The Long Now

Civilization is reviving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.

- Stewart Brand, founding board member of the Long Now Foundation

Anglo-Catholicism

Anglo-Catholicism claims the continuity of the Church of England with the early days of Christianity in Great Britain, even before St. Augustine. Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine in the late 6th century from Rome to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons, a process completed in the 7th century. It is commonly thought that the conversion of the English marked the beginning of Christianity in Britain, though the Romano-Celtic society which existed in Britain prior to the arrival of the pagan Germanic tribes from Denmark and northern Germany practised a non-papal, episcopal Christianity…

King Henry VIII took England into schism from Rome when the Pope refused to declare null his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, but retained Catholic views in theology and liturgy, while some reformers (such as Bishop John Hooper) wanted to follow the radical reforms of Geneva… Consequently, when Queen Elizabeth I took the English throne, she sought to steer a via media between what her bishops felt were the excesses of both Rome and Geneva. Thus was born the Elizabethan Settlement and the promulgation of a single Book of Common Prayer for all theological persuasions in the Church of England. This marks the birth of the Anglican ethos which was championed by the Elizabethan divine, Richard Hooker.

From that time, through Archbishop Laud and the Caroline Divines, up to the time of the Oxford Movement Tractarians, the Anglo-Catholic Congresses and the present day, there has always been a theological party within Anglicanism which has sought to stress apostolic continuity all the way back to the Twelve Apostles. In response to Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae (1896), which declared the Anglican apostolic succession invalid from the Vatican’s perspective, the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York have claimed, starting with their official response, Saepius Officio, that there is an unbroken apostolic succession in the Anglican priesthood and that the historical episcopate has been in the British Isles from the earliest days of the Church…

A minority of Anglo-Catholics, sometimes called Anglo-Papalists, consider themselves under papal supremacy even though they are not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Such Anglo-Catholics, especially in England, often celebrate Mass according to the contemporary Roman Catholic rite and are concerned with seeking reunion with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

— Wikipedia article: Anglo-Catholicism

Looking back over the controversies that drove many an embattled and despairing priest to renounce the Anglican Communion and deny the validity of his own priesthood, and even question that of his baptism, it is tragic and ironic to realize that many, perhaps most, of these were over points of practice and doctrine then considered hopelessly Protestant or even sacrilegious which are now common in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II — the vernacular liturgy, open communion, communion in both kinds, birth control, divorce, married clergy, the redefinition of scriptural, traditional and magisterial authority, of baptismal regeneration, and justification. Once the now apparently inevitable permission for a married clergy is granted, many Anglican and even some Lutheran churches and priests and ministers will be considerably more “High Church” than their Roman Catholic fellows.

— Kenneth Rexroth, The Evolution of Anglo-Catholicism

I attended the Remembrance Sunday service at Winchester College a week ago and found myself returning for another service this morning. Sitting in the serene but magnificent 14th century chapel, listening to the choir sing in Latin, I felt connected to a continuity of worship that transported me, albeit temporarily, to somewhere timeless.

Irrational though it may be — and recently I have begun to think that it probably isn’t, if rationality is to be a meaningful term at all — I experienced something during those services that my life otherwise lacks. No doubt there are many aspects to such an experience, some more profound than others, but the sense of being part of something ancient or eternal, immune to the vagaries and caprice of the outside world, is clearly an important one.

Genealogies

Every human faculty, by which we attempt to make sense of the world, may have its origins explained by evolutionary theory. But the validity of evolutionary theory presupposes the validity of such a human faculty. Thus the existence of an evolutionary Just So story, purporting to explain the origins of some faculty, cannot be used to invalidate the results of that faculty on pain of self-contradiction. Therefore, if we consider the faculty whereby we explain the actions of other entities in terms of purpose, or the faculty whereby we perceive the presence of the divine, in order to refute the claims of such faculties it is not sufficient merely to provide a plausible explanation of their origins.

Dirty Spectacles

As I recently admitted, I have in the not too distant past flirted with the excitement of Transhumanist philosophy. It is in many ways a religion of science, which makes it quite appealing: you get the feeling of purpose and destiny normally associated with religion but also the hard-headed rationality of science and technology. Of course, when one looks closer, it is anything but rational; nevertheless it is still surrounded by an aura of respectable logic and no-nonsense practicality, which tempts obsessive reasoners like me.

One of the rhetorical techniques used by the transhumanist crowd, which they share with fans of technological progressivism in general, is to accuse those who yearn for a “simpler” past of misplaced romanticism. Hence we find the following in the Transhumanism FAQ, intended as an answer to those who would like to “turn back the clock”:

The problem with this view is that the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic. It was a life of poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk, superstitious fears, and cultural parochialism. [1]

Let us deal with each of these claims in order. First, what is meant by poverty? Notoriously, poverty is relative. The poorest members of modern Western society may well possess material wealth far beyond that of the wealthier end of Western society a few centuries ago; but this does not mean that they are happier with their lot. That wealth is significantly correlated with happiness is a claim that has been debunked time and again. Here is just one example:

“I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. [Shows a slide of a graph plotting personal income and happiness.] This is a typical result that many people have presented and there are many variations on it. But this for instance shows that about 30% of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn’t changed at all whereas the personal income (on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation) has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely that after a certain basic point, which corresponds more or less to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well-being don’t seem to affect how happy people are.” [2]

So in one sense it is true that earlier societies were poorer than we are today: it is possible to construct absolute measures of material wealth according to which members of Western society are wealthier now than in times past. However, such an absolute measure of wealth is largely irrelevant. Recent research, as well as folk wisdom, shows that a rise in material wealth much beyond the minimum necessary for survival does not entail greater happiness. Even at the individual level, wealth is poorly correlated with happiness [3], but at the societal level it hardly seems relevant at all as long as basic needs are met.

As for misery, on what grounds do they claim that our ancestors were more miserable than we are today? Recent research does not support this claim:

“One problem that’s happening now is that although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Despite that we’re in a world with so much more material wealth, much safer, better health, and all kinds of pharmaceuticals and treatments for mental illness, we’re still seeing rises in depression and anxiety. Some people might say this is because we have better diagnosis and more people are being found out, but [the data] suggest that we’re seeing it all over the world. In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides; there’s a rash of suicide in China; and the World Health Organisation predicts that by the year 2020 depression will be the second largest cause of disability-related years lost after ischemic heart disease.

Happiness stays the same as ever. Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world we find that more people are happy than not. [Shows a slide.] And we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy. But this does not follow any of the usual trends. So, for example, these two [charts] show great growth in income but absolutely flat happiness curves. So more money doesn’t seem to be doing anything to increase happiness level. [4]

Yet more evidence that wealth does not entail happiness and good reason to doubt that we are happier today than in the past. There seems no justification for the progressivist claim that pre-industrial life was “miserable”: with no data from the past to go on, the best we can do is to extrapolate from present data, which suggests that pre-industrial people were about as happy as we are today but they suffered from less depression and less anxiety.

However, although our mental health may be worse today than it was then, it cannot be denied that our physical health has improved. Modern Western nutrition may be awful, as the obesity and diabetes epidemics seem to indicate, but that is no reason to condemn modern medicine. In fact, it might be thought something of an achievement that we are so well cared for that blubber and sugar are some of our major worries. The revolution in so-called evidence-based medicine, which is essentially the consistent application of the scientific method to those areas of medical care amenable to such a method, is one of the few 20th century revolutions of which I thoroughly approve.

It would be extremely callous of me, safe in my relatively good health with a doctor just a telephone call away, to claim that improvements in medical care do not matter. Nevertheless, with regard to general happiness, there is a sense in which medical care is analogous to wealth. Disease is one of the accepted risks of life: whereas we would be horrified if a friend or relative were killed by smallpox, we still expect to lose friends to cancer. That is not to say that we shouldn’t attempt to eradicate cancer just as we eradicated smallpox, but only that once cancer was forgotten its eradication would no longer be a source of happiness. Thus although medical care is undoubtedly a good thing (in general — I do not consider the prolongation of old age without accompanying quality of life to be a good thing: “old people’s homes” are an abomination) and hence a cause to prefer living today than in the past, it cannot be used as evidence that pre-industrial life was miserable for people alive then.

And why does Bostrom believe that pre-industrial life consisted of “heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk”? That sounds a lot more like 19th century industrial work than anything pre-industrial workers had to suffer. The working day for a medieval peasant did indeed stretch from dawn to dusk (thus it was approximately eight hours long in winter and sixteen hours long in summer) but it was broken up by many periods of rest. Breakfast, lunch, the afternoon nap and dinner all took place during the so-called “working day”, unlike today when we are lucky to get an hour for lunch. Labourers in the 19th century who campaigned for eight-hour working days were not taking a great step forward for workers’ rights, they were merely trying to undo the damage done during the Industrial Revolution. [5]

In addition, the year was full of holidays: Christmas, Easter and midsummer were all celebrated with long holidays and the calendar was peppered with saint’s days and rest days. There were also week-long “ales” to mark personal occasions such as weddings and deaths. Overall, approximately a third of the year was given over to holidays in medieval England. Even the ancien règime in France guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days and thirty-eight holidays. Travellers in Spain reported that holidays took up five months of the year. [6]

Furthermore, a peasant was not required to work on every day that was not an official holiday:

The peasant’s free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor — the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income — which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estimate finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year — 175 days — for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. [7]

Erik Rauch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has compiled a list of estimates of the average number of hours worked per year for different periods: [8]

13th century	Adult male peasant, UK	1620 hours
14th century	Casual labourer, UK	1440 hours
Middle Ages	English worker	2309 hours
1400 – 1600	Farmer-miner, adult male, UK	1980 hours
1840	Average worker, UK	3105 – 3588 hours
1850	Average worker, USA	3150 – 3650 hours
1987	Average worker, USA	1949 hours
1988	Manufacturing worker, UK	1856 hours

This demonstrates quite clearly that the only people who had to suffer long days of hard toil were those poor souls who had the misfortune to live through the Industrial Revolution. The claim that pre-industrial workers had a harder life than today’s workers is a lie based on falsely extrapolating early industrial conditions into the past. In fact, the working day wasn’t so bad until the industrialists turned up.

Finally, what should we make of the accusation of “superstitious fears and cultural parochialism”? We could point out that there are still plenty of superstitious fears around today, including many new ones. We could also suggest that a bit more parochialism might not go amiss in contemporary culture. However, it is clear by now that these are not reasoned arguments but merely baseless accusations fueled by ideology.

[1] Bostrom, N. 2003. Transhumanist FAQ (Humanity+) available at http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq

[2] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talking in February 2004 at TED in Monterey, California. Available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs. I quote from 03:15 to 04:15.

[3] Quiñones, E. 2006. Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion (Princeton University). Available at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/index.xml

[4] Nancy Etcoff talking in February 2004 at TED in Monterey, California. Available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W2dsnhC18Q. I quote from 01:44 to 03:05.

[5] Rogers, J. E. T. 1949. Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin)

[6] Rodgers, E. 1940. Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press)

[7] Schor, J. B. 1993. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books)

[8] Rauch, E. Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today’s. Available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

Forms

Visible light is just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic waves vary continuously from very high frequency, short wavelength gamma rays to very low frequency, long wavelength radio waves.

The only thing that differentiates visible light from the rest of the spectrum is the fact that it so happens that the human eye is sensitive to that range of electromagnetic waves, from approximately 400 to 790 THz. Other animals, equipped with different sensory apparatus, are sensitive to different parts of the spectrum. For example, bees are sensitive to electromagnetic waves of a higher frequency than those which we can perceive (we call that range “ultraviolet”, since it is just beyond the violet end of the spectrum visible to us) while pit vipers have an organ capable of perceiving lower frequencies of electromagnetic radiation (which we call “infrared”, since it is just beyond the red end of the spectrum visible to us).

Thus there is nothing inherent in visible light that differentiates it from the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is separated from the rest of the spectrum solely because of the way that our sensory apparatus, in this case our eyes, function.

Similarly, that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light is itself, of course, continuous. However, when white light (a mixture of different wavelengths of visible light) is separated into a visible spectrum by means of a refracting crystal or the water droplets that cause a rainbow, we see distinct bands of colour. Again, these discrete bands are not a property of the light itself but rather a feature of the way that our eyes perceive colour.

We can identify an analogous phenomenon in the way that we differentiate between different species of animal. There is nothing inherent in an animal itself that causes it to belong to one species rather than another, but rather we have devised a categorisation of animals for our own purposes into which we place the animals that we encounter. There is nothing in nature itself that corresponds to our concept of species, which is actually a rather vague concept anyway.

If one asks for a definition of species, one is usually told that animals of the same species breed with one another but do not breed with animals of other species. This is a fairly good working definition — good enough that it is still found to be practically useful — but it does not hold up to careful scrutiny.

There is a population of red deer in Richmond Park in London and there is another population of red deer, that resemble them in every respect, in the New Forest. These deer are usually reckoned to be of the same species and yet they never come into contact with one another so they never breed with one another. Are they then different species? Surely not. Presumably it is not the mere fact that one population does not breed with another that differentiates species, but rather that they cannot interbreed, even if they were to come into contact with another.

But then how do we account for the offspring of tigers and lions? A male lion may mate with a female tiger to produce what is called a liger. A female lion may mate with a male tiger to produce what is called a tigon. Unlike mules, ligers and tigons are fertile and can successfully breed. Actually, for that matter, some female mules are fertile too. Lions and tigers (and horses and donkeys) are generally reckoned to be different species, and yet they can successfully interbreed to produce fertile offspring.

So the fact that two different populations do not interbreed in the wild is not enough to make them different species, otherwise the red deer of Richmond Park would be a different species from those of the New Forest. And the fact that two populations can interbreed to produce fertile offspring is not enough to make them the same species, otherwise lions and tigers would be the same species. (Not to mention wolves, coyotes and dogs.)

Perhaps it is not merely the geographical separation of wild lions and tigers that prevents them interbreeding in the wild, as appears to be the case with the deer, so maybe we can save the definition by reference to some notion of natural interbreeding, as opposed to interbreeding in zoos. However, this too becomes hard to define rigorously:

As we look at the herring gull, moving westwards from Great Britain to North America, we see gulls that are recognizably herring gulls, although they are a little different from the British form. We can follow them, as their appearance gradually changes, as far as Siberia. At about this point in the continuum, the gull looks more like the form that in Great Britain is called the lesser black-backed gull. From Siberia, across Russia, to northern Europe, the gull gradually changes to look more and more like the British lesser black-backed gull. Finally, in Europe, the ring is complete; the two geographically extreme forms meet, to form two perfectly good species: the herring and lesser black-backed gull can be both distinguished by their appearance and do not naturally interbreed. [1]

We might attempt to save the idea of species by augmenting the definition in some way. Perhaps we should stipulate that animals of the same species resemble each other closely? This would allow us to continue to claim that lions and tigers are different species, but it might cause some consternation at Crufts. Maybe we should turn to genetic science for an answer? Unfortunately, even there the boundaries between species are quite fuzzy.

The point is simply that “species” do not exist as categories in any objective sense, any more than the distinct bands of colour in a rainbow exist in the electromagnetic spectrum, but rather they are just a convenient concept that we find practically useful. In the case of the bands of colour we cannot help but perceive rainbows that way (at least, assuming we are using our natural eyes) and in the case of animal species we just find it useful to categorise them that way, even if we do not have a rigorous definition.

This point may be made even clearer by considering the tomato. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? A biologist would say that it is a fruit, since it meets the scientific definition of a fruit rather than a vegetable, but a cook would say that it is a vegetable, since that is how it is commonly used in recipes. Our categorisations depend upon the use to which we put them. Neither the cook nor the biologist is mistaken, though the use of the cook’s definition in biological research or the biologist’s definition in a kitchen may well be mistaken.

Consider sheep. They all look the same to me. But a shepherd, so I am told, can identify each individual member of his flock. The shepherd has learned to categorise his sheep in a different manner from my own. That does not mean that the differentiating features were not there when I looked at the sheep; it is merely that I did not notice them. It is not the shepherd’s or my perceiving that creates those features but it is our perceiving that assigns significance to them.

Similarly, electromagnetic radiation between the frequencies of 400 and 790 THz exists whether or not humans are there to perceive it. However, it acquires a special significance, that of “light”, in the minds of humans that do perceive it.

Just as the shepherd employs categories of greater specificity when perceiving and thinking about his sheep, so other people and, more dramatically, other species might employ categories of lesser specificity. I strongly suspect that very small creatures, such as insects, do not distinguish between sheep and horses when attempting to negotiate a field without being stepped on.

All of the above suggests that at least some things which we generally consider to be ontologically distinct are in fact, like the bands of colour in a rainbow, merely facets of our perception or our modes of cognition. They are patterns in some underlying substrate, such as species in the continuum of the animal kingdom, or distinct colours in the continuous spectrum, rather than individual things whose individuality is inherent in themselves. Their individuality, that which makes them distinct from others, is a feature of our perception or thought.

Consider yourself. You presumably believe, as do most people, that you are the same person now that you were twenty years ago. (Unless you are less than twenty years old, in which case I hope you get the idea anyway.) However, most of the molecules making up your body, probably all of them, are different now from those that made up your body then. Physically, speaking in terms of the matter out of which you are constituted, you are a completely different person now from the person you were then. So what has persisted? How can I refer both to the person then and to the person now as ‘you’ if those two people are completely different materially? What persists is a pattern. Even if your appearance changes, as it probably did over the last twenty years, we can still perceive a continuously existing, if gradually changing, pattern. It is this pattern that is you.

In the St. Lawrence river, between the island of Montréal and the south bank of the river, there is a dangerous stretch of water known as the Lachine Rapids. The rapids consist of a number of dramatic standing waves caused by the shape of the rocky riverbed. As the river swells and subsides, the waves sometimes vary in magnitude but never in shape. Each wave has been given a name and tourists can take a boat out into the rapids to get to know each individual wave intimately. Clearly these waves, although they are named and are considered to persist through time, are not composed of the same water molecules from moment to moment. It is the pattern that the flowing water makes which is named and which is considered to persist. So it is with you: the material of which you are composed is ever changing, but the pattern that we identify as you persists.

It is this pattern which makes you what you are, not the material of which you happen to be composed at any one moment. Richard Dawkins made a similar point in a talk at TED in which he compared a person’s existence to the existence of migrating sand dunes:

Steve Grand, in his book Creation: Life and How to Make It, is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. The Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium, the aether. But we find real matter comforting only because we’ve evolved to survive in [a world] where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool for Steve Grand is a thing with just as much reality as a rock.

In a desert plane in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, there’s a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It’s what’s technically known as a barkahn and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about seventeen metres per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side then as each sand grain reaches the top of the ridge it cascades down on the inside of the crescent. And so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent thing. [2]

This “preoccupation with matter itself”, about which Steve Grand is apparently so scathing, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Aristotle, nearly two and a half millennia ago, taught that the material cause of a thing — the matter out of which the thing is composed — is but one part of the explanation of the thing. Among the three other types of explanation that he listed, Aristotle included the formal cause, which is a concept very similar to what I have described above as a pattern. [3]

It is the formal cause that makes a thing the kind of thing that it is. It is the essence of a thing, in conformity with which the matter out of which the thing is composed is arranged.

For example, you are not the matter out of which you are composed: you cannot be, else you would not exist from one moment to the next for the matter out of which you are composed is constantly changing. Your essence, that which makes you you rather than someone or something else, is the form that the matter takes.

However, despite the fact that it is form that defines a thing, we still have a tendency to think that forms are not real in the same sense that matter is real. As Dawkins put it, we don’t think that patterns are “really things at all”. We think that a pattern requires a material medium and is therefore dependent on matter for its existence. A pattern is a certain arrangement of matter, so surely matter is real while a pattern is just a way of talking about a certain bit of matter. [4]

This can perhaps be most succinctly illustrated by asking whether or not the pattern would exist if there were no-one to recognise it. In what sense would animals be categorised into species if there were no biologists to categorise them? In what sense would visible light be significant if there were no eyes sensitive to that range of electromagnetic radiation?

The existence of patterns appears to depend on the existence of somebody that recognises them. On the other hand, patterns are in fact the primary objects of our perception. Although formless matter is a coherent concept that we can consider and reason about, we can never actually perceive matter except as the constituent of a form. For example, one cannot perceive wood in an abstract, formless sense: it must always be the wood of which a table is made, or the wood of a tree, or the constituent wood of a plank, etc.

This sort of consideration should be enough to make us think twice about leaping to naïve conclusions. Many great thinkers, Aristotle among them, concluded that in fact form is more basic than matter. Where I, above, wrote that “surely matter is real while a pattern is just a way of talking about a certain bit of matter”, others might reply that the very fact that I have made reference to a “certain bit of matter” belies my claim that matter can be real without a form: formless matter may be a coherent concept in itself but it is not something of which the human intellect can actually conceive.

We are thus left with something of a conundrum. Forms, or patterns, do not appear to exist in any objective sense in the physical world. But fluid and arbitrary though the patterns we use may be, we cannot help but use them. We do not merely use forms frequently, we always use them: we cannot perceive or conceive of matter except as the constituent of some form. Thus, at least in our thought and perceptions, form is at least as primal as matter.

The conundrum is this: if form is a basic element in our thought, but there are no forms inherent in the physical world, in what sense, and where, do forms exist?

The obvious answer, at least to someone schooled in modern science and philosophy, is that forms are an artifact of the manner in which our brains process information. They exist only in the sense that our brains are capable of consistently recognising them. They are communicable — that is to say, we can talk about them and others will understand what we are talking about — only because those with whom we communicate have similar brains capable of recognising the same forms.

Thus the form of a dog, i.e. the pattern to which certain bits of matter conform which we call dogs, is a property that matter may possess. More specifically, it is the property of being able to be consistently recognised as a dog by human observers who have been taught to recognise dogs. Of course, dogs possess this property whether or not anyone is actually there to do the observing. The situation is analogous to that of the sheep described above: the shepherd and I are both looking at the same sheep but where I see a flock of clones he sees individuals; we are both looking at the same sheep but he has learned to assign significance to aspects of their appearance that I have not. Similarly, dogs possess the property of ‘dogness’ whether or not anyone is around to notice it. However, it is the human observer who decides what ‘dogness’ actually is.

So we return to the question of which is more basic, form or matter. Which, logically speaking, comes first? For example, consider a dog. There are various things we could say about the dog, such as that it is black, it is large, it has a tendency to drool, and so on. But these are all so-called ‘accidental characteristics’ of the dog: we can analyse the sentence “The dog is black” such that there is a subject – “The dog” – and a predicate that we apply to that subject  – “is black”. Thus there is a sense in which “the dog” is a more basic element of thought than “the black dog”. Another way to think about this might be to consider painting the dog white: now his accidental characteristic of being black is no longer true but he is still the same dog.

But what is it that makes the dog a dog? Is it the matter out of which he is constituted? Is it his property of ‘dogness’, according to which he is recognised as a dog by people who have learned to recognise dogs? Or is it some combination of the two?

Just as we broke down “the black dog” into the subject “dog” and predicate “black”, and so decided that “dog” is a more basic element than “black dog”, we might try to do the same with respect to matter and form. “Dog” could be interpreted as “matter in the form of a dog”: therefore just as “black” is a predicate of “dog”, so we might say that form is a predicate of matter. This would suggest that matter is more basic than form. In fact, this is exactly the same line of thought, although expressed slightly differently, as the one that I expressed earlier as “a pattern is a certain arrangement of matter”.

However, there is a problem with this analysis. As soon as we remove the predicate “in the form of a dog”, we are no longer talking about a dog. We could fill a bucket with all the atoms and molecules necessary to constitute a dog but we wouldn’t have a dog: we’d just have a bucket of organic gloop. Not unless that matter were arranged into the form of a dog would we have a dog. Thus although there is a sense in which form is predicated of matter, it does not follow that matter is the most basic element of thought when we wish to consider actual things. Matter alone cannot be a thing: it requires a form.

Furthermore, we know that the matter out of which a dog is composed is constantly changing; so the matter cannot be part of what it is to be a dog. It seems that there is nothing special, significant or distinct about any particular clump of matter unless it constitutes a form — i.e. unless it possesses the property of conforming to a certain pattern that observers recognise as a particular sort of thing.

So if we are to accord reality to things – if we are to accept the rather common sense proposition that things exist – then what we are really saying is that forms exist. If you and I exist, then it is because we are forms.

[1] Ridley, M. 1985. The Problems of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 5 quoted in  Dennett, D. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster) p. 45

[2] The talk can be viewed on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw); I quote from 08:54 to 10:28

[3] This only seems like a novel idea to Dawkins because he is ignorant of any philosophy before the modern era. Modern philosophy can be distinguished from the philosophy of the medievals by its revolutionary rejection of Aristotle’s formal and final causes.

[4] Regarding electromagnetic waves, Dawkins said, “The Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium, the aether.” We now know that this is not true. There is no aether: electromagnetic waves propagate through vacuum. Dawkins seems to be implying that our intuition that a wave must have a material medium is not that reliable.

However, I think the apparent failure of our intuition is actually the result of a confusion of terminology. Dawkins has been talking about matter in the vague, everyday sense of “solid, material things”. But as soon as we begin to consider electromagnetic radiation we need to clarify our meaning. If by matter we mean that which physically exists, then electromagnetic radiation is matter. If we wish to signify something else by the term matter, we need to define precisely what we mean. Whatever we choose, we will necessarily now be talking in the mathematical language of modern physics and not in the everyday language of our intuitions. Of course, this is part of Dawkins’ point: our intuitions are evolved heuristic approximations that only really work in the everyday world of human experience. But the fact that electromagnetic radiation propagates through vacuum tells us nothing interesting about the ontology of waves or patterns.

Neophilia

In the past, I have suffered from a psychological disorder that can best be described as neophilia. I have been enthralled by the idea of a revolution in thought: a brand new philosophy to blaze forth and sweep away the inadequacies and misconceptions of our old, encrusted mental landscape. I dreamt of technological wonders, life extension, cybernetics, space exploration, colonisation and transhumanism.

It strikes me as a very immature mindset, akin to that of a rebellious teenager. I remember proudly telling my parents that I was an anarchist, only to be told that my grandmother once told her parents that she was a communist. It appears that we both grew out of it. I look back on the political views of my teenaged self with a mixture of embarrassment and knowing self-indulgence. Many people seem to go through similar periods of teenaged rebellion, although it manifests in different ways for different people, but I would like to think that most people grow up eventually. [1]

Of course, many people never do grow out of it. On those few occasions that I encounter what is now called the “mass media”, I find ample evidence that modern society is governed almost entirely by men and women with the mental age of teenagers (and fairly obnoxious ones at that.) It is a great shame and, I am sure, a cause of much misery, but it no longer surprises me.

Although long immune to such conceits in the world of politics, it was not that long ago that I last found myself caught up in the excitement of some futurist philosophy. Transhumanism is exciting: it is positive, optimistic, groundbreaking, thrilling and new. But if one takes a step back and attempts a sober assessment, one quickly sees the similarity between youthful exuberance for political revolution and the “positive optimism” of futurists. Both are symptomatic of arrested development, both are the application of a teenaged mind to an adult problem.

I find myself thinking along similar lines when I consider technological development. There is a part of me — a geeky part of me that spent too much of its youth playing with computers — that admires technological development for its own sake. There is something bewitching about new gadgets, spacecraft, artificial intelligence and robotics. But ultimately it is nothing more than immature boys with new toys, perhaps doing more harm than good.

I recently completed a two month journey around the western half of North America. I travelled the whole distance, many thousands of miles, by car. I saw some fantastic and awe inspiring sights. All the way, I was struck by how lucky I was to be able to see all these phenomenal and humbling scenes and how I owed it all to the invention of the motor car. There is no way I could have had the wonderful experience of the last two months without a car. And yet, as I travelled along tarmac roads cut into thousand-year-old redwood forests, along tunnels blasted through mountains, down roads cutting across otherwise pristine desert, I grew to loathe cars and what they have done to our world.

Every new technology, no doubt invented with the best of intentions, seems to have its detrimental effects. I am sure plenty of people would disagree with my contention that cars do more harm than good but few people can seriously think the world is a better place with atomic weaponry in it. How about mobile telephones? They are now, my friends tell me, indispensable. Yet we all seemed to manage without them a few years ago. How much of our modern technology, the wonders of which neophiles are so keen to extol, actually improves the human lot? How much exists only thanks to an immature and unreflective passion for novelty?

Medicine is perhaps the best example of technological development that genuinely does improve lives. But even there the effects are not solely beneficial: pneumonia used to be known as the “old man’s friend” and with good reason. I am sure that almost all technological inventions are benevolently intended but I find it hard to discover a single recent invention that is unquestionably beneficial.

I have often thought that the world would be a better place if gunpowder had never been invented. Now I find myself thinking that most inventions — especially those that have come to characterise modern civilisation, such as the revolutionary changes in transport and communication — do more harm than good. In almost every case, it seems that technological innovation is justified solely by the fact that the new technology will allow us to do something that we currently desire to do but cannot. What better epitomises teenage rebellion than the selfish and unthinking attempt to satisfy desire at any cost?

During the Second World War, Tolkien wrote to his son who was then training with the Royal Air Force:

I wonder how you are getting on with your flying since you first went solo — the last news we had of this. I especially noted your observations on the skimming martins. That touches to the heart of things, doesn’t it? There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and is so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems almost a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent. How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually rotating wheel!

— J.R.R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 7th of July 1944. Excerpt from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: 2006) pp. 87-88

[1] But I must admit, when I consider the modern state, I might as well be an anarchist still.

Unreasonably Effective

In a much quoted academic paper, Eugene Wigner once wrote:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. [1]

Wigner dubbed the amazing success of mathematics in accurately describing and predicting the physical world, “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” [2]. It is quite astonishing. Why should it be that, for example, when Einstein was looking for some mathematical description of his theory of general relativity, he discovered that Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry, invented about half a century earlier, was the perfect fit?

How is it that recent experiments to measure the magnetic moment of an electron should so precisely match the predictions of quantum electrodynamics, even when measured at a precision of eight parts in a trillion? One of the inventors of the theory of quantum electrodynamics, Freeman Dyson, said, “I’m amazed at how precisely Nature dances to the tune we scribbled so carelessly fifty-seven years ago, and at how the experimenters and the theorists can measure and calculate her dance to a part in a trillion.” [3]

Mario Livio writes:

In the late 1960s, physicists Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam developed a theory that treats the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force in a unified manner. This theory, now known as the electroweak theory, predicted the existence of three particles (called the W+, W-, and Z bosons) that had never before been observed. The particles were unambiguously detected in 1983 in accelerator experiments (which smash one subatomic particle into another at very high energies) led by physicists Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. [4]

As Einstein put it, “How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?” [5]

First, we might question the claim that mathematics is “independent of experience”. Sir Michael Atiyah wrote:

If one views the brain in its evolutionary context then the mysterious success of mathematics in the physical sciences is at least partially explained. The brain evolved in order to deal with the physical world, so it should not be too surprising that it has developed a language, mathematics, that is well suited for the purpose. [6]

This seems to accord with the latest research by cognitive scientists:

The cognitive scientists base their conclusions on what they regard as a compelling body of evidence from the results of numerous experiments. Some of these tests involved functional imaging studies of the brain during the performance of mathematical tasks. Others examined the math competence of infants, of hunter-gatherer groups such as the Mundurukú, who were never exposed to schooling, and of people with various degrees of brain damage. Most of the researchers agree that mathematical capacities appear to be innate. For instance, all humans are able to tell at a glance whether they are looking at one, two or three objects (an ability called subitizing). A very limited version of arithmetic, in the form of grouping, pairing, and very simple addition and subtraction, may also be innate, as is perhaps some very basic understanding of geometrical concepts (although this assertion is more controversial). Neuroscientists have also identified regions in the brain, such as the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere, that appear to be crucial for juggling numbers and mathematical computations, but which are not essential for language or the working memory. [7]

This explains only how it is that we come to have the ability to grasp the mathematical nature of the world: it does not explain why the world is, to such an impressive extent, mathematical. It is quite conceivable that the world should not exhibit regularities at all. It is even easier to conceive of a world which, although regular, exhibits a particular regularity rather than the universal regularity that we observe.

Why is it that the same law governs the motion of the heavens and the falling of an apple? As Sir Isaac Newton described it:

“Nature is very consonant and conformable to herself.” [8]

This was not always believed to be the case. The Scholastic philosophers, following Aristotle, believed that each thing behaves as it does because of its own nature. Thus it is the nature of the Moon that makes it orbit the Earth, it is the nature of the sea that causes it to rise and fall in tides, and it is the nature of an apple to fall toward the centre of the Earth. According to such a view, natural philosophy consists of determining and describing the various different natures of different entities. Newton’s great insight was that the universe is governed by universal laws: the orbit of the Moon, the rise and fall of the tides, and the falling of an apple are all the result of a universal law of gravitation. This was a revolutionary realisation:

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book. [9]

So not only is it possible to conceive of a world exhibiting local, particular regularity but no universal laws, that is indeed how the world was perceived for many centuries.

It also seems possible to conceive of a world that exhibits regularities which are nevertheless not mathematical: such a possibility is described by George Coyne and Michael Heller in their book A Comprehensible Universe [10]. However, if we accept the thesis that our mathematics is an evolutionary adaptation to the regularity of the world, then perhaps such a world could not exist in practice. If we found ourselves in a regular world then necessarily those regularities would be mathematical, as what we mean by mathematics would depend on the regularities whose nature our brains had evolved to accommodate.

If Atiyah is correct, then it is not ultimately the mathematical nature of the world that is surprising, but rather the universal regularity of the world. On the other hand, it is far from obvious that Atiyah is correct. Richard Hamming wrote:

If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. [11]

The only answer to Hamming appears to be that, long before the age of science, we evolved, as the research of cognitive scientists mentioned above appears to tell us, an innate faculty for very rudimentary mathematics. We must then appeal to the nature of mathematics itself, what Atiyah calls the “abstract hierarchical nature of mathematics” [12], to explain how this rudimentary mathematics can be so remarkably successful when extended to every level from the subatomic to the galactic. Unfortunately, appealing to the nature of mathematics as we know it does seem to rather beg the question.

Nevertheless, whether we accept Atiyah’s evolutionary explanation or not, we are still left with the mystery of why it should be that the world exhibits universal regularities — regularities which, whether necessarily or contingently, we can express with astonishing accuracy in the language of mathematics. Coyne and Heller quote Einstein:

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking it can be put in order, this fact is one which … we shall never understand. One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”. [13]

Why is there order rather than chaos? Of course, this question cannot be answered rationally, for it is the validity of rationality that we are trying to explain. Coyne and Heller quote Sir Karl Popper:

Neither logical argument nor experience can establish the rationalist attitude; for only those who are ready to consider argument or experience, and who have therefore adopted this attitude already, will be impressed by them. That is to say, a rationalist attitude must be first adopted if any argument or experience is to be effective, and it cannot therefore be based upon argument or experience. So rationalism is necessarily far from comprehensive or self-contained. [14]

Coyne and Heller continue:

Why then should we not adopt irrationalism? Because when one confronts rationalism with irrationalism, one immediately sees that rationalism is a value. Therefore, “the choice before us is not simply an intellectual affair, or a matter of taste. It is a moral decision”. Indeed, the choice of value is the moral decision. Popper calls this kind of rationalism critical rationalism, the one “which recognizes the fact that the fundamental rationalist attitude results from an (at least tentative) act of faith — from faith in reason”. [15]

So there is a sense in which this mystery — this fundamental mystery about the world — cannot be answered, at least not rationally. As Einstein said, “we shall never understand” [16].

But the inquiring philosopher, who cannot help attempting to explain, is unlikely to be satisfied by this. As Coyne and Heller put it, “The principal tenet of rationality is that one is never allowed to cease asking questions if there remains something to be sought.” [17]

It seems clear to me that there is indeed something remaining to be sought.

---

[1] Wigner, E. P. 1960. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, no. 1. Reprinted in Saatz, T. L., and Weyl, F. J., eds. 1969. The Spirit and the Uses of the Mathematical Sciences (New York: McGraw-Hill).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Livio, M. 2009. Is God a Mathematician? (New York: Simon & Schuster). p. 223.

[4] Ibid. p. 224

[5] Einstein, A. 1934. “Geometrie und Erfuhrung” in Mein Weltbild (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Materialien).

[6] Atiyah, M. 1995. Times Higher Education Supplement, 29th of September. Quoted in Livio, M. op. cit. p. 243.

[7] Livio, M. op. cit. p. 232

[8] Newton, I. 1704. Opticks (London: Smith & Walford)

[9] Ibid. The book to which he refers is his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687 (London: Pepys)

[10] Coyne, G. and Heller, M. 2008. A Comprehensible Universe: The Interplay of Science and Theology (Springer)

[11] Hamming, R. W. 1980. The American Mathematical Monthly, 87(2), 81. Quoted in Livio, M. op. cit. p. 246.

[12] Atiyah, M. op. cit.

[13] Einstein, A. 1936. “Physics and Reality” in Journal of the Franklin Institute 221. pp. 349 – 382. Quoted in Coyne, G. and Heller, M. op. cit. p. 3

[14] Popper, K. P. 1974. The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) p. 224. Quoted in Coyne, G. and Heller, M. op. cit. p. 9

[15] Coyne, G. and Heller, M. op. cit. p. 9. In which they quote from Popper, K. P. op. cit. pp. 230 – 232

[16] Einstein, A. op. cit.

[17] Coyne, G. and Heller, M. op. cit. p. xiv

Che

I still don’t completely understand why it is that thousands of people can wander around wearing clothing emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara and it is considered completely acceptable; whereas if one person were to walk around displaying an image of a Nazi in a positive light he would, quite rightly, be excoriated.

Here are some of the wise sayings of Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.

- Quoted in The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis by Servando Gonzales (Spooks Books, 2002, p. 111)

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

- Quoted in The Cuban Revolution: Years of Promise by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay (University Press of Florida, 2005, p. 57)

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter.” I did so and his possessions were now mine.

- Diary entry quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (Bantam Books, 1997)

In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity.

Simulations

Since I read Atheism and Theism [1], J.J.C. Smart has become something of a philosophical hero for me. I really admire both his philosophical acumen and his attitude towards philosophy and other philosophers in general. If only all atheists exhibited his combination of sharp logic and respect for those that disagree with him (and all theists were a bit more like J.J. Haldane) then the philosophy of religion would be a lot more respectable.

I mentioned Smart only because I wanted to refer to his claim that there are few knockdown arguments in philosophy [2], which I think is important. However, I note that I have inadvertently produced another basis for my segue into a discussion of a talk by Richard Dawkins.

In July 2005, Richard Dawkins gave a talk at TED entitled “Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science” [3]. Much of the talk is taken up by Dawkins’ theory that our ideas about what really exists, or what is normal, are the result of our evolution in what he calls Middle World. The “middle” refers to our position in the scale of things between the very small, the level of particle physics and quantum theory, and the very large, the level of astronomy and general relativity.

Thus, for example, we perceive rocks to be hard and impenetrable because at our level, the level of humans, rocks are indeed impenetrable. I cannot walk through, or pass my hand through, solid rock. However, at the quantum level, both rocks and humans are of course mostly empty space. A neutrino-sized being that had evolved a brain in its neutrino-sized world would perceive rocks to be mostly space. Similarly, we have evolved to possess an intuitive understanding of motion at the sort of middling speeds that things, such as animals, in our middling world of everyday experience tend to exhibit. If we had evolved to move through the cosmos at speeds nearing the speed of light, we would have a better intuitive of understanding of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

Dawkins refers to Feynman’s description of quantum theory:

Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theory’s experimental predictions to specifying the width of North America to within one hair’s breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be in some sense true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, “If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.” [4]

The difficulty that we have understanding the way the world works at very small and very large scales is, according to Dawkins, due to our having evolved in a world of medium-scale entities.

Dawkins goes further than this, to speculate about the way the world might appear to other species:

“Really”, for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of “really”s. What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense-data, but constructed so it’s useful for dealing with the real world.

The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey’s brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks; a mole’s software for constructing models of its world will be customised for underground use; a water strider’s brain doesn’t need 3D software at all since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott flatland.

I’ve speculated that bats may see colour with their ears. The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the model that any bird, a day-flying bird like a swallow, needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model while the swallow uses light is incidental. Bats, I’ve even suggested, use perceived hues such as red and blue as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes — perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces: furry or smooth and so on — in the same way as swallows, or indeed we, use those perceived hues, redness and blueness etc., to label long and short wavelengths of light. There’s nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. [5]

It is interesting that Dawkins draws such a strong distinction between the way the world objectively is and the way it subjectively appears to us, even going so far as to claim that another species may see “red” in quite different circumstances from those that would cause a human to see red. His description of “redness” and “blueness” could be a textbook description of qualia. He certainly appears to be saying that there is something that it is like to be a bat. This seems to contradict his own self-description as an austere mechanist:

Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind. We’re the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are and our hormones are the way they are. We’d be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different.

But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person like a child murderer should be something like, “This unit has a faulty component, it needs repairing.” That’s not what we say. What we say, and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me, what we say is, “Vile monster! Prison is too good for you!” Or worse we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see of course all over the world today.

In short, when we’re thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines like computers or cars. But when we revert to being human, we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who you remember thrashed his car to teach it a lesson when it wouldn’t start on Gourmet Night.

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface-tension dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people, a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behaviour of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists.

Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate but it’s a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness.

Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it’s hardly surprising the same modelling software often seizes control when we’re trying to think about entities for which it’s not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole. [6]

There is some confusion here. Is it or is it not accurate to describe people as purposeful? Dawkins appears to be saying that it is never accurate to describe anything as purposeful but that it is sometimes useful to pretend that certain things, such as other people, are purposeful. He does not say that treating other humans as purposeful is deluded, he says it is useful. But in that case the millions of people who believe the universe is purposeful cannot be deluded either: it is merely the case that their belief is not as useful as it is when applied to humans.

Dawkins cannot have it both ways. Either humans genuinely are purposeful, in which case “treating people as machines” is neither scientifically nor philosophically accurate, or people who impute purpose to the universe are not deluded. Dawkins seems to switch between correspondence and pragmatist truth theories as it suits him, which makes his philosophical position rather incoherent.

But let us ignore his snide comment about the deluded masses. There is still a problem with the claim that although people are really just machines, it is more useful for us to pretend that they are not.

Even those who, like Dawkins, claim that the world is purposeless cannot help both experiencing the sensation of having purposes themselves and treating others as if they genuinely are “purposeful, goal-seeking agent[s] with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness.” Indeed, the latter segment of Dawkins’ talk is an attempt to explain why it is that we cannot help believing that humans are purposeful.

But if we cannot help believing it, we should surely demand some damn good evidence that it isn’t real. Dawkins does not present any such evidence: all he does is attempt to explain how it could be the case that we believe it even if it isn’t real. He does not present any rational reason for believing that it isn’t real.

What could such a reason be? Elsewhere, particularly when arguing about the existence of God, Dawkins makes reference to the idea that a simple or parsimonious explanation is better than one that introduces unnecessary complexity or leaves yet more to be explained [7]. So it may be that he would like to remove purpose from our understanding of the world because he believes that everything can be adequately explained without it.

However, there are two flaws in this approach. The first is that it is not at all clear that everything can be adequately explained without it. We experience the sensation of having purpose and we believe we perceive purpose in the actions of others. The obvious explanation is that our perceptions are correct: we really do have purpose and so do other people. Dawkins’ alternative is that purpose is illusory, an artifact of the way that our brains predict the actually mechanistic behaviour of others. But denial is not explanation. Dawkins has not demonstrated that purpose is illusory, he has just stipulated that it is so and then conjectured some way in which such a stipulation might accord with our apparently contradictory experience.

Furthermore, this conjecture does not even account for all the evidence. Perhaps it could explain why we treat other people as “goal-seeking agent[s] with pleasures and pains, desires and intention” but it does not explain why it is that we ourselves feel pain and desire. Regardless of its origin, artifact of simulation or otherwise, I have first-hand experience of pain, desire, intention and so forth. Dawkins offers no explanation for this.

Second, earlier in his talk he seemed to postulate the existence of qualia, which throws doubt on any claim he might make that his explanation is more parsimonious than the obvious one. It is hard to make sense of this, since the existence of qualia would presumably refute his mechanistic philosophy, the support of which appears to be the sole motivation for his denial that purpose is real. Moreover, even if there is some way in which Dawkins’ position could be stated coherently, it is still not clear that his explanation in terms of simulations of “a social Middle World” is simpler than just accepting the reality of purpose.

Finally, perhaps there is a pragmatic reason for claiming that purpose is illusory. We have already seen that Dawkins vascillates between pragmatism and a concern for objective truth: perhaps in this case he is being pragmatic. However, Dawkins himself admits that humans cannot help thinking in terms of purpose, in which case it would be bizarre to claim that it is more pragmatic to think in some other way. Indeed, one might reasonably claim in such circumstances that the most pragmatic option would be to accept the reality of purpose, even if other considerations cause one to doubt its reality.

On the basis of this talk, there does not seem to be any rational reason for rejecting the common sense view that humans are purposeful, that they have intentions and desires, experience pleasures and pains and so on.

Dawkins appears to have chosen a theory, a philosophy of mind known as eliminative materialism, and then tried to explain how our contradictory experiences might be shoehorned into this theory. In both science and philosophy, it is generally considered bad form to pick a conclusion then attempt to explain away any data that contradicts it. In general, one should attempt to begin with the data and then seek the theory that best explains it. One can only assume that Dawkins has an ideological motivation to do otherwise.

[1] Atheism and Theism, J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.

[2] ‘Why Philosophers Disagree’, J.J.C. Smart, in Reconstructing Philosophy: New Essays in Metaphilosophy, J. Couture and K. Nielsen (editors), University of Calgary Press, 1993, pp. 67-82.

[3] The talk can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw

[4] Ibid. 00:54 – 01:28

[5] Ibid. 11:29 – 13:28

[6] Ibid. 19:03 – 21:26

[7] Dawkins frequently complains that a creator God would have to be at least as complex as that which He created, thus any attempt to explain the universe as God’s creation is useless because we are left with the equally or more difficult task of explaining God. I deduce from this that Dawkins doesn’t really understand what theologians mean when they say that God creates and sustains the world. Until recently I did not understand what they meant either but, having read a couple of books, I now have a much better idea. It is clear to me that Dawkins has not bothered to do even a cursory amount of research into his opponents’ theses, which is remarkable given the scorn he pours on those who dare to question scientific theories without first studying science. I really enjoy his books on biology, which makes his hypocrisy in philosophical matters deeply saddening. See Dawkins versus Swinburne at the Maverick Philosopher for a very restrained response to one of Dawkins’ exercises in double standards.

The Unchanged Changer

Over on the aptly named McCabism blog, Gordon McCabe recently wrote about Christopher Hart’s review of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means. Dr McCabe wrote:

Hart’s proposition that God is not a being, but Being itself, is the familiar doctrine of pantheism, which is inconsistent with the personal nature of God enshrined in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

However, the proposition that God is Being itself is not the same as pantheism. In fact, pantheism and “God is Being” are mutually exclusive. To explain this — or, more accurately, to explain my understanding of this issue: the whole thing is too damn convoluted and confusing for me to claim to understand it completely — I thought I would attempt to produce my own exposition of the famous “Unmoved Mover” argument.

We start with two premises. The first is pretty uncontroversial so I’ll get it out of the way now: we observe change in the world. Things change.

The second premise is really an attempt to provide an explanation of change. This is rather typical of philosophers: whereas a normal person might quite happily accept that things change and leave it at that, a philosopher cannot help but ask why: why do things change? What is it that makes them change? Can we explain change?

Philosophy is basically an attempt to explain things. I think it revealing that some modern philosophers “solve” the traditionally difficult problems of philosophy not by producing an actual solution but instead by declaring that such and such does not really require an explanation. It smacks of intellectual dishonesty, or at the least a lack of imagination and curiosity unworthy of a philosopher, but that is a cantankerous complaint for another day.

What is change? It is the phenomenon whereby an entity ceases to be in one state and is henceforth in another state, at least until it changes again. There are two extreme views about change, which have come to be associated with two early Greek philosophers: Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Heraclitus held that change is all there is. He claimed that there are no entities, just flux. Even if we can make sense of this idea (which is not easy: one intuitively assumes a substrate when considering flux) it has an obvious problem. We observe entities all the time. If everything is just flux, then how do we explain the fact that we appear to be surrounded by identifiable entities?

Modern science does not help us. The entities of quantum physics may not be much like the everyday entities with which most people are familiar but they are nevertheless things, not pure flux. A quantum state is still a state, whether mixed or pure, so we cannot get away from the fact that there appear to be things that change. Indeed, I suspect the difficulty we have trying to make sense of the notion of pure flux is due to its incompatibility with our experience, both our everyday experience and the most bizarre experiences of esoteric science, in which change is not something that exists alone but is rather something that things do.

Parmenides overshoots in the other direction: he claims that there is no change. All the apparent change that we observe in the world is, according to him, an illusion. The usual interpretation of his argument goes something like this: everything that exists is a part of existence; anything that changes must be changed by something else; but the only thing other than existence is non-existence, i.e. nothing, which obviously can’t change anything because it doesn’t exist; therefore nothing changes.

Well, it’s something like that anyway. To be honest, I don’t really understand Parmenides (and there is considerable controversy among those who claim that they do) but that doesn’t matter for now: it’s not as if my description of the philosophy of Heraclitus was at all fair to the complexities of his thought. For the purposes of this argument, I just want to set up two extremes concerning change: everything is change and there is no change.

This allows me to portray Aristotle’s views on change as a welcome return to common sense, a reasonable middle ground between the two self-evidently absurd extremes. The problem is this: we need to explain how it is that things can change. We can’t just follow Heraclitus and say that change is all there is, because that doesn’t allow for the existence of the things that we see doing the changing. But we can’t follow Parmenides either because then we can’t explain the change that we see the things undergoing.

Aristotle solves this conundrum by proposing that things are both actually in some state and potentially in some other state (or states). Now we can describe change as the process by which a thing moves from its current actual state to one of its potential states. We now have a notion of potential existence. The matches in my matchbox are not actually alight at this moment but they have the potential to be alight, if, for example, I were to strike them.

Instead of one monolithic thing we call existence — which cannot change because the only thing that isn’t existence is non-existence, and something that doesn’t exist can’t change anything — we have many different entities that vary in their actual and potential existence. Because these entities have both actual and potential properties, and the potential can become the actual via the process of change, we can accommodate both the existence of things and the fact that they change. This answers both Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Now, nothing changes unless something causes it to change. A match lights when you strike it and not if you don’t. If a match appeared to spontaneously burst into flame we would look for an explanation — perhaps it was being heated by some other heat-source — and we wouldn’t be satisfied unless we could find some explanation for its ignition. Whenever anything changes we expect there to be something else that caused that change: that is why the change happened then and not at some other time.

But only something that actually exists can cause change. I cannot light my pipe with an unlit match regardless of the fact that the match has the potential to be lit. The match must be actually alight before it can cause change in other things as a result of its burning.

So we arrive at our second premise: change is the phenomenon whereby something that actually exists causes something else to actualise its potential.

It is important to note that this is an immediate effect. We are not talking about causes happening before an effect: that does not make sense in this context. Changes occur precisely when they are caused. The cause precedes the effect only in the sense that it is logically antecedent, not temporally antecedent. To go back to striking matches, it is precisely when the combustible chemicals on the head of the match reach their ignition temperature that they begin to burn. Here the friction caused by striking the match is the cause of the heat that ignites the match head and it all happens at the same time.

The stock example in philosophy textbooks is that of someone pushing a stone along the ground using a stick. The stone is moving because the stick is moving and the stick is moving because the person is moving, but obviously they are all moving at the same time. The movement of the person is logically antecedent to the movement of the stone but not temporally so.

Well, then. According to our first premise, things change. We observe change in the world. According to our second premise, the change that we observe involves the actualisation of potentialities by things that actually exist.

However, there is an obvious danger of infinite regress here. If A was changed by B which was changed by C which was changed by D which was changed by E… where does it end? How can it end?

Obviously the end of the chain cannot be something that can itself be changed. If it were, then it wouldn’t be the end of the chain. So the end of the chain cannot have the potential to be in any way other than the way that it is. So it has no potentiality. But it must, as we have seen, actually exist or it would not be able to cause change. So the end of the chain is purely actual.

You have probably guessed by now that the end of the chain is, as Aquinas would put it, what we call God (et hoc dicimus Deum). You can deduce lots of stuff about the Unchanged Changer, such as that there can only be one of them, but I don’t intend to attempt any of that now. I just want to point out the silliness of a couple of common refutations of this argument.

First, there is this one: “If everything has a cause then what caused God?” As should be evident from the above argument, it is not necessary to suppose that everything has a cause. We only suppose that change has a cause. God, as pure actuality, does not (indeed, by definition, cannot) change and therefore does not need a cause. That is the whole point of the argument.

Second, there is this: “If God caused everything, what came before God?” Again, it should be obvious from the above argument that temporal precedence has nothing to do with it. How or if or when the universe came into being is completely irrelevant. We are talking here only about logical antecedence. As Edward Feser wrote about Aquinas’ proofs:

His aim is to show that given that there are in fact some causes of various sorts, the nature of cause and effect entails that God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if we assume the universe has always existed and thus had no beginning. The argument is not that the world wouldn’t have got started if God hadn’t knocked down the first domino at some point in the distant past; it is that it wouldn’t exist here and now, or undergo change… here and now unless God were here and now…

I also rather like this metaphor:

The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

[The Last Superstition, St Augustine's Press, 2008, pp. 86 & 88]

Embarrassingly, I realised as I was coming to the end of the argument that I’d done the wrong one. I did the one that ends with Pure Actuality and not the one that ends with Being Itself. It is similar but is based on existence rather than change: roughly, contingent existence takes the place of potentiality and necessary existence takes the place of actuality; thus rather than ending up with something that actually exists and has no potential, you end up with something that necessarily exists and is not contingent on the existence of anything else.

Anyway, the point was merely to demonstrate that when theologians say things like “God is Being” they are, or at least might be, referring to the conclusion of a rational argument rather than just spouting mytho-poetic metaphor. Certainly, in that particular instance they are not referring to the doctrine of pantheism. It is also not true to claim that such a statement is “inconsistent with the personal nature of God enshrined in Christianity”, as it is actually a rather old proof, one of many, from which various attributes of God including his personality are deduced at great length by Aquinas and other Scholastic philosophers.

Finally, is the argument sound? I think it is valid. I think if you wish to refute the argument your best bet would be to have a go at the second premise: Aristotle’s metaphysics of change.