. And awareness of this aspect allows agents in the market to organise themselves rationally and cooperate (i.e. trade) more effectively, in a way that benefits both the individual and the community.

This is how I view morality. Is it real? Obviously. But that doesn’t mean that it’s real independently of us, in the way “realists” suppose it to be. My view is that morality is a set of expectations and standards which we hold ourselves and others to, and which allow us to organise ourselves and cooperate more effectively together. These standards are partly the product of our biological evolution as rational social animals, and partly the product of social processes in which our respective rights, duties, and expectations have been historically fought over, negotiated, and refined.

Like market values, morality is a real feature of societies and individuals, with real causal and explanatory power. It does not need to be objective facts, independent of the economic or moral agents that embody them, in order to be real.

The problem comes from thinking of real vs unreal as a simple binary, in which some things are “really real” and everything else is a “superstition”, “useful fiction”, or “illusion”. A way of thinking which depends, I believe, on a bad a priori metaphysics, based in the kind of unreliable intuitions Veit blames for leading philosophers to moral realism. My view is that reality is relational all the way, and that to exist is to make a difference, whether we are talking about physics or economics or morality. Gravity exists in relation to things with mass. Value exists in relation to markets. Morals exist in relation to persons. It’s real, but it’s also human.

This touches on a point of contention I have with moral realism. For moral realism to be true there must be objective moral facts. But if there are such facts, what makes them true? What is there in the world which they correspond to? My view is that morality is us corresponding with each other3. It’s us co-constructing ways for us to cooperate and live in harmony with one another. We are the “truthmakers”. And since we are a real part of the world, morality is a real aspect of the world too. Just, not like that.

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Christianity revolves around “the Word”. God created the universe via speech act. God spoke gave His word to us in the scriptures, making prophecies and covenants. And most importantly He gave His Divine Word most completely in the person of Jesus Christ. The God of Christianity is, more than anything else, a God who speaks to us and may be spoken to.

Despite this, there seems precious little discussion of the relationship between the philosophy of language and Christian theology. Certain ideas concerning language have historically been taken for granted by Christian theologians and philosophers, but I believe these ideas do not hold up well. And perhaps more importantly, I do not believe that these ideas fit happily with Christianity.

So in this post I am going to look at Christianity through the lens of my own philosophy of language. I think this understanding of language fits much more naturally and harmoniously with Christianity, and actually allows certain points of doctrine to shine forth more clearly and powerfully.

I should note that I am no longer a practicing Christian (I grew up protestant, was baptised a Catholic at 18, and left at 27). I am writing this partly to explore the implications of my philosophy in a radical test case, and partly because I secretly love theology and think this offers the potential for a really wonderful theology. I also think theology and religion, in all their weirdness, offer unique possibilities for deeper insight into the world via seeing from different angles.

For the sake of writing, I’m going to write from the point of view of a Christian, as if I were a Christian once again.

My Philosophy Of Language

In brief, my philosophy of language is that:

• Meaning is not contained or hidden within messages (words), as something merely transmitted across from sender to receiver. The meaning is “contained” as much in the interpretive scheme that “decodes” the message, as it is in the message itself. Instead, the two co-create the meaning.

• The meaning is found in the way that the receiver responds and relates to the message, how they integrate it within themselves and their ideas and their life.

• Each message must be interpreted to have any meaning, but in being interpreted a message may also reinterpret the interpretive scheme. The interpretive scheme is all the beliefs and practices through which we interpret a message, but the content of the message itself may revise those beliefs and practices. Think about, for example, the plot twist in a story, or the punch line of a joke.

• What stabilises meaning, and prevents interpretation from being arbitrary, is the back and forth dialogue and engagement with others and with the world at large.

• The aim of communication is transformation and unification, changing oneself and others to build mutual understanding and agreement and coordination, forging a shared mind and shared life.

I argued for and developed this idea in more depth in this post for those who are interested. Rather than arguing for it again here, I will take it for granted and jump to the theological implications.

The Trinity And The Word

In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was With God, And The Word Was God. (John 1:1)

Let’s start at the very beginning, with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and especially the eternal generation of the Word (who is also referred to as “God the Son”).

For many theologians1, the Word is thought of as God’s perfect self-knowledge, His idea of Himself. It is an idea so perfect and complete, that it is the perfect likeness of God, to the point that it is God Himself. And yet, there is still a distinction between God as conceiving of Himself (”God the Father”), and God as conceived of by Himself (”God the Son”). This is, in very brough and rough explanation, how it is that the Father and the Son are understood to be both fully God, and yet the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father. They are one in essence, but differ in their relations to each other. Then, in God’s conceiving of Himself He comes also to love Himself, and by the perfection of this self-love it must also itself be the entirety of God, and so this “spiration” of love is the “third person” of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit.2

Before I complain (just a little), I want to note how this is already a remarkably dynamic and relational idea of “Word” and of God. Already, God is so much more than just a static and solitary being. Already the Word involves and requires, and even creates, an other. The doctrine of the Trinity already implies an idea of the Word as an unfolding and dynamic process.

My complaint is that theologians have tended to slip into seeing the Word as primarily an idea rather than a word. An idea is a static thing that may remain entirely contained within a mind. It does not inherently need to go out and engage with the world. But a word must be spoken. It must go out and engage with the world. A word that remains shut up in the mind is not a word at all, and is without life and creative power. And the Bible does not say, “In the beginning was the Idea”!

So what happens if we approach the Trinity again, emphasising that the Son is the Word and not the idea? Then, God becomes essentially outward facing, creative, expressive. Rather than the Word being God’s self-concept, passively reflecting God’s nature, the Word is God’s active and self-creative self-expression. The unity between the Father and the Son is then not found in the perfect representation of God, but in the perfect authenticity of the self-expression. God has expressed Himself perfectly, and therefore there is no gap between God and God’s self-expression. The Word is fully God because He puts Himself fully into His Word. And yet, there remains the relational distinction between the Word that is spoken and the speaker of the Word so that, as before, the Father and the Son are distinct, despite both being the fulness of the Divinity.

In that case, God’s deepest nature is a kind of pure and spontaneous unfolding creativity. God pouring out of Himself in His unbounded joy and love. And seeing Himself in His self-creative self-expression, God naturally loves Himself, thus again spirating the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is then the creative interplay of God with Himself, God seeing Himself and responding to Himself. God is a glorious loop of being and self-expression and self-delight that then feeds back and re-informs His own being and self-expression and self-delight.

This does not mean that the idea of the Word as God’s self-knowledge is wrong. We may still say that God knows Himself in His Word. But the direction of causation is reversed: God does not first know Himself and then express what He knows; He knows Himself, discovers Himself, even (in a sense) creates Himself, in His self-expression.

I would argue that this is how we come to know ourselves too. We do not know ourselves in the secret of our own hearts. We discover ourselves by going out into the world and authentically and creatively expressing ourselves. There is not a “me” prior to my engaging with the world, but I create myself and come to know myself via my engagement with the world.

Creation

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:3)

Let’s turn now to the God’s relationship with creation. Part of the traditional idea of the Word is that He is the Word by which God created the universe. He is, in a sense, the “plan” for all creation. As Hebrews 11:3 puts it, ‘By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.’

In the theology of St Maximus the Confessor, all created things are known in the mind of God by their own logoi (Greek for “words”). Each creature is a small revelation of God, and so by purifying our minds and attending to the logoi we may come to contemplation of the one Logos (“Word”), the single divine Word in which the logoi find their ultimate unity, and so come to know God.

This bears a clear debt to the ideas of Plato concerning the Forms, and in my opinion is a powerful and beautiful conception of the universe. But with our modern scientific knowledge, and especially the theory of evolution by natural selection, what can we make of the idea of creatures as being representations of their separate “words” in the eternal divine mind? Does that not require a kind of “intelligent design” thesis, that is incompatible with evolution? And if that is the case, what is the place of the Word in regards to creation? Can nature no longer be a manifestation of the Word, no longer a revelation of the divine?

If we stick with the idea of words as static and ahistorical receptacles with immutable fixed meanings, no. BUT! if we embrace the idea of words as living, dynamic, evolving entities, then suddenly the difficulty goes away. Creatures do not have words, they are words. And words are historical entities without fixed meanings, shapes, or functions. They engage with the world and adapt to it and find their fit. They creatively unfold within the world and within time.

The ideas of linguistic and memetic evolution thus come full circle. Words and ideas evolve like organisms: therefore organisms evolve like words and ideas.

Evolution itself, then, is a part of God’s self-expression. It is not an obstacle to God’s creation of the cosmos by the Divine Word, but is precisely the creative unfolding of that Word in dialogue and ongoing reinterpretation. The creatures of the world are words — logoi within the Logos — not in the sense of being reflections of eternal and unchanging ideas, but as being God’s creative expression, ever unfolding and open to reinterpretation and transformation.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that evolution is guided by God or follows a premeditated divine plan. It’s the opposite: the creation of the world is an ongoing improvised act of divine self-expression. Evolution does produce genuine design and functionality3, but these are not things imposed by an “intelligent designer” from the outside, or dreamed up ahead of time. It is evolution itself as an ongoing creative process that produces the “meanings” of nature.

And as a more general point, if God is revealed by creation, and creation is a product of evolution, then God must reveal Himself precisely through the process of evolution itself. Evolution must have serious theological significance. If the Christian is to believe in both evolution and that God is revealed in creation, then evolution must itself be revelation!

Scripture

The Lord talked with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire (Deuteronomy 5:4)

Within this understanding of what it means to be a “word”, the scriptures as “the word of God” begin to appear very differently. Once again, we have to set aside the idea of static words with fixed meanings being handed down from on high, once and for all, and embrace the idea of the word as something which must evolve and unfold through history, as it is interpreted anew in an ongoing dialogue. The meaning of the text is not a metaphysical secret, but the life of the text, the way the text works on and in and through the community who receive it.

The idea of scripture as something simply “dictated” once and for all by the Holy Ghost4 at the time it was first penned must be set aside. Indeed, modern scholarship has already thrown serious doubt on the idea that much of the Bible ever was “first penned” in such a way: the Bible itself appears in many parts to be the product of a long evolutionary process, with multiple traditions, sources, authors, compilers, editors, and translators playing their parts. And then there is the process by which the texts we have today came to be gathered together and recognised as the canon of scripture. At which point are we meant to say that the Holy Spirit began and ended His dictation?

But if we understand the word of God (like all words) as existing within an unfolding dialogue, these difficulties ease. Just as the logoi of creation are God’s evolving and historically unfolding words, so too the scriptures may be understood as God’s evolving and historically unfolding word. This creative evolutionary process is the very process in which God reveals Himself to us. God reveals Himself to us in our dialogue with Him.

This also helps explain why so much of the scriptures are not written as God addressing humanity, but either as humans addressing God (for example in the Psalms or in Lamentations) or as humans addressing other humans (for example in Proverbs or the Song of Songs). Even if we take the text literally, it is evident that it is a dialogue, not a monologue!

In that case, the scriptures should not be understood to possess a single pre-fixed meaning for us to uncover by careful and objective study. This does not mean anything goes. It means that interpretation is necessarily a creative endeavour of engaging with the text and its author, and in that engagement being transformed. Objectivity imagines a distance between oneself and the text that is entirely out of place: the point is for you to hear it, and to be transformed. There must be real engagement, a real back and forth in which the hearer “wrestles” with God as Jacob did and by which he gained the name ‘Israel’5. It is in this dialogue, this struggle, that the meaning of the words are formed and refined, and we ourselves are transformed and blessed.

Again, this does not mean anything goes. Just as we do not say that “anything goes” when we are speaking with a friend, since they are there and able to push back on our interpretations and responses, so too with God. If God is a living God, then the meaning of the scriptures must be found in dialogue with the living God, in prayer and actively living out the word. It is a dialogue, which means we also have to listen and receive. We should remember that Jacob did not win his fight with God, even though he received His blessing.

The Incarnation

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14)

Applying this now to the our understanding of Jesus as “the Word made flesh”, we must not take it as an abstract secret metaphysical fact about Jesus, invisible to all observation. To understand Him in this way is to miss what it means to be a “word”. A word must be spoken.

Instead, Jesus is the Word precisely because His life makes God manifest. He is Himself God’s creative self-expression, the first-born of all creation, in which the whole of creation, all the logoi of created things, shall find their ultimate fulfilment and unity. It is not that God is hidden in Jesus’s flesh, but that His flesh itself is the perfect expression of the Divinity.

What can this mean? To understand Jesus as the Divine Word, we must look at what His life says. What would it mean to say that God is expressed in the life a man born of a virgin mother into poverty, forced to flee persecution to a foreign land as a child, who returned to preach a gospel of liberation, forgiveness, and love, who was crucified for this message by the powers of the world, and who rose again on the third day? Whatever we say here must fail to express the meaning as fully as His life itself, but we can try anyway. It tells us that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). That God is humble. That God empties Himself. That God cares for the lowly and downtrodden, and places Himself among them. It tells us that God’s love is victorious over the world and the forces of death, not by force but by its own creative and life giving power.

If we suppose that a word’s meaning is something it “contains”, we will similarly suppose that Jesus’s flesh “contains” the Word. In that case, we will fall into the heresy of thinking His humanity and divinity are not truly and fully united. But if we understand a word’s meaning as the life of the word, its relations and activity in its worldly context, we may similarly see that Jesus’s divinity is not something other than Himself, but is His very life in the world, proclaiming and living out and revealing God.

Does this imply that Jesus, as the Word, is also a product of “evolution”? It does. And this may be the most radical (and arguably heretical) implication, although it is not entirely without precedent. For example, Joseph Ratzinger (following Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) wrote,

Faith sees in Jesus the man in whom—on the biological plane—the next evolutionary leap, as it were, has been accomplished; the man in whom the breakthrough out of the limited scope of humanity, out of its monadic enclosure, has occurred; the man in whom personalization and socialization no longer exclude each other but support each other; the man in whom perfect unity—“The body of Christ”, says St. Paul, and even more pointedly “You are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28)—and perfect individuality are one; the man in whom humanity comes into contact with its future and in the highest extent itself becomes its future, because through him it makes contact with God himself, shares in him, and thus realizes its most intrinsic potential. From here onward faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single “body”—the man to come. It will see in him the movement to that future of man in which he is completely “socialized”, incorporated in one single being, but in such a way that the individual is not extinguished but brought completely to himself. (’Introduction to Christianity’, p206)

The incarnation is a key moment in the unfolding of the Logos, God’s progressive self-expression and creation. But it is not the end of it. That unfolding must be understood as ongoing, continuing in the “body of Christ”, the Church, which is to be understood as gathering all of humanity into the unity of Christ, even as it deepens and refines its understanding of Christ ever more.

I also said above that a word’s meaning depends on how it is interpreted and received. Is this true even for Jesus, the Word of God? It is. As St Paul wrote, ‘the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.’ (1 Cor 1:18) How the Word is received determines what it means for us, with serious consequences.

And most importantly, Jesus being the Word of God indicates that He must be received into ourselves and allowed to reinterpret our lives, to transform us radically. He is not merely transmitting sterile information from or about God, He is a living Word, a Word that transforms, that transforms everything we have ever heard or will ever hear, a Word that must live in us. It is true that we must interpret the Word, but in doing so faithfully and humbly, we must allow the word to interpret and transform us.

Tradition And Development Of Doctrine

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. (Colossians 3:16)

Even Jesus is not a single Word given once and for all with no need for further exploration and interpretation. He is a Word that must be passed on to each generation to be received and understood anew. In this, the Word goes on in its unfolding evolution, creatively manifesting God ever more fully.

The theological tradition of the Church is therefore not simply something handed to the Church once and for all as a static set of unchanging doctrines to be gradually elucidated. It is a living tradition. It is not primarily passing down doctrines or ideas, but passing down a life: the life of Christ.

This casts the development of doctrine in a new light. It can no longer be seen as a kind of passive and objective intellectual progress, but must be seen as a creative and constructive enterprise. It is the Word taking flesh still, within a new historical, intellectual, and spiritual context.

In that case, we must demand for theology to be continually updated and renewed. It is not sufficient to learn and teach the faith in terms of the philosophical and theological language of past ages. The Word was first incarnate in 1st century Palestine; it must be made incarnate for us too, here and now in the world of today. Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, we too must receive the Word interiorly within ourselves, and provide it with our flesh to be His flesh. The Son of God is also the son of Mary. He must be conceived within us and born of us too.

As with the inerrancy of scripture, this forces us to adjust our idea of the infallibility of sacred tradition and Church teaching. There is no fixed meaning for such infallibility to grasp onto as a fixed ultimate truth. The doctrines of past generations must not be simply rejected — that would be to reject the living tradition — but they also must not be made into lifeless idols that cannot be reinterpreted anew, and brought into dialogue with ourselves and our world. As Pope Francis put it, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

There is therefore not only the possibility but the necessity of ongoing reinterpretation. To reinterpret the faith is not to be unfaithful to what has been handed down to us, but just the opposite: it is faithfully and prayerfully receiving and integrated the faith that has been handed down, incorporating it most fully into our minds and our lives.

And I would add that this must be more than just intellectual. This act of interpreting and taking hold of the Word of God for ourselves must be a matter of our entire lives. The incarnation was not, and is not, a matter of abstractions and words, but of God’s active love, mercy, grace, life, and power. The Word became flesh: we shouldn’t try to make the flesh back into words.

A Christian Philosophy of Language?

For the word of God is living and active (Hebrews 4:12)

To close, I would like to try turning the question around. Rather than applying an idea of language to Christianity, what if we applied Christianity to our idea of language?

The first thing is that words are creative. In Genesis 1:3 we read, ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Words do not merely or even primarily describe reality, but in at least some cases actively create it. We see this in more mundane cases such as the creation or application of laws, or telling someone we love or hate them. Our words are not passive things which have a mere logical correspondence relation with the world, mapping it and not acting on it. No, our words act upon the world and especially on other people, and this is how they gain their meaning.

The next thing to note is that words may bind us. One of the most important uses of words in the Bible is the covenant, an agreement by which God and humanity are bound to one another. In this way, words transform how we relate to one another. It is for this reason that the word of God is said to endure forever (Is 40:8). It is not concerned with inerrancy in the modern conception so much as with God’s unfailing faithfulness. It endures forever because God is faithful.

And if we look to the incarnation of the Word, we might get further interesting ideas concerning the nature of words. For example, we might say that to utter words always involves a certain degree of vulnerability, placing oneself into the hands of others who may accept or reject (or even crucify) you. We might say the communication always involves a kind of “condescension”, taking flesh in the likeness of those you are trying to communicate with so that they might receive you. And we might say that there is always an element of kenosis, self-emptying, in all genuine communication, as we pour ourselves out in our words and place ourselves into the hands of others to know and to judge.

Whatever a Christian philosophy of language would look like, I think it is safe to say that it would not be one of sterile and passive words.

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“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good And Evil’

King Solomon

When I was about 4 years old I was read the story of King Solomon’s dream, in which God tells Solomon to request something of him, and Solomon asks for wisdom.1 That struck me as brilliant. He did not ask for longevity or wealth or power, he asked for wisdom, so that he could know what’s good and bad, and pursue what’s good effectively. Wisdom is a faculty that directs what we do with all our other faculties, making all the rest more profitable and effective. I decided there and then that I wanted to be wise like Solomon, and began regularly praying God to give me wisdom. When I later read that Solomon was called a “philosopher”, and that the word meant a “lover of wisdom”, I was instantly sold. I wanted to be the person who saw the world most clearly, who could answer its deepest riddles and solve its biggest problems.

That is maybe my “philosophy origins story”. Although I think my love affair with philosophy may have been inevitable, given my nature. That inclination to stepping back and analysing the problem on another level of abstraction runs deep in me, and maybe it just found something to latch onto when I read about Solomon.

Mathematics

I was also a naturally mathematical mind. When I was in year 1 at school, I remember my sister (in year 2) explaining negative numbers to me for the first time, just after she had been taught them at school. I was fascinated by the idea, and sat for a while at the top of the stairs (a regular habit for me), trying to figure out what would happen if we tried multiplying two negative numbers together. Somehow, I came to the conclusion that they would produce a positive number!

I think a lot of my relationalist philosophy has roots in my love of mathematics. From the start I was always fascinated by the patterns and relations within and between things, and how they allowed the same thing to be seen and comprehended in multiple different ways. That’s the heart of my philosophy, and in my opinion it is also the heart of mathematics.

For a while this love of mathematics informed my philosophy by leading me to a pretty serious platonism, especially mathematical platonism, but not limited to that. Mathematics was, I believed, the surest, truest, and most real knowledge and reality that there is. Since then my views have shifted away from platonic realms (or at least any naïve ideas of them), but the idea that the world is essentially made of relations and patterns, and therefore essentially mathematical (in this sense), has remained and even deepened.

“Become as little children”

I also remember as a child, reading in the gospels where Jesus says that we must “become as little children” in order to enter the kingdom of heaven2. This immediately resonated with me too, and I took it to heart, resolving to never grow up. It was all top obvious to me that Jesus was right, and that the free and playful spirit of childhood was the highest wisdom and perfection. Nietzsche later expressed the idea beautifully:

“The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

Did I succeed in not growing up? Perhaps somewhat. Truth be told, I’m not a very responsible adult. Although that’s probably not what Jesus meant. But I am still a playful soul, and often tend to think of life and the whole world as a kind of play. It is, I believe, a great self-creating game we are all part of and co-creating, making it up as we go. And when I was still a Christian and a Platonist, I saw God’s act of creation as an act of play, creating the world for its own sake, for the sheer fun of it. After all, what other reason could a perfect God who has it all have for doing anything?

Fear, Avoidance, Procrastination

But I should also admit that I have a strong tendency to fear and paralysis. I may honestly be one of the most indecisive people in the world. I am a master of avoiding decisions, until the decision stops being a decision at all and is made for me. It’s a very serious problem in my life, and I’m trying to work on it.

This is quite possibly tied to my love of philosophy itself. When faced with the uncertainty of life, it is deeply tempting to try to first retreat to concepts and abstractions, hoping to thereby find clarity. And to be fair, this does work in many cases. Often it can give some additional clarity and perspective, and can help with making decisions.

But it also has the potential to become a kind of endless procrastination, always trying to look deeper for concrete answers that do not exist. It may be tempting to think (and embarrassingly, I have at times literally thought this) that if only I could figure out the right philosophy, if only I could make sense of the world and my life, living would be easy. The truth, I believe, is that we have to learn how to live by going out and actually living. Which is extremely tough for me.

This may be a large part of why I tend towards views which emphasise the ambiguity of reality and the requirement to make choices and that we must create the answers we seek. This is part of why I love the existentialists, virtue ethics, and Daoism. Accepting that there aren’t always pre-existing ultimate answers offers freedom to stop agonising and take action. At a certain point, you have to stop theorising and start living.

Is it not true, then?

Does this mean that I think my philosophy is not true then? Is it mere “cope”? Is it just a product of my own psychology, and not a reflection of reason or truth. No, not at all.

I genuinely think that I have made a good case for all of my positions. My reasoning may not be disinterested (why would we investigate what we’re not interested in?), but that doesn’t automatically make it bad. All philosophy is necessarily a product of the psychologies of those who produced it, based on their predispositions and interests. It’s inescapable. Even the desire for a “disinterested” account is a product of our own desires and psychologies. The cynicism of the cynics and the scepticism of the sceptics are no less motivated than the romanticism of the romantics.

And further, the idea that we must be disinterested in our search for truth relies on a certain notion of truth. Perhaps if we take truth as an abstract correspondence to a state of affairs that exists in complete independence from ourselves, this might make sense. But I do not accept that this is truth as we actually know it, or ever could know it. As I argued in this post, I believe truth is created in our dialogue with the world, our ongoing actual back-and-forth correspondence and engagement with the world. It is not some abstract property of sentences, but is our deepening lived participation in the world. It is our actively integrating ourselves into the world and the world into ourselves.

Truth is not disinterested. The only way to truly be disinterested is to be dead, and truth is not a dead thing.

Confession

So, is my philosophy my personality writ large? Is it ultimately a confession? Yes. But it is not just me imposing my self upon the world. My philosophy is a part of my ongoing dialogue with the world. It is not some static abstract thing separate from myself, but is me engaging with the world, mentally and physically, and being transformed in the process.

That is the point of confession. To speak the truth concerning yourself and your own life, and so be transformed and liberated.

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But before I offer my solution, allow me to try to state the problem as clearly and forcefully as I can.

The Subjective Hard Problem

The subjective hard problem is the question of how it is that our subjective first-person experience of reality arises from the objective third-person nature of reality itself. How do we get from the kind of neural activity a neuroscientist might describe to the first-person experience we all know so intimately? How do we get from the objective view of the brain surgeon to the first-person experience of the patient undergoing the brain surgery?1

The difficulty in explaining the problem is that there is a temptation to shift to thinking of experiences in third-person terms. We can for example think of an organism’s experience as certain kinds of neural activity or information processing that allows the organism to interact with the world in certain ways. And considering that the information processing is structured in a certain way, and with certain epistemic limitations, it would necessarily be limited and subject-relative. Isn’t this enough to explain the “first-person” nature of our experiences?

The trouble with the explanation is that we have subtly changed the topic, speaking instead about certain third-person phenomena in place of the first-person experience that we were meant to explain. It is true that information processing must be relative, but why should that information processing be or produce first-person experience? Why should it not be just the information processing that we see from the third-person perspective?

To make the distinction clearer, it is helpful to use the idea of the philosophical zombie: a perfect physical copy of yourself, down to the subatomic level, who nonetheless has no first-person experience at all. Every objective physical fact about you is true for your zombie, but there are no facts about the zombie’s subjective experience at all.

Now, one good complaint about p-zombies is that they would imply consciousness is epiphenomenal (that is, it has no causal effects upon the physical world), which goes against our general belief that we respond causally to our experiences all the time (for example, when speaking about them), and poses problems for how our consciousness evolved. It might also be argued that p-zombies are begging the question by assuming that consciousness is non-functional and non-physical. I think these are both very good objections, but I also think that we still need an explanation for why we can’t have p-zombies. Why is it that the physical copy would necessarily have subjective experience?

Even if we say that the neural activity “simply is” the subjective experience, we have not explained anything. By what principle can we move from one to the other? How can they be the same thing?

As a crude analogy, consider Clark Kent and Superman. It is not enough to say that Clark Kent “simply is” Superman: Clark is from Kansas, Superman is from Krypton; Clark is short-sighted, Superman has X-Ray vision; Clark wears his underwear under his clothes (I assume?), Superman wears his above his clothes. We need to see Clark taking his glasses off, doing his hair, and putting on the suit. We need to catch glimpses of Clark using his powers when he thinks no one is looking. We need to discover the baby spaceship in a Kansas shed. We need to be shown how they are the same, despite being obviously so different. “Simply is” explains nothing.

Another way of thinking about the problem is that our minds seem to be a “world” of their own. We each have our own subjective world, and we talk about things being “within” our minds much like how things are “within” the universe itself. How is it that the world produces all these subjective worlds within itself? Why should a world with brains be a world with more worlds, and not just a world with brains?

Note that these problems do not strictly rely upon physicalism. Even if we were, as a matter of objective fact, immaterial souls in an immaterial universe, we would still have no bridge from these objective facts of our existence as souls to our subjective experiences. To say that having first-person experience “simply is” what it is to be a soul fails for exactly the same reason that saying neural activity “simply is” experience. The equivalence has been asserted, not explained.

The Hard Problem’s Big Assumption

The hard problem relies on a background assumption so widely held, most do not even realise it is there. This is that there exists a single, third-person, objective reality, a “reality-in-itself”, existing intrinsically and independently, which is what’s “really real”.

To begin with, this reality-in-itself is taken as being a third-person physical account, in terms of atoms and neurons and the like. Then, in response to the hard problem, it is common to propose adding some special substance such as “qualia” or “souls” to our idea of ultimate reality. As I noted above, I do not believe this actually solves the subjective hard problem, since it still remains unclear how we are to move from the objective entities of this new ontology to our subjective experiences.

This is the idea that there is a single absolutely correct description of the universe, with a single true ontology, and without any limitations of perspective (it is a “view from nowhere” or a “God’s eye view”). It is a world which is at base absolute and non-relational, in which what exists “simply exists”.

We might for example believe that trees do not objectively exist, but the atoms that make them up do. Or we might believe that the trees truly and substantially exist, while the atoms that make them up only have a “potential” or “virtual” existence2. Or perhaps only the universe as a single entity exists, and all division is illusory and unreal. Or perhaps reality-in-itself is the unknowable Kantian noumena. While there’s argument about what reality-in-itself is like and how it is rightly divided, it is generally taken for granted that there is a fact of the matter, even if we could never truly know it.

As intuitive as this idea might be to us, I believe it is wrong. First of all, what does it mean to say something is “really real”? What difference does it make whether chairs are “real” or just “atoms arranged chair-wise”? If it makes no difference (which it doesn’t), what work is the word “real” actually doing here, besides attempting to police our ways of thinking and speaking?

Our common use of the word “real” is much more pragmatic: a thing is real if it makes a difference. A chair is real if you can sit on it and unreal if you cannot. The value of an item is real if you can actually sell it for so much. A body of water is real if your camels can drink from it and you can wash your feet in it.

By contrast, the metaphysical sense of “really real” seems practically defined by its uselessness. Reality-in-itself is defined precisely in contrast to “useful fictions” and “mere appearances”, which are even at times rejected as unreal because they are so useful and knowable! At the extreme, this leads us to something like Kant’s “noumena”, the “thing-in-itself” that is so real it is perfectly unknowable and irrelevant.

The Alternative: Radical Relationalism

The alternative I am putting forward is what I call “radical relationalism”. There is no non-relational existence. No reality-in-itself. No view from nowhere. No absolute ontology or fundamental reality (not even one consisting of relations — even relations are entirely relational). What there are are things existing entirely in relation to one another. To be is to be in relation. There is no “thing-in-itself”, there is only the “thing-in-relation”. As the immortal words of Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “Whát I dó is me: for that I came.”

This gives us a non-foundationalist and pluralist view of reality. There is no one absolutely true or definitive metaphysics or ontology. But many different (and conflicting) ontologies may simultaneously be true. We do not need to say whether chairs “really” exist or not.

In that case, even the physical account of reality is not reality-in-itself, but is reality relative to the epistemic frameworks of our physical sciences. That does not mean that it is false, but only that it is not some ultimate exhaustive metaphysical truth. Atoms really exist — we can detect and manipulate them and see how they interact with the world. Similarly chairs exist, animals exist, laws exist, ideas exist, and so on. We know these things exist because they exist in relation to us. We can detect them, study them, interact with them etc.

To be clear, this is also not to say that everything is relative to our minds. For one thing, our minds are not fundamental and exist in relation to the world too, like everything else. But also, things exist not only in relation to ourselves, but to each and every other thing that exists too. The Sun, for example, exists in its relations to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the other planets, as well as to Earth and its strange creatures.

You might be feeling some resistance because this is admittedly a radical metaphysical thesis. But I would point out that the idea of reality-in-itself is an equally radical metaphysical thesis, and (in my opinion) completely unjustified. What’s “really real” is empirically unknowable and seemingly not even well defined. But the world-in-relation is knowable precisely because it is in relation.

The world-in-relation is this world we actually know and engage with. It is the world available to us in both our daily lives and in our scientific investigations. If there is a “real” world behind it, we’re not part of it.

How This Solves The Subjective Hard Problem

Radical relationalism pulls the rug out from under the hard problem by rejecting its hidden assumption of a single “really real” description of the world, from which we must somehow derive our subjective experiences. The physical description of the world is one truthful lens, but a lens nonetheless.

As a result, we can consider multiple different relational accounts of the world to be equally real. We can consider the world relative to atoms. We can consider the world relative to cats. We can consider the world relative to trade. We can consider the world relative to our concepts of the nation state. Each of these “carve up” the world in different ways, giving different “worlds”, and yet all of them are real and are describing the same world.

These examples are relative to general schemas or “universals”, but we can also speak about how things exist in relation to particular individuals. We might for example consider the motion of the Moon relative to the position of the Earth. The Moon’s position relative to the Earth is as real as its position relative to the Sun or to the centre of the galaxy or to the fixed stars. The only position that’s not real is its “absolute” position, devoid of any reference point. Or as another example, consider a little boy calling a certain woman “mummy”. He is referring to the woman as she exists in relation to himself, within his own relational ontology. To him, she simply is mummy — that is not an accidental property of her, that is what she is to him, how she exists to him, and him to her.

There is not only a world-in-relation-to our conceptual categories such as physics, biology, economics etc, we can also speak about world-in-relation-to each particular thing. For each thing, there is a world-in-relation-to that thing, consisting of all the things in relation to that thing, as they relate to it. This is not a separate world, but another equally real description or “carving up” of the one world we share.

We might for example say that for an electron being buffeted by various forces, its world consists of those forces acting upon it, directing its course. For a single-celled organism, its world consists of its various senses and its interpretation of them, that inform its reactions to the world.

For more complex organisms the picture gets much more complex, since they can relate to the world in vastly more complex and varied ways. Animal senses grow more complex and have to be integrated with one another, as well as with concepts such as “food”, “danger”, “mother”. They also develop more ways of responding to the world, both internally through more sophisticated internal processing, and externally through increasingly sophisticated behavioural responses. The world-in-relation-to such animals is therefore much more interesting and complex. Then as animals evolve memory and imagination and advanced cognition they integrate and relate to the world through these too, including relating to themselves, giving rise to an ever more complex relational world. These determine the world-in-relation-to the animal, its structure, its ontology, its categories.

This world-in-relation-to the animal is mediated by its sensory, neural, and conceptual apparatus, as well as by various aspects of the external world. For example, light mediates our relations to visible objects, which is then further mediated by our eyes and nervous systems. This mediation is typically successful in relating the world beyond our skulls to us, although this mediation does introduce the possibility for errors and even hallucinations. The world-in-relation-to us may therefore include some entities which only exist in relation to ourselves, such as hallucinations or imaginary friends.

It is this world-in-relation-to the animal that is its subjective first-person experience of the world. It is not a separate world or a special non-physical substance. It is the world itself, as it exists in relation to the creature.3

We do not need to explain experience as something added to the world. It is not something other than the world, nor a separate inner world. It is the world-in-relation-to us. We do not need to explain some second layer of reality, because there is none. Although this goes against certain dualist intuitions, it also surprisingly validates our deeper direct realist intuitions4, that what we are experiencing really is the external world. It is not the “world-in-itself”, but it is the real world.

It also allows us to resolutely reject epiphenomenalism. Our experience is anything but epiphenomenal, but is itself our receiving the world, interpreting it, and responding to it. Our experiences inform our decisions and actions, just as they intuitively appear to.

This view also allows us to now respond to challenge posed by the zombie problem. If there were a perfect physical copy of myself in a zombie world, he would exist in all the same relations as I exist in, and therefore there would be exactly the same world-in-relation-to him as the world-in-relation-to myself. Therefore, he would have exactly the same first-person subjective experience as I have.

What the zombie argument is really doing is imposing a rule that we must limit ourselves to one particular point of view, one particular ontology (i.e. the third-person physical point of view), and not imagine the world-in-relation-to the zombie, the world from their point of view. It is mistaking two different relational perspectives on the same reality — the third-person and the first-person — for two completely separate realities. Neither is reality-in-itself. Both are relational. Both are real. The zombie problem relies on privileging one perspective as absolutely, intrinsically real.

You might be wondering, how is it that the animal exists together as a unified whole to be the subject of these relations? Why is the brain not just neurons or atoms? To that my answer is that this question is again supposing there is a single definitive “really real” ontology, to which all real entities must belong. But radical relationalism rejects this. There is no difference between things acting and relating as if they are one entity, and things really being one entity. To the extent that things function as one, they are one. And to the extent that things relate to the world as one, the world is related to those things as one too.

You might also be wondering if this doesn’t amount to a kind of panpsychism. This is in my opinion largely just a semantic question. All things do have a world-in-relation-to them. But I do not think we should attribute “consciousness” to simple entities such as rocks or electrons, since they lack the kinds of reflection and representation that characterise “consciousness” in more advanced creatures, as well as our typical use of the word. We might speak of them as “experiencing” forces5, but there is no sign that they experience themselves experiencing them.

Let’s now turn our attention to the Qualitative Hard Problem.

How This Solves The Qualitative Hard Problem

The qualitative hard problem asks, how is it that the “phenomenal” or “qualitative” properties that make up our experiences exist? How is it, for example, that the “redness of red” exists? How do we get from the colourless, painless world of fundamental physics to the colourful, painful, beautiful world of our subjective experiences?

The answer is that these qualities are part of the relative ontology/categories of the world-in-relation-to us. They are real ways in which the world exists in relation to ourselves. They are not non-causal “intrinsic properties”, as is sometimes supposed, but are instead complex relational properties, existing in how they move us, what they mean to us.

Pain, for example, is not to be understood as an arbitrary quale which we just so happen to dislike and avoid6. It is relational, tied up with our awareness of bodily damage, with it grabbing our attention, with our learning to avoid this situation in future, with our desire for the pain to stop, etc etc. These are all relations that make pain what it is, and if we subtract them all, what is left? That does not mean that pain does not exist. It exists, like everything else, as a complex of relations.

This does not mean that these qualities are unreal or illusory. They are not intrinsic properties, and they are not fundamental. But then, nothing is. Everything is relational. It is not a second class kind of existence. They are real aspects of the world-in-relation-to ourselves. They are real. Just not in the way some have imagined.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My radical relationalist solution to the hard problem of consciousness. It is, in my opinion, deeply satisfying and rather beautiful. For the small price of the (useless) notion of a “world-in-itself”, we get a far richer vision of a relational universe. A universe in which consciousness is real and plays a real causal role. A universe in which the world we experience is the real world, not a mere image. A universe which is not limited to one point of view or one definitive description, but gives itself up to a multiplicity of views. A universe which is full of colour and beauty. A universe which is empirically and rationally knowable. A universe which exists in intimate relation to ourselves.

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The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

— Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld, ‘The Evolution Of Physics’

The Hard Problem

The hard problem of consciousness is famously difficult, as even its name tells us. For this post, I am NOT going to offer any solution.1 Instead, I want to break down the question, showing that what is usually treated as one problem is in fact two separate hard problems. Once we see the problem as two problems we can then better understand certain points of contention in philosophy of mind, better evaluate different positions, and better understand the landscape of possible positions that are available to us.

Before I present the two problems, here is how David Chalmers put the hard problem in his seminal paper, ‘Facing Up To The Hard Problem Of Consciousness’:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

The problems I want to distinguish are already implicitly within this paragraph, but they are not explicitly presented as being separate problems, as I believe they should be.

The Two Problems

The first problem is, how is there subjective first-person experience at all? Why should any physical organism have its own subjective “point of view”, rather than being merely the information processing system described by an objective third-person account? How does subjective experience arise from objective reality? I will call this “the Subjective Hard Problem”.

The second problem is, how is it that the strange qualitative properties that make up our experiences exist? What is the nature of the felt quality of redness, emotions, pains, orgasms, etc? How could our quantitative physical reality give rise to such experiential “qualia”? I will call this “the Qualitative Hard Problem”.

According to the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a similar conceptual division of consciousness into two components has been already made (although apparently not of the hard problem):

Uriah Kriegel (2009; see also Levine 2001) offers a helpful conceptual division of consciousness into two components. Starting with the standard understanding of conscious states as states there is something it’s like for the organism to be in, Kriegel notes that we can either focus on the fact that something appears for the organism or we can focus on what it is that appears, the something it’s like. Focusing on the former, we find that subjects are aware of their conscious states in a distinctive way. Kriegel labels this feature the subjective component of consciousness. Focusing on the latter we find the experienced character of consciousness—the “redness of red” or the painfulness of pain— often termed “qualia” or “phenomenal character” in the literature (compare Crane 2000). Kriegel labels this the qualitative component of consciousness.2

Are These Separate Problems?

These are clearly related problems, but I think they are essentially separate issues, which may potentially require completely separate solutions.

For example, suppose we found that all of our supposedly experiential qualities are in fact objective qualities, present in a mind-independent way in the external world. There are, it turns out, no secondary qualities which exist only in our perception, but only primary qualities. If this were established beyond reasonable doubt then the Qualitative Hard Problem would be solved, and yet the Subjective Hard Problem would remain untouched. OK, the world is colourful; but why would that imply that anyone would experience it? Why shouldn’t there just be colourful p-zombies? We still have no bridge from objectivity to subjectivity.

Similarly, we might imagine establishing some principle for exactly when a physical entity has a subjective point of view in which the world appears to it. Perhaps we discover that everything that exists has its own “point of view”. But this does not answer the question of where the qualities that make up our experiences come from. We could conceivably have had subjective experience but only of the world as it objectively exists. We might, for example, conceivably have had experience of the firings of the neurons in our brains as neurons in the brain.

Of course, it may well be that in finding the solution to one problem, we get the solution to the other for free. They are not unrelated problems so this wouldn’t be a complete shock. Still, by viewing them separately we gain conceptual clarity and perhaps some traction on the problems, and are better able to understand the debate and the status of different positions.

Rethinking The Debate And The Conceptual Landscape

For example, a common challenge to illusionism is to ask “who is having the illusion?” Armed now with the distinction between the Subjective and Qualitative Hard Problems, we can say that this question is concerned with the Subjective Hard Problem, while illusionism is primarily concerned with the Qualitative Hard Problem. Illusionism concerning qualia does not strictly entail any position on the Subjective Hard Problem3.

For any given position, we should ask what response it offers to the Subjective Hard Problem and what response to the Qualitative Hard Problem. In this way can better understand, map out, and evaluate different theories of consciousness.

For both problems, we might roughly divide the possible positions into “illusory, emergent, fundamental, and undefined”, giving 16 possible combinations of positions by which we might categorise different theories, or 9 if we exclude the undefined options.

We might for example place certain idealists as [illusory, fundamental], taking our subjectivity as illusory, since according to them we are not actually separate conscious selves, but part of the one reality that is “mind at large”, even while they take qualia as fundamental reality. A panqualityist might be placed as [emergent, fundamental], taking the existence of subjects with a first-person point of view as emergent while taking qualia as fundamental.

We might also use this framework to imagine combinations which have not been entertained so far, such as [fundamental, illusory], a position in which subjectivity is fundamental and qualia is illusory, or [illusory, emergent], in which subjectivity is an illusion and qualia is emergent. Exploring these possibilities might give us new ideas, new possibilities of thought, and new insights into the nature of the problems.

And most importantly, if we can focus our conceptual efforts on more clearly articulated and broken down problems, we might hope to make better progress. Who knows, perhaps they won’t prove so “hard” after all?

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What do you think?

• Am I right that the hard problem is better thought of as two separate problems?

• Does this help clarify things?

• What is YOUR position regarding the two problems?

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Relations

A relation is an aspect of some thing A, that depends for its existence and intelligibility on the existence, or at least the possibility, of some other thing that is not A.

For example, for one person to be a son requires the existence of someone else who is their parent. Or for London to be north of Paris, requires the existence of Paris. Or for the number 4 to be double 2, requires the existence of the number 2. They are aspects of these things that cannot be without the existence of something else.

You might argue that these are not truly “aspects” of the son or of London or of the number 4, but merely facts about them, but I do not think this is a meaningful distinction. These facts characterise their existence, making them what they are.

For each relation, it can also be viewed as an aspect of the other entity instead, although this will be as a kind of “inverse” relation. So the inverse of “child” is “parent”, the inverse of “north” is “south”, and the inverse of “double” is “half”. For some relations, the inverse will be the relation itself, for example “identical”, “different”, “equal”, “unequal”, “near”, “far”, etc.

One thing that this definition makes explicit is that different things may be involved in each other’s existence. We conceptualize things as separate from one another, but there are real aspects of a thing’s being which depend entirely on those things which we supposed to be external to it. Not-A is revealed to be essential to A.

Intrinsic Existence

With this definition of relations in place, we can now ask what it would mean for some thing or property to be completely non-relational, “intrinsic”, or “categorical”. This would require it to be capable of meaningfully existing absolutely independently of anything other than itself.

Are there any such properties or things? I do not think so.

We can start by imagining some thing and trying to abstract away all of its relations in order to see what is left behind at the end. Let’s take the sun as our example, and imagine that it ceased to shine, ceased to exert gravitational pull, ceased to act as an obstacle to anything that would try to pass through it, etc. Would the sun still exist in any meaningful sense?

Actually, we can go further and remove from it any location in space and time, since these too place it into spatial and temporal relations with the rest of the world. Would the sun still exist?

It would not exist from our point of view, but perhaps we might think that it would still exist to itself. We might for example imagine that the sun has been removed from all its relations to our universe and transferred to a separate universe of its own, in which there is nothing else. In this universe, the sun might go on shining, exerting gravitational influence over its own parts, etc, and so we might fairly say it still exists. But this means we haven’t truly removed all of its relations, but only the external relations. What if we removed all internal relations as well, so that its atoms cease to collide, cease to exert any forces on each other, cease to share a common space-time continuum, etc? What is left?

Now we might say that the atoms would go on existing even in this case, because it remains true that if they shared space with other atoms, collided with one another, etc, then they would have certain effects. But this is just relying on potential relations. What remains if we abstract away even potential relations? What is left to be conceived of at all?

Mereological Simples

One possible response is that “mereological simples”, those most basic constituent entities which have no constituent parts and together constitute all that exists, would remain. But notice that this description still involves a number of relations. They are defined in terms of “constituting” and “parts” and “basic”. Even the use of a plural in the description involves the relation of multiplicity. But what is left for us to conceive of when we strip the concept of these relations too? We are just left with the words “entity” and “exists”. But what exactly is that we are saying exists? To say that something exists without any specification at all of what it means for it to exist is entirely empty. It is like asserting the truth of a sentence which makes no claim.

Even in the term “something” there is an implicit relation — it is “some” thing, placing it in relation to “all” things. Even the property of being a “separate entity” is relational, since separation is a relation too!

In fact, even the property of being “unrelated” is a relation! A being “unrelated” to B depends on B, and is therefore a relation. If we understand “unrelated” here as being an absolute negation of all relations, this would be a contradiction. However, in our common use of the word we actually mean that the two things are unrelated in some more limited sense, and so there is no real contradiction in our everyday use of the word.

Consciousness

Perhaps the most plausible candidate for intrinsic properties is consciousness. This idea is at the heart of the panpsychism espoused by philosophers such as and , following the idea of Bertrand Russell that, while physics may tell us how things externally relate to one another, our qualitative phenomenal consciousness is the intrinsic nature of the world itself. This makes some sense, since the only intrinsic nature we could ever hope to know is by definition our own, and our experience of being ourselves is, well, experience!

My problem with this is that consciousness seems to me to be quintessentially relational. My experiences of the world present the world in relation to myself, and that experience of the world then affects my choices and actions on the world. Experience is intimately tied up with the world’s affecting me and my affecting the world. I do not experience my experiences as things with non-relational intrinsic natures, but as my existing in an ongoing and dynamic relation to the world.

I think this fits well with the qualitative nature of our experiences too, such as the fact that colour as we experience it is not merely a quality of the light we are perceiving, but is that light in relation to our physiology, neurology, evolutionary and personal histories, etc.

As an example of what I mean, our experience of the colour purple cannot be produced by any single wavelength of light, but is instead the product of a combination of long- and short-wavelength light activating the red cones and blue cones in our eyes, while there is a lack of medium frequency light activating the green cones. Whereas other colours we perceive may be generated by a single wavelength, this is not possible for purple. There are no purple photons. We are experiencing the light not as “an intrinsic property”, but as it is in relation to ourselves, right down to the physiology of our eyes.

That does not mean we must completely discard of Russell’s idea, however. Rather than taking our experience as the intrinsic non-relational nature of the world, if we recognise experience itself as relational we can instead see our own being as essentially relational.

Things And Relations

I therefore believe that everything that exists is entirely relational, with no intrinsically existing entities and no intrinsic non-relational properties. This does not mean that there are no things, only relations, but it does mean that there are no “fundamental” things which exist independently. Things are entirely dependent on, and constituted by, their relations. To be a thing is to be in relation.

But in my above definition, I defined relations in terms of things. Does this mean that things must be more fundamental than relations after all? In one sense, yes: relations are dependent on things. But those things are also dependent on their relations. We could say either that both are more fundamental than the other, or that neither are fundamental.

What this means is that relations, too, lack the kind of intrinsic self-existence we mistakenly ascribe to things. Relations exist relationally. They are not “fundamental” or “absolute” reality, any more than things are. To suppose that they are would be slipping into the same mistake with a new vocabulary.

Both things and relations are our conceptions of the world, relying on our conceptual act of dividing the world into separate entities. And because they are our conceptions, they exist essentially in relation to ourselves. The world does not come to us pre-divided, pre-labelled, pre-conceptualized. It only becomes a world of things and relations by our conceptualizing it as such.

This means that a thoroughgoing relationalism does not, in the end, give us an idea of fundamental reality as relational, but throws out the entire notion of fundamental reality! There is no bottom layer of reality. We have not found that reality is relational when viewed from a “view from nowhere”, where we see reality as it is “in itself”: we have found that there is no view from nowhere, no “reality in itself”, for us to speak of.

This brings us to a kind of non-foundationalism and non-dualism. There is no ground, no ultimate true conceptualization, no ultimate separation, and no ultimate unity either.

This is not to say that nothing exists! Things exist — just look around you, see the world as it exists in relation to yourself. It is just to say that our concept of an ultimate reality lying somewhere behind the world was confused to begin with.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.

These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery -
The gateway of the manifold secrets.

(Tao Te Ching 1, translated by D.C. Lau)

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Thanks to for prompting me to think about this stuff properly in the comments to my post last week!

A few months back I read George Berkeley’s book, ‘Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous’, in which he argues for his theory of idealism. I consider myself a physicalist, but I see Berkeley as (in a strange way) a kindred spirit. Berkeley saw himself as a defender of common sense, realism, and science, against the looming threat of scepticism. We might even count him as a proto-positivist. This throws a wrench for the all too common perception of idealism as unscientific, and physicalism as the only appropriate metaphysics for a respectable scientist.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. This is a late review (months after reading, centuries after publishing!) and mini commentary on that book. I read this edition from Penguin, and page numbers refer to the kindle version.

Overview

Firstly, here is a very brief overview of Berkeley’s theory:

1. There is no mind-independent stuff we call “matter”.

2. All that exists are the “ideas”/”sense contents” we directly perceive and the minds in which such ideas exist.

(NB: Berkeley uses “ideas” differently to modern usage, so that they refer more to percepts such as colours, sounds, feelings etc, rather than concepts such as “house”, “seven”, or “government”. For clarity, I will use “percept” in its place for the most of this essay, to help avoid confusion.)

3. The things we call “real” go on existing even when no creature is perceiving them because they are still being perceived in the mind of God. Our percepts by which we know the world are placed directly into our minds by the mind of God.

4. What we think of as one thing is typically a mere association between many different percepts that we repeatedly see coming together as a “package deal”, thanks to God’s providence in arranging things to come together in an orderly and harmonious and intelligible way for us.

For example, if we both hear and see a car coming, rather than thinking these are two percepts belonging to one unobservable entity we call a “car”, for Berkeley the car just is these percepts, along with all the other percepts that come along systematically with them.

Skepticism

You might be wondering, what motivated him to come up with such an absurd theory? The answer is that Berkeley wanted to combat skepticism and atheism. We can see this in the original full title and subtitle:

THREE DIALOGUES BETWEEN HYLAS AND PHILONOUS IN OPPOSITION TO SCEPTICS AND ATHEISTS

The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity: in opposition to sceptics and atheists. Also, to open a method for rendering the sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.

But wait, isn’t Berkeley himself a radical skeptic? Isn’t he the one denying the external world even exists? But this is to misunderstand him. He is not denying that the external world which we perceive exists, but rather is affirming that the things we perceive are exactly what really exist. They do not exist mind-independently, but that’s only a problem if we assume that’s what “real” existence consists in.

We perceive the world as full of colours, sounds, shapes, smells, etc. Many philosophers would deny that these things really exist, saying that they are only in the mind and not in reality. Some make a distinction between “primary qualities” such as shape and size, which are supposed to exist mind-independently, and “secondary qualities” such as flavour and colour, which are supposed to exist only in the mind. This distinction goes back to Descartes and Locke, and is still prevalent today. Others, such as Kant, don’t even accept the objective reality of primary qualities, seeing even these as merely “phenomenal”, and not revealing anything about the “noumena” or “thing-in-itself”.

The basic problem is that it seems to be impossible to really know the supposed mind-independent nature of reality at all. After all, as soon as we are knowing it, we are knowing it as it appears to our minds. We seem to be entirely cut off from reality, trapped in our own mental representations. There is (supposedly) a mind-independent reality out there, but we have no way to see it as it truly is.

In response to this dire scepticism (which Philonous, the idealist protagonist, has led Hylas, the materialist foil, into in their first dialogue), Philonous/Berkeley responds:

You indeed said, the reality of sensible things consisted in an absolute existence out of the minds of spirits, or distinct from their being perceived. And according to this notion of reality, you are obliged to deny sensible things any real existence: that is, according to your own definition, you profess yourself a sceptic. But I neither said nor thought the reality of sensible things was to be defined after that manner. To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it. (p159)

Where our materialist, Hylas, has been forced to concede that “matter” is a mysterious and unknowable substance we cannot access, Philonous proposes that our “ideas” (or percepts) are what really exist, and that these exist necessarily within a mind, and hence their existence apart from ourselves must be within the mind of God.

Berkeley is rejecting the unintelligible idea of “absolute existence” which is the cause of so much confusion and vain speculations. Such a notion defines reality as inaccessible to ourselves. Instead, he is embracing a radical form of direct realism: our percepts are reality itself, directly apprehended by us. They are still in a sense “external”, since we do not ourselves produce or control them by our own minds, and they exist not only in our own minds but also in the mind of God. But they are not some independent and inaccessible reality “out there”.

Science And Illusions

This comes through clearly in his defence of science and his views concerning illusions:

Is not that opposition to all science whatsoever, that frenzy of the ancient and modern sceptics, built on the same foundation? Or can you produce so much as one argument against the reality of corporeal things, or in behalf of that avowed utter ignorance of their natures, which does not suppose their reality to consist in an external absolute existence? Upon this supposition indeed, the objections from the change of colours in a pigeon’s neck, or the appearances of a broken oar in the water, must be allowed to have weight. But those and the like objections vanish, if we do not maintain the being of absolute external originals, but place the reality of things in ideas, fleeting indeed, and changeable; however not changed at random, but according to the fixed order of nature. For herein consists that constancy and truth of things, which secures all the concerns of life, and distinguishes that which is real from the irregular visions of the fancy. (p204)

For Berkeley, both our sciences and our general knowledge of the world come from our better understanding the structure, relations, and order, not of a mind-independent world out there, but of our experiences. Supposed “illusions” such as the oat or the pigeon’s neck are therefore not truly illusory at all, but are further valid and true aspects of reality. We might compare this with the following anecdote about Wittgenstein:

“Tell me,” Wittgenstein asked a friend, “why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” Wittgenstein replied, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

What would it have looked like if the oar were straight and submerged in water? What would it look like if the pigeon’s neck lacked those pigments?

His view of science as finding the connections within the world as we experience it puts Berkeley surprisingly close to figures such as A.J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap from the logical positivist tradition, who followed Berkeley in supposing that our statements must always be capable of being “reduced”, not to physics, but to patterns of sense-data. In the introduction to my Penguin edition we read:

Phenomenalism talks of ‘sense data’ where Berkeley talks of ideas, and according to the best–known and most influential recent version of it, the Linguistic Phenomenalism of A. J. Ayer (b.1910), ‘propositions which are ordinarily expressed by sentences which refer to material things could also be expressed by sentences which referred exclusively to sense–data’.28 Such a view, which was very popular in the middle years of this century, has its beginning ultimately in Mill’s version of Berkeley, but one of its more immediate ancestors was the Logical Positivist, Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), whose Logical Construction of the World (1928) systematically attempts to show how all meaningful statements can be reduced to statements about sense data. Another is the philosophical physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), according to whom all things (including Berkeleian minds) are combinations of sensations. Mach’s positivist account of natural philosophy as the study of uniformities and regularities amongst our sensations shows another aspect of the lasting influence of Berkeley. (p28)

Of course, these figures did not follow Berkeley in seeing the subsistence of these ideas as being in the mind of God. Nevertheless, they were following in Berkeley’s empiricist footsteps, understanding science in terms of the reality of experience rather than an inaccessible metaphysical reality entirely divorced from our experience of it.

We might even see developments in recent physics such as Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics as fitting remarkably well with a (roughly) Berkeleyan view. In the development of his theories, Einstein set aside any metaphysical notions of time and space, and instead took the “operationalised” view, that time is “what the clock measures” and distance is a matter of setting out a series of identical measuring rods. Absolute time and space are set aside, and in their place we look to time and space as we actually measure them.

Similarly in the development of quantum mechanics, the focus was on looking at the experimental observations and finding how to describe them mathematically. Only afterwards was there discussion of what the equations “really represent”. And perhaps this is a misguided question. Perhaps there is no deeper reality than the mathematical relations. What would make any such interpretation of the equations a more “true” representation of what is going on than the equations themselves?

My Thoughts

I’ve had a soft spot for Berkeley for a long time, ever since I came up with his argument for God’s existence as a teen and discovered he had already made it. Having at last read him myself, I think he’s brilliant. But, I’m not fully on board with him.

A lot of his arguments for the mental nature of our perceptions rests on their relativity. For example, the same water can feel either hot or cold to our own two hands, if one hand is coming from a bowl of colder water and the other from a bowl of colder water. The relativity of such “secondary qualities” is widely accepted, but he turns the same argument against our experience of shape and size too, noting how the size of a thing depends upon our distance from it, and how to a creature far smaller than ourselves, such as a mite, what to us is tiny must to it be gargantuan1. He similarly speculates that other creatures may well perceive different colours than we do, seeing relative to their different physiology and biological needs2.

For me, this picks out how our experience of the world is always relational. We always see the world in relation to ourselves, our position, our physiology, our conceptual schemes. I agree with Berkeley in arguing from this against the notion of some “absolute existence”, and in taking our experiences as real contact with the world, not mere representations on a mental screen.

But in seeing our experiences as relative, I still maintain the existence of the other end of that relation. The things of the world exist relationally, including in their relation to us in how we experience them. But I do not believe we should flatten them into being our experiences alone. To me, Berkeley seems to still be maintaining the idea of experience as representations on a screen. He is flattening reality onto that screen, making it 2-dimensional, whereas I would extend experience out into the world to make it 3-dimensional.

This comes out a bit more when we see how “atomic” his idea of perception is. For example, he speaks of seeing a statue of Julius Caesar and argues that we only see “some colours and figures with a certain symmetry and composition of the whole”. I disagree with this. Our experience is already presented to us conceptualized with things like objects and faces, as can be seen in our own phenomenology and demonstrated through various optical illusions. Put another way, there are already concepts within our percepts.

This does mean I can’t fully embrace Berkeley’s response to illusions, that appearances are always true even if we might misinterpret them. For me, our perception comes already laden with interpretations and content, and hence may be mistaken. For example, if I mistake a pile of clothes in the dark for a person’s face and body, that is a case of mistaken perception.

How can I maintain direct realism then? My answer is that I think our perception of the world is causally tied to the workings of the world in such a way that we cannot draw a non-arbitrary line between the world and our perceptions of it. There is no point in the causal story where there’s a switch from “world” to “representation”. That does not mean that there is no process by which we perceive the world, or that the process is infallible. It means that we perceive the world through those processes, coming into real contact with the world through them. For example, I perceive the world through my glasses, but that does not mean that my glasses are an obstruction to my direct perception, or that I only see a representation of the world formed by my glasses. Even though my glasses may get dirt or damaged, distorting what I see, does not mean that I am only seeing a representation of the world that they create.

I also think Berkeley and the positivists go too far with supposing we could reduce science to statements concerning our percepts. To actually do so in practice would be horribly complicated, and this simply does not fit how scientists in general actually work. Instead, scientists frequently utilise theoretical entities which we cannot directly perceive, such as atoms and fields of force. They do devise ways for us to indirectly perceive them, but our concepts of them are not reducible to our indirect perceptions. More central to their conception is how we imagine them to work, such as the (now rejected) “plum pudding” model of the atom. In general, we begin from the theoretical entities and progress to how we might detect and measure them, and not the other way around. Still, I think they are correct that for any such entities we should be able to at least indirectly perceive them, via their causal influences on the world in which we live.

What about God? Berkeley’s argument was that God must exist in order to explain why it is that things appear to go on existing even when no one is perceiving them. J.S. Mill adapted Berkeley in order to avoid this, instead saying that objects are “permanent possibilities of sensation”. I think this is a move in the correct direction, and I would push further and replace “sensation” with “relation”. For me, a thing’s existence is a matter of its relations, both its actual relations and its potential relations. Although if we want to consider all such potential relations as being “relations to potentiality”, and if we were to consider God as “pure potentiality”, then we might come full circle to something remarkably close to Berkeley’s position. (I argued for roughly this in this post of mine from a little while back.)

Conclusion

Every philosophy sounds stupid in the 20 second summary, and Berkeley often doesn’t even get that. “Esse est percipi” — “to be is to be perceived” — is too often given as if this were the entirety of his view. But when you dig under the surface and engage properly with his arguments, he is quite simply brilliant. Am I fully onboard with everything he says? No. But is he full of insight, even for materialists with no belief in God? Absolutely.

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“What is truth?” - Pontius Pilate

Truth is often understood to be when our beliefs “match up” with an external reality. I propose it is something else.

I propose that truth is our deepening participation in the world, our responding to the world and the world responding to us, conforming ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves. It is not the self mirroring the other, it is breaking down the very barriers between self and other, so that each becomes part of the other’s life, and together form a unified whole.

I am tentatively calling this the “participatory theory of truth” (although I’m open to suggestions).

Correspondence

Let’s begin with the correspondence theory of truth. The classic expression of this goes back to Aristotle:

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics 1011b25)

Now I think this is absolutely true, but it is also rather trivial and unhelpful. It takes for granted that we already know what it means for things to be (or not to be) as they are said to be. It does give us a clue by linking truth to being, but we are still left in the dark as to how our words are meant to connect to the world.1

A more modern statement of the correspondence theory is:

x is true iff x corresponds to some fact;
x is false iff x does not correspond to any fact.2

But this is just as uninformative as before. What does it mean for a statement to “correspond” to the facts? And for that matter, what does “facts” mean, without making reference to truth?

One approach is to take the correspondence relation as an abstract “isomorphism” relation, where the structure of the proposition’s content is equivalent to the structure of the proposition’s target in the world. This is OK, but it relies on us taking an imagined “God’s eye view” or “view from nowhere” from which the structure of both beliefs and reality can be compared. But we are limited to our own view. Such a correspondence relation is not something concrete, but a purely abstract relation which we cannot access.

This relates to the “evolutionary argument against naturalism”, which argues that belief in evolution and naturalism is self-defeating, since evolution is unlikely to produce beings with reliable cognitive faculties, capable of reliably knowing truth. Evolution (the argument goes) would produce creatures which are adapted to their natural environments, not to knowledge of the truth. Of course, it makes sense to think we might need supernatural help to give us access to truth, if we conceive of truth as an abstract relation in a God’s-eye-view.

The Participatory Theory of Truth

My proposal is that we set aside the idea of correspondence as an abstract relation between propositions and a thoroughly separate world. Instead, we should think about the actual correspondence that occurs, the ongoing back-and-forth interactions through which we know the world and live within it. Truth is not an abstract relationship, but is our deepening participation in the world, learning how to conform ourselves to the world, and how to conform the world to ourselves also, and in doing so forming a greater whole.

This idea is already implicit in the etymology of “correspondence”: com “together, with (each other)” + respondere “to answer”3. The correspondence which establishes truth is us actually responding to the world to the world and world responding to us.

We see this clearly in the case of knowing another person. We know other persons through our ongoing interactions and dialogue with them. We learn to recognise when they are feeling angry or stressed or upset, and how to respond to help them. When you really know someone, you don’t just have an “accurate mental model” of their thoughts and feelings, you know “just what to say and do”. And in this knowledge, we become genuine extensions of one another. In the case of romantic partnerships this can take the form of an intimately shared life, where both parties share their information, thoughts, capacities, goals, dreams, and desires. Their knowledge is not an abstraction, it is one life shared by two people.

Of course, such knowledge may also be used against a person. We might for example know how to manipulate someone we know well, since we know what they value and fear. This creates a certain kind of unity between persons as well, with the one being manipulated becoming an extension of the will of the manipulator, but it also creates a profound disunity and disharmony, since the victim is not acting freely, and is likely to resent being manipulated and resist where possible.

We can also see this back and forth dynamic in the practice and progress of the sciences. We learn how to correspond with nature through our ongoing correspondence with nature. We observe nature and seek for its signs, and through our experiments we see how we can get nature to respond to us. We are seeking to understand nature so that we can conform ourselves to it and it to ourselves.

It is sometimes suggested that through science we learn to speak “the language of nature”, but it is more correct to say that we are co-creating that language with nature itself. We learn to “listen” to nature, yes, but we also learn how to “speak” to it, how to intervene in certain ways to get certain kinds of responses. We pose it “questions” in the form of our experiments. It is a back and forth dialogue in which both sides play an active role, and in which the language is created through the dialogue, not prior to it. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers wrote concerning this:

Modern science is based on the discovery of a new and specific form of communication with nature—that is, on the conviction that nature responds to experimental interrogation. How can we define more precisely the experimental dialogue? Experimentation does not mean merely the faithful observation of facts as they occur, nor the mere search for empirical connections between phenomena, but presupposes a systematic interaction between theoretical concepts and observation.

In hundreds of different ways scientists have expressed their amazement when, on determining the right question, they discover that they can see how the puzzle fits together. In this sense, science is like a two-partner game in which we have to guess the behavior of a reality unrelated to our beliefs, our ambitions, or our hopes. Nature cannot be forced to say anything we want it to. Scientific investigation is not a monologue. It is precisely the risk involved that makes this game exciting. ( ‘Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature’, p4)

Seen in this way, science is not primarily about finding propositions or even constructing models, it’s about engaging with the world. This is what makes science so intoxicating. It is about coming into contact with reality at a deeper level. For example, when we look through a telescope and see Saturn’s rings, we see ourselves as part of a wider and more wonderful universe, full of new possibilities and worlds we might one day explore. It is an encounter with our world. The world in which we live.

Returning to the evolutionary argument against naturalism, we can now see evolution itself as an example of this process of ongoing dialogue with nature. Each species comes face to face with its environment and is forced to adapt to it, while also shaping and transforming its environment to fit itself. There is an evolutionary “dialogue”, with each species affecting the others and their environments and adapting and responding to each other. There is thus a real correspondence, a mutual adaptation, between bees and flowers, trees and soil, antelopes and lions. By their mutual adaptation they form unified ecosystems. They are brought into that unity and mutual participation that is truth.

Evolution is therefore no obstacle to true knowledge at all. Far from “hiding the truth from our eyes”4, it gave us eyes! Eyes which can really see, even if not from a God’s eye point of view.

In all of this, we get a picture of truth not as static representations in mind or in words, but as living organisms participating in the world, engaging with it in an ongoing and ever deepening dialogue. It is not an abstract relation with a world that is fundamentally separate from ourselves, but is the closing of that separation, the creation of unity and harmony between self and other.

Some Thoughts

There are a few interesting points about this that I want to draw attention to before I close.

Firstly, this gives us a different way to think about the progress made by scientific theories. Rather than truth being a binary, where a theory is strictly either true or false, we can judge theories by how much they enable our participation in the world. The Ptolemaic cosmology was less true than the Copernican model, which in turn was less true than the Keplerian5. But neither the Ptolemaic nor Copernican model was simply false -- they allowed us a deeper knowledge and understanding and engagement with the heavens. Knowledge which itself paved the way for future developments in our understanding.

Secondly, there is an interesting intersection between this idea of truth as unity and the idea of morality as unity that I argued for in a previous post. There I argued that morality is the constitutive unifying principle that forms us into a unified society, just as health is the constitutive unifying principle that forms our constituent cells into a unified organism. Morality is then a particular case of truth: it is us conforming ourselves to one another, thus deepening our unity and allowing for greater mutual participation in each other’s lives as a society.

And thirdly, this offers the possibility of an interesting interpretation of the idea of God’s omniscience. Rather than imagining God as possessing a list of all the true propositions, omniscience becomes a function of God’s immanence and intimacy with creation, his relation to it as its creator, and his omnipotence. God’s omniscience is then not a statement of how smart God is, but a statement of how close God is to his creation, how creation is God extending and expressing himself. In fact it is deeper still: we could say that God is omniscient because God is love6. I am no longer religious myself, but I wanted to put this idea out there for any who wish to pick it up. Similarly, perhaps this understanding of truth could shed some light on Jesus’s claim, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”7

Closing

I will leave you with an image that I think expresses the idea better than any further explanation of mine could give, taken from the Book of Chuang Tzu:

Cook Ting was butchering an ox for Lord Wen Hui. Every movement of his hand, every shrug of his shoulder, every step of his feet, every thrust of his knee, every sound of the sundering flesh and the swoosh of the descending knife, were all in perfect accord, like the Mulberry Grove Dance or the rhythm of the Ching-shou.

‘Ah, how excellent!’ said Lord Wen Hui. ‘How has your skill become so superb?’

Cook Ting put down his knife and said, ‘What your servant loves best is the Tao, which is better than any art. When I started to cut up oxen, what I saw was just a complete ox. After three years, I had learnt not to see the ox as whole. Now I practise with my mind, not with my eyes. I ignore my sense and follow my spirit. I see the natural lines and my knife slides through the great hollows, follows the great cavities, using that which is already there to my advantage. Thus, I miss the great sinews and even more so, the great bones. A good cook changes his knife annually, because he slices. An ordinary cook has to change his knife every month, because he hacks. Now this knife of mine I have been using for nineteen years, and it has cut thousands of oxen. However, its blade is as sharp as if it had just been sharpened. Between the joints there are spaces, and the blade of a knife has no real thickness. If you put what has no thickness into spaces such as these, there is plenty of room, certainly enough for the knife to work through. However, when I come to a difficult part and can see that it will be difficult, I take care and pay due regard. I look carefully and I move with caution. Then, very gently, I move the knife until there is a parting and the flesh falls apart like a lump of earth falling to the ground. I stand with the knife in my hand looking around and then, with an air of satisfaction, I wipe the knife and put it away.’

‘Splendid!’ said Lord Wen Hui. ‘I have heard what cook Ting has to say and from his words I have learned how to live life fully.’

(The Book of Chuang Tzu, ch3)

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By “physicalism”, I mean that everything that exists could (in principle) be given a comprehensive description in terms of physics, such that everything there is to know about the thing could (in principle) be worked out from the physical description.

Let me unpack this a bit.

What is “physics”?

What do I mean by “physics” here? I believe that all of reality is relational structure, and I would say that “physics” represents the most simple microstructural aspects of that structure. And I would add that these microstructural aspects lack the characteristic features of minds, such as intentionality. This can be neatly expressed using the language of Aristotle’s four causes. Physics, in a very broad sense, is looking at the world in terms of its simplest material causes (the parts that constitute a thing1) and efficient causes (how a thing was brought about by the past), while excluding formal causes (the unified whole that is constituted by the parts) and final causes (how a thing is directed towards the future).

This broad definition of physics avoids Hempel’s dilemma. Hempel was concerned that if physicalism is defined in terms of our present physics it is basically wrong, since we can be confident that our current theories, like previous theories, are wrong in ways we do not yet know. But if it is defined in terms of an ideal future “physics”, we have no idea what might be called “physics” in the future, and so physicalism turns out to be meaningless. By defining physics in terms of material and efficient causes and the exclusion of formal and final causes we keep what I believe is the core idea of physicalism, without overcommitting to present theories and without leaving physicalism unspecified until a later date.

Physics Isn’t The Only True Description

This is not to say that the physical description — the description in terms of the simplest microstructural elements — is what is “real” while the complex macrostructures they constitute are somehow “unreal”. Just because we could give a comprehensive description of the world in terms of its smallest parts, does not mean that that is the only true description.

In fact we could (in principle) use holistic concepts of larger and more complex things to provide a much more efficient and equally complete description of the universe. The key is to think in terms of information theory and data compression. For example, if we imagine that Laplace’s demon wanted to efficiently write down the positions and velocities of every atom in the universe, he might decide to first note the position and velocity of the centre of mass for each galaxy, star, planet, moon etc, and then record the positions and velocities of each atom that makes up the macro-entity relative to its centre of mass. As another example, if he wanted to record the location and element of every atom in a human body, he could significantly compress this information by e.g. recording the position of the skeleton and then using a shorter code to record “calcium” for the atoms within the skeleton.

These descriptions would be no less accurate than recording the same information without utilising the information about the macrostructural elements, but they would be vastly more efficient.

This is related to the point Daniel Dennett made in his famous paper ‘Real Patterns’, although he treated real patterns more as lossy pragmatic tools. He missed the fact that real patterns (including imperfect patterns) could (in principle) be used to provide a perfect compressed description of a system in its entirety. Of course, the “in principle” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but the same phrase is working even harder when we imagine Laplace’s demon working without real patterns!

The same point can be applied to intentionality and final causes. If you know what an animal intends to do then the behaviour of the atoms that compose the animal become far more predictable, and predictability is exactly what allows for compression and efficiency2. Therefore if Laplace’s demon wanted to more efficiently describe or predict the atoms within and around an animal over a period of time, it would do well to make us of information concerning the animal’s evolutionary design and its present intentions.

Since there can be equally complete descriptions of reality which make use of other categories of thought, including formal and final causes, why should we think the physical description alone is uniquely “true” or “real” or “ultimate”?

Physics Isn’t “Fundamental Reality”

Similarly, I would not say that the physical is “fundamental” or that everything besides the stuff of fundamental physics “depends on” the physical. The physical is a description of reality, not reality itself, nor even the sole description of it.3 To say, for example, that the biological depends upon the physical is nonsense. If we are talking about descriptions, it is possible to describe a thing’s biology with minimal understanding of physics. And if we are talking about the reality being described, the physical and the biological are the same thing. To say that the cat depends upon its material constitution is to say that the cat depends upon the cat. There is no cat over and above its material constituents, and there are no material constituents over and above the cat. They are the exact same thing, being described in different ways.

This idea of dependence is often put using the concept of “supervenience”. Phenomenon A is said to “supervene on” phenomenon B if and only if any change in phenomenon B necessarily requires a change in phenomenon A. I would agree that everything supervenes on the physical. But the physical description also supervenes on the compressed complete descriptions I described in the section above, where information about planets, bones, and intentions is utilised. The apparent asymmetry comes from treating our complex concepts as lossy compressions, where information is lost by generalizing over multiple cases, rather than recognising their potential for lossless compression, where the specific details are all encoded except more efficiently. Of course the lossless compression is, strictly speaking, imaginary and impractical, but then the uncompressed complete micro-description is even more imaginary and impractical!

There is also a tendency among many to suppose that the parts of a thing are more “real” or “fundamental” than the whole. After all, remove the parts and the whole disappears, right? But this is confusing our different conceptualizations for different metaphysical entities that are mysteriously related to one another. The whole is not something in addition to its parts, it is a conceptualization of the parts in their relational structure. This is why we can remove and replace all the parts while the whole remains, as with the ship of Theseus. Likewise, the part is not something in addition to the whole, it is a conceptualization of some particular aspect of the same thing. They are different conceptualizations of the same reality.

The idea that the are distinct “levels” of reality is confusing our conceptualizations for the thing being conceptualized. And that includes the conceptualizations we call “physics”. There is no “one true description” of reality — the same reality may be conceptualized in multiple equally true ways. To put it more bluntly, reality does not come pre-labelled.

This also means that the causal story given by physics is not the only valid causal story. We can explain why I am typing these words by saying it is caused by physical processes in my brain, or by saying it is caused by my intention to communicate this message. These are not rival causal theories, because my intentions are not something over and above the physical processes, and the physical processes are not something over and above my intentions. They are two ways of conceptualizing the same causal structure.

What Is “Everything There Is To Know”?

In my definition of physicalism at the start I wrote, “everything there is to know about the thing could (in principle) be worked out from the physical description.” This requires some elaboration.

Let’s take the example of ink marks on a piece of paper. Can the meaning of these marks be “worked out” from the physical description alone? Could it be worked out from a physical description of the entire universe?

If we imagine Laplace’s demon with full knowledge of all facts of physics but no other knowledge, then the answer is no. In fact, the demon would not even understand the question. If confined to physics alone, the demon would lack the concepts to understand what is meant by “What is the meaning of these marks?”, and so there would be something to know that could not be worked out from the physical description alone.

But if we suppose the demon had full knowledge of all facts of physics plus the required knowledge to understand the question, then the answer is yes. Even if the marks were in a language the demon did not know, it could work out what is meant by looking at how the ink marks relate to other ink marks and how they are related to the people’s behaviours.

The physical description only implicitly contains all facts there are to be known, such that they could (in principle) be worked out, but only by those who already possess the relevant conceptual frame. The physical description does not contain or subsume alternative descriptive or interpretive frames, even though it implicitly fixes all facts within those frames.

Conclusion

So that is what I mean by “physicalism”. It is not the claim that “fundamental reality” is physical, or that the “true ontology” is that used by physicists, or that all of reality is made of a “physical substance”. It is the much more modest idea that reality can, in principle, be comprehensively described in terms of its parts and its past. Even while it can also be validly and comprehensively described in other ways too.

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In this post I will explain how I reinvented the Gini coefficient from first principles, and what it reveals to us about the measure we’ve been using for over a century.

1. Background: The Gini Coefficient And Why I Wanted An Alternative
2. The Core Idea: Money-Distance
3. Producing A Formula
4. This is mathematically the same as the Gini coefficient!
5. An intuitive explanation for why this matches the Lorenz curve calculation
6. Advantages of viewing the Gini coefficient in this way
7. Conclusion

1. Background: The Gini Coefficient And Why I Wanted An Alternative

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of the level of income or wealth inequality within a society. I first learnt about it while studying A-Level economics, where I found it unsatisfyingly abstract and unintuitive to think about. Here is how Wikipedia explains it:

The Gini coefficient is usually defined mathematically based on the Lorenz curve, which plots the proportion of the total income of the population (y-axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x of the population (see diagram). The line at 45 degrees thus represents perfect equality of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of the area that lies between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve (marked A in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality (marked A and B in the diagram); i.e., G = A/(A + B). (link)

And if you don’t like that, it also offers the following alternative:

An alternative approach is to define the Gini coefficient as half of the relative mean absolute difference, which is equivalent to the definition based on the Lorenz curve. The mean absolute difference is the average absolute difference of all pairs of items of the population, and the relative mean absolute difference is the mean absolute difference divided by the average

Do you see what I mean? The Gini coefficient seems not to be a measure of an economy, but a measure of a graph of an economy. It’s a mathematical abstraction which is difficult to cash out in terms of a more intuitive idea of what it more concretely means.

I had also heard that the Gini coefficient is overly sensitive to values around the middle of the population, which from a glance at the Lorenz curve would appear to be true.

So I thought I would try my hand at coming up with a better alternative.

2. The Core Idea: Money-Distance

We begin by imagining everyone in the country is taken and lined up in order from poorest to richest.

Next we introduce the concept of “money-distance”: the money-distance for a transfer of wealth is the amount of money x the number of people it moves down1 the line (the “distance”). For example, if the richest person gives £5 to the 4th richest person, the money has moved 3 persons down the line, so the money-distance = £5 x 3 = 15d£.

Now suppose everyone in line agreed that they would transfer their money between themselves until they arrived at a state of perfect equality, with no one having any more or less than anyone else. The question is, how much work would that require, moving the money down the line to achieve that? What would be the total money-distance?

Once we have worked out the total money-distance to equality, we can then consider how unequal a situation this represents by taking it as a proportion of total money-distance to equality of a perfectly unequal society, where one person owns absolutely all of the wealth and everyone else owns nothing.

The key idea, then, is to understand inequality in terms of how much money would need to be redistributed and how “far” it would need to be moved, in order to reach equality. Then to consider this relative to the worst case scenario for a population of that size and with the same total wealth.

3. Producing A Formula

(WARNING: This section and the next are pretty maths-heavy. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip to section 5 where I give an intuitive explanation of why this approach is equivalent to the standard approach using the Lorenz curve.)

I hope you’ve found the above idea much more intuitive than talk of Lorenz curves. But now we need to translate this intuitive picture into maths so that economists can actually work with it.

To begin we assign everyone a rank i based on their place in the line, with 1 being the poorest and (for a population of size N) N being the richest. Then the money-distance for any transfer will the rank of the giver minus the rank of the receiver times by the amount of money being transferred.

To make matters simpler, we will assign one person in the line as the middleman who all the transfers will go through, and call their rank “m”. (We will see in a moment that our choice of middleman makes no difference to the calculations.)

At perfect equality everyone will have the mean wealth, μ. We can therefore have everyone with more than μ transfer the difference to the middleman, and for everyone with less than μ the middleman will transfer the difference to them. But for those below μ, rather than thinking of it as a positive transfer from the middleman, we can instead equivalently calculate it as a negative transfer to the middleman. This makes the amount negative, but since the direction is also reversed the money-distance is the same. As a result, whether the person is above μ or below it, the money-distance of their transfer to/from the middleman for each person at rank I is given by

where (i-m) gives us the distance, and (y_i - μ) gives us the amount of the transfer.

The total money-distance is therefore given by

Expanding the brackets we get

The m terms then cancel out (since the sum of y_i’s will give the total, as will the sum of N instances of the mean, μ), showing that our choice of middleman does not affect the calculations:

We now have the total money-distance to equality. Now to find it for a perfectly unequal society so that we can relativise it.

In a perfectly unequal society, we have

Then,

Then using the formula for the N-1st triangle number —

We get,

We can now normalise the actual total money-distance as a proportion of the total money-distance for the perfectly unequal case, and so get,

4. This is mathematically the same as the Gini coefficient!

Once I had my formula, I thought I would test it out in a few simple scenarios, and compare it against the Gini coefficient for each case. But in doing so I found that it was the same!2

This is especially surprising because the equation I gave above doesn’t seem to be used anywhere in the literature that I was able to find.3 There are however multiple different formulas used for it, and it is relatively simple to show that the above is equal to the following formula for the Gini coefficient found by Guillermina Jasso and Angus Deaton:

Starting from my equation above:

Using the formula for the Nth triangle number —

— we get:

Which is equal to the Jasso-Deaton formula above times by -1. Why is it times by -1? It is because they did their ranking with 1 as the richest, whereas I made 1 the poorest. If I had used the same ranking then my derivation above would have begun with (m-i) in place of (i-m), meaning it is effectively multiplying the whole formula by -1.

5. An intuitive explanation for why this matches the Lorenz curve calculation

OK, so they have the same formula. But this does not really explain why the Gini coefficient as understood via the Lorenz curve should also be understandable in terms of the money-distance. To see why this is, we need to look a little closer at the Lorenz curve.

Normally, a Lorenz curve looks like this:

On the x-axis is the cumulative share of the population, ordered from poorest to richest, and on the y-axis is the cumulative share of total wealth/income. So it may for example show that the poorest 20% of the population has 5% of the total wealth/income. The straight line at 45 degrees labelled the “line of equality” shows the Lorenz curve of a hypothetical perfectly equal society, where everyone has the same and so the lowest x% of the population will always have exactly x% of the total wealth/income.

But this nice smooth graph is an approximation. Because there are only a finite number of people, it should not actually be a continuous graph. For a very small population for example, it may look like this:

The top edge of the blue region represents the Lorenz curve — the cumulative wealth of the cumulative population ordered by wealth — for the society, while the top edge of the red region (increasing by the same amount at each step) represents the Lorenz curve for a hypothetical perfectly equal society. The area of the red region as a proportion of the area of the blue region plus the red region gives the Gini coefficient.4

The wealth/income of each individual is not represented by the height of the graph, but by the increase to the cumulative total once they are included in the cumulative population. For example, if for the cumulative population of the poorest 5 people the cumulative wealth is £30, and for the poorest 6 people it is £38, the sixth person’s individual wealth is £8, represented by the size of the “step” shown on the graph.

Now because the Lorenz curve treats both population and wealth/income cumulatively, it responds to wealth transfers in a particular way. Suppose for example that the richest person transferred a small amount to the fourth richest person.

Because the Lorenz curve is cumulative, this will not lower the value at the point of the richest person: the same money will just be counted earlier on the curve. It will however increase the value at the fourth richest person, and also for the third and second richest. This doesn’t mean it actually benefits the third or second richest, or that the transfer does not cost the richest person. It’s just that because of the cumulative nature of the diagram, the change is registered across all three. That means that the amount the area of the red region decreases by equals the amount of money transferred multiplied by how many ranks down it is transferred. That is, it is decreased by the money-distance!

Since the change in area for a transfer is equivalent to its money-distance, the area between the Lorenz curve and the perfect equality line represents the total money-distance to equality!

6. Advantages of viewing the Gini coefficient in this way

Firstly, I think the equation I gave above is very elegant and satisfying. Of course the equation is separable from the interpretation, but I think it’s a very neat equation.

As for the interpretation itself, it is much more concrete and intuitive. Rather than having to think about a graph, or a complex formula taking the average of all differences, we can think about how much money has to travel how far down the line. The money-distance is still an abstraction, but it’s a much more tangible abstraction, with more obvious relevance to the problem.

It also helps to illustrate how the measure works. For example, when framed in this way it becomes clear that the Gini coefficient will be changed by the same amount if the same amount of money is transferred down the same difference in rank, regardless of how high the start/end points are. A rich person giving £5 to the next richest person will have the same impact as a middle class person doing the same.5

It also offers the concept of money-distance which could be used independently of total Gini calculations. The calculation for a single transfer, so long as the gap between ranks can be estimated, is very simple to perform, and reveals the effect of the transfer on inequality.

7. Conclusion

I failed to create a better alternative to the Gini coefficient. In fact, I failed to create even a worse alternative! And yet this failure brought me a deeper understanding of the Gini coefficient and how we can think about inequality.

There’s a saying that we “don’t need to reinvent the wheel”. In one sense I set out to reinvent the wheel and failed — there was a perfectly good inequality measure already, and I didn’t create a better one. But in another sense I reinvented exactly that wheel, and in reinventing it gained new insight and modified my conception of it.

‘An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.’

—Max Planck

In this post, I want to discuss the role of differing generational perspectives and conflict within scientific progress, particularly in times of scientific crises and revolutions1, and will argue that these differing perspectives are in fact vital to scientific progress.

In my recent post, ‘Should Bayesians Believe In Magic’, I argued that we apply a kind of “conservative” epistemology in the face of new evidence, attempting to accommodate the new evidence in whatever way minimises damage to our present web of beliefs. We must find some way to account for the new evidence, but we actively search for interpretations and further evidence that will allow us to preserve our beliefs as far as possible.

As I argued, this is not merely stubbornness or irrationality, but is in fact a responsible truth-seeking behaviour. Our present credences/beliefs are our measure of what is true, and so they are the final (and only) judge by which to determine how we should update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. We seek truth by looking to maximise unity in two dimensions: internally within our beliefs at any moment, seeking to avoid ambiguity and contradictions, and temporally between our previous and new beliefs, seeking to preserve as much of our previous knowledge as possible while accommodating the new information with it.2

This makes further sense when we consider how our present beliefs represent the results of a very large body of previous evidence. When we attempt to integrate the new evidence with our prior beliefs, we are attempting to integrate all of our evidence, both old and new, into a coherent picture. It would do no good to dispose of a theory which accounts for 90% of the evidence in favour of a theory which only accounts for the latest 10%.

But what counts as “the evidence”, and how do we quantify it? Is it a small and insignificant anomaly that will probably be dealt with by some minor adjustment, or is it a gaping hole in the theory requiring a whole new paradigm? Do we require reform or revolution? I think the answer to this will depend on who we are asking.

We might attempt to quantify the evidence in terms of how surprising/improbable it was. From a Bayesian perspective, the more surprising a piece of evidence is the more evidential weight it has. But what is surprising to one person may be entirely unsurprising to another. Particularly, what is an earth shattering discovery for one generation of scientists becomes page 17 of a dusty textbook for another generation. It is not forgotten, but it does come to be taken for granted.

As an example, Newton’s theory that the motions of the moon and planets is due to the same force that causes apples to fall to the ground was an extraordinary breakthrough, uniting the laws that govern the heavens and the earth! It completely changed our conception of reality. But to us, this is something we learn in primary school. We are so accustomed to the idea that the same laws apply in space and on earth, that we might feel we would have discovered it ourselves, if only we were alive in Newton’s day.

As a result, I believe that older scientists will tend to have a much greater appreciation for the successes of their theories. The apparent outstanding anomalies may fairly appear to them as mere blips which will soon be resolved within the confines of the existing theory, as others have before them. But as anomalies accumulate and the low-hanging fruit of success for the theory gets taken, the anomalies will grow to dominate the scientific experience of the newer generations of scientists. Where the previous generation had the experience of rapid discoveries in a progressive research program3, the new generation has the experience of growing frustration as the program appears to be hitting its wall.

For the generation that enjoyed the theory’s heyday, they had direct experience of the explanatory, predictive, and technological power of the theory. But for the new generation, the theory’s successes are second-hand ideas, transmitted via textbooks and reproduced experiments, but without the original freshness and force of science on the cutting edge.

As a result, the older and younger generations are likely to appraise the present state of the same theory and the same experimental findings very differently. Neither needs to be unaware of any piece of evidence, old or new. But because of their different historical experiences as scientists working on the theory, they are likely to view its successes and difficulties very differently.

Does this mean the older generation are underestimating the significance of the anomalies, or that the new generation are underestimation the significance of the theory’s successes? I do not think so. There is, I believe, no perspective-independent measure of significance for a piece of evidence: it is always relative to our expectations, wider beliefs, and experiences.

But this is not a weakness. We cannot escape our perspectives in order to perceive reality from a perfectly detached “view from nowhere”. But we can instead utilise our multiple conflicting perspectives in order to form a more complete picture. We “triangulate” between different points of view, like how our two eyes provide us with the perception of depth. Knowledge does not come from finding the one correct point of view, but from the dialectical back and forth between conflicting perspectives and ideas.

The conservative perspective of the “old guard”, seeking to preserve and retain theories that have proved so successful, is necessary. It prevents us from prematurely discarding decent theories, and it sets the bar for new theories to overcome. And the revolutionary perspective, questioning and challenging received wisdom and offering new ways forward, is similarly necessary. It prevents us from remaining stuck in the dogma of the past, and allows for novel solutions and ideas.

The two generations represent two essential elements of science. The older generation, with their wisdom born of experience, represents induction. The old theory has worked so far, and we should stick with it. The younger generation, with their hunger for new and better solutions, represents imagination. The new theory may have worked OK up until now, but a better theory is possible! The old look backwards at what has been and the young look ahead to what might be.

We might say that the older generation bring their knowledge and experience and the younger bring their ignorance and imagination. It is their lack of experience that characterizes their perspective. But in being good scientists, they must think and act from their own perspectives, daring to question and challenge the received wisdom. We are each born in ignorance of the world and as we learn and engage with reality must question, challenge, and attempt to improve upon the ideas that are handed down to us.

In this way, ignorance turns out to be the driver of new knowledge. We are born in complete ignorance — a brand new perspective on the world. If we could download the mind and experience of those who came before us, we would lack the open intellectual space in which to see things anew.

The progress of science requires the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of those who have come before us, but it also requires the fresh start given in each new generation, giving us the opportunity to look at the world with fresh wonder and new eyes. Progress does not result from clinging to what we know, nor from blindly chasing after new ideas, but from the creative dialectic between the old and the new, between experience and imagination.

In science, as in life in general, aging involves the necessity of “passing the baton”. Each generation must do its part and acquire and pass on what knowledge it can, but this must then be entrusted to the next generation to take up the task anew.

“Science progresses one funeral at a time.” Yes, and one birth at a time too.

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1.

Approximately two billion years ago, living cells began to do something extraordinary: they teamed up to form larger multicellular organisms. It’s easy for us to take this for granted, but this really is incredible. They literally joined themselves together to make a single larger super-organism, as if they were Power Rangers forming a Megazord!

We might consider this event as something similar to the origins of life itself, where assorted chemical and thermodynamic processes became gradually coordinated into living, self-regulating cells, capable of operating as single unified wholes. What was many and disjointed has become one and whole, producing something new that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

These early multicellular organisms are our ancestors. It feels almost absurd to remember that we are constituted by vast numbers of separate living cells. That we are an organism made out of smaller, simpler organisms.

For these cells to live and work together as a single superorganism, they have to coordinate with each other and work for their common good. Their resources, information, and goals must be shared and distributed between the different parts for the good of the whole. If they don’t do this, it is not just bad for the organism, it will not exist. The harmonious coordination of the cells is constitutive of the multicellular organism.

Plotinus recognised this link between the unity of the whole and its existence as such, particularly in the case of living organisms:

It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity gone, neither remains: thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart and their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity.

Take plant and animal; the material form stands a unity; fallen from that into a litter of fragments, the things have lost their being; what was is no longer there; it is replaced by quite other things – as many others, precisely, as possess unity.

Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a co-ordinate unity.

(Enneads, VI.9)

The health of a body is thus not merely something which is beneficial to it, it is what constitutes the body as a body. It is its being. Without it, it is not.

In a sense this requires the individual cells to limit their own freedom and lose their individuality. They must no longer simply follow their own short term selfish interests independently of what others are doing. But in another sense there is a gain in freedom and individuality. The cell is still acting in its own best long term interests, since the whole organism will look after its parts. And while they cannot act independently, they are now free to act interdependently, opening up vast new possibilities. There is only so much a single cell can do, but as part of a body a cell could be a neuron engaging in higher thought, or a T-cell fighting infections, or a muscle cell building a house.

Of course, the good of the organism is not always what is best for the cell. For example, sometimes cells undergo “apoptosis”, a kind of “cell suicide”, in which the cell destroys itself for the good of the organism. We might say that the cell is acting out of a kind of “altruism”, identifying itself with the whole and its good with the good of the whole. It is not treating itself as simply an isolated individual, but as part of a larger organism. And in doing this it is not mistaken or irrational — it really is part of a larger organism, and so the organism’s interests really are its interests as part of the whole. Is it altruism then, or is it the recognition of a broader conception of itself?1

2.

Why am I talking about multicellular organisms? It is because I believe that the same dynamics that characterize the relationship between cells and multicellular organisms are what characterize the nature of morality, as the relationship between individuals and societies. And I do not merely mean that it is an analogy for morality, I mean that morality really is the same unifying principle as health, operating on a different scale.2

As with the evolution of multicellular life, we should not think of societies as appearing overnight. It evolved gradually with different degrees of complexity and coordination. We can see basic forms of social living in many species, from deer to tiny ants, from wolves to elephants. At the most basic level this requires social instincts such as liking the company of others, tolerating their presence, and caring for the young. And in the more advanced cases it requires more advanced instincts, such as the recognition of social hierarchy we see among elephants, apes, and wolves.

Humans take this to another level, thanks in large part to the development of language. Language enables us to share information and coordinate actions in a way that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom, and so to think and act as a unified whole with a depth and scale not found anywhere else in nature. Comparing ourselves to the body, we might think of the development of language as something like the evolution of nervous systems in early animals. Thanks to language (and technology) we can cooperate even on a global scale, across a civilization spanning billions of individuals.

But society is constituted by morality, just as the body is constituted by health. It is morality, the norms and practices that allow us to cooperate and so transcend our individual limitations, that creates societies. Where there is widespread dishonesty communication breaks down3. Or how poor property rights and widespread theft prevent economic prosperity. Morality is constitutive of society, even as the particular moral code is constructed by its society.

And as with the cells in a body, living together in a society in one way restricts our freedom as individuals, but in another way enhances it. To live in a harmonious society we must restrain our base desires, respecting each other’s rights, fulfilling our duties, and acting for the good of the whole. We cannot just do whatever we want however we want. Society must limit and constrain individuals for the good of the whole. But it also enhances our freedom, promoting our overall good and enabling us to achieve things together that we could never achieve on our own. A person living on their own on a desert island might never be told what to do, but they also cannot do a philosophy degree, or become a great chef, or form a punk band. Living together as a society allows us to explore and express our individuality far more, not less.

We also see the importance of identifying with others. It is crucial that the members of a community see themselves as part of a community, identifying themselves with that community and with each other. It is this sense of identity, belonging, and duty that hold a community together and allows its members to make sacrifices for the collective good and the good of others. They recognise themselves as part of a greater whole.

3.

It is important to note that we are not only part of one society, but are each part of multiple nested and overlapping societies and wholes. We are part of a family within an extended family within a tribe. We are part of friendship groups, schools, towns, businesses, nations, etc. Each of these societies brings with it its own moral standards that allow it to exist and to function as one. They will bring with them different obligations and degrees of duty so that, for example, you have less of a duty towards my father than you do towards your own.

In some cases these societies and standards may conflict with one another, as for example with the mafia. The mafia have their own moral code that allows them to function as a unity. There are norms of loyalty, respect, not snitching, and rules governing acceptable and unacceptable violence between rival mafias. This moral code is a large part of what makes them so dangerous and effective. But the mafia are also deeply immoral within the wider society, flaunting its rules and moral norms, exploiting people, and disrupting its harmony. A mafia is an organism of its own, but it is a parasitic organism within the wider society. The health of the parasite is the sickness of the host, and the destruction of the parasite is the health of the host.

4.

Now you might be concerned that this view would justify authoritarianism. If morality is simply the coordinative unity of a society, wouldn’t authoritarianism be not just acceptable, but perhaps even positively moral? My answer to this is that it is not a true and organic unity, in which the parts cooperate voluntarily. Consider how the cells in our bodies are not kept in line by the constant threat of violence from other cells. The violence of authoritarianism itself reveals the disunity of their society and the fact that the wills of those in power are at odds with much of the populace.

That is not to say that there is no place for force in a just and moral society. A society does need to be able to constrain and regulate its members, and especially those that would otherwise disrupt its harmony. This is similar to how the body must regulate its own cells, and even destroy cells which may, for example, have become cancerous, no longer functioning appropriately as part of the body, and threatening the wellbeing of the whole.

The point is not for there to be a mere superficial external unity, enforced by violence and fear, but for there to be a more profound kind of unity, requiring the free cooperation of its members. This will be a deeper unity, and also a much more creative unity, since violence and fear tend to suppress, while in freedom each is free to contribute their very best. This is also, I believe, a large part of why totalitarian regimes have historically failed.

5.

But what about those who are outside of the bounds of our society? What about the marginalised, the slave, the foreigner, the enemy? Have we no moral obligations to them too? We do indeed, and there are a couple ways to see why.

Firstly, we might consider the possibility of moral and social progress. I wrote above that morality is constitutive of society, and so by extending morality we extend the bounds of our society. This creates the possibility of a larger, more unified, more harmonious society. It allows us the possibility to create new friends rather than new enemies.

We might even consider the entire world to be a single moral community in embryo, with us gradually actualizing its potential unity. There is something of this idea implicit in the idea of being on “the right side of history”. That history is tending towards greater morality and harmony and respect for one another.

And secondly, we might consider morality as such, prior to any particular society. As I said above, morality is constitutive of society — it is prior to it. Even while every particular moral code will be embedded in a particular society, there is a principle of morality that is prior to them all because it is constitutive of societies as such. What is this principle of morality? It is, as Plotinus said, unity. The moral impulse, the impulse to unity, extends beyond the borders of all present societies because it is what creates all societies.

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P.S.

Here are the Power Rangers forming Megazords:

Azmorith: Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be one of the souls we’re tormenting each day?

Baphyros: Of course! Helps me get the best results, and makes it more fun. Don’t you?

A: Oh well yes of course I do that. But what I meant is, I wonder what it’s really like for them. They’re such radically different creatures to us. Maybe, for example, what we find unpleasant they actually experience as pleasant. Maybe they experience being tortured similarly to how we experience the pleasures of torturing. Who can say?

B: Well, couldn’t they say? Why don’t we ask one of them?

[pulls a head out of the boiling tar pot they’ve been stirring]

B: Do you find this pleasant?

Soul: Oh Satan no! Please, I’ll do anything for you to let me out!

[pushes his head back under]

B: Thank you, that will do.

A: Ah, but this proves nothing. If he experiences torture as pleasant, then the word “pleasant” would mean something quite different for him. Perhaps something more like what we mean by “pain”.

B: Like it’s opposite day for him, so that he’ll call pleasure pain and pain pleasure?

A: Exactly. Perhaps his experience of pain and pleasure are the opposites of what they are for us, but the words “pain” and “pleasure” mean their opposites too.

B: I suppose I can’t rule it out... But then why did he ask us to stop? Do you imagine they have the opposite meaning for “stop” too?

A: It’s possible. Perhaps he really did mean “This is very pleasant, please go on!”

B: Hm, kind of takes the fun out of the job.

A: Well don’t worry, it’s just speculation. It might not be true at all. Maybe there’s some problem with the idea we’ve missed so far.

B: Fair enough, let’s speculate on then. Suppose he really does want us to go on. Wouldn’t we be able to tell that from how they’d behave when it’s up to them whether or not they will go on being tortured? For example, if we took that soul out of the pot again and told him he could jump in again or stay out, don’t you think he would stay out?

A: That’s a good point. You know I think I read about someone trying a similar experiment once, and sure enough they did choose to stay out.

B: Well then, isn’t that clear proof that they really are suffering and not experiencing pleasure in the pot?

A: Not necessarily. What if they like what we call suffering and dislike what we call pleasure?

B: What?! How could anyone dislike pleasure? That seems like a manifest contradiction!

A: It seems absurd to me too, but then, they’re extremely different creatures to us. Perhaps they dislike the very experiences we like. A bit like how those abominable “angels” don’t like blaspheming.

B: Well hold on now. I think you may be confusing two very different things.

A: Oh?

B: We like blaspheming, and we like pleasure, but do we like them in the same sense?

A: Aren’t they both just experiences we have (or phenomenal states, if you like) that we might like or not like?

B: I don’t think so. I think that when we enjoy blaspheming, what’s happening is that it is something that we desire and when we get to do it it fulfils that desire. Hypothetically someone could not have that desire, and then they wouldn’t enjoy blasphemy. But pleasure is our experience of the desire being fulfilled itself. It is not a separate desirable thing. So to find pleasure undesirable would be to find it undesirable that our desires be fulfilled, which is contradictory.

A: Hmmm... I think I see what you are saying, but how can we be sure it really is “the experience of the desire being fulfilled itself”, as you put it? It feels to me like it’s its own separate ineffable “quale”. It’s just pleasure itself.

B: Well, I cannot argue with how it feels to you. But would you agree that we can experience our desires being fulfilled?

A: Of course.

B: And you would agree that we desire our desires to be fulfilled?

A: Well, what if we have conflicting desires, so that one desire leads us to desire that another desire not be fulfilled?

B: OK, but setting aside such cases for now. In the simple case where there are no conflicting desires, must we desire our desires to be fulfilled?

A: Yes, I suppose so.

B: If we didn’t desire them to be fulfilled in any sense, in what way could we even consider them desires?

A: I suppose we couldn’t.

B: Then I hope you’ll agree, even in cases with conflicting desires there must be conflicting desires that each desire be fulfilled. Else it seems they were not really desired after all.

A: That makes sense.

B: Well now, if we call the experience of a desire being fulfilled “pleasure”, that is clearly desirable, right?

A: But I do not grant that this is pleasure!

B: OK OK, let’s call it “spleasure” instead. Happy now?

A: I’ll allow it...

B: Well, do you agree that spleasure is desirable and that it could not be undesirable?

A: I will grant that it is desirable, since it is logically necessary to desire the fulfilment of our desires. Although what if someone formed the desire not to have any spleasure? A desire to not experience their desires being fulfilled. Perhaps some ascetic?

B: Hmm I always forget how backwards humans can be... Well, I suppose they could manage it by desiring that their desires be fulfilled without their experiencing it. For example, they might only have desires for things they cannot experience, such as desiring certain things to occur after they die.

A: But even then their desire not to experience any desires being fulfilled would itself be being fulfilled, moment by moment, while they are still living.

B: Oh so it would! Good catch. And then their experience of that desire being fulfilled would be spleasant for them.

A: But if it’s spleasant then they’ve failed to fulfil the desire, and so it would be unspleasant.

B: Yes, and if it’s unspleasant then they haven’t failed after all, so it will be spleasant again.

A: But if it’s... Ohhh it’s like the liar paradox. “This sentence is false.” It being true makes it false and being false makes it true.

B: Yes. So I suppose the desire to not experience any desires being fulfilled is similarly paradoxical. It is a desire that conflicts with itself.

A: It seems so. So then like with conflicting desires, there is still a sense in which its fulfilment must be desired, even though it is suppressed by another desire. Except in this case the suppressing desire is itself.

B: Quite right. But we’re getting off track. Where were we?

A: You were saying that “spleasure” is always desirable, and I’ll grant that it seems so.

B: Thank you, yes. Well then, what does adding another experience of a pleasure “quale” on top of this spleasure (that we get automatically) give us?

A: It gives us the experience of pleasure!

B: Now you’re just begging the question!

A: What I mean is, this additional experience that we call “pleasure” seems to better fit my phenomenology, since there are times when my desires are fulfilled (and so I must have “spleasure”) but I’m surprised to find I don’t experience any pleasure from it.

B: Could you give me an example?

A: Why, just earlier today I was hungry and decided to have some devilled eggs.

B: Oh I love devilled eggs!

A: Me too, normally. But on this occasion they brought me no pleasure at all, although I was eating them intentionally so they must have brought me “spleasure”, correct?

B: Well now, I didn’t say spleasure comes from whatever we do “intentionally”, I said it’s the experience of our “desires” being fulfilled.

A: What’s the difference? It seems to me that I always intend what I desire and desire what I intend. Is it not so for you?

B: There’s definitely an overlap between the concepts, but they are not quite the same in meaning and do not always go together. We already discussed cases of conflicting desires, and in those cases we have one of the desires without a corresponding intention, so we can have desires without corresponding intentions.

A: Fair point. But can we have intentions without desire? If not, you’ll still have to grant me that those devilled eggs must have given me your “spleasure” even though I can tell you for a fact they gave little pleasure.

B: In one sense we always desire what we do intentionally, but in another sense the two can come apart. For example, I might make the long climb up to the surface to do a little tempting of some saint, just for sport, you know?

A: I do know! Great fun. I’d go more often if it weren’t for the climb.

B: That’s exactly my point. We intentionally make the climb, and so in some sense we desire to do it, but we don’t desire it for its own sake. I certainly would not say that I desire the climb, but I am willing to do it for the sake of something else that I do desire.

A: OK, but I would have said that I really did desire those devilled eggs.

B: Would you agree that the devilled eggs were disappointing?

A: Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying. I desired them, but when I had them they were disappointing.

B: OK, and why would you say they were disappointing?

A: Because they didn’t bring me pleasure!

B: Anything else?

A: Well, they didn’t have very much flavour. Not nearly enough spice. And there weren’t enough to fill me up either.

B: And you would agree that you desired the flavour, the spice, and to be filled up, correct?

A: Of course. That and the pleasure itself.

B: Right. Well then, it seems to me that you did not really desire the eggs themselves, except as a means to achieving these other things, like how we only “desire” to make the climb for the sake of making sport up top. The fact that you did not find it pleasant is due to those other desires not being met.

A: Don’t you mean “spleasant”?

B: Well, yes but no. I think spleasure is pleasure, but I’ve been using another word for the sake of communicating with you. But do you agree with what I just said, swapping “pleasure” with “spleasure”?

A: Yes, I accept your point. I certainly wouldn’t bother with the eggs if I knew they would be so disappointing in those ways. But I wouldn’t bother if I knew I would get all those other things and no pleasure from it either. In fact I would dare say I wouldn’t bother with anything if I knew there was no pleasure to be had from it.

B: I see. In that case it seems pleasure is the only thing you really desire, and all the rest are just means to that end, just like eating the eggs or making the climb.

A: Yes, exactly. Pleasure is my only real desire, and I suspect yours too.

B: I don’t think it is. Tell me, why do you desire pleasure?

A: I don’t think there’s any answer to that question. I just do desire it. It is just desirable to me.

B: So you could hypothetically find it undesirable?

A: Yes. We’re back to the question we started with, of whether or not the humans might experience pain as pleasure and pleasure as undesirable, and we would never know.

B: So we are. You know, it seems to me that on your account pleasure is meaningless.

A: Isn’t it all meaningless?

B: No, sorry, not like that. I mean that it seems to lack any content. It’s an experience that does not tell us anything about anything. An empty symbol. It has its own character I suppose, like any symbol, but it has no meaning.

A: Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. In itself pleasure is neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable. It just is what it is. It is only desirable because we happen to desire it, and that is what it gives it its meaning/role within our minds.

B: And that same “role” could be played by any other “symbol” within the mind?

A: Exactly! That is why these human souls could, for all we know, experience pain as pleasure and pleasure as pain. Just like how different languages may use different letters for the same sounds, or different words for the same things.

B: I suppose that is one way of thinking about it, but it seems very strange to me. Shouldn’t we think of the experience as more like the meaning rather than the symbol? In that case the thing that makes it pleasure is the role it plays within us, and particularly our desiring it. And actually, if it is the role it plays within us, how could we even know the nature of the symbol considered in itself?

A: Sorry, I’m not following.

B: You just now equated meaning with the “role” the symbol plays within our minds. That makes good sense to me. That’s how the meaning of symbols generally works. But if it’s the role within our minds themselves, how could we have any access to the symbol in isolation from its role? How could we know it except from how it affects us?

A: But we experience symbols as separate from their meanings all the time. Look at the letters of the alphabet before you have learned how to read and all you see are shapes. They have an intrinsic aspect which is just how they are in and of themselves, like the shape of the letter A, and then their extrinsic role or meaning, like that it refers to the “aah” sound and can be used for the indefinite article. I think the “symbols” within the mind are the same.

B: But notice that those symbols, when taken apart from their meaning as with the shape of the letter A, are still affecting us. The shape of the symbol is irrelevant to its meaning within the language, but we experience the symbol as it acts upon us in a different modality. And in some cases the symbol and the meaning are intertwined, like with the pronunciation of onomatopoeic words like “bang” or “slurp”.

A: What is your point?

B: My point is that we can only experience things insofar as they affect us in some way, and so we can only experience the symbols within the mind via their role or what they mean to us. With external languages we can experience the symbols apart from their roles within the language, but when the “language” in question is our own minds taken as a totality, there is no way to experience the symbol in another modality.

A: But I do experience the pleasure itself!

B: Right! So what you are experiencing cannot be the “intrinsic” aspect of the symbol as mere symbol, it must be the meaning or role it is playing. Tell me, do you experience pleasure as desirable?

A: Of course.

B: And you said earlier that the desire we have for pleasure is what gives pleasure its role?

A: Yes, I did say that.

B: Well then, aren’t we experiencing pleasure via its role and meaning rather than as a mere symbol?

A: I will grant that we experience it in part via its role and meaning. But surely that cannot be the whole story? Surely we need to experience the symbols first, in order to experience their meanings?

B: But how could we? If the meaning of the symbol is in how it relates to our minds, whatever is left over when this meaning is excluded is necessarily inaccessible to us. We do experience the symbols, but our experiencing them is what they mean to us. We can’t experience the symbol as a Kantian “thing in itself”, because that is defined so as to exclude our experiencing it.

A: It is hard to argue with you on that, but perhaps some counter will come to me later... And maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about it in terms of symbols and meanings at all.

B: Possibly. It seems a good enough analogy to work with for now though, especially since we know that experience is like language in having a kind of “content”. But if there’s a better way of thinking about it we can use that instead.

A: I cannot think of any at this point. But let’s suppose you are right about pleasure being defined by how we relate to it. In that case, shouldn’t it be impossible for us to even imagine what we began with: that these human souls might experience pain as pleasure and dislike pleasure? In which case, haven’t we already disproved it?

B: Well, I think it is impossible. We began with that idea precisely because it is absurd. That is why ideas like that fascinate us. I certainly couldn’t imagine it in any clear way. To the extent that I could, I think it proves no more than the fact that it is not immediately obvious that you cannot have a triangle with 200 degrees as the sum of its internal angles.

A: Yes, I suppose it was the absurdity and difficulty of imagining it that made the idea fun to begin with... I am willing to grant that it is probably not possible after all. At least until I think of some further arguments. But I am still not sure about your idea that pleasure is really “spleasure”, no more than the experience of desires being fulfilled.

B: It is funny that you say “no more”. What more should we want it to be? An empty symbol which we arbitrarily desire?

A: Well no, I’ve already agreed to drop that. But do you not think pleasure is some further experience, in addition to the desires and their fulfilment?

B: But what would such a further experience be? Do you not see the oddity of thinking our minds first recognise that our desires are being fulfilled, and then produce some additional experience in recognition of that recognition? What would be the point? Isn’t the first recognition of the fact sufficient?

A: So do you mean that the pleasure is indeed still something over the fulfilment of the desire, since it is the experience or recognition of that fulfilment?

B: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

A: I see. In that case... I do believe you have satisfied me.

B: Wonderful! In that case I will take my leave and go get myself some devilled eggs.

(NB: For this post when I talk about “virtue ethics”, I mean broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics.)

What is the goal of virtue ethics?

Unlike other moral theories such as utilitarianism and deontology, virtue ethics begins from the question: How can I achieve my happiness, my flourishing as a human being? The Greek term is “eudaimonia”, which is typically translated as happiness/flourishing/blessedness. The point is not to figure out what you must or must not do regardless of your own best interests, but how to fulfil your true interests, as a rational social animal.

That might sound egoistic, but another way of looking at it is that we are inherently social animals, and so our lives and our interests are by nature intertwined with those of others. Morality is not about suppressing the self, it’s about recognising that we exist in and as our relations, our communities. We cannot truly separate our own best interests from those of our friends and communities.

This is a totally naturalistic understanding of ethics. Morality is an expression of how to live well according to our evolved nature as rational social animals, and within the ethical norms our societies have evolved1. Aristotle saw 2,300 years ago that morality is rooted in our nature (though he didn’t know about evolution) and our social constructs and customs.

For rational social animals such as ourselves, our flourishing will in large part depend upon our directing our lives rationally and pro-socially. You will probably not be happy if you have no friends. You will probably not be happy if you lack discipline. You will probably not be happy if you are easily angered over little things. You will probably not be happy if you never stand up for yourself.

Of course, everyone is different and maybe some people don’t want the kind of life Aristotle and I think of as “flourishing”. Maybe they don’t want friends, maybe they want to be feared, or just left alone. I think that by nature we do want the kind of pro-social flourishing Aristotle outlines, but for those who for whatever reason do not want it, there is not much to be said. Virtue ethics will not convince anyone who is resolutely set on a life of vice (although I think it has a better chance than the alternatives, since it is at least appealing to our natural desires).

With this end goal in mind, virtue ethics then asks, what are the skills/habits/traits that will, over the course of a lifetime, lead to having such a life? This is how the virtues are defined.

There is therefore no circularity. We do not reason, “the right thing to do is what a virtuous person would do → a virtuous person is someone who does the right thing → the right thing is what a virtuous person would do → ...”. Instead it goes, “the virtuous thing to do is what a virtuous person would do → a virtuous person is someone who lives a flourishing human life, the kind of life we should like to live.”

Rival theories take a “bottom up” approach, starting with saying what is the right or wrong action and defining virtue based on that. But virtue ethics takes a “top down” holistic approach, starting with a vision of the kind(s) of life that is best for creatures like ourselves, understanding virtue in terms of that vision, and then deciding what to do by looking at how those virtues would look in that particular situation.

Learning Virtue

As a result of this holistic approach, virtue ethics says that we cannot properly learn ethics via learning and applying a universal formula or set of rules. Life is far too complex for that.

Let me use an analogy. Suppose we want to become a great chef. A great chef is someone who creates great food. But what specific steps do we need to take in each specific scenario in order to create great food? Is there some universal formula, algorithm, or rule set? Unfortunately not. To become a great chef, we have to learn by practice and experience, developing various skills, including muscle memory, a refined palate and sense of smell, and an intuitive sense of practical judgment. The great chef knows what to do to fix a dish, but they likely cannot explain how they know. It’s something they had to learn from their own practice and experimentation and from studying under other chefs. And if we want to become a great chef, our best approach will similarly be to study what great chefs do, practice, and experiment. We have to learn from experience, both our own and others’.

In virtue ethics, virtue is similarly understood as a skill that has to be developed via experience, but that we can also absorb from others to some extent by utilising their experience. We learn to live by living, but we can also ask for advice and learn lessons from the life experiences of others, especially those we consider to be “good at life”. This is why we turn to others for advice when we are faced with difficult situations. This is why we read biographies of people we look up to.

We can even gain such wisdom via our imaginations. When cooking, we might ask ourselves, “What would Gordon Ramsay do here?” and so come up with ideas and techniques we would otherwise have overlooked. Similarly in difficult situations, we might ask ourselves, “What would grandad have said to me if he were here?” or “What would Sam Gamgee do?” This offers us a more grounded way of approaching the situation, not thinking in terms of moral abstractions, but in the more human terms of story and character.

And notice, this is how people tend to actually do moral reasoning in their lives. It is relatively uncommon to perform a utility calculus for our decisions, or to see if they fail Kant’s categorical imperative, or to reason about abstract rights and obligations. It is common to ask for advice from those we look up to, or to ask what our heroes would do in our situation. Far from being circular and unhelpful, virtue ethics is so useful we actually use it!

Summing Up

To sum up, the objection misunderstands virtue ethics by assuming that, like its rivals, it defines virtue in terms of individual right actions, where the point of virtue ethics is in fact to reverse that dependence, taking a holistic top down approach, where good action is understood in terms of virtue, and virtues are understood as those long term traits/skills that contribute to our flourishing as human beings. And, like with other skills, we develop virtue by a combination of our own practical experience, and by studying and imitating the lives of others, especially those we consider virtuous.

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The fine tuning argument is an argument for God’s existence, based on the apparent fact the constants in our best theories of physics appear to be “fine tuned” to allow life to exist. That is, when we model the laws of physics at the origin of the universe and adjust the values of the constants in our equations, we find that there’s an extremely small set of values that are compatible with life ever arising. The mystery is, how did we get so lucky?

The argument goes that this is extraordinarily unlikely to have occurred by chance, and far more probable under the hypothesis that the universe was created with life in mind. In whose mind? God’s mind! We can represent this using Bayes’ theorem as follows:

G = God
FT = the universe is extraordinarily fine tuned for life to exist
P(G|FT) = the probability God exists supposing the universe is fine tuned
P(FT|G) = the probability the universe would be fine tuned, supposing God exists

Then,

Or equivalently,

That is to say, God is more likely given fine tuning in proportion to how much fine tuning is more likely given God.

A slightly simpler way of thinking about it is that the probability of God given fine tuning is the probability that both God exists and the universe is fine tuned, taken as a proportion of the probability of fine tuning.

From this we can see that as P(¬G ∧ FT) (i.e. the probability of God not existing and the universe being fine tuned) approaches zero, P(G|FT) approaches 1, i.e. it approaches certainty.

So what is P(¬G ∧ FT)? Estimates vary between different arguments, but it’s often put in the range of 10^-60 to 10^-120. Going with 10^-60, that’s about as unlikely as winning the lottery 7 times in a row!1

If we set P(G ∧ FT) as 1 in a million (10^-6), and plug these numbers into the above equation we get:

Suppose the lottery had just begun, and the same person won the jackpot every week for the first 7 weeks. We should consider this to be extremely strong evidence that the lottery had been somehow rigged in their favour. What is more likely, that they just happened to win 7 times in a row by pure chance, or that someone managed to rig the draw? Similarly (so the argument goes) the fine tuning of the universe means we should believe with high confidence that the universe was “rigged” in favour of life existing.

2.

We will return to the fine tuning argument, but first of all I want to make a digression into magic.

Let’s suppose you don’t believe in magic and you go to a magic show, where the magician pulls off a feat you would have previously said was absolutely physically impossible. You, along with the rest of the audience, were absolutely astounded. Should you leave the show believing magic is real and you just saw a genuine sorcerer?

What if we applied the kind of probabilistic calculations we did above? We might say that your prior credence in magic was somewhere around 1 in a million. And maybe the feat technically could happen naturally by some freak quantum fluctuations all occurring together at exactly the right moment. But supposing magic is real, it is much much more likely the magician could have performed his feat. We could plug this in to Bayes theorem with the following numbers:

P(M) = 0.000001
P(F) = 0.0000001000001
P(F|M) = 0.1

Then,

It seems we should leave the magic show believing magic is almost certainly real! So why don’t we?

Instead, you go home and question your interpretation of events. Did you see something physically impossible occur, or were you somehow deceived? You’re not sure how you could have been deceived — it was all so convincing! — but you give it some thought, trying to think if there could have been mirrors or hidden strings or identical twins involved somehow. You try to come up with hypotheses of how the trick might have been pulled off. You research magic tricks online for ideas. You watch videos of the magician doing this same trick previously, watching it closely, frame by frame, looking for clues.

In the end, you still don’t know how the trick was done. Should we finally apply Bayes’ theorem and accept that magic is real? Or should we still think we were almost certainly just tricked, and the magician did not really do what he appeared to do, even though we can’t say how?

3.

Let’s turn back to the lottery scenario I briefly mentioned above. Imagine your friend telling you they won the lottery every week for the last 7 weeks. Your first reaction would not be “Wow, the lottery must have been rigged!” It would be something more like, “Wait, really? No way! Seriously? Are you joking with me? Are you sure it wasn’t a dream or something? Are you high?! Am I high!?”

If they persist in claiming they really did win 7 times in a row, the next move would be to ask to see their tickets, their bank balance, and the numbers being drawn. Even if all of that checks out, you might still remain suspicious and look around for hidden cameras in case this is part of some elaborate prank for TV. Elaborate TV pranks have been known to be done from time to time, whereas winning the lottery 7 times consecutively is practically impossible.

4.

What is happening in both cases is that what is initially presented as “the evidence” is actually a theory-laden interpretation of the evidence. We might miss that it’s an interpretation because it is the naïve interpretation — the magic act was exactly as it appeared and our friend was telling the truth — but it is an interpretation nonetheless. What we actually know is only that the magic act appeared to be something that is physically impossible, and that our friend claimed to have won 7 times.

Still, why should we doubt that things were as they appeared to us, or that our friend was telling the truth? What reason do we have to be so sceptical in this case, when we aren’t usually?

It is for the same reason that the naïve interpretation would be such strong evidence if true: it is incredibly improbable. Our experiences and our friend’s testimony do count as evidence for the naïve interpretation to some degree, but not nearly enough to convince us of things that are so monumentally unlikely.

Before we consider whether or not winning the lottery 7 times in a row is evidence it is rigged, we need to establish the extraordinary claim that they really did win 7 times in a row. Before we consider whether or not the magician’s incredible feat is evidence of real magic, we need to establish whether or not he really did what he appeared to do.

What has been presented as “the evidence” is really an interpretation, E₁, of the more primary data E₀.

P(E₁ ∧ E₀) must be less than or equal to P(E₁), which is extremely low already. Then the higher P(¬E₁ ∧ E₀) is (that is, the more plausible it is that we could have the same data but our naïve interpretation be mistaken), the less we should be confident to accept E₁ is true. And since P(E₁ ∧ E₀) is so low, this is not an incredibly high bar.

5.

This ties in to the Duhem-Quine thesis — for any evidence that might be taken as falsifying a theory, it is always possible to preserve the theory by instead adjusting some “auxiliary hypothesis”. A classic example is that Newtonian physics was found not to accurately predict the orbit of Uranus, and so astronomers hypothesized that there must be another planet beyond Uranus, which they then found and dubbed “Neptune”.

In the lottery case we might adjust our auxiliary hypothesis that our friend is an honest person, or that we are not on TV. In the magic case we might adjust our assumption that the member of the audience was not part of the act, or that there were no mirrors, or that we were paying close attention to all the important action.

Rather than accepting the interpretation that would lead us to shocking conclusions that magic is real and the lottery was rigged, we seek out more modest (to us) ways of accommodating the primary data. In this way we minimise damage to our web of beliefs.

6.

Returning at last to the fine tuning argument, we can apply the same kind of reasoning. What was presented as “the evidence” (the extraordinary fine tuning of the universe for life) is in fact a theory-laden interpretation of the more primary data. And the very fact that we have such a low prior credence for the interpretation (which is why it works as such strong evidence) calls it into question. In fact even if we cannot provide a better explanation, we might reasonably still say it is more likely that the constants only appear to be fine tuned, just as we might be unable to explain a magic trick and yet still refuse to believe in magic.

One auxiliary hypothesis we might question in the case of fine tuning is whether the appearance of fine tuning might be an artifact of the incompleteness of our present science. For example, in the 17th century the orderliness and harmony of the solar system appeared as clear evidence of God’s providential design, believed to have been unchanged since the creation of the universe. Who could look at an apparently “clockwork universe” and imagine it had formed by mere chance? But as our understanding deepened, we found that the order of the solar system is a result of deeper principles governing the formation of planets and solar systems — neither intelligent design nor random chance occurrence were needed.

It seems to be the general nature of scientific progress that what at first appears as complex and inexplicable gradually comes to be explained and understood in terms of simpler underlying laws and processes. What was complex comes to be seen as simple, what was incomprehensible comes to be comprehensible, what was unpredictable comes to be predictable. If this is correct, we might fairly expect future scientific progress to simplify and unify our physical laws, removing or reducing the fine tuning mystery.

Another auxiliary hypothesis we could question is whether or not the constants are always and everywhere the same. Perhaps there are other universe with different constants. Perhaps new universes are formed by every black hole with slightly different constants. Perhaps different regions of our universe have slightly different constants.

Yet another is the probability distribution being used for calculating the likelihood of our being in a fine tuned universe by chance. What’s interesting with this is that we could question the correct way to model such probabilities without even affecting the theories of physics being discussed.

7.

The above illustrates a remarkable aspect of rationality: we actively resist making significant changes to our beliefs. We do not passively accept “the evidence”, apply Bayes theorem, and update our beliefs; we search out ways to cast doubt on the supposed evidence, generate alternative interpretations of the primary data, and even seek out counter-evidence.

This might look like merely being stubborn and irrational. After all, shouldn’t we put our preconceived notions aside and follow the evidence impartially, wherever it leads? Isn’t all this just motivated reasoning?

In a sense it is motivated reasoning, but we should ask what is it motivated by? Looking at it one way, it is motivated by not wanting to change our beliefs more than is absolutely necessary. But we can express this in another way: it is wanting to change our beliefs in the way that makes them most likely to be true.

How do we do that? Well, our starting point must be our prior beliefs about what is true. We must believe that our beliefs are (broadly) true — they are all we have. But with new data comes new beliefs (i.e. the belief in the data, at the least), and to maintain consistency we will therefore have to update our web of beliefs. So we seek a way to restore consistency among our beliefs, while diverging as little as possible from what we believed prior to the new evidence. In this way we are attempting to maximise our consistency with ourselves both in the present and across time, while attempting to harmonize our beliefs with the data of experience.

There is perhaps an awkward subjectivity and circularity to this. Our experiences shape our beliefs and our beliefs shape our experiences, and our new beliefs must be judged by the light of our old beliefs. We cannot escape our own point of view. But this is not a bad thing. It is refusing to let go of hard-won beliefs without a fight. And in this back and forth dialogue between old beliefs and new data, we slowly move closer to truth.

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For any set of true propositions, we can form their conjunction (that is, joining the claims together with an “and”), and it will also be true. That is, if P1, P2, … and Pk are true propositions, “P1 and P2 and... Pk” will necessarily be true as well.

Let’s define the “All-Truth”, A, as the conjunction of all true propositions. If we knew A, we would know every truth there is to know.

Is the All-Truth true?

Initially and intuitively, it may seem obvious that the All-Truth is true. Since A is defined as the conjunction of all true propositions, and conjoining true propositions always creates a true proposition, A is necessarily true.

But it’s not so simple.

If A is true, it would itself be one of the true propositions that were conjoined to form A (since it is the conjunction of all true propositions). But this would mean that it is self-referencing in a problematic way, which would mean it is not true. To illustrate this, let’s look at a more simple case.

Let P be some true proposition, and define proposition T as “T and P”. Now if we want to evaluate whether T is true or not, we need to evaluate the truth values of its component propositions, T and P. We already know that P is true so we just need to evaluate T, which is the conjunction of T and P. We already know that P is true so we just need to evaluate T, which is the conjunction of T and P. We already know...

We can map this out with a diagram.

T
| \
T P
| \
T P
| \
T P
:

To evaluate a proposition, we want to come to the bottom of its tree and evaluate the propositions where the tree terminates, then see how the truth “flows” back up the tree to the proposition we are evaluating. But in this case the tree never terminates, and so we cannot evaluate it.

We can try testing if it can consistently be assumed to be true or false. If we assume that it is true, when we evaluate “T and P” we find it is true, confirming T’s truth. But if we assume that T is false, when we evaluate “T and P” we find it is false, confirming T’s falsehood. Whether we assume it is true or false, we are just begging the question.

We call such propositions “ungrounded”, and take them as neither true nor false.1 If we were to take such ungrounded propositions as true we might end up in trouble since the negation of T is similarly ungrounded, and we probably do not want to say that both T and ¬T are true.2

Supposing the All-Truth is true, A contains itself in the same way that T does. Taking P to be the conjunction of all true propositions except for A, we could state A = “A and P”. But then A would be ungrounded, just as we saw for T. Hence A is ungrounded and so neither true nor false.

Except, if A is not true, then A is no longer one of the propositions that are conjoined to form it, meaning the problematic self-reference is removed. A is no longer “A and P”, it is just “P”, the conjunction of all true propositions excluding A, and therefore A is true. But if A is true it becomes self-referential again.

If A is true it is self-referential and therefore not true (nor false), but if it is not true then it is not self-referential and is therefore true. And like how the liar paradox (”This sentence is false”) is true if it’s false and false if it’s true, the All-Truth is grounded if it’s ungrounded and ungrounded if it’s grounded.

A is true → A is self-referential → A is ungrounded/not true → A is not self-referential → A is true

This is a bizarre paradox. As we evaluate the All-Truth it not only forces us to change its truth status, but its content. And as we do that it does not oscillate between true and false (like the liar paradox) but between grounded and ungrounded, self-referencing and not self-referencing. It is like the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

What to do?

One option is to say that the All-Truth is simply not a well-formed proposition, and that the difficulties discussed above demonstrate that fact. This is fine, but this is already pretty mind-blowing! To say that it is in principle impossible to form the All-Truth is incredible! If there can be no All-Truth, what should we think about the nature of truth in general?

It seems that truth is not as simple, solid, and straightforward as we might have naïvely assumed. No proposition, and by extension no set of propositions, however large or even infinite, can ever exhaust the fullness of truth.3 We might think this is either because there is a greater non-propositional fullness of truth, or perhaps there is no such thing as the fullness of truth.

Another option would be to simply stipulate that the All-Truth is true, despite being self-referential and ungrounded. The difficulty would be to find a principled way of allowing such stipulations without allowing the same move to be applied to the negation of the same propositions, or allowing similar question begging in other areas.

Does the impossibility of the All-Truth present an issue for the idea of an omniscient God? If we suppose an omniscient God would have to know all true propositions, then it seems it would be logically impossible for such a God to exist. However, theists do still have the option of believing that God knows all things in some non-propositional way, and in fact this idea has strong precedent, with philosophers such as St Thomas Aquinas arguing that God knows all things immediately in His knowledge of His divine essence, and this self-knowledge is perfectly simple and identical to the divine essence itself.4

This ties in surprisingly well with the idea, prominent in Buddhism and Daoism, that reality cannot be truly known through concepts, but must be known in a direct, non-conceptual manner (hence all the meditating). To truly know reality is not to have an exhaustive list of propositions or concepts, but to be truly present to one’s own lived existence in the present moment.

But these are just some possible responses, and I’m sure there are many more. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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If you’re interested in Buddhism, it won’t be long before you come across phrases such as “everything is empty” or “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”2. What does this mean? Are they saying that nothing exists at all? Isn’t that just obviously absurd?

The first thing to understand is, what is it empty of? If we say that a cup is empty we do not mean that it does not exist, we mean that it is empty of any solids or liquids which we might have imagined could have filled it. In fact it does not even mean that it is empty of all things, since the empty cup is (probably) still full of air.

So when Buddhists say that all things are empty, what is it they are empty of? It is emptiness of an “intrinsically existing self” — something which simply is, independent of anything else. This is a common idea found in many philosophies throughout the world: that there is something which is “really real”, something fundamental, something lying beneath the shifting world of change and appearances, something that exists independently, and on which all other things depend.

This concept takes on different shapes in different philosophies. For Democritus, it was the indestructible and eternal atoms that truly exist. For Parmenides there was only “Being”, and all change and distinction was an illusion. For Plato, it was the Forms/essences of things, and especially the Form of the Good, that were truly real. Meanwhile, in many theistic traditions, it is God that is ultimately real. For example, Anselm of Canterbury wrote,

Indeed, it would seem to follow from the foregoing that [God] is, for some reason, the only thing that exists: other things that seem to exist, in comparison, do not exist. It is the only thing that would seem, on careful examination, to exist without qualification, perfectly and absolutely, while all other things almost do not, and hardly do, exist. (Monologion ch.28)

The idea in each case is that there must be something with such absolute existence, not subject to change or dependent on anything besides itself. The world of change might be seen as existing in some lesser sense or as being nothing but illusion, but beneath it there must be some fixed and eternal absolute reality that exists in and of itself. It is exactly this that emptiness denies.

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Since what is being denied has two key aspects — it is unchanging and exists independently — emptiness can be approached through two key aspects too: impermanence and interdependence.

The teaching of impermanence says that all things that exist come into being, are subject to change, and will eventually cease to be. There is no firm and permanent bedrock of reality that is not subject to change. And even while a thing exists there is no fixed essence or self underlying that remains constant through its changes, so that we cannot even say it is the same thing from moment to moment in an absolute sense. As Heraclitus said, “You never step into the same river twice.”

Meanwhile, interdependent origination teaches that all things gain their being from other things and exist in relation to other things. The river does not exist independent of the landscape it is part of, nor the clouds that provide its waters, nor the sea into which it flows. And likewise the landscape, clouds, and sea do not exist independently of the river. Similarly, a human being cannot exist independently of their ancestors, their culture, or nature. Without these things we would not exist. We exist thanks to them, and they exist within us. Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term “interbeing” for this idea that our existence cannot be separated from the existence of others. We exist in one another, interdependently.

The whole depends on its parts and the parts depend on the whole, and both depend upon our conventions of naming them separate entities. Each thing depends on both its causes and the role it plays in its context. As an example, a dining table depends on the wood it is carved from, and the carpenter who made it, and our conventions of seeing it as a table, and our use of it as a place to eat, and its role within the context of a dining room and meals. This is uncontroversial in the case of a dining table, but the teaching of emptiness asserts there is similar interdependence in all of reality. What is an electron beyond how it interacts with other particles? What is space without any objects within it? What would time be without any events?

Impermanence means there is no intrinsic self underlying change. We conventionally speak of ourselves as being the same person as we were yesterday, but this is just a convention, and we might equally think of the “old me” as having died and a similar but different “new me” taking its place. And interdependence means there is no intrinsic self existing apart from the rest of the world. We conventionally speak of things as separate entities, but these are lines we draw on the world, not independent features of the world. As Thich Nhat Hanh put it,

The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else. The insight of impermanence is that nothing is static, nothing stays the same. Interbeing means emptiness of a separate self, however impermanence also means emptiness of a separate self. Looking from the perspective of space we call emptiness “interbeing”; looking from the perspective of time we call it “impermanence.” (‘The Other Shore’, p45)

This does not mean that things don’t exist at all. Persons, tables, electrons, money, words, and all the rest still truly exist in a conventional sense — we can interact with these things, point to them, rely on them in our day to day lives — but they do not exist as separate, independent, self-sufficient realities. They are empty of a separate self.

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We might be tempted to look at all of this and say “Yes! Everything is one being, the Universe, Being Itself!” But this is not the teaching of emptiness. No, emptiness is more radical than that: even the universe is empty of intrinsic self-existence. The universe itself is impermanent and interdependent. It does not exist independent of the entities within it, nor of whatever may have brought it into being.

We might also be tempted to view “emptiness” as itself being the self-existing fundamental substance, the one thing with Absolute Existence. You will sometimes even see Buddhist teachers talking or writing in this way, using analogies such as ourselves being waves while emptiness or Buddha nature or even “God” is the unchanging ocean underlying those waves. But these are only a “skilful means” — they are ways of speaking that are not strictly speaking correct, but are useful pedagogically for bringing those hearing it closer to understanding and liberation. Despite that, this is not the correct view. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it,

There are still many people who are drawn into thinking that emptiness is the ground of being, the ontological ground of everything. But emptiness, when understood rightly, is the absence of any ontological ground. To turn emptiness into an ontological essence, to call it the ground of all that is, is not correct. Emptiness is not an eternal, unchanging ontological ground. We must not be caught by the notion of emptiness as an eternal thing. It is not any kind of absolute or ultimate reality. That is why it can be empty. Our notion of emptiness should be removed. Emptiness is empty. ( ‘The Other Shore’, p40)

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Why does this matter?

In the context of metaphysics, the idea of emptiness presents a radical alternative to those metaphysics that attempt to identify what ultimately or fundamentally exists as being one thing or another. Much metaphysical speculation and argumentation relies on this assumption of things with intrinsic self-existence, and the teaching of emptiness shows us that there is an alternative approach.

Within the context of ethics, emptiness might inspire a more relational conception of our human nature and of morality. We are impermanent and interdependent: we are all going to die, and our lives are inseparable from each others’: therefore let’s care for each other. We don’t need to think of morality as subjugating ourselves to a world outside ourselves, but as recognising that we are part of others and they are part of us. Morality is then an expression of our interdependence. In a similar vein (though not relying primarily on Buddhist ideas) has written some great posts on the relational concept of the self.

And within the context of Buddhism, suffering is understood as a result of attempting to grasp onto things which are inherently impermanent. We try to grasp pleasure and avoid pain. We don’t want the party to end. We don’t want to die. But we know that these efforts cannot, in the end, be successful. These things are impermanent and unreliable. The temptation is to look for a firmer foundation, something that will never change or disappoint. Perhaps we cling to diamonds, since “diamonds are forever”. Perhaps we seek the fountain of youth. Perhaps we seek eternal life and happiness in heaven with God. But for the Buddhist, these are yet more forms of grasping and delusion, and so lead to further suffering. The solution is not to find something Absolute to grasp onto, it’s to let go of grasping at all.

Further Reading

‘The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries’ by Thich Nhat Hanh

‘Essence of the Heart Sutra’ by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

‘The World of Tibetan Buddhism’ by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama