Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress

Here's an article of mine that went up on Scott Bakker's blog. The article's called "Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress." It's about the full implications of thinking that the naive, quasi-dualistic conception of the human mind should be eliminated in favour of thinking that only material systems exist. Here are the article's first few paragraphs:

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As scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries, informed people have come to learn that many traditional beliefs are woefully erroneous. There are no witches, ghosts, or disease-causing demons, for example. But are cognitive scientists currently on the verge of showing also that belief in the ordinarily-defined human self is likewise due to a colossal misunderstanding, that there are no such things as meaning, purpose, consciousness, or personal self-control? Will the assumption of personhood itself one day prove as ridiculous as the presumption that some audacious individuals can make a pact with the devil?

Progress and a World of Mechanisms

According to this radical interpretation of contemporary science, everything is natural and nature consists of causal relationships between material aggregates that form systems or mechanisms. The universe is thus like an enormous machine except that it has no intelligent designer or engineer. Atoms evolve into molecules, stars into planets, and at least one planet has evolved life on its surface. But living things are really just material objects with no special properties. The only efficacious or real property in nature, very generally speaking, is causality, and thus the real question is always just what something can do, given its material structure, initial conditions, and the laws of nature. As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” Thus, instead of there being people or conscious, autonomous minds who use symbols to think about things and to achieve their goals, there are only mechanisms, which is to say forces acting on complex assemblies of material components, causing the system to behave in one way rather than another. Just as the sun acts on the Earth’s water cycle, causing oceans to evaporate and thus forming clouds that eventually rain and return the water via snowmelt runoff and groundwater flow to the oceans, the environment acts on an animal’s senses, which send signals to its brain whereupon the brain outputs a more or less naturally selected response, depending on whether the genes exercise direct or indirect control over their host. Systems interacting with systems, as dictated by natural laws and probabilities—that’s all there is, according to this interpretation of science.

How, then, do myths form that get the facts so utterly wrong? Myths in the pejorative sense form as a result of natural illusions. Omniscience isn’t given to lowly mammals. To compensate for their being thrown into the world without due preparation, as a result of the world’s dreadful godlessness, some creatures may develop the survival strategy of being excessively curious, which drives them often to err on the side not of caution but of creativity. We track not just the patterns that lead us to food or shelter, but myriad other structures on the off-chance that they’re useful. And as we evolve more intelligence than wisdom, we creatively interpret these patterns, filling the blanks in our experience with placeholder notions that indicate both our underlying ignorance and our presumptuousness. In the case of witches, for example, we mistake some hapless individual’s introversion and foreignness for some evil complicity in suffering that’s actually due merely to bad luck and to nature’s heartlessness. Given enough bumbling and sanctimony, that lack of information about a shy foreigner results in the burning of a primate for allegedly being a witch. A suitably grotesque absurdity for our monstrously undead universe.

The Irony of a Natural Afterlife

Is a natural afterlife possible? Answering this depends on what we mean by a person, since that which is traditionally supposed to survive the body’s death is the personal self, or more specifically the individual’s innermost self. Mystical traditions in the world’s religions identify that self with God, so that the afterlife is thought to be the “union” of an individual’s mind with the ultimate source of all minds. This is a euphemistic way of saying that in the afterlife we’re all destroyed as we realize that only God is real.

The Plausibility of a Natural Afterlife

In any case, most religions identify the self with a spirit, that is, an incorporeal substance. New Thought adherents attempt to explain this substance in terms of energy, vibrations or other such pseudoscientific notions, so that the self-help advice sold by leading members of that movement can appeal to a secular crowd (because that crowd has the most disposable income). If we assume the naturalistic, cognitive scientific picture of the self, though, this metaphysical dualism between mind/spirit and body looks as though it reifies higher-order thought. Reification is the concretization of something, such as treating a thought as though it were the same as that which only symbolizes it. In effect, Judaism’s ban on idolatry prohibits the reification of God, since the monotheist’s God isn’t supposed to be any particular being but the ground of all beings. Likewise, if the self is something sustained by the brain, the religious notion of the immaterial spirit is only a symbolization of that mostly hidden inner reality of consciousness flowing into particular thoughts and feelings. If we ask what the human brain does that distinguishes us from other species, the answer is that it thinks abstract thoughts. Those thoughts in turn allow us to use language and form meaningful social relationships and thus communities bound by cultures that include religious ideas; moreover, our abstract ideas can act as models or simplifications of our environments, which enable us to discover how natural processes work, to predict and to plan for events, and thus to technoscientifically control the wilderness by reshaping it according to our wants and needs.

The natural self, then, isn’t a thing that thinks abstract thoughts. To speak of a possessor of thoughts is to reify or to concretize the self, to mistake a symbol or other simplification, such as the Cartesian mental substance or the immaterial spirit, for the self’s reality. The human self isn’t identical even with the brain, as is clear from the computational, which is to say linguistic, aspect of thinking. Just as a computer program can be implemented in different devices, so too a pattern of thinking is multiply realizable. In any event, the person that we most wish to survive bodily death is just the stream of thoughts itself, including the appetites, fears, tastes, imaginings, fantasies, cogitations, and all the myriad other forms of thinking that make for the experience of being a human person. Some of these thoughts are more primitive or animalistic than others, but all are distinctly human to the extent that they have rich layers of meaning owing to their intellectual connections to background thoughts or worldviews that draw upon language and culture. For example, other species have appetites and fears, but animals lack personal selves if those mental states of theirs have only mechanical roles in causal relations as opposed to having higher meanings in a certain autonomous project, that being the creation of a coherent inner self through practice in introversion. Each self is different because we have different patterns of mental activity owing to our distinguishing artistic judgments about what sort of person we want to be. We practice being one sort of person or another by feeding our impulses so that we accumulate peculiar assortments of mental habits which individuate us.

The question of an afterlife, therefore, is about whether a pattern of thinking can survive physical death. To some extent, this question was answered long ago by Plato who distinguished between biological afterlife through procreation and intellectual afterlife through the survival of ideas. Plato lives on, in part, because the survival of his texts sustains Platonism, the system of ideas that reflects some of his mental habits. But this isn’t the survival of the whole self, since most of Plato’s mental habits aren’t recorded in Platonism. As science fiction authors have speculated since the invention of the computer, the whole self may be immortal, after all, as long as a computer can implement the entire pattern of mental activity that comprises the inner self. A computer program can be copied and stored on multiple devices, greatly increasing its potential longevity; in addition, the program would be immune from biological degradation or from the vicissitudes of the cellular or animalistic life cycles. Simulating a mind would require being able to predict how a person would respond to any situation, by weighting each possible thought in terms of its probability given either some sense impression or another thought. For example, someone who works at a zoo may be more likely to think of elephants in superficially non-elephant-related situations, since she’s liable to interpret her experience in terms that she considers important on the basis of her experience. If she loves elephants, she’ll be in the habit of wondering about their inner life or about how our modern activities endanger them. Again, someone whose parents smoke and who takes up that habit herself will have a high probability of thinking of smoking a cigarette when faced with certain stresses. With enough study, such habits should be predictable, in which case we could map out the relations between our mental tendencies, which amounts to laying out the blueprint for reproducing the personal self in question.

Clash of Worldviews: Islamist Terrorism Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome, viewers, to another clash of worldviews, the show that pits philosophies against each other. This evening, we’re joined by noted liberal secular humanist, Adam Garnett, self-proclaimed postmodern pessimist and cynic, Heather Fogarty, and influential conservative Muslim philosopher, Tariq Shadid. Recently, Islamist terrorists have been in the news for ISIL beheadings and immolations in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, shootings on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and the killing of Parisian cartoonists and Danish Jews and free speech supporters. Adam, why don’t you start things off by laying out the liberal’s case against those terrorists’ ideology?

ADAM: Sure, but I wouldn’t call it a “case,” exactly. A case is an argument that supports a viewpoint in a rational context in which the listeners understand and assent to logic and the rule of evidence. Religious faith, though, has utterly overtaken the sanity of these radical Islamists. Debating their ideology would be like teaching quantum mechanics to a four year-old.

But let’s begin by familiarizing ourselves with some highlights of the history of how we got here. In the eleventh century, al-Ghazali, the jurist, Asharite philosopher and Sufi mystic refuted the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, in the name of Islamic theology. Whereas that philosophy was naturalistic, al-Ghazali’s book, Incoherence of the Philosophers, contends that nature entirely submits to God’s will, having no independent causal power. The laws of nature are just elements of God’s rationality, so that all the events we perceive are caused directly by God. When faced with the epistemological problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world, al-Ghazali retreated to a kind of mysticism that substitutes God for that world and appeals to faith that God can do anything. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroes, the medieval polymath, defended classical philosophy, but while that defense led to the rise of naturalism and secularism in modern Europe, Averroism was rejected by most of the Muslim world, and so the way was cleared for today’s Islamist puritans who scoff at modern science and liberties. “God is great!” they chant, meaning that defiance of God is impossible because Islam is the one true religion that reflects God’s oneness and supremacy: the whole world isn’t just created by Allah but sustained, moment by moment, by him, so that when the radicals act out of intuition that they carry out God’s will, it’s God who acts through them. There is only illusory opposition to God, since everything must submit to the mightiest being, by definition. That’s the Asharite mysticism that al-Ghazali codified, which places revelation and mystical intuition before reason.

Later, in the eighteenth century, the Salafi reformer, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab, preached that Muslims should return to monotheistic purity. He made a political pact with Muhammad bin Saud, who used the fundamentalist ideology to conquer territory and establish the Saudi state that survives to this day, by funding Salafism but directing it outwards to alleged external threats to Islamic purity, thus protecting the decadent Saudi family. Salafis reject scholastic philosophy (kalam) as a foreign, ancient Greek import that encourages free-thinking and debate to make theology rational. Adhering to a minimalist interpretation of Sunni, that is, the equivalent of Catholic Islam, Salafis regard speculative philosophy as a heresy of arrogance, of setting us up as rival gods who can learn the truth through our rational powers, without divine guidance, whereas the Islamic imperative is to submit to Allah. Salafis thus preach that the Quran, Hadith, consensus of elite Muslim scholars, and traditions from the first three generations of Muslims provide sufficient guidance for Muslims. In essence, this Salafism, which dominates Saudi Arabia and the UAE and which is the source of most Islamist terrorism today, is about submission to dogmas.  

Moderate Muslims and milquetoast centrists like President Obama contend that these terrorists merely distort true Islam and that no major religion justifies their savagery. Invariably, they remind us that the vast majority of Muslims reject the terrorist’s interpretation of Islam as “extreme” and as a “distortion” of the faith. Of course, anyone saying this should drop what they’re doing, pick up the nearest whip and flagellate the flesh of their back for wasting their listener’s time with a fallacious appeal to popularity. It goes without saying that the “correct” theological interpretation needn’t be the one that most people accept. More importantly, this debate about whether today’s militant jihadists betray or practice their religion isn’t worth having. There is no correct answer to the question, because the debate is theological. It’s exactly like asking which interpretation of Christianity is correct, Catholicism, Protestantism, or Fundamentalism (Evangelicalism). Even in Christianity, which at least honoured classical wisdom in medieval scholasticism, leading to naturalistic, systematic theology which ironically opened the door for modern science, reason has a precarious position, because of the alleged rival sources of knowledge in revelation, faith, and intuition. As I’ve just recounted, Islam as a whole lacks even the pretense that its theology owes its worth primarily to reason. Of course, for Muslims, reason is supposed to be compatible with faith, but that’s only because reason—like the whole of nature itself—is assumed to submit to God in the sense of being nothing without the deity. Christians went as far towards rationalism as to entertain deism, the possibility that God created an autonomous world that operates according to natural rather than divine laws, which reason can discover. By incorporating Sufi mysticism, Islam left no such room for reason’s authority and thus no room for modernity.
 

New Atheism and Edward Feser’s Thomistic Gambit

Imagine living in a country that’s been run by a dictator for decades. The dictator’s removed from power by progressive rebels, then humiliated and imprisoned. Instead of using his time in prison to reflect on the error of his ways and to repent, the dictator becomes bitter: holding the bars of his prison cell door, he excoriates the new administration’s progressive ideals and accuses his people of being fools for not allowing him to reign over them once more.

That’s an analogy for the uppity Catholic’s chutzpah. If you think the species of pompous, haughty Catholics is extinct, having been killed off in the last few centuries by skeptical hunters of dogmas, take a look at Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of New Atheism. To be sure, Feser, a philosophy professor, likely fills that book with disdain because he’s guided by the lex talionis, the principle that what goes around should come around: new atheists have sneered at and ridiculed Christians for long enough, so proud Christians should respond in kind. But this doesn’t entirely explain the tone of that book or of Feser’s blog in which he celebrates the absoluteness of scholastic theology. The question is how Christians today can find it in them to be proud of their faith, given that, like the dictator, the Church has lost its totalitarian control over Western life. How can a Catholic, in particular, examine Western history from the classical period to the modern one, and conclude not just that modern philosophy has been a farcical blunder but that the only solution is to return to the medieval way of thinking perfected by Thomas Aquinas?

The question is rhetorical, but this is exactly what Feser’s done and it accounts for the uncanny match between the style of his response to the current popularity of atheism, and the stereotype of modern Catholic apologetics as being mainly an expression of pretensions mixed with bitterness. In this respect, the Catholic polemicist is rather like a conservative Briton, exemplified by Niall Ferguson who admires the old British Empire. Not chastened but passive aggressive, these conservatives have the gall to side with the bully even after the bully’s disgraced himself. But whereas Ferguson does so for pragmatic rather than moralistic or philosophical reasons (Ferguson says the British Empire pioneered free trade and globalization, maintained global peace, and stood against the much worse empires of Germany and Japan in the last century), Feser argues that Thomism annihilates the philosophy of New Atheism.

You see, Feser isn’t merely playing a role, taking revenge against atheistic screeds for their hostility towards Christianity, or pursuing a marketing strategy. He seems genuinely furious because he thinks that New Atheism is so obviously false to those who know how to reason, that atheists are clueless about that fact, and that few recognize that Thomism is the supremely rational worldview. He’s thus very much like a resentful devotee to the imprisoned dictator, who labours under the delusion that his master was born to rule. The downfall of such a smug, sanctimonious institution as the Catholic Church is sublime, meaning that when the members of an institution become so powerful and thus naturally deluded and corrupt that an infinite abyss emerges between their inflated self-image and the reality of what they’ve become, their sudden fall echoes in that abyss like a mighty thunderclap heard around the world. Pride goes before the fall, but this is a secret recipe for the most exquisite comedy, because the greater the pride, the more monstrous the dupe who sets herself up for a pratfall, and we’d rather laugh at than be terrified by monsters. Not that all supervillains get their comeuppance, but when they do the comedy is poetically just. However, when the supervillains or their henchmen continue to curse those who’ve engineered their demise, vowing revenge even while wriggling beneath the superhero’s boot heel, there comes a moment when the impulse to pity them overtakes the urge to laugh at them.

Thomism’s Bastardization of the Perennial Philosophy

But let’s prepare ourselves to look at how Feser sees the world. Mind the lightshow now as we travel back in time to periods governed by strange, obsolete mindsets. According to Feser, the new atheist is hardly a superhero because she’s utterly blind to the nature of the conflict at hand. Often unwittingly, the new atheist subscribes to scientism, which is a form of idolatry in which science is regarded as the only source of knowledge. Thus, the new atheist mistakes all scientific progress for an intellectual development away from religion, whereas there’s no conflict between religion and science itself. Science is neutral on religious questions, because the terms of those questions are philosophical and theological. Science is only one kind of Reason, another being the philosophical evaluation of ideas which was developed long ago in the West by Plato and Aristotle and perfected by Augustine and Aquinas.

How Horror Begets Mind from Matter

According to supernatural conceptions of the self, we’re not identical with the brain since we consist of a spiritual, immaterial and thus seemingly immortal substance. That substance portends an apocalyptic end of all of nature by a hidden, transcendent reality that’s thought of as the abode of the universe’s personal creator. The modern word for “spirit” is “consciousness,” since consciousness, too, seems like a ghostly presence, an invisible essence within the head. According to the science-centered view, though, the self is a congeries of programs computed somehow by the embodied nervous system; at any rate, the self is a natural thing or process, operating under physical laws. The opposition between these two conceptions sets up either the personal self or the natural body to be interpreted as an illusion subordinated to the other’s corresponding ontology.

But all of this is oversimplified. There clearly is a materialistic, animalistic, embodied self just as clearly as there is a subjective, personal, and thus potentially noble or transcendent thing as mind.

The Self’s Origin in Higher-Order Thought

Here’s how I see mind arising from mechanisms operating in the body. The brain evolved as a hodgepodge of modules, which are independent, specialized subsystems that carry out specific functions. Most animals receive inputs from one or another module and their training takes over, automating their behaviour. This is to say that they lack personhood, which is the awareness of being a self that processes perceptual inputs and can freely decide how to respond. Our species adapted to life after the eons in which dinosaurian might made right, by developing a capacity for high intelligence that’s generated by the cerebral cortex. Our Mesolithic and Paleolithic ancestors found themselves able to categorize phenomena to a high level of abstraction and to systematize their communications using the technology of linguistic symbols and rules. Instead of reacting automatically to stimuli, they could reflect and prepare their response, learning the most efficient techniques and preserving that information for future generations.

Consciousness arose as a special kind of higher-order thought. Picture a primate flooded with information from its environment which it could now customize by categories and access at will, thanks to its cerebral cortex which acts as a brain within a brain, detaching the emotion and motor centers from the environmental cues so that the primate’s behaviour needn’t be slaved to genetic programming. The primate could always investigate the outer world with its paws and outer senses, but now it could also organize the flood of data within its head. In short, it could think about its thoughts. For example, the primate could think roughly, “This pain feels bad, but it would be best not to wince, to avoid looking like a weakling.” Instead of being concerned just with modifying its outer environment, the sapient primate learned how to develop its cognitive capacities. It did so by rational detachment and by linguistic abstraction, which allowed for higher-order thoughts, which in turn enable the species to thrive and thus to continue to practice thinking in its free time.

But what is the self that is accomplishing these cognitive feats? There was no otherworldly monolith that intervened in the Stone Age and miraculously transformed animals into people, as in Kubrick’s film 2001. Instead, I think we should picture those early intelligent primates as being terrified of their cognitive powers and as inventing the self to manage that fear. Specifically, as their reasoning center gradually disentangled itself from the older neural subsystems, with the advent of their brain within the brain, and as those forerunners became more sophisticated in managing their thoughts, they would still have been exposed to fear of that enclosed inner space.

Clash of Worldviews: Political Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome back to Clash of Worldviews, the unlikely show in which the philosophical assumptions of popular worldviews are pitted against each other. This week, we bring back Adam the liberal secular humanist, Heather the postmodern skeptic, and Lindsey the conservative Catholic, and we focus the discussion on their social and political disagreements. Adam, shall we begin with you? Tell us about liberalism.

ADAM: Sure, but I should begin by repudiating the ludicrous stereotype that liberals are quasi-communists. That slander was perpetrated by devious conservatives in the US and elsewhere, who are professionals at muddying the waters so that the so-called center of Western political discourse moves ever rightward. Far from being equivalent to anticapitalism, liberalism should be identified with the political side of early European modernity, and it’s that period in which capitalism was first celebrated.

This becomes clear when we reflect on the fact that liberals are also known as progressives. The idea of progress was a defining feature of modernity as it arose in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Recall that Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill were champions of individual liberty. They railed against ignorance, superstition, dogma, and the oppressive institutions of feudalism and the Catholic Church, arguing that humans are equal in their personhood as constituted principally by their ability to rationally control themselves, to express their individuality and to discover the truth in spite of institutionalized myths. Political power should therefore be vested in the majority in some democratic system that respects the greatness of each individual. Progress was opposed to the traditions that rationalized the gross inequality inherent in monarchies and aristocracies.

And so when liberals today speak of civil rights, equal opportunity for minorities, and the need for functional markets and a representative government, they speak first and foremost as modernists, or if you like as secular humanists, that is, as believers in the ideals that took the West out of its dark age. Current opponents of liberalism are best thought of as anti-modern—not, mind you, as patriots or freedom fighters or lovers of Jesus or the Constitution. So-called conservatives today resent the gains of modernity. Their project is to return us to a premodern state of affairs in which only the privileged few are free while the majority are reduced to slaves. Whereas liberals aren’t quasi-communists, conservatives are cryptototalitarians.    

LINDSEY: That, of course, is the myth of modernity. Progressives like to think they’ve outgrown the need for myths, that they merely follow Reason where it leads. But modernists, liberals, progressives, or whatever you want to call them are terrific myth-makers. They trumpet the greatness of the individual, but Catholics are upfront about our fallen nature, our inherent tendency to stray from moral principles. “Liberty!” cries the modernist. “Let everyone be free to do what they please!” This is a recipe for hedonism and civilizational decline. Left to ourselves to figure out how to live, we’d spiral downwards into self-imposed conditions of squalor and ruin. Contrary to the modernist’s pretense of positivism, that she bases her beliefs solely on logic and evidence, we devise endless fictions to rationalize our original sin of being more like animals than angels.

The Satanic Grandeur of Modernity

What are the ideals of Western modernity? Liberty in at least three senses: freedom of thought and method, as demonstrated paradigmatically by scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Darwin; freedom from oppressive, dogmatic institutions like the Church, as instituted, for example, by the American democracy; and freedom to pursue earthly happiness, as enabled chiefly by technological applications of science which tend to elevate living standards. Also, modernists prize the originality of a Renaissance genius such as Goethe or Leonardo da Vinci. Modernity is thus an anti-Christian affair. Breaking with the past, including the doctrines of Christianity which dominated Europe for centuries, modernists sought progress in all aspects of life. Modernists overthrew stifling traditions, encouraging skepticism of dogmas and trusting in the authority of facts as understood by each rational individual. Modernists are thus humanists in that they posit natural human rights that don’t depend on any official interpretation of a religious text. Our rights to personal freedom and to pursue happiness are inherent, not conferred by a deity. However the Church might have protected medieval Europe from chaos after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the cure became worse than the disease, according to modernists, and so progressives awakened to their curiosity and to their pride as natural creatures who share the earth with other admirable animals. The Elizabethan Chain of Being, which ranked humans above beasts and plants, was replaced by the Darwinian continuum that takes morality to be less important than biological function.

The modern cognitive ideal is enlightenment, the objectivity to see the world as it really is. Modernists are methodologically naturalistic in that they understand that supernaturalism and theism are vacuous as explanations of anything, and so they ban references to gods or to divine intentions or purposes from their theories. This leaves modernists with a monstrous pantheism, according to which natural orders form by themselves for no reason. The world is thus undead: ordered and intelligible, albeit fundamentally random and bizarre, as represented by quantum mechanics—but also comprised of impersonal forces acting on material systems. The universal energy and matter are thus as baffling as the fictional zombie that shambles on with no intelligent direction. Mind, intelligence, and consciousness are byproducts of natural processes, not their first causes. Natural systems are beheld as having only aesthetic value as amoral artworks that are mechanically assembled by impersonal forces. When we see something as just art, we see it as arbitrary since it stands by itself without the context supplied by the perceiver’s presuppositions or social agendas. We don’t think of it as being useful, but simply as being; we see it as it really is, as a physical appendage of the monstrous, decaying body of the cosmos. And the awakened mind comprehends these grim truths by the method of depersonalization. For example, the scientist subjects her pet hypotheses to the impersonal tribunal of the natural facts as these are observed by multiple fellow scientists whose personal agendas are canceled out by their variety. Personal preference counts for nothing in this enlightenment. The facts are allowed to speak more or less for themselves; logic and evidence carry the day as the modernist learns to discount the cognitive weight of her intuitions and other feelings.

Paraphrasing Nietzsche, human nature is distinguished by its ability to be overcome. The enlightened soul thus divests herself of her personality, zombifying herself to become a fitting vessel for a vision of natural reality in all its equal undeadness. Objectivity is self-zombification, and this is the only respect in which the theory of truth as correspondence is valid. Symbols don’t magically agree with facts. Instead, the knower detaches from her emotions and instincts, which tend to delude and flatter her; she renounces her ordinary personhood so she can imagine what it’s like to be merely one material object in a universe of other such objects. Instead of transcending her earthly form, acquiring a spiritual body as in traditional monotheistic religions, the enlightened individual regards her every distinguishing characteristic as a distraction if not an outright illusion. Her position in history, her hobbies and nationality, her limited experience—all such ephemera are like the myriad trees that can prevent sight of the wood that hides in plain sight. The personal self in all its particularities is a void compared to the stunning truth of nature’s original undeadness, its self-creation and direction from nothing and no one. Instead of ascending to heaven, the modern hero is submerged in the decaying plenum.

Clash of Worldviews

MODERATOR: Welcome to Clash of Worldviews, the show that spotlights the philosophical differences that shape both the daily conflicts that determine our personal fate and the flow of history on the grandest scale. And may I say hello to our eleven viewers around the world. This evening, we introduce Adam Garnett, a liberal secular humanist who believes that science, democracy, and capitalism liberate us, which makes for social progress; Heather Fogarty, a skeptic and postmodern pessimist and cynic; and Lindsey Rowe, an unabashed Catholic conservative. Gentlemen and lady, I vacate the floor and leave it to you.

HEATHER: It’s about time! Love the phony formalism of your discourse, by the way. That’s the old bogus neutrality of the civilized modern man. So discreet, so polite is the modern man, all while serving rapacious aristocrats who plundered their colonies for resources and slaves so they could live as amoral, godlike connoisseurs, and later while backing democracies that free us up to be domesticated by huge corporations that likewise elevate a small class of sociopaths. I’m just so bowled over by your British affectations that are supposed to distract from your mammoth-sized phallus-worship.

MODERATOR: Ah well, do remember, dear guest, that you’re here to engage with the ideas of your fellow ideologues.

HEATHER: Yeah, while the dispassionate, scrupulously objective host has no ideas of his own, as if he were a robot rather than just another hairy primate that stuffs his belly and farts and craps and bangs someone else’s naked body in the dead of night like the rest of us “dear viewers and participants” in these slickly-staged spectacles and monuments to modern conceits of progress.

ADAM: Heather, I hope you’re not going to be this tedious the entire time.

HEATHER: Tedious? Have you really been so dehumanized by the powers of modernity that you can feel only ever-so-polite tedium when someone speaks prophetic truth to power? How very civilized of you!

LINDSEY: She’s full of herself as well. An upstart feminist whose delusions of equality and persecution complex are signs of her fallenness and need for redemption.

HEATHER: Get your facts straight, chauvinist. I’m a realist, not a feminist. My pleasure is in transmuting the horror that comes with knowing the natural facts into comedy and art. And how rich is it for a Catholic to speak of a persecution complex! You’re the one wearing a cross around his neck, Lindsey.

LINDSEY: Yes, because Jesus really was persecuted and tormented.

HEATHER: Oh, really? Is that a fact? Known how, I wonder. Next to science, your dogmas are infantile babblings. You’re supposed to grow out of religion by the time you can think for yourself. Have you ever tried doing that? Thinking for yourself?

LINDSEY: Who’s the modernist now? As Proverbs says, pride goes before the fall, and the most arrogant children of God are the modern rationalists and individualists that idolize the renaissance genius who challenges traditions and institutions and discovers facts that have been hiding in plain sight. You see, originality counts for nothing and is barely even possible due to the weight of culture. So stop trying to outthink God! All you need to know is that morality is a transcendent business that elevates us above the animals. We wrestle with moral questions because God’s testing whether we’ll do the right thing even when we’re confined to the desolate material plane.

Qualia, Artificiality, and Fractals: A Solution to the Hard Problem

What is consciousness? The philosopher David Chalmers distinguishes between the Hard Problem and the Easy Problems of explaining consciousness. The latter are those of discovering mechanisms that can carry out mental functions. So one aspect of consciousness is that it has certain effects and scientists can explain how those effects are physically achieved. But according to many philosophers, we won’t understand everything about what it is to have a subjective point of view even after we’ve mapped all of those causal roles of how an organism categorizes its environment, accesses its internal states, controls its behaviour, and so forth. The Hard Problem, then, is to explain the nature of what are called qualia, which are the facts that mental states feel a certain way—so that the philosopher Thomas Nagel can ask what it’s like to be a bat and we can intuit that that question is meaningful, because even were the mental states of the members of all species to have similar evolutionary functions, the qualitative aspect of those states should differ. Thus, it would be redundant to speculate about aliens from another world, because for millions of years ours has been proliferated with animals that have alien viewpoints.   

In short, the relatively Easy Problem is to explain the neural mechanisms that carry out the work done by a conscious being in so far as that being is conscious, whereas the Hard Problem is to understand where consciousness in general fits into the mostly unconscious universe. The former problem takes for granted the scientific context of reducing phenomena to causal relations between sums of material elements. The latter problem requires you to hold in mind the qualitative essence of consciousness itself, not just the physical causes and effects of subjectivity, while simultaneously realizing that the anomaly of consciousness somehow belongs in a manifestly unaware and indifferent cosmos. What consciousness does is different from what it is. The former question is scientific, while the latter one is philosophical since what consciousness seems to be—namely the qualia, the having of a private viewpoint filled with meaningful mental contents that are felt to be such by the mind of a living creature—is in fact an anomaly that calls into question the completeness of the scientist’s world picture. Science explains by quantifying and objectifying, whereas consciousness seems to be the antithesis of anything that could be explained in those ways. Consciousness is perfectly subjective, so an objective account of it would miss the point. Moreover, scientific methods of explanation have the social function of empowering modern societies, since scientific theories are applied by industries to exploit natural processes. Conscious beings, however, seem to have moral rights which any such exploitation would violate. Thus, again, the Hard Problem is suited more to (relatively powerless) philosophy than to science.

The Strangeness of Life and Consciousness

The Hard Problem of understanding consciousness is similar to that of understanding life in general, since the existence of organisms on the outskirts of a lifeless galaxy is likewise bizarre. How consciousness emerges from unconscious processes is currently as baffling as how life emerges from nonlife. In either case there’s a discontinuity that makes for the anomaly’s weirdness. The concept of consciousness or of life is incommensurate with that of physical things as such. Granted, after Darwin and Watson and Crick, biologists understand organisms better than psychologists do consciousness, but even as we come to piece together how biological processes developed, such as by studying viruses and other borderline biological phenomena, life’s rarity, its divergence from almost all of the absurdly vast universe makes it strange and that strangeness makes for a hard problem indeed: even if the organic somehow mechanically or non-miraculously evolved from the inorganic, there remains the question of life’s potential as understood against the backgrounds of that natural origin and that alienated position. What are living things in so far as they’re natural anomalies? One event accidentally followed another, perhaps made probable by certain natural regularities, and so life came on the scene—and with life, the evolution of consciousness. But that’s only the history of how we got here. With that knowledge we can understand the mechanical side of ourselves, which empowers us to change our nature just as we tinker with our technology. Yet that technoscientific knowledge won’t encompass life’s weirdness in this, mostly lifeless universe or dictate what living things should do with themselves in light of that existential mystery.

Asceticism and the Existential Crisis

Here is the secret history of life: animals evolved as machines produced by genes and proteins, working in concert with undead natural forces and processes such as natural selection. Those machines strive to carry out all the stages of their life cycle, meaning that they grow, eat, fight, mate, reproduce, and die. As species become more varied and competition for resources becomes more complex, animals evolve more sophisticated control centers and social relationships, which partially liberate them from their primitive cycles. For example, mammals learn to play and not just to practice fighting but for the joy of it. More powerful brains were used mostly to analyze opportunities in the outer environment, but eventually awareness and rationality were turned inward, leading in humans to self-creation and to an egoistic awareness of all other things in relation to the self.

Those are preliminary matters of biology and psychology. But the secret is that the difference between animalism and personhood lies in a dreadful enlightenment and a terrifying freedom to choose how to respond to the existential crisis. As reason and consciousness are more and more finely attuned, as humans build up more rigorous conceptions of the facts, and as we learn to objectify instead of just projecting the products of our imagination and indulging in our childlike yearnings, we confront the horror at the root of all things: Being is undead and there is no God but only natural forces, materials, and processes that parody personhood except when they transcend themselves and produce sentient creatures who are then cursed to learn their deeper undead nature. Like the artificial person in science fiction stories who doesn’t realize she’s a robot, but who scratches away at her organic skin, sees a metallic surface in the mirror, and goes mad from discovering the gap between her deluded self-image and the unnerving reality, every authentic person faces an existential crisis culminating in the question of how to live with philosophical illumination. 

This history isn’t progressive. There is no purpose of natural creation; rather, there’s an undead flow towards apocalypse and oblivion at the end of time, at the eventual extinction of beings which will reveal that the world has been inwardly empty all along. Life just happened to evolve and some mammals just happened to inherit the faculties which made them hyperintelligent. These are accidents of evolution, but they have the monumental consequence that through an enlightened soul’s cognitive faculties the cosmic zombie, the natural universe, is equipped to know itself for the monstrosity that it is, whereupon that doomed creature must decide what to do with such accursed knowledge. The noble lie in the West, originating from the plagiarisms in Genesis, is that self-knowledge is a sin, that Eve chose to disobey God and so God punished Adam and Eve because the Lord was afraid of having rivals. All of that is mere personification, which is the projection of comforting images sprouting from the minds of our more naïve ancestors. Of course, we weren’t created by any persons other than our biological parents and we don’t choose to be self-aware; instead, we acquire that power in so far as we’re embedded in the decaying plenum of the undead god. Genes and proteins and social relations align so that children tend to learn a language, to rationally process the contents of their conscious awareness, and to be domesticated as dictated by their cultural conventions. That’s our species’ life cycle—except that ours is one in which there’s a rupture that curses us with satanic freedom: we can choose to go back to sleep, to live as animals, forsaking our potential for transcendence, or we can choose how to transcend.

This may surprise you, but most biological humans aren’t persons in the existential, spiritual sense. Psychologically, they have minds or selves as well as a capacity for self-control, compared to nonhuman species. But they’re also antiphilosophical, meaning they don’t undertake the promethean project of inquiring into the objective truth; instead, they succumb to delusions, noble lies, and bodily distractions. These are the beta herds, the human animals that grovel and scramble and otherwise debase themselves for fleeting advantages in our dominance hierarchies, blind to the philosophical significance of their actions and to the universe’s aesthetic status—which is to speak of the horror within all things that leaves intelligent creatures dumbfounded until they devise noble means of coping.