Undivided Looking

Let’s talk about Ethics now.  Most of us have, whether it comes from Instinct, Reason, or Culture, a strong belief that certain acts and behaviors are morally right and therefore obligatory or commendable, while others are morally wrong and therefore forbidden or reprehensible.  Until we are exposed to certain philosophical questions, we tend to assume that this is just part of how the world is: that there is right and wrong and that one can persuade other people of it.  “It’s not fair!” say small children to their parents.  There is, admittedly, some disagreement about what morality says (just as there is disagreement about everything else), but there is also a fair amount of common ground.

Once people get exposed to Philosophy (even if only in the form of a shallow cultural relativism common among college Freshmen), it is natural to question whether this sense of ethics is grounded in the actual objective nature of reality.  Or is it is purely subjective?  In the latter case, one should probably bite the bullet and say that, other than as descriptions of our own psychology, moral facts don’t really exist at all (Ethical Nihilism), and it is a mistake to think that there is somehow a fact of the matter about e.g. whether murder or adultery are really wrong.

It seems to me that the belief that e.g. “murder isn’t really wrong” is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who really disbelieved in the truth of ethics (though perhaps it is not fully possible) would be leaving behind an important part of their human heritage.  Just as a person whose left and right brain hemispheres have been severed is a defective or damaged human specimen, so the person whose heart and mind have been severed by moral relativism fails to be fully humane.  At the very least, Ethical Nihilism hardly seems likely to inspire moral excellence.  Even the moral duty to believe what is true would in principle be undermined by it.  But this, however important it may be practically, is a moral argument in favor of morality, and those who do not accept this vision of humanity may accuse me of arguing in a circle.  Instead, let’s ask what could ground ethical truths.

There are many views which have been held about Meta-Ethical theory.  For simplicity let’s consider four main ones: which we might call, with some degree of over-simplification, the Protagorean view, the Kantian view, the Aristotelian view, and the Platonic view.  All but the first of these views attempt to ground morality in some sort of objective reality, but in different ways.

The Protagorean view is that Ethics is grounded in nothing more than one’s own personal subjective opinion.  That opinion may be partly determined by cultural or biological factors, but there is nothing inherently good or bad in accepting or defying one’s heritage: whatever you want to do is best.  If somebody sincerely believes a different sort of ethical system which permits say revenge and genocide, they aren’t really any better or worse than anyone else, just different.  We judge them to be bad, but then again they judge us to be bad. Once you decide to pursue a particular goal, you can ask whether your means are well-chosen to suit your ends, but your ends are really up to you.  Thus, the wise man who wishes to live in a peaceful city might perpetuate myths which help other people to be virtuous, but he won’t believe any of them himself.

The Kantian view is that Reason tells us that certain things are right and wrong; that the reasoning mind can know the truths of Ethics much as we know the truths of Mathematics, by deducing them from self-evident first principles.  Kant himself had an argument for something called the Categorical Imperative which was roughly like the Golden Rule, and he claimed that this was equivalent to treating other people as ends rather than means.  Nobody much accepts his specific arguments anymore, but newspaper ethics columnists still have a broadly Kantian mindset, perhaps because it takes them more or less where they want to go, given the current tendency among democracies to reformulate all ethical questions in terms of “Human Rights” vested in autonomous (self-governing) individuals.

The Aristotelian view is that Ethics is grounded in human nature.  That is, all living creatures have some sort of intrinsic goal, purpose or end (τελος) which is what it means for that plant or animal to flourish, fully developing its nature in the way that is good for it.  Evil would be a perversion or corruption of a thing’s nature, not something which has an independent existence apart from the telos of a thing.  For us as humans, Ethics consists of identifying the requirements of human nature and cultivating habits which help to promote that flourishing.  Since we are sexual beings, part of our good is directed towards reproducing ourselves, and since we are “political animals”, another part of our nature consists in promoting benevolence towards others, but the highest and noblest aim (according to Aristotle) is to develop our rational nature, which flourishes when we pursue philosophy.  Each person has their own individual telos (what’s good for you is not necessarily good for me)—which is however objective, since it is grounded in a more-or-less universal human nature.

(Some people might think that this Aristotelian view that biological organisms have purposes, i.e “final causes” is undermined by Darwinian evolution, but this is contestable.  Did Darwin eliminate purposes from the biological world, or did he explain their existence?  In any case, we are not here dealing with the Design question of how organisms like us came to exist, but with the quite distinct question of what our ethical significance is, now that we do exist.)

The Platonic view is that there is a transcendental principle called “the Good” or “goodness itself”, which acts as the standard or judge for all other things.  Thus, as in the Aristotelian view, goodness is based on the nature of things, but now it is a property of the fundamental nature of existence.  All things, to the extent that they exist, participate to a greater or lesser extent in goodness.  They are thus good only in a derivative sense, by participating in goodness.  The philosopher begins by appreciating the beauty or virtue in visible realities, but ascends from there to appreciating the primary goodness in that which is Beauty or Virtue itself.  Thus, in this view, the fundamental nature of reality requires us to be benevolent to others; although the precise set of actions to be performed are doubtless (as in the Aristotelian view) dependent on the precise details of human nature (it is kind to give a beggar bread rather than cyanide because of the nature of human biology, but what kindness is does not depend on that).

Of these four views, Platonism is particularly conducive to arguing for Ethical Monotheism, due to its ascribing all goodness to the fundamental nature of things.  On the Aristotelian view, one can still attempt to trace the teloi back to their ultimate goal, much as the Cosmological Argument traces causes back to their ultimate cause.  (By rights this ought to be called the Teleological Argument, but unfortunately that term is usually taken to be synonymous with the Argument from Design.)  If Ethics can be deduced rationally as in the Kantian system, then one can at least deduce that if the Universe originates from something like a mind, that mind should also be able to appreciate ethical truths.  But on the Protagorean view, the Argument from Ethics is dead in the water and can go nowhere.

Next: What’s Right is Right

You might say that, at any rate, it is very natural to suppose that an animal whose brain processes sensory stimuli, represents them as patterns, and then reacts to them should be conscious.  Granted, it is very natural for you to think this, since you are yourself a conscious being, and what’s more you are evolved to attribute mental states to other things in order to help you survive and reproduce.

When we engage with fictional characters displayed in books or anime (leaving aside plays and movies, since in them the actors are real people), we are indulging our tendency to treat sets of letters or pixels which have no inherent meaning, as if they did have meaning, in fact as though they were people.  But none of us think that the characters in books have an independent mental existence, since apart from the actions of an external mind in making sense of them, they have no intrinsic meaning or significance.

Well, in some sense we are in the same boat as these fictional characters.  We have the advantage that our brains, lives, and actions are specified in considerably more detail, whereas in the case of fiction there are a lot of gaps to be filled in.  But from a sufficiently “objective” perspective, we are ourselves just a collection of material objects, a set of 1′s and 0′s in the cosmic computer with no inherent meaning.  Well, evidently this supposedly objective perspective is wrong.  Our Universe seems to be more hospitable than that.  Sometimes, when there is a collection of matter to which meaning might be ascribed, it is so ascribed.  Something is to us as we are to anime characters, interpreting the pattern as significant.

As Muriel Rukeyser writes in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” [erotic themes, not safe for work]:

Say it.        Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

Well, all of this suggests that the fundamental nature of existence has to be more like a mind than like a set of equations, because no set of equations interprets itself.  And obviously we are not the most fundamental minds in existence, because human beings are contingent.  We are born and we die and we need not have existed.  The Universe existed long before we did.  Therefore, some other mind-like entity must be.  At best we participate in the operations of this mind.

Being the most fundamental entity in existence, there can be no distinction between its subjective thoughts and feelings and the objective “real world”, as we have seen previously.  Its thoughts are what is.

This is not the only way to try to incorporate mental qualities into the fundamental description of the world, but it has a certain appeal due to its simplicity.  In any case, these considerations turn the tables on claims that Naturalism is simpler because it can describe everything in a mathematically quantitative way, without any appeal to basic mental qualities.  You can’t get mental qualities out of any model of the world, unless somehow you put them in from the beginning.

To recapitulate: a book is a material object containing a set of letters in a row.  The words in a book contain meaning because a human being, who is conscious, reads and understands them.  But why does the human brain contain any consciousness or meaning?  Because the ultimate nature of reality is like a mind, not like a set of equations, and it “reads” our brains and finds them to be meaningful.

Given that the series has to terminate in any case, why not just stop at our own minds rather than on God?  Because we know that we, as complicated, evolved, and contingent constructs, are not the most fundamental entities in existence, and therefore any reasonable worldview should explain everything about ourselves in terms of a more fundamental picture.

Or to put it another way, if there are any types of meaning in the world which cannot be deduced just from the laws of physics, then it follows that the most fundamental reality is more than just those laws of physics, and indeed it must be something capable of supporting this meaning.  This increases the probability that the fundamental reality is more analogous to a mind than a set of equations.

By itself, this Argument from Consciousness might well support a pantheistic conclusion, rather than a theistic one.  But for the reasons given before, I think the unity and clarity of Monotheism has a decided advantage, not least for making sense of a scientific approach to the world.

Next: Theories of Ethics

To my mind, the true implications of Philosophy of Mind, far from being an argument against Theism, are actually an argument for Theism.  To see this, we must start, not with God’s mind, but our own.

It is indisputable that Consciousness exists.  Or rather, it has been disputed, but it ought never to have been.  However many fallacies Descartes may have committed later in his arguments, I think therefore I am has always seemed perfectly sound to me.  It is in fact more certain than anything else.

What would it mean to say that I am wrong about being self-aware?  That would require me to be aware of some perceptions or arguments that make me think I have awareness or thinking—but in fact I am wrong, because I only think I think!  This is manifestly absurd and self-contradictory.

In the case of other people, or certain animals, we assume they have conscious self-awareness because of their similarity to us.  This is an argument by analogy which (even though it is very reasonable) could potentially be mistaken.  But in the case of our own conscious self-awareness, there can be no doubt.  This consciousness includes specific qualia or experiences such as blueness or sounds, as well as many other things.

Now this is a very interesting fact, primarily because, as far as I can see, there is no way you could possibly logically deduce it even if you knew all the Laws of Physics, and everything about Neurology which one could possibly learn from external observation alone.  It is quite inexplicable, if all you know are the physical Laws of Nature, why some of those physical systems should have the additional property of having subjective experiences.  Physicists mostly don’t think about this issue since it’s not our specialty, but when asked most of us would probably admit that there’s a deep mystery here.  This mystery is known in Philosophy circles as the “hard problem of consciousness” (a term coined by David Chalmers).

Please don’t think I’m saying more than I am.  I’m not talking about the question of why our material brains are arranged in the complex pattern that they are, as one might in an Argument from Design.  Presumably Darwinian evolution is at least a large part of the answer to that question.  I am asking why, once they are arranged into these patterns, they experience self-awareness.

Nor does this argument imply that there has to exist a detachable “soul”, which is separate from our bodies, and survives death.  I’m not denying that the brain has a lot to do with our minds, or even that the brain and mind are in one-to-one correspondence (or more likely, many-to-one).  I am only saying that we could not possibly deduce this correspondence from the Laws of Physics plus Logic alone.  It might even be metaphysically necessary that living brains (and maybe artificial intelligences if we ever make them) have minds.  But if so, we’ve just learned something about Metaphysics!

That Consciousness tells a story against Naturalism can be seen by the great efforts which many Naturalists take to resist the unavoidable conclusion.  The first main counterattack is to try to deny the existence of the problem at all, through some type of “eliminative” or “reductionist” materialism.  Maybe Consciousness is just another name for certain kinds of information processing which happen to occur in the brain.  As in the Sondheim musical: “The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood!”

As much as I respect philosophers like Daniel Dennett for trying to make this idea precise, I just don’t think it can work.  Self-awareness might well turn out to be related to certain types of causal events in the brain, but we knew that we were self-aware long before we knew anything about neuroscience.  So we cannot say that self-awareness is by definition a certain pattern of neurons.  If folks like Dennett are right that there’s no hard problem to explain, then their position has to be true by logical necessity.  And it just isn’t, because no matter what you tell me about the physics, I could assert without contradiction that nothing in it is self-aware.

The second main counterattack is to say: “We may not know the answer now, but Science will discover it one day!  Once upon a time, some people used to think that biological life was due to some inexplicable élan vital, but now we know that it can be explained entirely through ordinary chemical processes.  The same will one day be true of Consciousness.”

It’s a little presumptuous to appeal to future scientific discoveries as an argument for any position, since by definition those discoveries haven’t happened yet.  That is why these people instead make an inductive argument, based on imagined triumphs of Science over Mysticism in the past.

But there is a key dis-analogy between Life and Consciousness: we are directly aware of the latter but not of the former (except insofar as it includes the latter).  And the argument that Physics cannot explain Consciousness is not based on the detailed form of the Laws of Physics.  So long as they consist of formal mathematical equations which merely describe the spatio-temporal patterns of material entities, it seems that the problem remains insoluble.  At the very least, a radical change in how we even do Physics would be necessary.  And as for neurological studies, surely brain researchers could go on and on making lists of which neural processes correspond to which conscious sensations, and classifying them into patterns, without ever explaining from the basic Laws of Physics why that particular set of correspondences should hold (or any set).

I said earlier that I am going to confine myself to plausibility arguments, but in this stage of the argument I think strict demonstration is possible: to deny that we are conscious clearly contradicts experience; but to say that our consciousness follows logically from the known Laws of Physics is also manifestly false when consciousness is properly defined.  So it appears that our description of the Universe in terms of physical laws is incomplete.

This is why many of the early Enlightenment philosophers and scientists were Dualists.  Because they assigned all conscious, sensory, and “secondary” qualities to mind rather than matter, they were free to construct scientific descriptions of matter which made reference only to their “primary” qualities, those capable of mathematical modeling.  Having assigned these quantities to the “soul”, they were free to do quantitative physics on the rest.  To go one step further and also banish these secondary qualities from the mind, was for them obviously inconsistent. As the philosopher St. Ed Feser says:

…the reductive method in question is like the method of getting rid of all the dirt in the house by sweeping it under a certain rug.  While this is a very effective way of getting rid of the dirt everywhere else, it is not a strategy that could possibly be used to get rid of the dirt under the rug itself.  On the contrary, it only makes the problem of getting rid of that dirt even worse.  And that is exactly why the mind-body problem as it is understood today essentially came into existence with Galileo, Descartes, and Co. and has remained unsolved to the present day.  What these early modern thinkers wanted (for certain practical and political ends) was a completely quantitative, mathematical description of the world.  Irreducibly qualitative features—secondary qualities, final causes, and the like—since they would not fit this model, were thus essentially defined away as mere projections, “swept under the rug” of the mind as it were. But that only makes the idea of dealing with the mind itself in the same manner even more hopeless.  For these early moderns, the mind just is, you might say, the holding tank for everything that doesn’t fit their quantitative method.  Naturally, then, that method cannot coherently be applied to the mind itself.

This does not mean that a Cartesian mind-body Dualism is the only or best way of describing our situation—I think it isn’t—but at least it recognizes explicitly some of the problems at stake.  (There are several other options which recognize the objective reality of the mind, which go by names such as “Property Dualism”, “Hylomorphic Dualism”, “Epiphenomenalism”, “Idealism”, etc.)  But any view which says that all mental quantities can in principle be derived from a purely physical description of the brain, is necessarily incoherent and wrong on philosophical grounds.   And no amount of progress in empirical Science can ever prove that which is logically impossible.

Note that the logical contradiction lies in a reductionistic form of materialism which claims that all of our mental properties can be derived from external, physically measurable properties.  On a non-reductionistic definition of “matter”, to mean “that mysterious thing which we are made of, which may have additional properties besides those which can be externally measured”, it would not necessarily be a contradiction to say that we are entirely made out of matter.  Such a viewpoint would be a type of Property Dualism, which asserts that that we are one type of entity which has both physical and mental properties.

My arguments should stand on their own apart from any suspicions about my motivations.  But since this term “soul” has popped up, let me add that for many years, I thought it was possible to reconcile Christian theology with the view that the human mind is identical to the material brain.  I thought then, and I still think now, that the reason we will live forever is because of God’s promises and his faithfulness, and not because of what we are “made out of”.  It was not my interest in Theology, but trying to make sense out of the Philosophy of Mind, which led me to see the contradiction in a purely materialistic conception of human beings: that we are solely what can be physically measured about the brain.

Next: Stories and Atoms

[Next-to-last paragraph added later.]

One possible objection to Theism is this: in the case of human or animal minds, we think using our brains.  This is a rather complicated chunk of matter, that has—at the very least—a rather large amount to do with determining what our thoughts are.  Assuming that there is a divinity which transcends the material world, and everything else, it wouldn’t and couldn’t have anything like a brain.  So how could God possibly think?

The problem is aggravated all the more if we decide that the fundamental reality should be simple in the sense of not being composed of any kind of parts (this is a technical term in theology, not to be confused with “simple” in the sense of easy to understand or unsophisticated).  Since if it were composed of separable parts, it would be natural to seek some explanation further back about how these parts got to be stuck together.

Recall, however, that I only proposed that God is like a mind, not that his mind works in the exact same way that ours does.  Because we have brains, our knowledge is necessarily limited (because there’s a limit to the information capacity and reliability of a finite piece of matter) and also indirect (because we experience things in the outside world by representing them as particular patterns of firing neurons).

If God does not have a brain, then there is no physical mechanism to determine which things he knows and which he doesn’t know.  So it seems likely he would have to know either nothing or everything.  (Aristotle stands up to propose the compromise that God knows only his own act of thinking, but let’s ignore him.)  Since our original motivation for Theism was that God is like a mathematician who can appreciate the mathematical elegance of the physical world, it seems only the omniscience option will do.

Unlike us, God knows things directly, rather than by the mediation of a perceptual apparatus and neural processing.  For if an omniscient being knew things by representation, then he would need an exact identical copy of the entire Universe in his brain.  If he is omniscient, the copy would be exactly like the original, which seems absurd on grounds of redundancy: everything in the world would exist twice, once in reality and once exactly the same in God’s mind.  Better to say that God just knows whatever is true, or rather that God is such that his knowledge and Truth are one and the same thing!  (This, incidentally, also provides a general recipe for dispelling almost any supposed logical paradox about omniscience.  Just replace all instances of “God knows X” with “X is true”, and then you will have a new paradox which must have a solution, even if you are an atheist.  That solution is then also available to the theist.)

Some readers may think that this view of God is a form of Pantheism, because in some sense the world is a part of God’s thoughts.  But I don’t think this is true.  The views which I am articulating here are a form of Classical Theism, which has historically been the most important view of God in the philosophy of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.  This view might come a little closer to Pantheism than people think, but it differs in some essential details.

If God is the fundamental reality, then he exists quite apart from the world and does not depend on it for his existence.  His wisdom and power are eternal, and eternally he knows himself.  Because he is omniscient, and does not need representations, what he knows about a tree must be exactly the same as that tree (together with its context), but that is not to say that his pre-existing ability to know is identical to the tree, still less that he himself is made out of wood, like the idols that have no understanding.

A brief digression:  In Christian theology, there is one possible exception to my argument here, namely that God’s knowledge of himself might well still be representational.  We believe that there is also a Divine Son who is the Word and Wisdom of God, that he eternally pre-existed with his Father before all Creation.  “Word” (λογος) is a metaphor for an expression of some idea, and this suggests that in some sense the Son is involved in God’s act of knowing himself.  So, although this is getting into very deep waters here, maybe even God can’t fully understand himself without recourse to a representation.  Since God is omniscient, this representation is in some sense an exact copy; fully accurate to who he is, yet distinguishable by the fact that it is the copy, not the original.

In fact, we believe that God is so full of life that there are actually two distinct self-expressions springing up out of the Father’s being, namely the Son and the Holy Spirit.  When an artist paints a self-portrait, the image of himself is an expression of who he is, and in a different way his artistic style—the “spirit” of the work—is also an expression of who he is. Yet there is only one portrait, and there are not three artists but only one.  Since as Monotheists we believe that God is also One, we do not regard these as three parts of God but rather use the language of three persons within the unique divine Being.  (A person is something which can be in a loving relationship with another person.)

However, most Christian philosophers (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas) have thought that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be deduced from armchair reasoning alone!  (Though after we learn the fact, we can say something about how it might make sense given God’s loving nature.)  Especially since it sits rather uncomfortably with the idea of divine unity; our theologians have their work cut out just explaining why the Trinity is consistent with the idea of Monotheism which we hold in common with Jews and Muslims, let alone demonstrating it from sound metaphysical reasoning.  Thus these last three paragraphs are NOT part of my main argument; I cite them only to avoid some confusions about how what I’ve said might fit in with what God has revealed about himself in the Bible.

Next: The Hard Problem of Consicousness