Personalizing Ourselves: Science, Liberalism, and the Reality of Illusions

At the end of one of our discussions, Scott Bakker concludes, “To say there is no meaning in nature is just to say there is no meaning in us. The death of God is the death of Man. There is no objective subject or subjective object.” I’d like to analyze this conclusion, especially the second of those three sentences, and explore what it means to speak of the difference between natural reality and the illusions of purpose, normativity, and the personal self.

Science Undermines Liberalism

Scott’s provocative comparison of the death of God with the death of the human person should be especially troubling to liberal atheists. The theist, after all, denies that either of those individuals is dead, but the liberal atheist is in danger of inconsistency rather than just of being uninformed. This atheist believes that theologies are fairytales which beguiled our ancient ancestors but which no longer make sense, that when Europeans woke up in the modern age, they lost faith in their monotheistic traditions in just the way that when a child grows up, the adult is no longer interested in children’s stories. Thus, the fictional character called God died in our imagination and that’s all God ever was: a fantasy that captivated most people who ever lived, but that no longer serves as part of a powerful story for those who understand the importance of modern science. And yet, as John Gray argues in Black Mass, liberalism borrows its morality from monotheism. Liberals assume that each person has moral worth, because he or she is an end rather than a means, an independent individual or agent rather than another link in a causal chain, and thus a conscious, autonomous, and rational person rather than merely a machine or an animal.

Liberal institutions like capitalism and democracy assume as much. Capitalism depends on the assumption not that we’re just narrow-minded animals seeking our advantage over others, but that we’re rational in seeking that advantage, which is why capitalism is supposed to leave us not with the anarchic and chaotic state of nature, but with a merited distribution of goods. As rational creatures, we plan how best to use our skills to compete and so we implicitly sign a social contract in which we agree to live by certain rules that permit private ownership, and so on. Those who most cleverly play by the rules and put their talents to work earn the most rewards in this system, assuming the economy lives up to the ideals set out in capitalistic theory. Thus, the concept of rational self-interest is crucial to this sort of economy, but what if there are no such things as selves or rationality as they’re commonly understood? Again, democracy requires that citizens be worthy of self-governance, by being informed about their representatives and about how economies and political systems work, so that their votes make sense, and by being free to pursue happiness so that the voters leave the dreary business of politics to the professionals. But what if no one’s free and happiness isn’t ideal, after all, because nothing in nature is really good or bad?

What’s radical, then, about Scott’s attribution of the folk notions of selfhood to the brain’s native blindness to its inner workings isn’t just that Scott sets himself in opposition merely to some compromises in academic philosophy, to a discipline which doesn’t greatly interest most people. No, Scott’s interpretation of cognitive science conflicts also with the foundations of liberal, which is to say modern society. If academic philosophy went up in smoke, there would be no apocalypse, but if liberalism were widely viewed as bankrupt, there would be no bulwark against right-wing craziness, including religious fundamentalism, the backlash against science and rationality themselves. If rightwing or so-called conservative ideologues were to have the whole floor on which Western societies stand, I believe those ideologues would bring down modern civilization and we’d be faced with a neo-feudal Dark Age.

To be sure, liberal assumptions about people aren’t the only foundations of our civilization. Even in a grossly pyramidal system, in which a tiny elite rules over the mass peasantry, with no middle class, economic growth, or advance in living standards for the majority, people would act in their self-interest and would struggle to survive as all animals do in the wild. The instincts driving an animal’s self-interested behaviour are the natural underpinnings of dominance hierarchies in most species, and without the liberal ideals to make something more of society, this natural struggle would come to the forefront. Granted, even in liberal societies like Canada and the US, plutocrats and their “free market” lobbyists manipulate the democratic government from some distance. But contrary to Chris Hedges, liberal institutions aren’t entirely inoperative in the United States. Arguably, those institutions are very weak in that country, which allows natural inequalities to mount there, but Americans haven’t yet seen close-up the Third World degradation that awaits them should they lose all faith in the liberal myth of each person’s dignity.

So that’s what at stake here: not just dusty academic philosophy, but the liberal basis of modernity. The Scientific Revolution inspired modern liberalism via the scientistic presumption that social progress can happen by the same means as the cognitive sort, through objective reasoning. But ironically, science’s reductive explanations seem to threaten the liberal view of human nature.

The Reality of the Illusion

Let’s look closer, though, at what it means to say that God is dead. The point is that God has always existed only in our mind, as it were, as an idea, which is why we can change our mind about theism, and when we do so God vanishes, in that the idea of God loses its power over us. In this way, theism presents us now with an illusion, at best. The idea of God works only when the idea is taken seriously, when disbelief in anything supernatural is suspended through faith. In fiction, we suspend our disbelief for entertainment or catharsis, but in religion the stakes are higher. Religion and the illusion of God allow people to go on living together even as they witness the injustices and the natural suffering which call into question the entire human enterprise and the universe’s worthiness. Theists can’t afford the postmodern irony of conceding that God is just an illusion, an idea in our mind, because in that case the idea of an absolute lawgiver can’t perform its social function. So the illusion must become a delusion, which means that the idea must be thoroughly mistaken for a reality; that is, the idea must be reified. And to say that God is dead is to say that modern developments have turned the theistic delusion into a mere illusion or fantasy, at best.

Again, it’s important to appreciate the benefits of the theistic delusion. Neither an illusion nor a delusion is nothing at all. Both are ideas which have causal power in their capacity as mental states. So if you believe there’s a God who gives us immortal spirits which survive the death of our physical bodies and which can enjoy paradise in the afterlife if we do God’s will, your acceptance of that creed can cause you to behave in one way rather than another. You might sacrifice your welfare to help others, by way of imitating Jesus. Or you might use your religion to summon the courage to fly a plane into a skyscraper, by way of punishing heathens who are at war with innocent followers of the supreme religion, Islam. More commonly, religious ideas give their adherents peace-of-mind despite nature’s evident indifference to our condition. So to say that God is only an idea and not a reality is to say that while the idea may perform some functions, it can’t do what God is thought to do. The idea of God (and of the supernatural and the spirit’s immortality) may have been needed for social cohesion, but the mere idea couldn’t have created the universe, nor can it keep people alive after their brain death or ensure perfect justice. There is, then, a discrepancy between what the theist assumes God can do and what the much more modest reality of God can actually accomplish. God is really just an idea, a useful fiction, not an infinite, transcendent being.

A more straightforward example should clarify this distinction between reality and illusion. Take the paradigmatic case of a hallucination: a weary traveller is lost in the desert and thinks he sees an oasis, including a spring and a tree that provides some shade, but in reality there are only patterns in the shimmering sand which he interprets according to his wishes. Again we have the discrepancy: the idea of the pool of water can’t slake thirst and the idea of shade can’t cool body temperature. However, those ideas do have some causal power, as ideas, since by means of the placebo effect, the happy thoughts can give the traveller hope and distract him from his dire situation, driving him to keep trudging through the desert in search of some aid. The hallucination isn’t nothing at all, but it’s not what the perceiver thinks it is; again, that suspension of disbelief may be needed for the illusion to have certain effects.

Turning to the question of whether personhood is as illusory as God, we should notice right away an important difference. At least in the Western religious traditions, God is supposed to be something other than ourselves, just as a hallucinated oasis is hoped to be something really out there in the desert. But even if the liberal interpretation of personal identity were only an idea, the discrepancy would appear to be less significant since a real person would, in any case, consist partly of ideas. In other words, even if people turn out to be mere figments of our imagination, those figments may have virtually the same causal powers as people are naively thought to have, in which case people may be real enough even though they’re just ideas entertained by the brain. For example, whereas a mirage can’t feed a starving person, the idea that we’re special may cause us to act as if we were special, which in turn might make us different from other species. This is the Placebo Effect or the Dumbo Principle, which says that a mere idea can affect the world. In particular, the illusion of the personal self may act teleologically to bring that sort of self into being or to reinforce itself, by directing our biological and social mechanisms.

Now, the eliminativist who thinks there’s only the brain and no such thing as the personal self will insist that the brain does all the alleged self’s work and that this work should be understood without any reference to personhood, consciousness, freedom, or rationality. All we do is the result of chemical reactions and neural programs. But this is a matter of mere notational variation. If the illusoriness of the personal self means that the self exists only as an idea of such a self, that idea isn’t thereby nothing at all, in which case the idea surely exists as some neurochemical regularity. So “mere idea of the personal self” stands for whatever that idea turns out to be in the much more complicated neurological or other scientific theory. And the point would be that when the brain generates all of the psychological and social behaviours, somewhere in that causal chain stands the “mere” idea of the personal self. This raises the question of whether that idea, or more exactly that set of naïve ideas comprising the manifest as opposed to the scientific image of a person, is as good as the reality that’s supposed to correspond to the idea. Is the idea of the self, in this special case of an illusion, the same as the self so that the idea is really self-referential? Or in making the mistake of thinking there’s a person in addition to the brain, does that mistake ironically bring into being the very thing which isn’t supposed to exist?

The answer to the first question must be “Not exactly,” because there’s still a discrepancy here. Indeed, with the death of God does fall part of the personal self, at least, since some of the manifest image was defined in relation to theism. Thus, we might distinguish between the mind and the spirit. The spirit is thought to be immortal, immaterial, and destined for heaven or hell in the afterlife. The mere idea of such an entity won’t make it so, so to the extent that the illusion of the spiritual self amounts to the existence only of a thought of the spirit, the illusion differs greatly from the reality. But the secular concept of the mind, which is more relevant to folk psychology and naturalistic philosophy, posits only certain powers of consciousness, rationality, self-control, imagination, and belief and desire. Can the mere thoughts or fantasies of such capacities bring about the same effects as the capacities themselves? Is there so great a divide between what we intuitively think of the mind and what the mind would be were the mind illusory in the sense of being some way of passing between mere thoughts?

Freewill, Normativity, Consciousness, Meaning, and Rationality

Take, for starters, freewill. What’s the effective difference between having freewill and having only the idea that we’re free? Well, the more ideas we have in our head, the greater the barrier between our control center and the outer world and thus the less immediate the outer environment’s impact on us. This means that the more we think, the more we detach ourselves from the natural as opposed to the artificial world, and the more liberated we are from certain forces that control the other species. So thinking we’re free might contribute to the process of making us actually free. Or take the issue of normativity. What’s the difference between there being such a thing as right or wrong and merely thinking there are such values? Well, if thinking frees a creature by supplying it with a rich inner world that walls its mind off from much of the outer one, that creature will no longer be so subject to biological regularities. To be sure, this creature will still have a body and its health will depend on what’s going on around it, but this body will be controlled largely by the autonomous mind (by a brain with richly-interconnected neurons), which can think for itself instead of being determined by instinct or outer stimuli. This sort of creature will be able to ponder natural processes and decide how to make use of them, instead of just going with their flow.

For instance, in cold weather, warm-blooded animals may shiver or seek shelter if their fur provides insufficient warmth, but this is the extent of their ability to cope with that suboptimal circumstance. Hence, their behaviour is explained by the biological concept of homeostasis. However, when humans in modern societies are cold, we go far beyond those rudimentary responses. We build substitutionary environments with artificial heating and air conditioning, and we design and manufacture all manner of clothing to express our culture and social station in addition to moderating our temperature. Far from seeking only equilibrium with our environment, we aim to master our environment, as gods, by replacing the wilderness with artificial worlds. So while other species have some tools and an interest in social status, none has the sort of godlike power and knowledge that we do.

The upshot is that as we detach ourselves from nature, thanks to all our thinking which gives us an extraordinary degree of autonomy, we must create an artificial, chosen way of life which involves coming up with ways of regulating our activities. We do so with prescriptive laws which we’re free to follow or to violate. Thus, “merely” thinking there’s right and wrong isn’t so insignificant, after all, since that thinking brings into being phenomena that aren’t well-explained in strictly biological or mechanistic (objective and non-normative) terms. The phenomena which call for normative explanations are all around us. Many of them can be partly explained by reducing them to biological regularities or to other matters of fact, but such evolutionary psychological explanations are often as empty and unfalsifiable as theistic ones. An observed regularity will always be capable of being modeled in different ways, and each model will have its strengths and weaknesses, depending on the modeler’s interests. In any case, the decadence of an aristocrat, the depravity of a Jeffrey Dalmer, or the self-sacrifice of a Gandhi cries out for the normative distinction between good and bad, which posits an ideal that relatively self-controlling creatures can choose to follow or to reject even though they ought to do the former.

I could give similar accounts of consciousness (qualia), meaning (intentionality), and rational beliefs and desires. Consciousness is arguably a matter of higher orders of thought, so that as we stack thought upon thought (or connect neurons to neurons), not only do we grow more independent than nonhuman animals, but we become aware of how our labyrinthine thoughts make us distinct from everything else. And so even as we imagine, say, a tree, in the back of our mind we can think of how amazing it is that we—distinct from everything else in the world—are having this thought, and we go back and forth between higher and lower-order thoughts so that a frisson—a giddy thrill or the thought that such a thrill is possible if only we switch fast enough between the orders of thought—builds up in our mind. In short, we become excited about our mental capacities, and that’s the feeling of what it’s like in general for a person to occupy a mental state; that’s the essence of qualia. Now, is there an important difference between really being conscious and only thinking we’re conscious? Not really, since real consciousness would be a matter of having certain thoughts, namely higher and lower-order ones as well as the thrill of bouncing back and forth between them, like the thrill of riding a rollercoaster.

Moreover, meaning and rationality are forms of normativity, and beliefs and desires are likewise just types of thoughts. Intentionality was originally, to our ancient mythopoeic ancestors, a magical coalescence between subject and object. The difference between there really being such sameness between compared things, between the symbol and what it stands for, and only imagining there’s such a connection is indeed great. In any case, we’ve since lost this way of experiencing the world even as we retain a vestigial use of symbols. For us, a symbol’s meaning is only the imagining of what is, in effect, a broken sort of mythopoeic coalescence between something in the head and something in the outer world. Thus, meaning is one of the regulations we use to govern our way of life after we’ve broken free of the prison of nature and of the womb of our mythopoeic past, as it were. And notice that not even in a police state do we have the absolute power to force people—being ends rather than means—to behave in some way. Thus, we can misuse symbols or have flawed ideas. Our concepts, for example, are stereotypes which carry essential information pertaining to part of the messier world over which we have less control. If we see a dog with only three legs, we’ll think there’s something wrong with that dog, because it doesn’t match the conceptual image of dog normality. The concept then guides our dealings with dogs, by causing us to feel sorry for the three-legged dog or to take the animal to a veterinarian. In some cultures, dogs are eaten rather than treated as companions, and while there may be no objective reason to favour one concept over the other, each population feels strongly that their concept isn’t just a matter of fact but is right to be factual. This tells us that even the ghosts of mythopoeic symbols are thought to retain some of the old normative magic.

Now, again, is there an important difference between a symbol really having meaning and its only being thought to have meaning, so that intentionality turns out to be an illusion? Well, like theism, the mythopoeic assumptions were factually false at the time, so the ancient illusion of meaning was indeed misleading. As for the modern illusion, recall that normative beliefs function to eliminate precisely the difference between reality and illusion, between the world as we find it and the world as we conceive of it and prefer it to be. The desert wanderer wants to find water and while his hallucination of the oasis won’t magically create one, that hope does indirectly work to make reality match his expectation, by causing him to keep trying to find shelter and thus by increasing the chance that he’ll succeed. The concept of dogs regulates our dealings with dogs, and we require that regulation because our minds are autonomous and we prefer to have some order in our life, even after we’ve “fallen” from the natural order. So when we “merely” assume our symbols have meaning, that assumption causes us to use our symbols as tools to reshape the world to match our thoughts. Thus, what begins as an illusion of meaning turns into a real, causally-established coalescence between subject and object, which goes some way towards vindicating the ancients’ enchanted worldview. The illusion of meaning acts teleologically as a purpose that drives us to correct the discrepancy between the real world and the imagined one. Thus, the illusion of meaning seems real enough.

As for rationality, or logic, this has to do with another way of idealizing a perfect synthesis between the personal self and a natural mechanism. We imagine that even though we’re free from the prison of nature, we can follow habits of thought like a machine, so that we don’t lose touch with the prison. Logical thinking is thus like escaping from prison but being so used to that ordered life, that the former inmate keeps pretending her imagination ought to be bound by the prison’s rules. In short, rationality is a matter of a person's pretending to be a machine or an animal, that is, an object bound by natural laws. But because people aren’t mere objects, the “laws of thought” are only ideals we can choose to obey or to violate. So is there an important difference between really being rational and only thinking we’re so? Again, because we’re dealing here with an ideal, we might not really live up to it all or even much of the time. And yet thinking (hoping or wishing) we were rational drives us to be more so. The illusion or myth of rationality acts as a noble lie which provides us with a new game to play, to distract us from the fact that we’re no longer inmates that have to follow the same rules as the more hapless animals in the wild. 

Now, you might be thinking that logic isn’t subjective, that the universe follows the laws of logic just as it does the laws of physics. But this would amount to personifying the universe. In fact, the universe doesn’t follow any laws, not even scientific ones; that clumsy way of speaking is based on theism or on deism, which turns the universe into an artifact and which implies that the laws are prescriptive. Instead of thinking of natural regularities as being governed by laws, we should think of the phenomena as usefully modeled for limited purposes. In any case, the laws of logic are laws of thinkability and they govern only people, that is, the rational thoughts of autonomous, self-regulating creatures. (Indirectly and potentially, they govern the rest of the world by causing those creatures to replace nature with an artificial, technological substitute that extends those creatures’ minds.)

It seems, then, that the difference between appearance and reality isn’t so damning for the former in the case of the personal self, even given naturalistic philosophy. The mere idea of the self can directly or indirectly do much of what the self has always been thought to be able to do; after all, the self has been assumed to be made up partly of ideas, that is, of a mind with the power to think and feel. If the brain thinks and feels it has a personal nature, those very brain activities may be identical with, or may at least indirectly produce, such a nature by creating the artificial worlds that civilize us and call for normative explanations of our actions.

The Self that Makes a Difference

Let’s return to Scott’s conclusion. Do people die with the dethroned God? In part they do, because the spirit if not also the mind must go. Also, there’s the postmodern threat of incredulity towards all metanarratives, fictions, and other illusions. I call this a kind of hyper-skepticism, which is to say anxiety, which eats its way through even the modern liberal myths. Thus, we tend now to anatomize the self, always asking more and more questions without being satisfied with any answer; we’re paranoid and suspicious of ever-deeper conspiracies and so we don’t trust commonsense, but posit ulterior motives; we become antirealists and relativists even if that means contradicting ourselves and pulling the rug out from under us. We contend that the liberal notion of the self makes for a devious ideology that’s meant to con the masses into enabling wealthy individuals to keep their ill-gotten gains, or to rationalize men’s subjugation of women, or to further any of a hundred other such postmodern conspiracies. In this way, skepticism about God can indeed be pushed towards skepticism about the self. This never-ending skepticism, though, continues on to doubt about scientific theories and about everything else under the sun, until we’re left with solipsistic psychosis.

But I’ve tried here to explain the difference between the hallucination of something outside the self and the hallucination of the self. The discrepancy between illusion and reality should be greater in the former case than in the latter, because a self is, by definition, made up partly of mental states which include hallucinations. So just because we have good reason to doubt the existence of spirits, including God, doesn’t mean we should doubt that there are personal selves in the form of minds, where a mind is largely just the capacity to think with ideas. Even if this way of speaking of the brain is crude, this simplification may still be useful for various purposes, in which case it squares with the pragmatic aspect of methodological naturalism, which undergirds science.

What naturalists should say, then, isn’t that there’s no such thing as people, meaning, or normativity. We should say these things are illusions, meaning that they’re at least initially subjective, that they’re made up of brain states which may establish feedback loops, causing our bodies to modify our outer environment to act as a cocoon or training ground, thus separating us further from our animalistic origins and helping to personalize us. We’ve personified everything around us, because our imagination knows no bounds, but again there’s a difference between imagining there’s a spirit in the rain and imagining there’s a self in our brain. The rain won’t actually behave in any personal way; the suspicion that the rain stops and ends depending on a rainmaker’s dances is unreliable. But when we simplify our brain processes in our imagination, we gain self-control by stacking thought upon thought, which creates an inner self before our inner eye. We can’t learn about the brain just from introspection, just as we can’t learn Swahili just by speaking English. When we introspect, we’re blind to the brain as it’s understood in neurological terms, but we do thereby perceive the brain’s footprints as they’re understood in the layperson’s more fluid terms of mentality and ideality. That lay understanding encompasses the whole realm of human experience, which is why folk psychological terms are less rigid than narrower, cognitive scientific ones. By itself, the brain may provide no reason to think there’s any normativity in the world, but the brain plus the body-as-interactor plus the artificial environment which redirects our development, generate the sort of political, economic, religious, and other social phenomena that are ably understood (predicted and controlled) in the commonsense ways.

Scott says that if there’s no meaning in nature, there’s none in us. I agree with that, but only if we define “nature” in metaphysical terms. Metaphysically, everything is natural, nature is that which is explained scientifically, and scientists don’t posit meaning. Therefore, nature is devoid of meaning in the sense of purpose or intentionality. However, any such extremely broad, metaphysical naturalism, by itself, will offer us only a tenuous grasp on the evident difference between humans and the other species. In one sense, everything is natural, but in another some things are artificial rather than natural. If we think of nature as the wilderness, meaning the world as it is before it’s modified to suit the interests of some organisms, we must be impressed by the extent to which we’ve eliminated nature. Again, far from science and nature eliminating the personal self as it’s nonscientifically understood, people have destroyed much that’s natural on our planet and replaced it with artificiality, with machines that extend the mind and whose functions (intended purposes) more readily remind us of our ideals. So in this second sense, it’s not the case that because nature-as-wilderness is bereft of meaning/purpose, there’s none in us. On the contrary, the disappearance of that sort of nature is explained by our obsession with creating a more meaningful world, and again the evidence of that semantic and purposive “enchantment” of the world is all around us.  

As for science’s threat to liberalism, I think the threat is real but more indirect than in Scott’s account. According to Scott, scientific theories posit only mechanisms, the personal self isn’t a mechanism, and so the ordinary conception of the self conflicts with science. I add that liberalism incorporates that conception and so liberalism also conflicts with science. This may all be so, but the liberal can respond by saying that the concept of the personal self is meant to be philosophical and inspirational, not scientific and empirical. The question, then, is whether the philosophical concept of the person will be replaced by the scientific concept of the brain. Because scientific models are pragmatic, I doubt society will feel much pressure directly from science to reject the philosophical way of speaking. Of course, rationalists did pressure the masses in Europe to reject the superstitions of witches and demons and so forth, but that was largely because those notions lacked utility in the more modern societies in which the faith-based practices were outlawed. Only if technoscience similarly transforms modern liberal society so that there will be little use in speaking of people and their ideals, as opposed to brains and their mechanisms, will the scientific model spread far beyond science.

No, the current threat, at least, is more indirect. What’s happened is that the ideal of scientific rationality has inspired many young people to be very self-conscious, which in turn has made them postmodern. In effect, those who are likely to doubt that people exist, that certain primates are extraordinarily free, purposive, conscious, and rational have been made anxious by what modern technoscience has wrought. Postmodernists in technologically advanced societies have to compete with machines and computers for jobs; they adapt to their artificial environments and pretend to be able to excel at multitasking and at computing their life choices. They become inspired by the goal of a rational utopia in which transhumans are cleansed of their primitive biases and other limitations. Science thus threatens liberalism indirectly through postmodern hyper-skepticism. Modern science has ironically made the savviest denizens of science-driven cultures unable to suspend their disbelief, by providing world-changing standards of objectivity which compel these elites to doubt even the modern liberal myths of reason’s goodness for humanity and of each person’s supreme value as an autonomous being. The ideal of objectivity has been pushed so far that the philosophical justifications of modernity have themselves been undercut, leaving us with never-ending doubt and postmodern nihilism.

So it’s not scientific theories that now threaten the manifest image, but technoscience’s enormous cultural impact. Indeed, even if cognitive science doesn’t necessarily conflict with introspective impressions of the self that philosophy codifies, postmodern doubts have infected philosophy departments so that plenty of academic philosophers spout the postmodern conspiracy theories which call liberal politics, economics, and ethics into question. And American conservatives, of course, dine on a feast of conspiracies about elitist liberals, from their cynical sources of infotainment. As I see it, then, the primary threat to liberalism is cultural, not theoretical. At any rate, we must tragically carry on with our “mere” illusions, despite our having killed God.