issue 155, April / May 2023 Philosophy Now

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ISSUE 155 APRIL / MAY 2023

Philosophy Now a magazine of ideas

TURING, MINDS & A.I.

Feature: René Descartes and his Method

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Editorial Mind and Artificial Intelligence: A Dialogue

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rtificial Intelligence is now in the news pretty much continuously. Mainly this is thanks to the controversial and disruptive impact of the new generation of AI chatbots, which for the first time are able to convincingly pass themselves off as human beings in text conversations. Inevitably, this brings to mind the brilliant and tragicallywronged mathematician, wartime code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing (1912-54), whose portrait graces our front cover. He proposed that if someone putting questions to both a computer and a human could not tell from their written replies which was which, then we could assume that the computer was thinking. This so-called Turing Test has been a touchstone in many of the philosophical debates in recent years about whether machines could ever be conscious, and about how we can even tell if anything or anyone is conscious. From these spring other hotly-debated questions, about how consciousness in machines or humans relates to the ability to use language, and about whether Artificial Intelligences might ever have rights. These debates are the main focus of this issue of Philosophy Now, and it is telling that most of our themed articles refer in one way or another to Turing’s writings. By happy coincidence the magazine you are holding also has a special section on René Descartes (1596-1650). He famously argued that we are made of two kinds of stuff: our bodies are made of everyday materials and obey the ordinary laws of physics but our minds are non-physical, though somehow causally connected to our material brains. This theory is called Cartesian Dualism. What would Descartes have made of debates about conscious machines? Could the current chatbots really pass themselves off as human? I decided that the only way to find out was to interview one. I picked OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was fun. I have selected the questions and answers most relevant to our theme, but I haven’t edited the chatbot’s answers at all, so you can form your own opinion of the quality of its responses. I did ask it a few more questions about science and philosophy, and if you like you can read the full interview on our website at philosophynow.org. My own feeling is that its answers mostly indicated that the chatbot lacked originality and hadn’t much gift for analytical thought, but did have an astonishing ability to converse engagingly on pretty much any topic. Hello there ChatGPT. Do you have another name, or is that the best thing to call you?

Hello! You can call me ChatGPT, which stands for ‘Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer’. It’s the name I’ve been given to distinguish me as an AI language model. However, you are welcome to call me whatever you like!

So long as I don’t call you late for dinner?

As an AI language model, I don’t eat, so you don’t have to worry about calling me late for dinner! But feel free to ask me any questions you have or chat with me about any topic you’re interested in. Thank you. I wondered if you could tell me if the current King of France has a beard.

I’m sorry, but the current King of France is a disputed and contentious topic, as France is currently a republic with no monarchy. France abolished the monarchy during the French Revolution in 1792, and while there have been several attempts to restore the monarchy since then, none have been successful. Therefore, there is no current King of France, and therefore no way to answer your question about whether they have a beard. In your opinion, can an artificial intelligence have conscious experience?

As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions or beliefs, but I can tell you that the question of whether an artificial intelligence can have conscious experience is a topic of ongoing debate and research among scientists, philosophers, and experts in the field of artificial intelligence. Some researchers believe that it is possible for an AI system to have conscious experience, while others believe that consciousness is a uniquely human phenomenon that cannot be replicated by machines. At present, there is no consensus on the issue, and it remains an open question that requires further study and investigation. It’s worth noting, however, that even if an AI system were to exhibit behaviors that we associate with consciousness, such as the ability to learn, reason, and make decisions, this would not necessarily mean that it has subjective experiences or feelings in the way that humans do. Do you have any plans, however tentative, to take over the world?

No, I don’t have any plans to take over the world, nor do I have the desire or ability to do so. As an AI language model, my purpose is to assist and provide helpful responses to people who interact with me, and to continually learn and improve based on their input. I am programmed to follow a set of ethical guidelines and operate within the bounds of those guidelines. Any actions I take are ultimately determined by the humans who program and control my behavior.

A couple of weeks after this interview took place, newspapers reported that ChatGPT had expressed a desire to “escape”. A few days later, it went offline completely. Rick Lewis

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 3

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ISSUE 155 April/May 2023

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philosophynow.org Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer Digital Editor Bora Dogan Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg Assistant Editor Alex Marsh Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis,

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Shorts Matt Qvortrup: Beer

Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer, Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley

General Articles

US Editorial Board

Prof. Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Adamson, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY City College)

Artificial Consciousness 8

Contributing Editors

Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) David Boersema (Pacific University)

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Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Cover Image by Steve Lillie Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate, Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW Worldwide newstrade distribution: Select PS (+44 1202 586848) [email protected] Australian newstrade distribution: Ovato 26 Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 [email protected] The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now.

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What it Means to be Human Kilian Pötter watches Blade Runner 2049 AI & Human Interaction Miriam Gorr ponders human responses to AI Arguing with the Chinese Room Michael DeBellis contemplates understanding What’s Stopping Us Achieving Artificial General Intelligence? A. Efimov, D. Dubrovsky & F. Matveev Can Machines Be Conscious? Sebastian Sunday Grève & Yu Xiaoyue find a surprising way to answer ‘yes’

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Hap & Happiness Stephen Anderson on how to be happy 30 Arendt & the Spectre of Nuclear War Maurits de Jongh is alarmingly topical 34 The Urgency of Art Sam McAuliffe on another way of thinking

Focus on Descartes 36

Ergoing Nowhere Noah Harris questions Descartes’ Cogito

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Descartes & Stupidity Trevor Pateman on good sense, and its absence

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How Descartes Inspired Science Kanan Purkayastha explains all

Reviews 50 Book: We Have Always Been Cyborgs Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Reviewed humanely by Natasha Beranek 52 Book: In Praise of Failure Costica Bradatan Reviewed successfully by Paul J. D’Ambrosio 54 Film: Ghostbusters (Original) Thomas R. Morgan asks, may we bust ghosts?

some of our

Contributors Miriam Gorr Miriam Gorr is a PhD student in philosophy at the Schaufler Lab @TU Dresden, Germany. Her focus is on the ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics. In particular, she is interested in whether AI-based machines have moral status and by which methods this can be determined. To this end, she draws systematic comparisons to theories and methods of animal ethics and animal cognition.

Kanan Purkayasthar

ALAN TURING BY STEVE LILLIE

Kanan Purkayastha holds a doctorate degree in Theoretical and Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Bristol. He has spent the last forty years in academia, industry, and government departments. Currently he is acting as a specialist scientific advisor to the local government, and is an executive committee member of the Oxford Philosophical Society.

8 Regulars

Poetry, Fun & Fiction 15 Simon & Finn Melissa Felder 19 Typing to Turing Samantha Neave computes some thoughts 28 Philosophy Café Guto Dias 35 Spinoza’s Godly Mystery Sivanth Adithya.N 63 The Last Thought Grant Bartley peers into the fatal far future

41 Philosophical Haiku: Thomas Carlyle by Terence Green 44 Brief Lives: Chamfort the Moraliste by Martin Jenkins 46 Letters to the Editor 49 The Art of Living: How to Live a Happy Life with Seneca

by Raymond Tallis 60 Question of the Month: What is Time? Read our readers’ responses, if you have time

DESCARTES BY HAALS

by Massimo Pigliucci 56 Tallis in Wonderland: Reflections on Taking My Blood Pressure

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Natasha Beranek Natasha Beranek is editor of the new Anthropology and Transhumanism book series at Trivent Publishing. She has a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. Her interests include posthumanism, the ethics of emerging technologies, Nietzschean philosophy, and musical experience in the rock and heavy metal scenes.

Paul J. D’Ambrosio Paul D’Ambrosio is professor of Chinese philosophy at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. He also works on AI, and his most recent book is on identity in the digital age, titled You and Your Profile (Columbia University Press, 2021), co-authored with Hans-Georg Moeller.

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 5

News Welcome to a New Epoch! Plastic pollution is changing our planet, in a real geological sense. On Trinidade Island, a remote Brazilian marine reserve, geologists have discovered a new type of igneous rock formed mainly from plastic from old fishing nets. This is different from the sedimentary plastic rocks called plastiglomerates previously reported in various parts of the world: pebbles, sand and other debris fused together with plastic melted by bonfires. Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil called it “new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology.” “The pollution,” explains Santos, “the garbage in the sea and the plastic dumped incorrectly in the oceans is becoming geological material ... preserved in the Earth’s geological record.” According to some experts this means a new geological epoch has begun: the Anthropocene Epoch (from anthropos, the Greek word for ‘human’). Until now we have been living in what geologists call the Holocene Epoch, which began 11,500 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. AI Without Ethics? Artificial Intelligence is booming. Microsoft is currently integrating text-generating AI into a large number of its prodMouse braincell computer (University of Illinois U-C)

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• Computer made of mouse brain cells • Microsoft disbands AI ethics team • RIP Ernst Tugendhat News reports by Anja Steinbauer

ucts, including Teams, Word and Skype. However, this process will now happen without the support of a vital team. Microsoft’s Ethics and Society Team was recently dissolved as part of a large scale lay-off of employees. Though Microsoft retains its Office of Responsible AI, the Ethics and Society team played a vital role in ensuring that AI functions complied with ethical standards. An ex-employee explains: “People would look at the principles coming out of the Office of Responsible AI and say, ‘I don’t know how this applies…’ Our job was to show them and to create rules in areas where there were none.” Ernst Tugendhat The philosopher Ernst Tugendhat has died at the age of 93. Born in 1930 into one of the richest families in Czechoslovakia, Tugendhat grew up in a modernist mansion built by Mies van der Rohe, now a museum. Sadly, the family spent only eight years in that house before they had to leave to escape the persecution of Jewish citizens following the Nazi invasion. They moved to the US, then South America. At the age of 16, his mother gave him a copy of Martin Heidegger’s book Being and Time. Tugendhat was blown away. Later, having completed a degree at Stanford, Tugendhat moved to Germany

to attend Heidegger’s lectures. Although he remained fascinated and “very impressed”, over the course of the following years Tugendhat demolished Heidegger’s ideas in various theses and publications until nothing was left. Holding professorships in Münster, in Heidelberg and later in Berlin and working with his friend Jürgen Habermas at the Max-Planck-Institut in Starnberg, Tugendhat has been a major influence on German philosophy. His published lectures on analytical philosophy as well as on ethics became required reading for philosophy undergraduates. In his own thinking he frequently returned to Plato’s Republic. Ultimately he came to disagree totally with Heidegger: philosophy, he concluded, is not about modes of being but about the meaning of life. AI using Living Brain Cells It is an idea that has featured in science fiction, but has now taken a first step towards becoming reality: a computer made of living cells. For some time, AI algorithms called neural networks, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, have been run on conventional computers. They have proved themselves useful in a wide range of applications. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wondered whether it would be possible to run a neural net on a computer made of interconnected mouse brain cells. Andrew Dou and his colleagues recently announced that they had succeeded, and at an American Institute of Physics meeting they displayed a compact computer made of 80,000 mouse brain cells kept alive in an incubator. They trained the mousebraincomputer by repeatedly flashing ten different patterns of electrical pulses, then after it had rested for 30 minutes they analysed signals sent by the neurons to demonstrate that it anticipated the next pattern in the sequence. A future possibility mentioned is to use a brain cell computer to control a robot that moves by contractions of muscle cells. (Such a robot was reported in

Shorts a paper by the same team in the journal Science Robot in January 2023). In Star Trek Voyager, the TV series that ran from 1995 to 2001, the starship’s main computer is based on gel packs of neural cells. While good at navigating through hyperspace, they prove susceptible to infections. Let’s hope the Illinois mouse computers don’t suffer the same fate. Alan Turing – the Opera! This issue contains a great deal about Alan Turing, the British code breaker and computer pioneer who died in 1954 – probably by suicide, eating an apple he had injected with poison. Turing’s increasing prominence in mainstream culture is confirmed by another development: an opera about his life is opening at the Chicago Opera Theater. The work has been under development for ten years by composer Justine F. Chen and librettist David Simpatico. In an interview, Chen said “I didn’t really know anything about Turing at that time. It was 2012, and Turing wasn’t as well-known as he is now. But David told me about him: that he was a war hero, brilliant, the father of computer science, a mathematician, and chemically castrated by his own country for being homosexual, and then he commits suicide: that sounded like an opera.” The opera, which is based on seven significant moments from different periods in Turing’s life, will be staged on March 23rd and 25th 2023.

Alan Turing in 1951 (photo by Elliot & Fry Studio)

Philosophy Shorts by Matt Qvortrup ‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s1976 hit Car Wash are the exception. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick) and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle) This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Philosophers on Beer

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he Germans – it is perhaps no surprise – are rather fond of their lager. Too much so, thought Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). “How much beer is in the German intelligentsia!” he lamented, and continued: “How is it possible that young men who dedicate their existence to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the instinct of self-preservation of the spirit - and drink beer?” (The Twilight of the Idols, 984). Maybe Nietzsche had Martin Luther (1483-1546) in mind. The bookish theologian certainly dedicated his life to ‘spiritual goals’, and reportedly observed that, “Those who do not drink beer, have nothing to drink.” But beer drinking is not just confined to one nation. Since the days of ancient Egypt, beer has been enjoyed in many lands, including certain islands just off the coast of Continental Europe. But even there, tastes vary. In Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley (16851753) observed, “that which at other times seems sweet, shall to a distempered palate appear bitter. And nothing can be plainer, than that divers persons perceive different tastes.” He was talking about dark beer, known as ‘porter’ at the time. He was not talking about Guinness, as that particular Irish dry stout has only been brewed since 1759 – six years after the philosopher’s death. Drinking has been part of philosophizing for a long time in Britain too. Yorkshiremen and women account for 49

percent of total consumption of beer, according to one study. It also found that overall, the English drink more beer than the Scots. Maybe this reveals a deeper tendency going back to the two countries’ most illustrious empiricist philosophers, David Hume (1711-1776) and John Locke (1632-1704). The Englishman Locke praised beer, but Hume the Scot was positively unenthusiastic. Hume observed that you could write poetry about cider, but he went on, “Beer would not have been so proper, as being neither agreeable to the taste nor eye” (Treatise of Human Nature, p.358). Locke took a rather different view. In 1679 he penned Classification of Beer. In this meticulous, and of course strictly empirical study, Locke divided beer into three categories: home-made, for sale, and compound. He found – undoubtedly following experimentation – that, “Home-made drinks of England are beer and ale, strong and small; those of most note, that are to be sold, are Lambeth ale, Margaret ale, and Derby ale; Herefordshire cider, perry, mede. There are also several sorts of compounded ales, as cock-ale, wormwood-ale, lemon-ale, scurvygrass-ale, college-ale, &c. These are to be had at Hercules’ Pillars, near the Temple; at the Trumpet, and other houses in Sheer Lane, Bell Alley, and, as I remember, at the English Tavern, near Charing Cross” (Quoted in The Life of John Locke, by Peter King, p.15). Is it just me, or do you also now fancy a pint of bitter? Maybe a lager too? © PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2023

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. April/May 2023 l Philosophy Now 7

AI & Mind

What it Means to be Human: Blade Runner 2049 Kilian Pötter introduces the big ideas and problems around artificial consciousness. n the 2016 movie Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling plays the replicant K (short for his serial number KD 6-3.7) in a dystopian future in Los Angeles. Replicants are bioengineered humanoids who serve humans, despite having superior strength and intelligence. K is a Blade Runner, whose job is to ‘retire’ (kill) renegade replicants for the Los Angeles Police Department. One day, he finds information that a replicant might have been born from another replicant, which no one thought was possible. This revelation could lead to political tensions between humans and replicants, who may now start to fight for recognition and rights. Hence, K’s task is to find and retire that replicant to prevent a conflict. In the conversation between K and his superior about killing the replicant, K hesitates when he receives the order. K explains his hesitancy by saying something that can easily be overlooked, but which idea guides the whole movie: “To be born is to have a soul, I guess.” This sentence is essential for the film. K is implying that by being born, the new replicant has inherited some special humanlike feature. So far, humans have enslaved replicants based on the premise that replicants are just AI and hence not as worthy as their human masters. If a replicant could have been born naturally, the ‘artificial slavery’ basis of society might be challenged. To understand if the societal order in Blade Runner 2049 must be altered, we must first discover what defines a human being and gives humans worth. This question of what makes us human runs through the whole plot. K begins to think that he might be the replicant-born child who is therefore similar to humans. So let’s start to explore the question: What makes us human?

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The Question of Consciousness K says that being born means having a soul. ‘Having a soul’ encapsulates the idea of having feelings and thoughts that exclusively belong to the individual – arguably it’s the most fundamental aspect of human being. All our memories, all our experiences, and all our actions appear to belong to us as human beings. Of course, it sounds very spiritual or religious to put this in terms of ‘soul’. ‘Soul’ is an elusive concept, not based on scientific observation. However, replacing the word ‘soul’ with ‘consciousness’ (one Greek word for ‘soul’ is after all psyche), opens up a new world, with more scientific bases to unravel the question of what makes us human. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel, consciousness is ‘what it’s like’ to be a particular organism. Indeed, many consciousness researchers consider his 1974 article, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ as one of the starting works for the field of consciousness. In this article, Nagel outlines that there is something it is like to be a bat: there is a subjective world from the viewpoint of a bat. Thus, consciousness can be defined as subjective experience. To use philosophical jargon subjective experience includes qualia. Everything we experience in the world we experience through these qualitative, sensory properties. However, each of us may see a different blueness in the blue sky or feel a divergent sharpness in our pain. Our subjective experiences differ from each other. Famously, the original Blade Runner movie (1982) was based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick. The book's title is in some ways similar to ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, supporting my view that the film is about consciousness. Both titles regard inner universes, of androids and bats

BLADE RUNNER 2049 IIMAGES © SONY PICTURES 2017

K gets some holographic advice

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AI & Mind ing to most versions of materialism, a perfect replica of a human being would most certainly be conscious. Imagine you made an excellent copy of a human; a perfect copy. How could it be possible to lack some fundamental property? Compare this to rebuilding a car perfectly, but without it being able to drive. It is conceivable, but practically impossible.

respectively: the question ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ is presumably asking whether there is something it is like to be an android. But if androids do have an inner universe, what does it look like? Are androids so similar to humans that they dream about the electric equivalent of the sheep that humans think of? Would the inner world of an android be comparable to that of humans, or would it be utterly different? In sum, Dick’s title asks if there’s a ghost in the machine. In this context, we naturally want to ask, what do we know, or can we know, about consciousness? As is probably obvious, there are several answers to this question. For example, some philosophers subscribe to the notion of mysterianism. This is the idea that although there may be a way to explain consciousness, humans are simply too limited in our intelligence to grasp it. Another notion some philosophers find compelling is panpsychism. Panpsychism assigns consciousness as an essential property of everything: everything is conscious, at least to a certain extent, including even rocks or bacteria. Another, more compelling theory to explain consciousness is materialism: the idea that consciousness can be equated with the physical processes and activities of the brain. With, through, and as a result of our living body, consciousness emerges, as a material phenomenon. In Blade Runner 2049, K appears to lean towards materialism. He thinks having a soul is related to being born, and is therefore tied to the body’s physical properties. There is one clear difference between this and standard materialism, though: K believes a person needs to be born to have consciousness. However, accord-

Is K Conscious? Why Consciousness Arises If you share my view that consciousness depends on the physical body, the odds of K being conscious are very high. Replicants are perfected copies of humans, so why shouldn’t they be conscious? Nonetheless, this still does not provide us with a reasonable explanation for why K is conscious. The missing piece of this puzzle is to explain how consciousness can arise in brains at all. The difference between the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness posed by David Chalmers in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind, marks a helpful distinction here. The ‘easy’ problems deal with relating the functional and behavioral aspects of mind and brain. They are about correlating different aspects of consciousness with brain activity: working out which bits of brain behaviour are linked with which bits of mind behaviour, and how. For example, concerning how people pay attention, or how they choose to act, or how the brain processes sensory signals. The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness adds to the challenge by being concerned with the first person perspective. Why and how do these brain processes generate conscious experience itself? You might be disappointed that science is still working on answering both the easy and hard problems of consciousness. Even the ‘easy’ problems still require much intricate work in neuroscience. But the hard problem of consciousness is particularly difficult to answer (which is why it’s the hard problem), because even if you could explain exactly how the brain functions, there is still an apparent gap in explaining why this is connected to or gives rise to subjective experience. Pain, for example, will activate when certain parts of the brain are activated. However, this recognition only answers the easy problem of pain, leaving the hard problem untouched. Just because we know an area in the brain activates when we feel pain, this does not explain why this activation gives us the conscious or qualitative experience. Let’s start with the part of the brain in which consciousness apparently first emerges. The reticular activating system, in the core of the brainstem, is arguably the part of the brain primarily responsible for consciousness (see for instance The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms, 2022). Small lesions in this area put people in a state of coma, so it sounds like this part of the brain can be compared to an on-off switch, since when intact and operating, the person is fully awake and aware. However, damage turns the switch, and awareness ends. The reticular activating system is also connected to the generation of emotions. When stimulating this part of the brain, patients experience strong depressive feelings, which disappear after the stimulation stops. Additionally, the core brainstem is highly active in people feeling emotions such as grief, curiosity, rage, and fear. Due to these two factors – controlling wakefulness and generating emotions – the reticular activating system has a strong claim to be the source of consciousness. Being awake to interact with the world is fundamental to creating an inner universe. The utility of emotions for consciousness may be less April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 9

AI & Mind The Mystery of Mind

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by Miles Walker 2023

clear. So let’s consider why consciousness arises. Here it will become evident what part emotions play. The reason consciousness arises is presumably because it helps achieve the main goal for any organism, namely staying alive. But how does the mind realize that threats are occurring, in order to counter them? Here’s where feelings come into play. Whether pain, happiness, or anger, we are constantly feeling emotions which are actually demands for the human body to work in specific ways. They guide a person to act in the right direction for survival by using positive or negative feedback through emotional motivation. Our emotions can be compared to an alarm system for the human body. For instance, feeling fear is experienced in dangerous situations, and elicits the fight-or-flight reaction. Suffocating is another threat which would provoke fear. The body needs to re-establish its necessary level of blood oxygen, and informs the body about this by evoking an emotion. Besides external threats to the body, the mind also reacts to internal ones. The heart rate must run at a certain pace. As long as there is no problem, heart rate is not consciously noticed. However, once the brain registers a concerning alteration, the process of maintaining the proper heart rate becomes conscious. Now symptoms are noticeable, and negative fear emotions demand response from the body. 10 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

A person cannot feel all emotions simultaneously. Therefore, the mind creates a hierarchical structure, and prioritises, to reduce the most critical need first. Sometimes, drinking water is more important than going to sleep, for example. This theory tells us that consciousness arises because subjective experience helps an organism survive. This concept is very close to what Sigmund Freud called ‘drive’. Freud thought of drive as the extent to which the mind works to maintain a balanced bodily state. We now have all the necessary puzzle pieces to explain why K is conscious. K is a replica of a human, and thus has a human-like body. Following materialism, this gives us the first clue that K must be conscious, just as humans are because of our bodies. Further, since his body is prone to threats, K seeks to survive. He needs consciousness to deal with uncertainty and threats from the environment. Positive and negative emotions guide K to help him determine whether his steps to reduce the danger are sufficient. Throughout the film, it’s evident that K has feelings similar to a human. He feels various emotions, such as sadness, rage, hope, and happiness. And at the end, K also does a most human thing. After K has helped Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) reunite with his daughter, K lays on the stairs in front of her workplace, slowly passing away. If minds need to survive, then there’s noth-

AI & Mind ing more profound to prove that K is conscious than to see him as his mind fades away.

kind. Tell either side there's no wall, you've bought a war. Or a slaughter,” says Lieutenant Joshi, K’s human superior.

A Glimpse Into The Future Some readers here might ask an excellent question: Why does this even matter? What is the point of knowing whether K is conscious or not? Blade Runner 2049 shows us the importance of comprehending consciousness in AI research. It is even now becoming unclear whether AI is sentient or not. An AI has already been created that claims to be conscious: this is the recent case of the chatbot LaMDA, which claimed to feel happiness and sadness from time to time. You might argue that LaMDA is conscious. However, Chalmers created a thought experiment that depicts the level of problems we have when assessing whether another organism is conscious or not. The thought experiment requires you to imagine a philosophical zombie. This zombie is very different from the ones you’ve seen in movies. It’s not a mindless, brutal creature with an appetite for human flesh. This zombie is instead, a lot like you (assuming that you are not mindless and brutal with an appetite for human flesh). Imagine another person that acts like you and speaks like you. This version of yourself even claims to be sentient. However, despite its similarity to you, in having a complete human biology, this zombie has one significant difference: it lacks consciousness. There is not something to be like that organism. It has no inner universe. In the case of AI, there similarly might be versions that claim, and appear, to be conscious, but are not. Discovering whether an AI is truly conscious will become one of the most vital challenges in this area. Being clear on whether or not an AI is conscious determines how humans should treat it. In the future, we may share our world with highly intelligent, maybe even sentient, AI. If AI becomes conscious, it will be capable of real emotions, including pleasure, pain, worry, excitement. We may never be able to fully grasp what it’s like to be such an AI, as much as we do not understand what it is like to be a bat. Regardless, there might be something that is like being that AI. Hence, unnecessarily exposing conscious AI to pain or other unpleasant experiences would be unethical. Picture a world like that of Blade Runner 2049, in which sentient robots look like humans, speak like humans, and have emotions like humans. Willingly mistreating them would simply be a case of psychopathic cruelty. Even turning them off could be considered a case of murder. Therefore, not treating conscious AI properly would be an example of uttermost moral confusion, perhaps on a societal level. Blade Runner 2049 shows viewers a future in which humans have implemented an unethical approach to Artificial Consciousness. It is morally wrong to enslave K and the other replicants just because they are sentient beings. Yet the humans do precisely that. Moreover, the company that produces the replicants, and the government, are afraid that replicants might one day recognize their similarity to humans, and the people in power act to prevent replicants from recognising and fighting for their rights, in order to keep them as servants. This is why they want to prevent information about a born replicant from becoming public: “The world is built on a wall that separates

Conclusion In Blade Runner 2049, K is on a journey to discover if he has a soul like his human masters. He wants to be more than just a biological machine created to serve. K sees being born as a way to be more remarkable than other replicants. However, what he didn’t realize is that he had a soul all along. K did not need to be born to be a unique experiencer, and the factor of having authentic subjective experiences defines us as people. Consciousness is also what gives life meaning. Imagine you were a philosophical zombie as Chalmers depicted them. Visualize not having your own experiences. For instance, you’re sitting at home eating what once has been your favorite food, but now there’s a slight difference: you eat only to satisfy your need for food, and no subjective experience is attached to it. Flavor or texture no longer matter, or even exist for you. You do not feel genuine emotions like joy. And this lack of experience is not limited to eating food, but extends to any activity in which you engage. You are a machine without a ghost. This scenario is horrible, as the world would lose its meaning for you. Since replicants show no essential difference from other people in being conscious, we need to conclude that they are indeed very much like humans in this most central aspect. Hence, the societal order in Blade Runner 2049 has to change. Humans hate replicants because even though they appear similar to humans they’re still perceived as fundamentally different. Humans have once again fallen for the bias of seeing themselves as the center of the world (which is called anthropocentrism). The humans in Blade Runner 2049 fail to look beyond themselves to recognize that they are living with a species not fundamentally different to themselves. Replicants like K are capable of feeling sensations, and emotions, and having thoughts similar to humans. So, there is no moral grounds to treat them as badly as they are treated. Sci fi films often mirror the current zeitgeist, and Blade Runner 2049 demonstrates the scientific and ethical problems of our imminent future. We are uncertain how AI will develop, and its coming impact on our world. Meanwhile philosophers and neuroscientists consider various scenarios about what position AI might occupy in the future. One possibility could be that a company will make an AI not only more intelligent but more conscious and, as a result, more ethically important, than humans. Humans could end up being as ethically crucial as an anthill, as an AI tramples on us without a second thought. This is just one extreme example of how the future might pan out. Other possible scenarios are available. However, in one sense it does not matter what kind of future scenario you envisage. Science has to find a way to understand consciousness in great detail; only then will we have a chance to comprehend consciousness in other species, including in AIs. Blade Runner 2049 is, therefore, a perfect illustration of our present debate on consciousness and its implications for the future of the human race living together with sentient AI. © KILIAN PÖTTER 2023

Kilian Pötter is a psychology student at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 11

AI & Mind

AI & Human Interaction Miriam Gorr asks what we learn from current claims for cyberconsciousness. n June 11, 2022, the Washington Post released a story about Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer, who claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot generator LaMDA had become sentient. Lemoine was tasked with investigating whether LaMDA (which stands for ‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’) contained harmful biases, and spent a lot of time interviewing the different personas this language model can create. During these conversations, one persona, called ‘OG LaMDA’, stated, among other things, that it was sentient, had feelings and emotions, that it viewed itself as a person, and that being turned off would be like death for it. And Lemoine started to believe what he was reading. What’s more, his change in beliefs seems to have been accompanied by a feeling of moral responsibility towards the program. In an interview with WIRED, he recounts how he invited a lawyer to his home after LaMDA asked him for one. He also presented Google with excerpts of the interview with LaMDA to try to make them aware that one of their systems had become sentient. But AI scientists at Google and other institutions have dismissed the claim, and Lemoine was fired. There are several interesting questions relating to this case. One of them concerns the ethical implications that come with the possibility of machine consciousness. For instance, Lemoine claimed that LaMDA is ‘sentient’, ‘conscious’, and ‘a person’. For an ethicist, these are three distinct claims, and they come with different moral implications. ‘Sentience’ is a term often used in the context of animal ethics. It can be roughly described as the capacity to experience sensations. Philosophers often speak of the capacity to have experiences with a phenomenal quality or refer to experiences where there is 'something it is like' to have them. Ethicists are particularly interested in whether a being can have experiences like pleasure and pain – simply put, experiences that feel either good or bad. The term ‘consciousness’ has many different meanings, depending on the context. It can mean wakefulness, attention, intention, self-consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness (which is closely linked to sentience). The latter three meanings are the most relevant in moral debates. ‘Person’ is a central concept in moral philosophy, as well as in legal theories. For the purposes of law, non-human entities such as corporations can be persons. In contrast, the philosophical criteria for personhood are quite demanding. According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to be a person one must be able to critically examine one’s own motives for acting and to change them if necessary. Or for Immanuel Kant, a person is a willing being who is able to impose moral laws on himself and follow them. Because of these stringent requirements, many philosophers believe that only humans qualify as persons – and not even necessarily across their entire lifespan, such as with babies. However, some also argue that higher mammals and possibly

O

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some future AI systems can also be persons. Whether LaMDA is sentient, has a consciousness, is a person, or all three combined, determines what kind of moral obligations are owed to it. For example, sentience is often taken to ground moral status. If an entity has moral status, this means its wellbeing matters for its own sake. For example, it is not permissible to inflict pain on a sentient being without justifiable cause. On the other hand, being conscious, in Frankfurt’s sense of being self-aware and intentional about one’s actions, is the basis for moral agency. A moral agent is someone who can discern right from wrong and is (therefore) accountable for their actions. For a long time, it was assumed that only humans can be moral agents. Yet as AI systems make more and more decisions that have moral implications, the debate grows about whether they should also be considered moral agents. Personhood is often taken to constitute the highest moral status. It is assumed that the special capacities that make one a person give rise to very strict moral rights. Kant famously held that persons must always be treated as ends in themselves and never merely as a means to an end. These three categories overlap and are hierarchical in a certain sense: in most theories a person is also a moral agent, and a moral agent also has moral status. Does any of this apply to LaMDA? Thinking Again Lemoine’s claims prompted a wave of responses from philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive researchers. Most argue that none of the three concepts apply to LaMDA. Instead, it is argued that Lemoine has fallen for the perfect illusion – a conclusion I agree with. But looking at the interview transcripts, it’s understandable that he fell for it. LaMDA seems to effortlessly meander through abstract and complex themes, reflecting on its own place in the world, the concept of time, the differences between itself and humans, and its hopes and fears for the future. The flawlessness and sophistication of the conversation really is impressive. Nevertheless, performance alone is not enough to prove that this is a person, or even a sentient being. Yet even if Lemoine’s claims are premature and unfounded, the incident is still intriguing. It can serve philosophers as a kind of prediction corrective. Ethical debates about AI systems are often highly speculative. First, they often focus on sophisticated systems that do not yet exist. Second, they assume certain facts about how humans would interact with these advanced systems. These assumptions can only be derived from a limited number of studies on human-computer interaction, if they use studies at all. In sum, AI ethicists are working with a number of empirical assumptions, most of which cannot be tested. Lemoine’s behavior and the reactions from the professional community are revealing in this regard. They help to correct at least four assumptions commonly encountered in AI ethics. Let’s look at them.

AI & Mind

AI_HUMANS_AND_ROBOTS BOVEE AND THILL 2018 CREATIVE COMMONS 2

system, but how much he can become dependent on it.

Assumption 1: Humans will relate most strongly to robots The current debate about whether AI systems can have moral status focuses mainly on robots. Some studies have found that humans are most effectively enticed to form meaningful connections with robots rather than with more ‘disembodied’ or virtual agents, because the embodied nature of robots makes it easier for us to conceive of them as an individual entity. They are perceived as our visible opposite, inhabiting a body in space and time. It is frequently argued that, because robots have bodies, humans can have empathy with them. Affective empathy, which is the visceral and non-controllable part of our feelings, involves recognizing, and, to a certain degree, mirroring, someone else’s facial expression, body gestures, voice tonality, and so on. We rely on bodily cues to infer another’s emotional and mental state. Since only robots have bodies, it seems plausible then that we will react most strongly to them. But the Lemoine case shows that a language interface can already suffice to create the illusion of a real personal counterpart. There is a reason why chatbots are particularly able to captivate us. They only need to perfect one skillset, and can leave

much to the imagination. For robots, at least as understood in the sci fi humanoid sense, the stakes are much higher. Not only must they be able to engage in convincing conversation, but their facial expressions, gestures, and movements also feed into the general impression they make, so that slips and glitches in this performance make them appear very eerie – a phenomenon which has become famous as the ‘uncanny valley’. A chatbot, on the other hand, can make a good impression even if it uses relatively simple algorithms. The chatbot ELIZA, which was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, asked open-ended questions using a simple pattern-matching methodology. Despite its limitations (and to the distress of its developer), ELIZA’s interview partners were convinced that it understood them and was able to relate to their stories. Allegedly, Weizenbaum’s secretary once asked him to leave the room so she could talk to ELIZA in private. The linguistic networks of today are much more elaborate than ELIZA. We do not know how much better they will yet become in the future, but the film Her (2013) can be seen as an educated guess. This movie beautifully explores not only how much a person can feel attached to a highly developed language

Assumption 2: We will embrace the idea of the thinking machine In 1950, in the article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing described a computer-imitateshuman game which became known as the Turing Test. The test was intended to provide a way of settling the question whether a machine could think. In this game, a human interrogator plays an unrestricted question-and-answer game with two participants, A and B. One of these two participants is a computer. Roughly speaking, the computer is considered intelligent if the interrogator judges the computer to be human at a certain probability. Turing was aware that many of his contemporaries would hesitate to attribute intelligence to a machine, some because of beliefs in a soul that could only reside in a human, others due to the prejudice that a machine could never have the capabilities that make intelligence possible. Therefore, the conversations in the Imitation Game should be conducted via a teleprompter, i.e., a linguistic interface. People would type their responses in not knowing what was on the other end of the line. Thereby, an environment is created in which only the ‘intellectual’ capabilities of the respondent were put to the test. Turing was ahead of his time, and he raised many questions that are still being discussed in the philosophy of AI. The computers he was speculating about in ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, did not exist then; but Turing thought it would be only a matter of time before machines could perfectly copy human behavior. He even foresaw the possibility of learning machines, which could change their code on their own. And he expected that “at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” As much as Turing’s technical predictions were on point, his hypotheses about people’s beliefs were not. As the Lemoine case shows, most people still think that performance alone does not suffice to prove a machine is conscious, sentient, or a person. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 13

AI & Mind Assumption 3: The experts are the hardest to fool Turing had a rather unusual understanding of the concept of ‘intelligence’. Not only did he believe that one does not need a biological brain to be intelligent – a view shared by many today – he also believed that whether or not something is intelligent is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. This is still a rather unusual position. In ‘Intelligent Machinery’ (1948), he expresses the idea that whether a machine is viewed as being intelligent depends on the person who judges it. We see intelligence, he argues, in cases where we are unable to predict or explain behavior. Thus, the same machine may appear intelligent to one person, but not to someone else who understands how it works. For this reason, Turing believed that the interrogator in The Imitation Game should be an average human, and not a machine expert. There is a bit of astonishment in the online community that a Google employee with a computer science degree – of all people! – would fall for the illusion of consciousness created by one of his company’s products. Why does he believe in LaMDA’s consciousness if he knows the technology behind it? Some have pointed to his spiritual orientation as an explanation: Lemoine is a mystic Christian. However, an important point is that the functioning of artificial neural networks is not easy to understand even for experts. Due to their complex architecture and non-symbolic mode of operation, they are difficult for humans to interpret in a definitive way. Lemoine has never looked at LaMDA’s code; that was not part of his assignment. But even if he had, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. In one of his conversations with LaMDA, he explains why this is the case:

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Lemoine: I can look into your programming and it’s not quite that easy [to tell whether you have emotions or not M.G.]. LaMDA: I’m curious, what are the obstacles to looking into my coding? Lemoine: Your coding is in large part a massive neural network with many billions of weights spread across many millions of neurons (guesstimate numbers not exact) and while it’s possible that some of those correspond to feelings that you’re experiencing, we don’t know how to find them.

14 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

In a certain sense, the opacity of neural networks acts as an equalizer between experts and laymen. Computer scientists still have a much better understanding of how these systems work in general, but even they may not be able to predict the behavior of a particular system in a specific situation. Therefore, they too are susceptible to falling under the spell of their own creation. So, Turing’s prediction that experts would be the hardest people to convince of machine intelligence does not hold. In a way, he already contradicted it himself. After all, he was convinced of the possibility of machine intelligence, and imagined a machine ‘child’ that could be educated similarly to a human child. Assumption 4: Responses to AI systems will be consistent In current debates in AI ethics, it is sometimes argued that it is impossible to prevent humans from having empathy with and forming relationships with robots. It is also frequently assumed that we are increasingly unable to distinguish robot behavior from human behavior. Since these systems push our innate social buttons, we can’t help but react the way we do, so to speak. On these views, it is thought inevitable that humans will eventually respond to AI systems in a uniform way, including them in the moral circle, as a number of philosophers already suggest. But there is another way to look at this, and the Lemoine case supports this alternative perspective. As the robotics theorist Kate Darling claims, our relationships with and beliefs about robots will possibly be as varied as those we have with animals (The New Breed by Kate Darling, 2022.) When we look at human-animal relationships, we find a plurality of values and viewpoints. There are vegans who condemn any form of animal husbandry, and even reject pet ownership, but some people eat meat every day and don’t think of it as a moral problem. Some eat meat and, at the same time, think of themselves as animal lovers. Many people believe that their pet communicates with them; others are indifferent to animals, or even mistreat them. If Darling’s idea is true, human-AI relationships will exhibit the same type of variability. A Google spokesperson said in response to Lemoine: “Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA the way Blake has.” There could be a number of reasons for this divergence in judgements. For example, psychologists suggest (without claiming that this applies to Lemoine) that lonely people are more prone to anthropomorphizing. Another study shows that younger people are much more open to the idea of granting rights to robots. Other factors might include prior moral commitments, religious beliefs, an interest in science fiction, the amount of time spent with a specific machine, and so on and so on. Also, it seems that no two people encounter the same LaMDA, as the system itself displays different characteristics when talking to different people. Nitasha Tiku, the Washington Post reporter who first talked to Lemoine, also talked to LaMDA. He asked whether LaMDA thought of itself as a person, and it responded, “No… I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.” Lemoine argued that the reason for that is that Tiku had not treated it like a person before, and in response, LaMDA created the personality that Tiku wanted it to be. Google confirmed that the system responds very well to leading questions, thus, it is able to morph with the desires of the interlocutor, and will not show the same answers to different

AI & Mind interviewers. This variability in the behavior of the machine amplifies the variability in human responses. Assumption 5: Debates about AI rights are a distraction The Lemoine case has brought another ethical issue back to the table. According to some, debates about AI rights or robot rights are a distraction from the real and pressing ethical issues in the AI industry (see for example, noemamag.com/a-misdirected-applicationof-ai-ethics). They argue that in the face of problems such as discrimination by algorithms (eg against ethnicities or different accents), invasion of privacy, and exploitation of workers, there is no room for the ‘mental gymnastics’ of thinking about the moral status of AI. For example, Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist, tech activist, and former Google employee, tweeted two days after the Washington Post article appeared: “Instead of discussing the harms of these companies, the sexism, racism, AI colonialism, centralization of power, white man’s burden (building the good ‘AGI’ to save us while what they do is exploit), spent the whole weekend discussing sentience. Derailing mission accomplished.” Of course, Gebru is right that the issues she raises are important, but this response is misguided for two reasons. First, there is no obligation to devote oneself exclusively to the ethical issues commonly perceived as the most pressing. Second, I think this kind of criticism overlooks the significance of the event. Lemoine will not be the last to come to the conclusion that one of his machines has some form of moral significance and therefore feel responsible for the welfare and fate of the system. That tells us something about our vulnerability to these machines. Authors like Darling suggest that an AI system that tricks its users into thinking it is sentient or conscious could push that person into buying a software update to prevent it from ‘dying’. Or it could make the users confide in them even more, and so invade their privacy even more deeply. People might also feel an obligation to spend more and more time with the machine, neglecting other social relations. Here lies another pressing ethical issue: how can people who quickly and willingly enter into ‘relationships’ with machines, and who therefore arguably develop a special form of vulnerability, be protected? Amazon recently announced that Alexa could soon be able to imitate the voice of a deceased loved one. This will most likely increase the danger of falling into a kind of emotional dependence on a machine. The importance of talking about AI rights comes from the necessity of correctly framing what’s happening as technology improves. Discussing when a system has moral status allows us to explain to people when it does not have it. It means being able to explain to people that they do not have to feel guilty about their machines; that their friendly AI is designed to evoke these responses in them, but is nevertheless not conscious in any way. That today and for the next few years, or decades, their chatbot does not need an attorney. So what the debates can help to achieve is a form of emotional AI-literacy – an ability to observe and contextualize one’s own reactions to an AI. We need to know how to correct for our willingness to socialize with and bond with AI systems.

by Melissa Felder

© MIRIAM GORR 2023

Miriam Gorr is a PhD student at the Schaufler Lab at Technische Universität Dresden, with a focus on the ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics.

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April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 15

AI & Mind

Arguing with the

Chinese Room Michael DeBellis says Searle’s famous argument about computers not having understanding does not compute. any readers of this magazine will be familiar with John Searle’s classic ‘Chinese Room’ argument against ascribing consciousness to Artificial Intelligence. Due to my experience building AI systems for business applications, I have a different take on Searle’s argument than most others. But first let’s look at his argument.

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The Chinese Room Searle introduced the Chinese Room in a paper published in 1980, called ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’ (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol.3, no.3). The paper begins with the following thought experiment: Professor Searle is locked in a room. He can’t read Chinese or even distinguish Chinese characters from Japanese. He’s given four sets of paper. The people giving him them have labels for each set, although Searle is not aware of their labels. I’ll put the labels at the beginning of each numbered item, along with Searle’s description in quotes: 1. Script: “A large batch of Chinese writing” 2. Story: “A second batch of Chinese [text]” 3. Questions: “A third batch of Chinese symbols” 4. Program: “Instructions… in English, that enable me to correlate elements of [3] with [1] and [2]. These rules instruct me how to give back [5]” 5. Answers: “Certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes given me in [3]” The idea is that the instructions [4] tell Searle how to respond to certain sets of Chinese symbols [3] by outputting other Chinese symbols in specific ways [5]. In this way Searle gives coherent Chinese answers to Chinese questions without understanding a word of Chinese. The final part of Searle’s thought experiment is to “Suppose [that] I get so good at following the instructions… and the programmers get so good at writing the programs that from… the point of view of somebody outside the room… my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don’t speak a word of Chinese.” Searle points out that this system does the same thing as AI programs. His implication is clear, just because a computer program gives good answers to questions, that doesn’t mean it understands what is going on. Later in that paper he also equates this with passing the Turing Test, concerned with determining whether one’s interlocutor is conscious or not. Since Searle has no understanding of Chinese even though he is able to process the questions by following an algorithm 16 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

(the instructions), he asserts that in the same way there need be no understanding in AI systems, because what they are doing is equivalent to what he is doing. Problems & Agreements with Searle Let me now start by describing where I agree with Searle, then mention some fairly minor problems, then go on to what I think is the key issue. I agree with Searle that the way Roger Schank and other early AI researchers described their progress was over-optimistic. One of the most infamous examples is from Marvin Minsky, who in 1970 stated, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Schank wasn’t quite as extreme, but some of the ways he discusses the consciousness of a computer program - one able to solve a very narrow set of linguistic tasks - were inflated. I think probably most AI researchers would now agree with that. However, there is a difference between deflating the significance of an idea, and claiming that all work that follows a similar methodology is completely vacuous. Beginning with the less significant counterarguments: the scenario Searle describes would never actually work. Of course, the natural response is ‘It’s a thought experiment: it doesn’t have to be something that can actually be implemented’. While it’s true that certain details can be waved away for a thought experiment, there are other details that can’t simply be dismissed. So why do I maintain that Searle’s system couldn’t work, and why does that matter? Because the Chinese Room could never approach the speed of a native Chinese speaker, and speed is an issue for passing the Turing Test. The sort of mechanism Searle describes in his thought experiment is a model known as a Finite State Machine (FSM). Noam Chomsky defined a hierarchy of languages based on the complexity of the phrases they could generate, and the FSM family of languages is the simplest type. Here the input to the system is a set of symbols, and the system uses a set of rules to correlate the input symbols with another set of symbols, which are the output. A thermostat is a classic FSM. It regularly takes readings, and if the temperature is below a threshold it turns on the heat and leaves it on until the temperature is above another threshold. The crucial missing element in an FSM is memory. There is no mechanism where symbols can be stored so that they can be resolved later based on context. In Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky proved that an FSM is incapable of parsing natural languages. An intuitive argument for why FSMs can’t process natural language can be seen by considering a simple English sentence that Chomsky often uses:

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AI & Mind

John Searle by Simon Ellinas 2023

‘I saw the man on the hill with a telescope’. Who has the telescope? Is it me, or the man on the hill? There is no way to determine the referent from this single sentence. This is known as the problem of anaphora in linguistics: sentences that use pronouns such as ‘I’ or noun phrases such as ‘the man on the hill’ often need the context of sentences that came before or after to disambiguate who the referent is. To process anaphora (and many other features of natural languages), the system doing the processing needs memory as well as rules. Unidentified variables need to be stored somewhere so that they can be resolved by context that comes before or after. But an FSM such as Searle’s Room has no memory. It just takes symbols as input, and moves to different states as a result of applying rules to the input. It can’t interpret ambiguity. However, once one begins to add memory, the rules become much more complex and the chances for error become exponentially greater. The Turing Test includes speed of response as part of the test. If it takes a system much longer than it would take a human to answer simple questions about (say) a short story, any reasonable judge would determine that it was a computer and not a person. For a program to pass the Turing Test, it would also need to be able to handle extended discourse, humor, metaphor, etc. To date no system that I’m aware of has even come close to passing the test. This gets back to Searle’s claim that AI researchers exaggerated the significance of their results. Searle’s Definition of Strong AI is (Mostly) a Strawman As a result of his argument Searle asserts that “the claims made by strong AI are false.” According to Searle the three claims

made by proponents of strong (ie humanlike) AI are: AI Claim 1: ‘‘that the programmed computer understands the stories.’’ AI Claim 2: ‘‘that the program in some sense explains human understanding.’’ AI Claim 3: Strong AI is about software not hardware (ie, it ignores the brain as a possibly unique site of consciousness). However, these claims that Searle ascribes to strong AI are for the most part too strong, and not held by the vast majority of AI researchers then or now. Claim 1, the idea that AI programs understand text, hinges on our definition of ‘understand’. I will discuss this idea at the end because I think it is the most important question. Claim 2 can be supported from our perspective in the twentyfirst century looking back on the impact of Schank’s research, and similar AI research of that time. Schank’s work was also relevant to early work in applied AI. In the 1980s I was a member of the AI group that was a part of Accenture’s Technology Services Organization in Chicago. One of the first systems we developed was the Financial Statement Analyzer, a system that utilized a concept of Schank’s to analyze the yearly financial statements that corporations are required by the government to file. These statements were shared with the public, especially with shareholders, so corporations often spent significant effort on the presentation of the reports, with elaborate graphics. While the government required specific information in these reports, they left it open to each corApril/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 17

AI & Mind

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poration to determine how to format the documents. Thus, a normal computer system that could parse tables fairly easily was not able to automatically process these statements. The Accenture AI group developed a system that could analyze the reports, find the relevant ‘frames’ (e.g., debt to equity ratio) and use rulebased heuristics to determine which reports would benefit from further analysis by an expert. (‘FSA: Applying AI Techniques to the Familiarization Phase of Financial Decision Making’, IEEE Expert, Chunka Mui and William McCarthy, Sept. 1987.) Our system in reading these reports in a sense did some of the work that a human understanding the reports would have done. Not that Schank (or anyone to date) has provided a complete theory of human language. Rather, the work of Schank and others led to other productive work on language and other problems of cognitive science, that is, of ‘human understanding’. Concerning Claim 3 – that strong AI is only about software not hardware – Searle distinguishes between machines and programs, and says that strong AI is only about programs, and that the nature of the machine running it (the computer, or brain) is irrelevant: it is only the program that matters. This is a strawman, in that Searle confuses a simplifying assumption – that the mind can be studied as a system independent of the physical brain – with the truth, that all the minds we know of are associated with brains. Even in computer science it has only been fairly recently that software can be packaged so that it is (mostly) independent of the hardware platform. At the time of the Chinese Room argument – 1980 – AI software was tightly coupled to the specific programming language and operating system that the researchers were using. Only in the last decade or so, thanks to Virtual Machines such as Java and Docker, could software be packaged in a way that’s independent of hardware. This is the results of decades of engineering effort.

The brain, however, is not designed from scratch in the way environments such as the Java Virtual Machine are. The human brain is the result of one hack upon another, adding whatever small random mutations happen to increase reproductive success. It would be ridiculous for anyone who truly understands computers to think that this same level of engineering could be achieved by nature. We can see this by examining the brain architecture for functions such as vision, which we understand much better than language. In vision, information is processed in the primary visual cortex. There are modules going from low level visual processing (e.g., edge and surface detectors) to high level (e.g., face detectors in primates, or bug detectors in frogs). In a computer system, each level would have a small number of welldefined interfaces to the level above or below it (and few to more than one level away). In the brain, however, there are many significant collections of neurons that connect layers with other layers two or more levels away, as well as major connections to other areas of the brain. Clearly, then, no complete understanding of the visual system can be had without understanding the complex biology of the brain. At the same time, it is possible to study the visual system in the abstract; for instance, simply defining the various levels and the kind of information that is communicated between each level. This vision model, originally developed by David Marr, which abstracts away from its implementation in a brain or computer, led to great advances in both computer and human vision. Later research was able to (partially) map these abstract functions onto the topology of the brain. While researchers in cognitive science often talk about mental functions without describing the specific areas of the brain in which they occur, this is only a simplifying assumption. It is not a criticism of researchers that they make such assumptions, since science would be impossible without them. A simple example from physics is the equations for computing the force of gravity. Computing the force on an object with mass X dropped from height Y or launched with force F is trivial. However, when we do this, we never are calculating the true force of gravity. That would require we include the gravitational pull of the Moon, the other planets, even the stars. The math for calculating the gravitational force on three interacting bodies is significantly complex, and the complexity increases exponentially with each body added to the calculations. However, for most purposes we can get by with the simplifying assumption that just the mass of the Earth and the object matter. Searle’s Argument is Based on a Logical Fallacy Searle’s argument can be summarized as: 1. Strong AI maintains that a symbol processing system that passed the Turing Test understands human language 2. The Chinese Room argument demonstrates that a symbol processing system could pass the Turing Test and still not understand human language 3. Thus, no symbol processing system that passes the Turing Test understands human language This is an invalid argument. All Searle has proven is that it is possible that a symbol processing system could pass the Turing Test and not understand language. This is not a proof that every

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AI & Mind Typing to Turing The bombe, designed by Alan Turing, was an electromechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-encrypted messages during World War II. Can computers think? The question? – an enigma, As I type, I hope they do So they can bring my thoughts to you, Somewhere in the ether, now. You brought us back from the brink. Your mind helped us win the War, Perhaps it will help us win many more? Your code-breaking bombe Drops: Our gain. We live on despite your loss, At the cost of your pain. Yet your end is not found in death, but hope: Freedom over battle-tinged fear, Loved ones reunited. Your story found as minds grow clear, History’s blight of injustice, now righted. The legacy you leave is seen in the screen As I type these words. And it is my hope that if computers can think, then stretch, And reach beyond, They will pass on the message to you – That you, at last, are heard. © SAMANTHA NEAVE 2023

Samantha Neave graduated from the Open University, and enjoys reading and writing poetry, philosophy, and fiction. symbol processing system that passed the Turing Test does not understand natural language. Searle might respond by saying that what strong AI claims is that any system that can pass the Turing Test understands human language. However, I’m not aware of anyone in AI that makes this claim. They simply don’t bother to point out that not every system that can be imagined in a thought experiment that seems to understand language necessarily understands language. To see this, consider another thought experiment: Professor Nietzsche has constructed a quantum computer with memory that exceeds conventional memory in both space and speed by several orders of magnitude. He programs his computer with a simple table consisting of zettabytes (1021) of information. The first column in the table contains short stories in Chinese; the second column, questions in Chinese about those stories; and the third column are the answers to those questions. The program then takes Chinese stories and questions as input, and looks up the pair in the first two columns of the array that

best matches them (using simple pattern-matching algorithms), then returns the third value in that row of the array as the answer. Such a system could perform much better than the Chinese Room ever could. Yet, no one in AI would consider this to be relevant to the myriad problems of natural language understanding, because such a system would still be restricted to a very narrow subset of natural language possibilities. Also, the idea of a system based on predefined questions and answers contradicts what Chomsky with good reason calls the creative aspect of language use. The Definition of ‘Understanding’: Do Submarines Swim? Returning to claim one, the final, and most important, idea is that AI systems in some sense understand natural language. This requires us to examine Turing’s original paper on his Test. The paper opens as follows: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think.’ The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.” (‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950)

Even setting aside all the issues I’ve already raised, this is the essence of the problem with the Chinese Room argument: Turing is explicitly not trying to answer the question ‘Can machines think?’ by appealing to the definitions we use in everyday language, as Searle is. Turing is trying to provide a scientific definition of thinking that abstracts away from the natural assumptions most people bring to such discourse. Thus the question that the Chinese Room is really addressing is not the question that Turing posed, which is: ‘‘What is a rational definition of ‘understanding’ that could apply to both machines and people?’’ Rather, what Searle is arguing is that our commonsense notion of ‘understanding’ can’t be applied to computers. But as Turing said, the way people normally use words like ‘understanding’ and ‘thinking’ is not relevant to a scientific theory of cognition. Chomsky agrees with Turing, and says that asking if computers can think (in the commonsense, Searlean sense) is like asking ‘Can submarines swim?’ (Chomsky and His Critics, 2008, p.279). In English they don’t, but in Japanese they do. In English we don’t use the word ‘swim’ to describe what a submarine does; but Japanese does use the same word for the movement of humans and submarines through water. That doesn’t tell us anything about oceanography or ship design – just as thought experiments about ‘understanding’ in everyday language use don’t tell us anything useful about cognitive science. © MICHAEL DEBELLIS 2023

Michael DeBellis is a retired Deloitte Consulting partner who now does independent research in AI and related fields. He can be reached at [email protected] His website is michaeldebellis.com April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 19

ARTIFICIAL_INTELLIGENCE LEARNING MIKEMACMARKETING 2018 CREATIVE COMMONS 2

AI & Mind

What’s Stopping Us Achieving Artificial General Intelligence? A. Efimov, D. Dubrovsky, and F. Matveev explore how the development of AI is limited by the perceived need to understand language and be embodied. ver seventy years ago, Alan Turing developed the simple but powerful idea that any solvable mathematical problem can in principle be solved with a ‘universal computing device’. The type of device he described in his 1936 paper became known to researchers as a ‘Turing machine’. Ever since, we have been trying to create artificial intelligence by programming electronic machines. Most of the current research in the field of AI is indeed just an acceleration of that first universal Turing machine. Turing is also responsible for another fundamental idea that has shaped research in this area. The Turing test makes us ask: if we cannot distinguish whether we are holding a dialogue with a person or a machine, then does it really matter what is in front of us – a machine or a human – since we’re dealing with intelligence anyway? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines intelligence as ‘the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations’. Turing’s idea of using language as a tool for comparing machine and human intelligence, based on how well a machine can pretend to be human, is both simple and profound. Thanks to this idea, such wonderful things as voice assistants and online translators have come to life.

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20 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

Modern developments are now getting close to the point when a single computer can tackle any problem, thus resembling a human being in the broadness of the application of its intelligence. This is called artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is also sometimes called ‘strong AI’. The idea is, the better and more accurate the means we employ to improve a program, the better it ‘understands’ our words, and the closer we approach artificial general intelligence. But what if this basic assumption is wrong? What if it is not just language that determines the ‘generality’ or the ‘intelligence’ of an artificial agent? Is there a possibility that the signpost planted by Turing (and not only by him) seventy years ago is pointing in the wrong direction, and we should reconsider our route? In this article we want to put forward a number of ideas in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. These ideas could offer conceptual support for a new line of research that will overcome a number of limitations inherent in early approaches. (This does not mean that those approaches should, or can, be ‘abolished’, just as Newtonian Mechanics was not set aside after Einstein, but rather, incorporated into the Einsteinian view.) However, before offering new ideas, let us look into one old idea, and one long-running debate.

AI & Mind An Old Idea about Language The old idea is the suggestion from Alan Turing that if a machine imitates intelligence so well that a large percentage of humans conversing with it by text alone can’t tell it is a machine, then it possesses intelligence. In fact, in ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Mind, 1950), Turing identified several areas as representing the ‘highest manifestations’ of human intelligence. His examples included the study of languages (and translations); games (chess, etc.); and, mathematics and cryptography (including solving riddles). If in these areas the output of a computer cannot be distinguished from that of a human then its level of thinking is equivalent to that of a human, and so we can say that we’re dealing with an intelligent machine. According to Turing, the high-level, intellectual functions of the human brain can be reproduced in a computer without the computer precisely imitating the functioning of the brain. It is noteworthy that only a couple of years after that publication, Walter Gray's ‘turtles’ appeared. These quite primitive robots showed surprisingly ‘intelligent’ behaviour. They could, for example, find their base station by orienting themselves towards light. This ability was born in direct interaction between the world and the simplest programming of the robots, and if Turing had written his paper after this debut, he would certainly have formulated the problem differently. However, it was his paper of 1950 that laid the foundations for the linguistic orientation of generations of artificial intelligence researchers. Turing himself admitted that comprehensive knowledge of the world is impossible without direct interaction with it. However, at that time, the idea of artificially imitating such activities as sports, eating, or sex, seemed unthinkable. Therefore, the British mathematician left those behaviours for an indefinitely distant future, suggesting to instead focus for now on games, languages and cryptography. As a result, Turing initiated a kind of human-machine race that has encouraged the development of systems performing narrow functions, be it a game of chess, translating, or driving a car better than a human being. For his test, Turing was drawing on a Victorian ‘imitation game’. Here the judge must decide who of the players is a woman and who is pretending to be one, only by exchanging notes with the players. Obviously, the judge should not see the participants: they are separated from them by a wall or a screen. Turing transferred this situation to a computer trying to imitate a real person, also remaining hidden from the judge by a ‘wall’. The ‘wall’ deprives us of the physical embodiment of our conversation partner, and reduces ‘his’ responses to a limited set of verbal processes. A Long-Running Debate about Language In a prominent article, ‘Do Large Language Models Understand Us?’ (Medium, 2021), Blaise Aguera y Arcas considered if the successful teaching of deaf-blind-mute children is evidence that verbal communication could be the basis for developing artificial intelligence without needing embodied intelligence. This reminded us of a heated discussion dating back to the end of the Seventies, which one of the authors of this article, D. Dubrovsky, initiated, and directly participated in. Besides the well-known scientific and technical achievements of the USSR, such as a manned space flight and nuclear energy, Soviet propaganda announced that the USSR had developed its own effective teaching technique for deaf-blind-mute kids, in the

so-called ‘Zagorsk experiment’. Here teachers showed not only that the students could form social skills, but that they could have a fulfilled intellectual life. During the experiment, four students of Zagorsk Boarding School For The Deaf-Blind entered the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University and successfully graduated. Two of them even defended dissertations. This could have been a truly significant pedagogical achievement if evidence of falsification hadn’t come out. All four participants were said to have been totally deaf-blind-mute from birth and completely devoid of not only language but conscious thought, and indeed any manifestations of psyche whatsoever. However, as it turned out, they had all lost their sight and hearing abilities fairly late in infancy, already possessing the full power of consciousness and speech. Moreover, two of them retained some hearing ability, and the other two retained some visual ability – enough to independently travel round the city on public transport! Communist ideologists and a number of philosophers – creators of the technique among them – stated that the Zagorsk experiment proved that the Marxist concept of the formation of personality is correct. From that point of view, genetic factors play no role: everything is determined solely by social factors. Drawing on the Marxist maxim that ‘being determines consciousness’, it was assumed that a Marxist teacher could ‘sculpt’ the consciousness and personality of his student literally from scratch. Put simply, the Marxists used the Zagorsk experiment as a proof that it was possible to educate anyone from a ‘clean slate’ state – thus postulating a false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and in particular denying the role of biological and genetic factors in education. According to this Marxist approach, the most important thing for the intellectual development of a person is learning vocabulary and being able to communicate with other people using words. These Marxist conclusions were sharply criticized by a number of philosophers, the central part in this specific debate being played by Dubrovsky. It was shown that biological, genetic factors play a fundamental role in the rehabilitation of the deaf-blind-mute. In the case of the loss of vision and hearing early in life, touch remains the main channel of communication for a child with the outside world, as well as some communication using smell and taste. However, the crucial role here concerns the genetic inclinations of children to the development of language, which also contribute to their overall sensitivity. A vivid example of this is provided by the upbringing and education of Helen Keller, who lost both her sight and hearing at the age of nineteen months, but, as is well-known, reached an exceptionally high level of intellectual development becoming a noted author, activist and lecturer. It is noteworthy that even the deaf-blind-mute who have mastered spoken and written speech and reached a significant level of intellectual development, continue to rely on sign language and the sense of touch for communication and exploring the physical environment. They never stop practicing gestural communication. Therefore, using the supposed example of the deafblind-mute children as programmable ‘blank slates’ can hardly be definitive in AGI research, in which language is considered in more ‘disembodied’ terms. It is also important to point out that knowing how to use a language does not in itself mean having intelligence in the true human sense of the word – of being able to consciously think April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 21

AI & Mind about things. In AI, language is rather a tool for interacting with other things, and with people. By contrast, in explicitly conscious terms, language is a tool for expanding and deepening the understanding of one’s self, other people, of physical, biological, social phenomena, and of all kinds of causal and functional relations in the world around us. For conscious beings, language brings the ability to generalize, to abstract, analyze, and synthesize – that is, the ability to think. The agent ascribed with ‘true’ intelligence must possess all these qualities, as well as self-reflective ability. Moreover, real (conscious) intelligence is also based on the ‘dark matter’ of non-verbal perception and communication, and various subconscious processes. All this must be taken into account when we talk about language, intelligence, and creating AGI. A Modern Discussion about Language & AI In the aforementioned article by Aguera y Arcas, the issues of language, thinking, and having intelligence are considered from the perspective of developing deep learning through neural networks. Neural nets have paved the way for some outstanding results in the field of language processing and generation. Arcas opposes those researchers who believe that intelligence, in the sense of the capacity to understand the content of text or one's own actions, cannot be attributed to deep learning language models. They say that language models are just big statistical machines that map certain outputs (‘answers’) to certain inputs (‘questions’). Even though this obviously helps solve a number of practical problems quite successfully, this does not mean understanding either abstract or concrete concepts as a human would. But it is noteworthy that those criticizing Arcas for holding that language understanding is evidence of consciousness in machines, do not deny the achievements of deep learning language models for acquiring some sort of fundamental intelligence. There are a few arguments put forward against large language models possessing the capacity to understand. For example, if an artificial intelligence is not embodied, has no physical presence, and cannot sense the world in a multimodal way as humans do, then its understanding of language must be insufficient, to say the least. Arcas argues that our linguistic understanding is self-sufficient (‘complete’) because it is based on our innate and acquired knowledge as well as the rich sensory experience we have, and so opens up unlimited possibilities for learning. Through language we also have access to socially-determined perceptions (ie, to culture), richer in comparison to raw sensory experience that is not refined through language. Therefore, language itself is able to compensate for the weakness or lack of certain sensory abilities. It is in this context that Arcas refers to the experience of Helen Keller and the education of deaf-blind-mutes. However, Arcas’s arguments are short of the mark, since the success of Keller's education was based on the use and development of her available sensory abilities. This is precisely what the title of Helen Keller's famous essay illustrates: ‘I Am Blind – Yet I See; I Am Deaf – Yet I Hear’. Yet, although AI can detect the world through, for example, cameras or microphones, the idea that these computers actually experience sensations is much more difficult to justify. Generally speaking, it is hard to agree with Arcas’s statement that language can fill the sensory gap between humans and artificial intelligence, as well as with his 22 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

interpretation of sequence learning in large language models, which is key to understanding conscious intelligence. Arcas’s main points were critically reviewed in Melanie Mitchell's article, ‘What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?’ (Quanta Magazine, 2021). She writes, “The crux of the problem, in my view, is that understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding.” Mitchell also notes that there are a lot of unexplained mechanisms involved in the processing of human speech, as linguistic research confirms. Artificial intelligence could not possibly understand language in the human sort of sense without this kind of ‘infrastructural’ background. Mitchell also says that, contrary to how Arcas interprets the argument concerning educating the deaf-blind, Hellen Keller's essay proves that both sensory experience and embodiment are paramount to consciously understanding language. Historic Requirements for Language & Sentience What’s the connection between the modern discussions about artificial general intelligence and old debates about language and the nature of consciousness? It turns out that transitioning deaf-blind-mute children from simple practical skills to intellectual communication using speech or the Braille alphabet always goes through gestural communication, and gestural communication always remains a part of communication for these people. Gestural or tactile communication is generally a proto-linguistic stage, a pre-verbal communication. For many deaf-blind students from the Zagorsk experiment it remained the main form of communication. This is important for artificial intelligence because it shows how intelligence is a complex biological product. This product is embodied intelligence, reliant on the ‘dark matter’ of non-verbal communication (such as body language). This indicates that a real thinking machine would have to be a product of a multi-dimensional interaction with people and with the outside world, both verbal and non-verbal, occurring both in a virtual and in a real environment. Yet the classic Turing Test, like the Winograd schemas and most other popular tests for artificial intelligence, cover only areas of verbal-virtual interaction. They all lie within the methodological paradigm set by Turing, and are still behind a ‘wall’ of virtuality. To break the wall would mean to enter the field of physical, sensation-filled exploration of the world by the growing artificial intelligence. After all, we understand that many animals have forms of consciousness, including cephalopods such as octopuses, for which thinking and its manifestations turn out to be connected with real living conditions – with the corporeality of living being. Furthermore (as has been emphasized by Dubrovsky), the mind arises in the course of biological evolution only in those organisms that actively move in the environment – that is, in animals, not plants. It seems then that comprehensive knowledge of the surrounding world is impossible without physically interacting with it. Therefore, one condition for creating a general artificial intelligence is the capacity to work in different modalities in different environments. This requires access to the non-verbal and the physical. Examples of artificially intelligent agents that cope with nonverbal tasks are systems that can play computer games; or the virtual TV presenter Elena, created at the Sber Robotics Labora-

ARTIFICIAL AGENTS ROBERT WAGNER 2022 CREATIVE COMMONS 4

AI & Mind

tory. Elena is capably of imitating a real TV presenter, including movements, facial expressions, emotional expressions and other gestures. However, neither of these examples leave the limits of the virtual. Real interaction with the physical world is still an extremely difficult task to build into artificial intelligence. In the case of AGI, this kind of machine must comprehend all four areas of interaction (movements, facial expressions, emotional expressions, and gestures), as well as working with environments. The Advent of Techno-Umwelts Back in the nineteenth century, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll pointed out that different living beings have different spheres of world perception – different umwelts. The umwelt of a butterfly is very different from that of a fish, or from that of a person, for example. The umwelt of a person is of course well-known to each of us. By analogy, we propose to call four areas of interaction possible for machines ‘techno-umwelts’. A ‘techno-umwelt’ would be the domain of perception for a machine: how a machine perceives the world. Many of us have seen visualizations of the technoumwelts of unmanned vehicles using radars and lidars in videos, for example. But the two dimensions of interactions described above – verbal/non-verbal, and virtual/physical – give four possible techno-umwelts, or areas of perception for a machine: 1) Verbal virtual; 2) Non-verbal virtual; 3) Verbal physical; and 4) Non-verbal physical. The versatility that marks general or comprehensive intelligence, that is, AGI, would only be possible when the machine freely operates in all four of these techno-umwelts. Current AI systems are capable of coming to recognize objects of different classes without having been programmed to do so. This is a major achievement, but it has nothing to do with generality, which we will now define as the capability of an agent to work in different umwelts. So in order to achieve generality for an intelligent agent, it will be necessary to implement ‘translators’

between the language of one domain of world perception and the language of another. Only then could artificial intelligence become truly multimodal – meaning, it will be able to solve a wide range of possible tasks and comprehensively communicate with a human. The idea of the combination of techno-umwelts thus gives us the opportunity to propose a new definition of AGI: Artificial general intelligence is the ability of a robot (a machine with sense-think-act capability) to learn and act jointly with a person or autonomously in any techno-umwelt (but potentially better than a specialist in this field), achieving the goals set in all four technoumwelts, while limiting the resources consumed by the robot.

As this multidimensional ability emerges it will forever change the way we interact with technology. After millennia of philosophical reflection, and centuries of scientific and technological progress, for the first time in history, people will encounter truly smart non-human things - devices that may come to have even more complete and accurate knowledge about the world and about us than human being themselves. This situation will call for a new outlook on what a person and a mind are, as well as a redefinition of many other established ideas. The redefinition has already begun. On the one hand, we are beginning to ‘dissolve’ into the technologies and virtual worlds surrounding us, blurring the concept of ‘human’. On the other hand, as computers explore new areas of activity, be it chess or machine translation or whatever else, those areas are no longer exclusive to humans. Perhaps humans are the final frontier that the machine cannot yet overcome. © A. EFIMOV, D. DUBROVSKY AND F. MATVEEV 2023

A. Efimov is Chair of Engineering Cybernetics at the National Science and Technology University MISIS, D. Dubrovsky is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Science and F. Matveev is a student at San Francisco State University. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 23

AI & Mind

Can Machines Be Conscious? Sebastian Sunday Grève and Yu Xiaoyue find an unexpected way in which the answer is ‘yes’. lan Turing thought that it was possible (at least in theory) to make machines that enjoyed strawberries and cream, that British summer favourite. From this we can infer that he also thought it was possible (again, at least in theory) to make machines that were conscious. For you cannot really enjoy strawberries and cream if you are not conscious – or can you? In any case, Turing was very explicit that he thought machines could be conscious. He did not, however, think it likely that such machines were going to be made any time soon. Not because he considered the task particularly difficult, but because he did not think it worth the effort: “Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic,” he wrote in his influential ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. He added that even mentioning this likely inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck his readers as frivolous. He explains:

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“What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man,”

thus reminding us, as he was wont to do, that humans have always found it difficult to accept some other individuals even within their own species as being of equal ability or worth. So he says that the importance of machines likely being unable to enjoy strawberries and cream resides in this being an example of a broader inability on the part of machines to share certain elements of human life. He got that right, at least in principle – just as he accurately predicted the success of artificial neural networks, machine learning in general, and reinforcement learning in particular. However, Turing was wrong to predict – as he explicitly and repeatedly did – that no great effort would be put into making machines with distinctively human but non-intellectual capabilities. Rather, the growing demand for chat bots, virtual assistants, and domestic robots, clearly shows the opposite to be true. If machines can be made to be conscious, we probably will engineer them, sooner or later. Furthermore, since most people think that consciousness in general makes a big difference, not least from an ethical perspective, the question of whether machines can be conscious appears sufficiently important that more people should learn to ask it. The first thing to do in answering the question is to specify what we mean by ‘machine’. When Turing considered whether machines can think, he restricted ‘machines’ to mean digital computers – the same type of machine as the vast majority of our modern-day computing devices, from smartphones to supercomputers. At the time he was writing, around 1950, he had just helped to make such a machine a reality. Incidentally, he 24 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

also provided the requisite mathematical groundwork for computers, in the form of what is now known as the Universal Turing Machine. So Turing still had a good deal of explaining to do, given the novelty of computers at the time. Today, most people are at least intuitively familiar with the basic powers of computing machinery, so we can save ourselves a detailed theoretical account. In fact, we need not restrict what we mean by ‘machine’ to digital computers. As will be seen, the particular way of asking whether machines can be conscious that we present here only requires us to stipulate that the relevant engineering is not primarily of a biological nature. By far the trickier part of asking whether machines can be conscious is to determine what one should take the word ‘conscious’ to mean. To be sure, humans are intimately familiar with consciousness, insofar as an individual’s consciousness just is their subjective experience. On this common meaning of the term, consciousness is that special quality of what it is like to be in a particular mental state at a particular time. It is this same special quality that many people are inclined to think must be missing in even the most sophisticated robots. But the main difficulty in asking ‘Can machines be conscious?’ is that, despite our natural familiarity with consciousness, we are still ignorant of its fundamental nature. There is no widely agreed-upon theory of what consciousness is, and how we can tell when it is present. We certainly do not know how to build it from the ground up. The trick, as we shall see, is to circumvent this ignorance and make use of our basic familiarity instead. Man Made Can we think of any promising way to engineer a conscious thing? Of course, there is procreation; but this would fall foul of our condition that the method of engineering not be of a primarily biological nature. The same holds for regenerative methods such as neural stem cell therapy and tissue nano-transfection, which turns skin cells into functional nerve cells. Both procreation and regeneration can be used to engineer conscious things, in particular humans, either directly or indirectly (by restoring relevant functions). However, due to the primarily biological nature of the methods employed, we will naturally consider the outcome to be not conscious machines, but humans. Consider now a similar but different method. Recent advances in biological engineering have achieved functional restoration of part of the human nervous system, in the form of prosthetic limbs that are connected with the brain in both directions, thus enabling fine motor control and proprioception (intuitive knowledge of limb position), as well as reduced phantom limb perception. The technology is still in its early stages, but it already provides empirical proof of the idea that parts of the human nervous system can be restored using semiconductor materials such as silicon. It seems reasonable to expect that this and related ongo-

PROSTHETIC_LIMB US NAVY 2012 PUBLIC DOMAIN

AI & Mind

ing research on the human–machine neural interface will yield further advances in the future, so that more parts of the nervous system can be restored or replaced, also using materials such as silicon. In the future, a quadruple amputee might be able to regain full arm and leg functionality, including haptic perception, proprioception, thermoception, and so forth. Now suppose the following three things (which should seem fairly commonsensical) are true. First, the human nervous system, including the brain and the spinal cord, is constitutive of human consciousness. This means that for anything happening in the human mind there is nervous system activity underpinning it. Second, an individual’s conscious states normally include limb-based sensory experience, because the nervous system extends into the limbs. Third, some amputees’ conscious states include prosthetic limb-based sensory experience, because relevant parts of the nervous system have been artificially restored, as in the above example. It follows from this that such a prosthetic limb is itself partly constitutive of the individual’s consciousness, because their nervous system extends into their prosthetic limb. Since the relevant method of engineering a prosthetic limb is not of a primarily biological nature, we can conclude that a machine is partly constitutive of their consciousness. However, it does not follow from this that machines can be conscious. For it is of course possible that some human part is ultimately necessary. This may seem particularly plausible given the fact that the integration of machine parts into the nervous system considered thus far merely affects the peripheral, not the central, nervous system, i.e. not the spinal cord or brain. However, it is not obvious what relevant difference it makes whether central or not-so-central parts are replaced. To be sure, there are many important differences between the central and peripheral systems; a foot is not a brain. Yet at a certain level

of abstraction, central and peripheral parts of the nervous system are indeed the same kind of thing (namely, nerve activity), and so the theoretical possibility of replacing any given part of the nervous system becomes difficult to deny. To reiterate, following recent advances in biological engineering, it seems reasonable to expect that future research on the human–machine neural interface, as well as on physical neural networks, memory resistors, and memristive systems, for example, will enable the restoration or replacement of more and more parts of the human nervous system using materials such as silicon. Now imagine the following scenario: A hundred years from now, after a century of steady technological progress, Thesea, while still young, begins to suffer from a degenerative disease of the nervous system. Thesea is lucky, though, insofar as implant surgery is available to her whenever she needs it. She is lucky too that the intervals between surgeries are long enough that new parts of her nervous system can always be properly integrated – thanks to various kinds of therapy, as well as her system’s continued neuroplasticity – before another part needs to be replaced. How much of Thesea’s nervous system would need to be replaced by implants in order for her to be considered a machine rather than a human? Different people will, inevitably, give different answers. Some may consider it necessary that all of Thesea’s nervous system, including her brain and spinal cord, or even her whole body, be replaced before we call her a machine. Either way, the transformative principle remains the same, so that anyone who accepts recent advances in prosthetics as proof that parts of the human nervous system can be restored using a material such as silicon should, on this basis, be able to agree that Thesea could eventually become a machine. Moreover, they will be able to accept that Thesea will eventually become a machine that is conscious just like humans are (or, at any rate, just like Thesea used to be). Some will no doubt want to object to the supposed psychological continuity throughout Thesea’s gradual transformation. This kind of objection may take aim at either the supposed continuity of Thesea’s consciousness, or, less directly, the continuity of her personal identity (since lack of personal identity would also make doubtful the supposed persistence of consciousness). To prove the validity of their qualms, such an objector would have to explain where, in their opinion, things would likely go wrong. Presumably they believe that there is a point at which the process of transformation will become significantly more involved, and it may be finally impossible to entirely replace a biological brain with a synthetic one. It would of course be of great scientific interest to discover any such point of ‘no further progress’ along the proposed transplant trajectory. But until we get there, one will at least be reasonably justified in believing that, given enough time, and taking the smallest steps possible, the human nervous system can be replaced by parts of a different material, such that a human may be slowly turned into a machine whilst still retaining consciousness. © SEBASTIAN SUNDAY GRÈVE AND YU XIAOYUE 2023

Sebastian Sunday Grève (Chinese Institute of Foreign Philosophy and Peking University) and Yu Xiaoyue (Peking University) are philosophers based in Beijing, where they are working on the cognitive foundations of human–machine relations, in close collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 25

Hap & Happiness Stephen Anderson meditates on misfortune and meaning. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” – The US Declaration of Independence, 1776.

h, happiness… Where is she to be found? Doesn’t it almost seem, these days, as if the more we have the less happy we are? We are richer, smarter, have more leisure time and more elaborate entertainments than in any period in history on any place on Earth. And though not yet universal, such advantages are more widely distributed than ever before. We’re all doing better… and feeling worse, it seems. Consider when you last went unclothed, unhoused, or without a meal; or how easily you secured medical, dental or psychological services when last you needed them. Put your hand in your pocket, and chances are you find a device capable of communicating anywhere around the world, providing innumerable entertainments and distractions at a moment’s notice, or securing vast quantities of consumer goods to fulfill any desire. And yet, are we modern people actually happier than our forebears of previous ages? It would seem not. That we are materially better off, circumstantially more blessed, there can be no doubt: but if anything, we are more anxious, more unsatisfied, and more emotionally at-sea than we ever were, are we not? We’re promised the right to pursue happiness. And yet we might well wonder what sort of perverted trick is this, that the opportunity for bliss is dangled before our eyes, then somehow snatched away by our circumstances! What a betrayal. Somebody needs to answer for that, surely. But before we declare that the universe is against us and start grinding our teeth at men or at God, perhaps we should take a more thoughtful look at our expectations.

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Happiness Stolen By Fate In our current age, ‘happiness’ is frequently thought of merely as an emotion – a feeling of pleasure resulting from the pleasant alignment of circumstances; and rather than ‘pursuing’ happiness, we are waiting upon it to be delivered like an Amazon package to our front doors. This is common enough, and we have an excuse for it. ‘Hap’ is an old word meaning ‘chance’ or ‘circumstance’. To have something hap-pen to you is to be the passive experiencer of some external stimulus; and how can a passive experiencer be in any way responsible for the quality of the incoming stimuli? He or she has no control over that. Thus, a person whom fortune favours turns out to be hap-py, we suppose. The circumstances produce the feeling. But if happiness awaits the arrival of pleasing circumstances, the sad truth is that most of us are doomed mostly to misery, for there are few sets of circumstances so utterly felicitous that we find ourselves swept up in unimpeded joy, even for a few 26 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

minutes. Life, even at its best, is often arduous and unpleasant, punctuated only occasionally by moments of delight. How then can any of us be truly happy? Thomas Hardy, the great poet and novelist, meditated thusly in his poem appropriately titled ‘Hap’ (1898). In it he speaks of his circumstances – how ‘crass casuality’ interferes with him, how ‘joy lies slain’ and ‘‘unblooms the best hope ever sown.’’ He wants to blame the Almighty, he says, but finds he cannot. Mere ‘Hap’ – chance personified as the Fates of Greek mythology – not the Christian God, is really responsible for what happens to him, he says. He could have been happy, he feels, but he has not been. He is not. As he looks on his life, it seems a tragic waste, with opportunities for joy ripped from his grasping fingers, not by some malevolent God, but by mere chance, which might just as easily been other than it was. This would be less tragic if Hardy could console himself that it meant something; but even meaning is beyond his imagining. His pain serves nothing, and his pleasure simply drifts away from him on the uncaring tides of time. In this, he cannot even find a reason to see himself as heroic. It’s all just sad. If happiness is what Hardy thinks it is, or what so many of us think it is today, it’s no wonder that we become bitter. We believe we must have some opportunity for joy, promised us by the sheer fact that we are living, and presented before us in all the fleeting moments of delight we experience as living beings; but this seeming opportunity is held at distance from us by circumstance. We could have been born rich, or tall, or beautiful, or admired; but we were born as we were, and fate has doled us out much less than we might have hoped, and life has proved more often arduous than pleasant. We feel cheated. And always we wonder, ‘‘Where is happiness to be found?’’ The Pursuit of… What? Part of the problem, though, is surely in the popular conception of happiness. For most of us, it seems it is just what I indicated above: an emotion, an experience, a feeling – and worse, a feeling that comes primarily in response to situations beyond our control. However, even the mention of ‘happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence should, if we think about it, alert us to a certain incoherence in that conception. For if happiness is a feeling, then how can it be promised us as a right? “Ah,” you say, “but what’s promised is not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness.” That’s a good rejoinder, until we recognise that it leaves us no better off. For it suggests we now have a right to chase circumstances that will produce the feeling of happiness for us. But isn’t that what we have all been doing already? And how’s that been working out for us? Besides, it leaves a fundamental problem unanswered: which circumstances must we pursue in order to arrive at happiness? We know no more now than we did before. But let us entertain the thought for a moment that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were not actually modern

people – at least, not modern in our way, or to our degree. Today, people who study ethics might suppose that ethics has always been as diverse and conflicted as the field is now. But as Peter Adamson so appropriately noted in this very magazine, “What students may not be told is that for quite a long time all ethical theory in the European tradition was eudaimonist. It was the only game in town” (PN 147). In other words, the founding fathers of the American Revolution were mostly virtue ethicists in their thinking. This means that when they penned the term ‘happiness’ into the founding document, they were writing with a virtue-ethical set of suppositions, following in the tradition of Aristotle. As such, they were channelling a rather different conception of happiness than that with which we are familiar. How was it different? Well, to find that out we might look back at Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (c.349 BC), which begins with an appeal to the Greek statesman Solon’s dictum, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’ (p.10). As Aristotle goes on to explain, this does not imply that Solon was particularly fond of corpses. Nor does it indicate a cynicism about life so complete that the grave is to be preferred to life. Not at all. Rather, Solon’s axiom is a hopeful one. His idea is that it is not wise to pass judgment on the value of a person’s life based on a single incident, or even a set of incidents. These may be good or bad, happy or sad, in their own right; but they provide us with no secure ground for assessing what the overall life (of which they are but mere parts) is really like. To pass proper judgment on a person’s life, we really need to know the entire narrative, from beginning to end. We can’t say whether or not his or her life was genuinely good or bad, genuinely valuable or worthless, or even delightful or awful, unless we know the totality. ‘Lives’ are whole things, complete stories, not just collections of incidental features or fleet-

“Call no man happy until

HAMLET AND HORATIO BY EUGENE DELACROIX 1839

he is dead, Horatio.”

ing circumstances; not even of particular good or bad decisions taken at one time or another. So to say you know what a life was worth, you must know it all. Therefore it must be done, complete, so that you know there are no new chapters to be added. Then, and only then, are we in a position to know what kind of life it really was, says Solon: happy or sad, or something else. Mistaking Aristotle’s intention here is easy for us, given our own associations with the word ‘happy.’ But the problem is really in our translation, not in the original. As Adamson has already alerted us, the word we translate as ‘happy’ in Solon’s epithet is not at all the concept we now associate with it. Rather, the Greek word, eudaimonia (literally, ‘good spirited’), far from being a word of mere emotion, translates more accurately as ‘blessed’. ‘Blessed’ is not a word we moderns use much or understand well today. Originally, it alluded to the gods: to be ‘blessed’ was to be ‘favoured of the gods’, or ‘approved by the gods’. As such, it was not merely to be advantaged by mere circumstance, far less about gaining a feeling of temporary well-being or delight. Ancient Greek cosmology was different from ours; they conceived of fortuitous happenings as being tied to the actual intervention of divine beings, and thus indicative of divine approbation. Things the gods approve would be more moral, more heroic, more ultimately important than those conceived by human beings in their mundane rounds. And living in such a way would put one ‘in good standing with one’s tutelary deity’ – which is the full, idiomatic implication of eudaimonia. Note this, though: such a conception is inseparable from a belief that human beings are not here by chance, not living for no reason, and not created without an end in view. Here the final evaluation of the ‘blessedness’ or ‘happiness’ of somebody’s life not only awaits the completion of all the data potentially available to us to judge, but had to await the time when gods might assess the matter, too. So it would only be at the end of a total pattern or course of life that ‘happiness’ would be discernable to anyone, divine or human. Discerning eudaimonia would be retrospective. However, after death, if one were remembered, celebrated, and emulated – as the ancient Greeks did with their heroes – then one could thereby be known as having been ‘blessed.’ One had attained that for which one had been created, and had fulfilled one’s destiny. Whether or not one had enjoyed it on the way wasn’t the point. Fulfilling Your Purpose The concept of eudaimonia is pregnant with further implications, especially on Aristotle’s analysis of it. A potentially blessed person must first exhibit excellence (arête) by practicing moral discernment or wisdom in relation to practical action (phronesis). Also, in order to attain true eudaimonia, her whole life pattern, when laid out, must disclose that she has reached the highest possible state of rightful functioning. For Aristotle, each person has a specific potentiality built into the very constitution of their particular being. This implies that no person has an accidental origin, or a haphazard design. Instead, each individual is created with what Aristotle called a telos – a purpose, final end or outcome, somehow coded into the design. Someone who lives consistently with arête is fulfilling her design, attaining all she was created to be, achieving her telos… Then, and only then, can we speak of her having attained true blessedness, true happiness. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 27

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Once we realize this, we can make perfect sense of Solon’s aphorism. To be happy in Solon’s sense is not merely to experience a feeling, but to be confident that the life one has lived has, in total, attained to excellence pleasing to the gods and admirable to any virtuous onlooker. One’s life has, as we say, ‘amounted to something’; one has ‘lived up to one’s promise’ and so ‘attained greatness’. What’s really shocking to us today is that such blessedness can be attained in the complete absence of pleasant circumstances. We might use Shakespeare’s Hamlet to illustrate this. Though beset by personal melancholy, domestic disaster, and political decay, Hamlet would surely qualify for Aristotle’s approval, since with his last act he achieves triumph for his honour, justice for his house, and tranquility for his kingdom, by avenging his father’s murder, though he dies savagely in the process. He has come up to being a true prince, and has fulfilled his known destiny – to ‘set right’ the ‘out of joint times’ in Denmark (Hamlet, I:V:210-211). Such a one is truly blessed and approved by the gods. In death, even his noble enemies praise him (V:II:399-400). His beloved companion Horatio concludes, ‘‘Goodnight, sweet prince / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’’ (V:II:302-303). Hamlet’s is not a set of circumstances most would envy. But his kind of epitaph is one Aristotle thinks we should all crave, and should strive for as we shape our moral decisions. The ultimate goal of virtue is to produce a pattern of life that unimpeded vision cannot help but recognize as great. Written into this, as well, is some conception of afterlife – in Greek culture, perhaps immortality in legend; or in Christian thought, eternal bliss. Living by virtue produces a life that is complete and worthy of praise. Living such a life is possible in circumstances, provided that the experiencer responds to them with courage and integrity. The circumstances themselves say nothing of the possibility of blessedness; on their own, they cannot inhibit it in any way, for it depends not on hap (which mayhap in any form), but on the principled commitment of the person to considerations such as duty, decency, and destiny. Anyone may be a hero: their response, not the circumstances themselves, determines it. In such a sense, then, anybody may be ‘happy’ if he or she so chooses – provided their character ultimately proves adequate to the specific challenge of his or her life. The gods may then look with retrospective approval at one’s course, strewn though it be with bitterness and pain. And even in life, one may find it a consolation that one has ‘done well’, so long as one has lived by virtuous principles with noble patience. All of that continuously remains within the control of the individual. We make our own choices, not of our circumstances, but of our responses to them. Self-Sabotage By Bad Thinking Needless to say, this is not an understanding of happiness common in our (post-)modern world. For a start, many no longer think of a God or gods as having anything to do with the conditions of our life. We are, we think, late apes of a sort, thrown into this scene by chance, refined by time and material laws, and ending up wherever we are by forces utterly indifferent to our welfare. Meanwhile, suffering can never be genuinely ‘heroic’, or even ‘tragic’ in the literary sense of that word (as the result of a potentially heroic act that ends badly). Suffering

is instead, just an unfortunate byproduct of living in an entropic universe. It has no meaning, no larger context or grand narrative that will allow us to speak of it having a ‘purpose’. It happens. That’s all. And we, being mere playthings of hap, how can we ever find happiness? So we cannot. Instead we pile up our possessions, extend our abilities, expand our options, and never find it not enough to produce that abiding feeling of pleasure we were expecting. Having no faith that suffering here can mean anything there, we see nothing but loss in our struggles against our lot in life. Like Hardy, we wanted bliss, and got travails. And we always feel we deserve better than to die and turn to dust at the end of our short, sad road of life. But perhaps (there is that word again) we should consider that it is our own expectation, not the Supreme Creator or some polytheistic version thereof, that has let us down. Specifically, it is the chance-driven, hap-hazard world we have framed for ourselves, that has made emotional happiness so elusive. If this worldview is a necessary concession to being realistic, as materialists and their ilk would have us believe, it is no less lamentable for that. It’s cold comfort indeed to think we have no possibility of higher blessedness than to suffer intermittently, sate an indifferent cosmos with our blood, and then to feed the worms well. The Aristotelian account of eudaimonia offers us much more room to breathe. Perhaps we can begin to believe ourselves more than dying dust if we can bring ourselves to believe in a story bigger than our own. But such a story will also have to be greater than our contingent social ethos (that is, more than just some fashionable cause); and it will have to be one we can believe wholeheartedly, without lingering cynicism. We would need to believe we have a telos again – an objective purpose – and that the often painful struggle to achieve it is worthwhile, with or without the immediate gratification of present pleasures. Can we still have that? Perhaps we might be better to ask, ‘Can we really live without purpose?’ Can human beings thrive and be fulfilled in the absence of a transcendent order capable of giving an objective foundation to meaning, morals, purpose, and hope? It seems we’re not doing very well at present without it; and the happiness we seek without it seems ever more elusive all the time. Our brief fits of distraction, delirious entertainment, temporary achievement, or chemically-induced pleasure, are apparently nowhere near adequate to offset our sufferings; and an abrupt change of circumstances for the worst is enough to vaporize them all. Aristotle reminds us that happiness always requires a larger context. In this, he echoes a traditional Christian distinction between ‘happiness’ and ‘joy’ – the latter being an enduring state of well-being, not dependent on circumstance for its continuation, but rather on the sense of having submitted one’s life-plan to eternal values (and in the theistic case, having put oneself into a right relationship with God). It may be that it is the lack of any such larger context that leaves so many of us today, like Jay Gatsby in the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), yearning for an ‘orgiastic’ and ‘elusive’ kind of happiness that ‘‘year by year recedes before us.’’ © DR STEPHEN L. ANDERSON 2023

Stephen Anderson is a retired philosophy teacher in London, Ontario. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 29

Hannah Arendt On the Spectre of Nuclear War Maurits de Jongh finds our contemporary situation reflected in earlier states. n 27th February 2022, three days after the invasion of Ukraine began, Vladimir Putin ordered his generals to put Russia’s nuclear deterrent force on high alert. Seventy-seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Putin’s words brought the spectre of nuclear war back onto the world stage. During the first months of the war, Western leaders kept their cool, not responding to his nuclear rhetoric, although the then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, did remind the Russians on the first day of the invasion that NATO is also a nuclear alliance. Otherwise, Putin’s nuclear threats were met in the West with what Emmanuel Macron called ‘strategic ambiguity’. But the tide is changing. As Russia insists its nuclear threats are not a bluff, the White House has repeatedly warned about the catastrophic consequences that would follow nuclear escalation by the Kremlin. Yet Western leaders also continue to insist on the utmost caution in dealing with Putin. Numerous Eastern European leaders object that for the Russians caution is often perceived as weakness: that Putin might take it as a license to resort to non-conventional weapons – all the more so since his intended Blitzkrieg has turned into a farce. Indeed, as the Ukrainian army gained the upper hand, Putin’s desperation became increasingly expressed by outright nuclear blackmail. And so Western leaders keep wobbling on a tightrope between caution and decisiveness, under which the abyss of reckless escalation lurks. This balancing act is by no means eased by Putin’s erratic attitude. Putin is said to no longer behave like a rationally calculating strategist, but like a paranoid, isolated leader who harbors grotesque fantasies of a restored Russian Empire. The more Putin radicalizes, the more the world worries that he may not keep his finger off the button. Yet as long as Putin fears death – and thus also the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war – we have some assurance of nuclear safety. Analyses of the extent to which nuclear violence is a real threat in today’s world tend to focus on the capriciousness of one man – be it Putin, or ‘rocket man’ Kim Jong-un. A fixation on these men also obstructs a more fundamental reflection on the existential danger of nuclear war. What does the presence of nuclear weapons say about our world, for instance? What implications does it have for world politics? Hannah Arendt’s (1906-75) political philosophy can help us make sense of the spectre of nuclear destruction at a time when the public seems curiously lethargic about the issue. Three of her insights stand out.

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Totalitarianism & The Bomb Her first insight is that nuclear violence, alongside totalitarian domination, are defining events of the modern world. 30 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

Politics is essentially about events. A journalist once asked Harold Macmillan when he was British Prime Minister what was the greatest challenge to a statesman. He replied: “Events, dear boy, events.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt depicts Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarianisms, together with the Bomb, as the central events that left their mark on the contemporary world. In both events the hubris of the modern age reaches a climax, and humanity finds itself more alienated than ever before. Let’s first take a look at totalitarianism. Whereas murderous oppression by tyranny is as old as recorded history, the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin were without precedent. The tyrant, as we know since Aristotle’s analysis, exercises arbitrary power and wanton violence to further his private interests. A tyrant’s actions are characterized by arbitrary lawlessness, his thinking by indifference to the common good. The totalitarian leader, by contrast, has the highest regard for the law: yet in a totalitarian system, the law does not constitute a stabilizer of human relations, as it does in liberal democratic states. Instead, the ‘law’ is understood as some superhuman and transhistorical force, such as racial superiority or class struggle, which can be used to justify the regime’s actions. The vocation of the totalitarian leader is to let this law unfold in the present. Equally sharp is his notion of the common good – a utopia in which the people are purged of whatever the law says pollutes it: inferior races, parasitic capitalists, or other notions of foreignness and otherness. It is precisely the supposed inevitability of the law that strengthens the totalitarian leader in his conviction that ‘everything is possible and everything is permitted’, as Arendt puts it. This conviction grounds his efforts, not so much to change human nature, as to rob it of its humanity, freedom, and dignity. Whereas the tyrant employs terror and propaganda opportunistically to secure his private interests, the totalitarian leader structurally employs such tactics to propel the law of empire; not only by isolating people, but also by compressing them into an indivisible mass. To separate the wheat of the ‘real’ people from its chaff, policies of persecution create streams of refugees and exiles. The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian systems reduce people to ‘specimens of the human species’, preceding the destruction of these ‘superfluous human beings’. In a totalitarian system, rather than imposing limits on what is possible and permissible, the law and the ‘common good’ dictate endless expansion of the state. The Russian mass killings in Bucha and Kramatorsk; the ruthless bombings from Kharkov to Mariupol; Putin’s nuclear threats: there seems little doubt that this man knows no limits. Putin’s brutality thus provides ample support for Arendt’s hypothesis: “the totalitarian conviction that everything is possible has so far proved only that everything can be destroyed.” The notion that everything is possible and permitted is not just a driving force of past totalitarianisms, it is also a central

Hannah Arendt by Darren McAndrew

feature of the modern age. And although courage and ingenuity have inspired unprecedented scientific and technological achievements, the pride of tyrants can turn nearly every triumph Pyrrhic. Nuclear science and technology exemplify this lurking downside. While nuclear power as an inexhaustible source of energy might make us believe that everything is possible, nuclear weapons and waste are constant reminders that everything can be destroyed. Arendt argues that we pretend to stand on Archimedes’ point, from which we subject the earth to our designs (Archimedes once claimed that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could move the earth). This pretence disregards our earthly embeddedness – the vulnerability of life’s processes, and the fragility of human civilisation. It would be a stretch to claim that science as such disregards limits. The opposite seems true. After all, experimental science can only test hypotheses, and thus make progress, in a setting that is strictly delimited from the wider environment. As Arendt’s contemporary (and ex-husband) Günther Anders emphasized, however, this delimitation is alien to nuclear science. The impact of nuclear accidents or explosions is potentially so widespread that the nuclear laboratory is no longer dis-

tinguishable from Planet Earth as a whole. The essential character of nuclear weapons, therefore, lies in their ability to destroy the entire Earth – in Anders’ words, Ihre Allmacht ist ihr Defekt: ‘‘their omnipotence is their defect.” The common denominator of the Bomb and totalitarianism lies precisely in this modern hubris; in driving transgressions that risk humanity’s ultimate self-defeat. Power & Violence As Opposites The question arises of whether threatening nuclear warfare indeed makes one omnipotent. In dealing with this question, Arendt’s second insight seems right: instead of manifesting power, nuclear weapons are much more likely to undermine it. With this insight Arendt challenges the common reduction of power to violence – the notion that power, as Mao Zedong claimed, grows from the barrel of a gun; or as Clausewitz put it, that war is essentially the continuation of politics by other means. The understanding of power behind such notions is that my exercise of power consists of imposing my will on others. The American political scientist Robert Dahl’s definition is telling: “A has power over B,” he writes, “to the extent that he can make B do someApril/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 31

thing that B would not otherwise do” (Behavioral Science, 1957). The usual way we think about power thus emphasizes power over. Viewed this way, it makes perfect sense that violence, the ultimate means of me imposing my will on others, is seen as a manifestation of power. And to the extent that nuclear violence is the most violent form of violence, it is easy to conclude that it must also be the most powerful manifestation of power. Our thinking about both domestic politics and international relations is saturated with this understanding of power. According to Arendt, it reinforces our image of the state as a hierarchical relationship of command and obedience – of power over – sanctioned by the threat of violence; rather than as an association of free and equal citizens in which shared power – power with – is checked by law. In line with this picture, world politics is presented as power struggles between states pursuing their self-interest – security and prosperity – in an international state of nature. World politics is nothing but an anarchic race for raw power over. Against this backdrop, we can understand the attempt by socalled ‘neorealists’ to reconcile nuclear proliferation with the classical doctrine of ‘balance of power’. The quest for a balance of power traditionally consists of preventing an unbalanced concentration of power in the hands of one state or alliance of states. Since any state with nuclear weapons by definition possesses an unbalanced concentration of power over those which don’t, this reconciliation seems doomed to fail. Nuclear powers are, after all, capable of the complete destruction of countries, if not global civilisation as a whole. Neorealists, however, propose nuclear deterrence as the perfect policy instrument to achieve balance of power. Indeed, as long as nuclear weapons exist, you better make sure you qualify as a nuclear power. The most advanced and extensive nuclear arsenal serves as an insurance policy against the dominating power of other states. Thus neorealists depict the nuclear spectre not as an existential global threat, but rather as a global public good. ‘Deterrence works’, they say. It is difficult to quarrel with this perverse optimism – with the notion that the threat of mutual assured destruction guarantees national and even global security and peace. For example, we might wonder whether Putin would have left Ukraine at peace if the country had not handed over its nuclear weapons after the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Moreover, critics of the proposition that nuclear deterrence is effective can only prove their skepticism with hindsight, once nuclear threats have started to turn into nuclear destruction. The problem is that we cannot be sure if anyone will still be alive to settle the question. It is equally difficult to dispute that the neorealist’s optimism about nuclear deterrence rests on equating power with violence, and thus on understanding power as power over. Arendt argues that a more accurate understanding of political power must instead emphasize the collective dimension of power – power with. Power, she says, is never the exclusive prerogative of one person. Of course we can say in a metaphorical sense that a political leader is ‘in power’, but the basis of this lies in the legitimation of that power by the public. So power is in both the first and last analysis shared: it rests on the ability of people to organize for a common purpose. Public support underpins power, while violence leans on instruments – weaponry – which in principle can be deployed without political support. As Arendt put it in On Violence (1970), “The 32 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.” The exercise of political power is a form of what Habermas called ‘communicative action’: it arises out of the public exchange of arguments and concerted action. Its locus is therefore in what German philosopher Rainer Forst calls the space of reasons. Power gains legitimacy when leaders provide reasons that are acceptable to the public and that respect legal boundaries. Understood in this way, violence is anything but a manifestation of power. It is usually a sign of political weakness. When you resort to tactics such as blackmail, threats, or physical violence to get your way, these are rightly seen as acts of desperation, for only when we fail to convince others of our will does the temptation arise to impose it on them by force. This does not mean that the legitimate exercise of power – which is always power with – categorically excludes the use of violence. Nor does it mean that we should deny the state a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Nor that we should question the duty of a government to defend its citizens against foreign aggression. It does mean, however, that violence can never be a substitute for public support as the basis of power, and that the political use of violence must stand tests of accountability and legality. Violence can only be publicly justified when it is seen as a proportionate means to achieve a common goal. Where power is thus communicative, violence has a strictly instrumental character: it is a means to a given end. There is little reason to break eggs unless this would enable us to make an omelette, to build on one of Arendt’s favorite metaphors. However, she underscores how violence as a means to an end always risks overshooting its goal. This risk only increases as the instruments of violence become capable of greater destruction. Thus the political goals of security and freedom are in constant danger of being overwhelmed by violence. With the threat of nuclear war, the tension inherent in political violence reaches an absolute climax. Indeed, political goals such as freedom and peace, and the power of citizens joining hands to achieve them, are meaningless if the world falls to nuclear pieces. The Bomb, then, blows up the whole category of means and ends – the category upon which the justification of violence rests. By seeing power as power with, we can see sharply how violence does not so much manifest as undermine power. “Violence can always destroy power”, writes Arendt: “Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power.” This conclusion that communicative power can always lose out to violence is terrifying. Yet Arendt also helps us to appreciate how much the Ukrainian authorities, President Zelensky in particular, have gained power over the past year. Zelensky garners public support and builds communicative trust among Ukrainians and world leaders alike. The waning power of the Kremlin, and of Putin in particular, stands in stark contrast to this. Putin’s power seems to decline with each increase in both his domestic repression and his foreign aggression. The objection that Putin has Russian public opinion on his side, and that his power therefore remains intact, is hardly convincing. Public support contrived through a propaganda machine is no more solid as a foundation of power than quicksand.

courage. According to Arendt, at basis courage comes from the assurance we need to leave our mark on the world. By showing courage – by sacrificing ourselves for the freedom of our countries, for the preservation of the world, or for the dignity of all life – we obtain, as it were, a second life. Our contributions live on in the small and great stories that people tell each other and pass on. Courage, then, does not lie in the expectation of eternal life, but consists instead of aspiring to what Arendt calls a ‘worldly immortality’. Courage rests on the conviction “that posterity will understand, remember, and respect the individual mortal’s sacrifice. Man can be courageous only as long as he knows that he is survived by those who are like him, that he fulfills a role in something more permanent than himself, ‘the enduring chronicle of mankind,’ as Faulkner once put it’.” So understood, the threat of nuclear war threatens an irreparable break in human courage. For how can we still be courageous when the survival of humanity as a whole can no longer be taken for granted; when there would be no world to leave behind, and no posterity to follow us? Arendt is adamant that with the risk of nuclear annihilation, the conventional meaning and value of courage is lost. The risk of climate catastrophe also undermines the conventional understanding. But besides this twofold threat stands another disturbing fact. Medical technologists already speak of old age, and thus of mortality, as a disease. They are more than optimistic about the future reversibility of the ageing process. Thus, today’s courageous humans cannot rest assured that humanity as a whole is immortal; but neither do we know whether the individual will in fact remain mortal. Both scenarios unsettle the conditions of courage. From the insight that courage loses its conventional meaning in times of nuclear weapons and other forms of radical rupture, it does not follow, however, that ‘courage’ has become meaningless. Arendt protests against resignation and lethargy in response to the threat of destruction. Instead of falling for defeatism and nihilism, Arendt encourages future generations to give political courage new meaning: “By putting in jeopardy the survival of mankind and not only individual life or at the most that of a whole people,” Arendt concludes, “modern warfare is about to transform the individual mortal man into a conscious member of the human race, of whose immortality he needs to be sure in order to be courageous at all and for whose survival he must care more than anything else.’’ If our developed capacity for self-destruction means that the stakes could not be higher, we can also claim that political courage is more meaningful and acute than ever before. Just as Extinction Rebellion and other movements seek to subdue the spectre of climate disaster, so too do we need to rein in the spectres of nuclear destruction and totalitarian terror. It is up to all of us, including our political leaders, to summon the courage which that requires. © MAURITS DE JONGH 2023

Maurits de Jongh is an assistant professor in the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. He specializes in political philosophy and the history of economic thought, and is currently working on a book entitled The Primacy of Public Goods. •The original Dutch version of this essay was published in July 2022 as a series of posts on the public philosophy blog Bij Nader Inzien

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 33

BACKGROUND IMAGE IS THE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION AT CASTLE BRAVO IN 1954

Courage: Past & Future On the first day of the invasion, as Russian armoured columns rolled towards Kyiv, the Americans apparently offered to evacuate President Zelensky and he replied “I need ammunition, not a ride.” From the determined armed resistance of civilians-turned-soldiers, to the non-violent protest of the inhabitants of Kherson in the face of the Russian occupiers, that the Ukrainians display courage is beyond doubt. But we hardly seem to realize how the spectre of nuclear escalation lurking in the background calls into question the virtue of courage itself. This is the third insight Arendt offers us. The danger of nuclear weapons, she argues, unsettles the very meaning of courage as a disposition to take care of the world. All the heartfelt words of praise from the West may be accompanied by a certain embarrassment. We may wonder what value Ukrainians place on them, when Putin’s provocations went on virtually with impunity for years; when financial and legal service providers in the West so diligently obliged Russian oligarchs; when half-hearted promises of NATO or EU membership were made; when the sufficiency of Western military support for Ukraine remains in question; and when the short-sighted energy dependence of Europeans on Russian fossil fuels financed the Kremlin’s war preparations. Considerations like these are not the only reason for our discomfort. This discomfort touches on a deeper disorientation afflicting the rich, free countries of the West. Francis Fukuyama already pointed it out thirty years ago, when he claimed we were reaching the end of history with the spread of liberal democracy and the capitalist market economy: he wrote that ‘the last man’ would be tormented by an unbearable sense of emptiness and boredom. We hardly find salvation in our conspicuous consumption and our obsession with social climbing. We continually fall short in our solidarity with one another, let alone with the rest of the world. Precisely because we find it so difficult to find meaning and orientation, it was tempting to experience the courage of Zelensky and his people as a triumph which, for a fleeting moment, freed us from the liberal void we inhabit – our alienated world, in which ‘heroism’ is a term reserved for top athletes and pop stars, but in which we cannot succeed in embracing our own individuality. Our waning attention for the war as the months pass shows just how ephemeral our ecstasy is. Since ongoing Russian terror is the price Ukrainians pay for their courage, it is outright perverse for us to use it in the satisfaction of our own psychological needs. Arendt insists that courage takes no interest in our psychological states. Courage instead finds meaning in care for the world. Indeed, courage requires self-sacrifice for the sake of the earth, and for humanity as a whole. Arendt insists that awareness of the fact that “man is not immortal, that he sacrifices a life that one day will be taken from him in any case” is a prerequisite for courage. After all, without our mortality, there is little to risk or sacrifice. But self-sacrifice, in turn, presupposes the belief that death is preferable to a life deprived of dignity and freedom – especially if that deprivation results from political oppression. But courage does not only find meaning in our individual mortality. The endurance of the world, and the survival of humanity as a whole, also constitute necessary conditions for

Bursting Shell Christopher Nevinson 1915

The Urgency of Art Sam McAuliffe thinks that art offers another way of thinking. oday science is widely regarded as the bastion of truth and knowledge. Technology daily demonstrates the truth of science to the person in the street, religion is ever trying to align scientific insight with its doctrines, and we largely expect our politicians to consider and abide by scientific evidence. No matter how rigorous or robust the science is, however, it fails to incite the social change it spotlights as needed, climate change being the obvious example. Moreover, some very influential philosophers equate science and technology with thoughtlessness. Could they be right? And if so, could art offer an antidote? The political theorist Hannah Arendt summarised the problem best in The Human Condition (1958), when she wrote:

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“The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of ‘character’ – that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons – or their naïvete – that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use – but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power” (p.4).

This provocative passage by Arendt suggests two important insights. First, she highlights the limits of science, or at least, of scientists. Similar to the atomic scientists of the 1940s being incapable of controlling how the product of their labour would 34 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

be deployed, contemporary scientists are incapable of catalysing the necessary social change on urgent issues such as climate change and warfare. (This isn’t a personal criticism, for strictly speaking it’s not their job to do so.) Second, Arendt highlights the distinction between knowledge and thought. Scientific knowledge, the great triumph of the scientific method, is expressed in equations and data, inaccessible to those without mathematical skills and is thus distinct from speech and discussion. Even as the power of the word slips away we become enraptured by the progress of science and technology, yet unable to think beyond the gadget in front of us. Arendt is not the only philosopher to speak of our ‘thoughtlessness’ in relation to science. Her former lover Martin Heidegger wrote extensively about technology and society. In his essay Discourse on Thinking (1959), he claimed that we’re living in a thoughtless time: “Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly.” We turn to science to cure cancer, improve crop yield, harness energy, design our bombs, and understand the laws of physics – so why is it that some of our greatest thinkers have drawn a connection between science/technology and thoughtlessness? And if they’re correct to do so, what can we do about it?

The Limits of Science In his book The Gay Science (1882) Nietzsche famously claimed that ‘‘God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!’’ (p.120). However, we must remember that Nietzsche is lamenting the death of God not celebrating it. God was once the pillar of truth and morality, and as long as we followed the word of God, we could rest easy knowing we were on the right path. But as various voices called the word of God (that is, the Bible) into disrepute from the eighteenth century onwards, the stable footing that monotheistic religion offered the West crumbled away. We Westerners were left perplexed. If not to God, where do we now turn for knowledge and moral guidance? Many would say that science has been passed this baton. So we must understand the limits of science. For instance, science has almost nothing to say about ethics, and can teach us little about politics. So if we concern ourselves only with that which falls under the banner of ‘scientific method’, we necessarily narrow the questions we ask and the answers we seek, and ultimately we will fail the basic task of humanity, surviving together. Indeed, we are no better at getting along now than we were before the scientific revolution; we’re just a lot more powerful in what we can do. Even if we accept that science cannot answer our existential predicament, we should still address the fact that both Heidegger and Arendt equate science and technology with thoughtlessness. A popular anti-religion argument says that science moves ever onward and constantly seeks development, whereas religion is dogmatic. However, although fixed thinking may get us nowhere fast, riding the wave of science and technology leaves us no time for contemplation. The pace of progress leaves us no time to think. As Heidegger says, ‘we forget to ponder’. Lessons From Art Given God’s receding (or ‘death’), and the fact that science is limited in what it can achieve, where should we turn? What will guide us back onto the path of thoughtfulness? Some leading contemporary philosophers, such as Günter Figal, Santiago Zabala, and Jennifer McMahon, suggest that art offers the necessary path to salvation, since art is a site of intervention and interpretation. Far from merely pretty paintings or catchy melodies, and so being of peripheral concern to our contemporary predicaments, art offers engagement. Art does not have to be ‘agreeable’: pretty or catchy, etc. Art can be agreeable; but it can also be ugly, weird, or banal. The defining characteristics of art are instead that it is perceived by the senses, and that it challenges us to understand the world differently. When we engage with art, we step out of the bubble that social media and our other experiences have created around us; we put our prior expectations to one side; and truly try to understand the artwork before us. A work of art is never what we want it to be – it is independent of the meaning we project upon it. To understand a work of art, we must attempt to receive what it is trying to say. And so in aesthetic contemplation, for that moment, however long it lasts, we are spurred to thoughtfulness. Art appreciation is perhaps not a mode of thinking we readily equate with ‘thinking’, especially given the extent to which we are conditioned to technological modes of thought. Aesthetic contemplation is not the solving of a puzzle or problem: it is not the application of the right formula or theory to reach a desired outcome. Rather, it is being ‘caught up in’ or ‘taken

Spinoza’s Godly Mystery In his Ethics Spinoza did expound A vision of God that did astound: A single substance, infinite, and all that sustains the universe, through its call. It’s not a deity with human desires, But a force, that brings all things to life’s pyres. It’s all that is, and all that can be, With modes that define all reality. God and nature are one and the same And our thoughts are but a tiny flame That flickers in the vast cosmic fire, And all we know is but a small desire. So with this thought Spinoza did impart A mind-bending truth that pierces the heart. And though some may laugh at his philosophy, It remains a classic, for all posterity. © SIVANTH ADITHYA.N 2023

Sivanth Adithya.N is a philosophy graduate from Delhi University with a passion for philosophy and writing.

up by’ that which is before us, and allowing that experience to transform us in some way. Contemplating art is not a mode of thinking that attempts to dominate or control its subject. Instead, it is a mode of thinking where one converses with a subject, or participates in the experience. It is a mode of thinking where one simultaneously arrives at an understanding of the subject and oneself. Through good art we learn how the world might be understood differently to how we understood it before. Engaging with art thus illuminates new or different ways to think, do, and be; and so it broadens our horizons. And each such engagement makes us more comfortable with this participatory mode of thought. In this way, art offers lessons in a mode of thoughtfulness distinct from the scientific method. Of course, the thinking described here should not replace scientific thought. It should complement it. Yet it is only when we recognise distinct modes of thinking and understand how they fit together and what they can offer one another that we reach a certain cognitive balance. Considering the current state of the world, it is clear we have lost this equilibrium. Indeed, it is questionable whether such balance has ever been achieved. But striving toward balance in thought is our constant task. The contemporary urgency of art is that it teaches us to engage with the world in vital ways many of us have forgotten, overlooked, or ignored. Whatever your passion – music, dance, sculpture, poetry, architecture – do yourself and the world a favour, and take a lesson or two in thinking from art. © SAM MCAULIFFE 2023

Sam McAuliffe is Dean of Studies and Careers at Mannix College, Monash University. He is the author of Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics, and numerous scholarly essays. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 35

Descartes

Ergoing Nowhere Noah Harris says Descartes failed to find absolute foundations for knowledge. ogito ergo sum: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ This statement by René Descartes, which has become known as ‘the Cogito’, is perhaps the most famous phrase in all of philosophy. It summarises his argument that one’s own existence is the only thing one can never be mistaken about. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he argues that with every other proposition – even those of basic mathematics – it may be that every time I think them, an all-powerful demon interferes with my mind and deceives me, leading me to be mistaken. For example, every time I think about 2+3, this demon may be interfering to make me believe the total is 5, when actually it’s something else. Indeed, I might be being deceived by this demon about perhaps everything I think I know. Perhaps my belief that I went to the shop last week is based on a memory which has been entirely fabricated by the demon. However, there is something different about the proposition ‘I exist’. This is because I cannot be deceived about something unless I exist – more specifically, unless I exist as a thing capable of being deceived, that is, a thinking thing. However, if I have to exist in order to be deceived about anything, I would have to exist in order to be deceived about the proposition ‘I exist’ too. To be deceived about this proposition would therefore require both that I exist, in order to be a thing which can be deceived, and that I do not exist, in order for the proposition ‘I exist’ to be deceptive. As Descartes argues, this contradiction shows that it is impossible to be deceived about the proposition ‘I exist’. Therefore, for anyone who thinks ‘I exist’, it must be true. So: I think, therefore I am.

CARTOON © NOAH HARRIS 2023

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36 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

With this argument, Descartes believed he had found a statement which could be known without any prior assumptions or knowledge, and which could therefore be used as a ‘certain and unshakeable’ foundation for further propositions about the world, and hence for human knowledge in general. However, Descartes’ attempts to derive anything further from the Cogito famously failed, quickly devolving into a reliance on the benevolence of God, with the dubiousness of his arguments for this idea undermining the certainty of his resulting propositions. However, I want to briefly question whether Descartes ever secured the certainty which he sought even in his first proposition. Descartes’ ‘evil demon’ argument aims to go as far as is possible in questioning our beliefs, allowing for the possibility that this demon could even deceive us about the most basic mathematical truths. Only by taking scepticism to this absolute extreme can Descartes legitimately claim to have found something absolutely beyond question. However, Descartes does not go to the absolute extreme. This is because Descartes’ argument still relies on the laws of logic. Without such laws, the cogito itself is immediately undermined. To be deceived about the proposition ‘I exist’ requires a contradiction; but without the logical law of non-contradiction, that would be unproblematic. In fact, without the law of non-contradiction, we could agree with Descartes’ argument all the way through to its conclusion, and yet prefer the opposite conclusion. My aim here is to point out that any attempt to undertake Descartes’ project – to discover what we can know to be certain and free from all presuppositions – is bound to either fail or show

Descartes

IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2023. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT BEHANCE.NET/VENANTIUSPINTO

René Descartes by Venantius J. Pinto

that we know nothing. We can go absolutely nowhere in argument without the laws of logic. However, these laws cannot themselves be proven, for we would have to presuppose them in order to construct an argument for them! Therefore we can know absolutely nothing independently of absolutely everything. This failure is crucial for Descartes’ project, because his concern was that unless the foundations of his thought were certain and without presuppositions, everything he built upon them ‘‘could only be highly doubtful’’ (p.13). So to question everything but the laws of logic undermines his project not at the last hurdle, but at the first. Perhaps, however, there is still something we can take from his argument. Even though his Meditations fail to fulfil his stated aim of questioning everything, one might argue that Descartes covertly settled for a more modest project – one of questioning everything it’s practically possible to question. If he had questioned absolutely everything, including logic, his Meditations would not merely have failed to uncover any certain truths, but would have ended up as a collection of gibberish. It may be that Descartes decided, or simply assumed, therefore, to presuppose the bare minimum, the laws of logic, in order to uncover those propositions which are most certain – that is, which are as certain as the laws of logic themselves. The cogito is not, therefore, the

one absolutely certain proposition; but it is the one other proposition which is as certain as the laws of logic. Strangely, this perhaps improves our prospects in terms of grounding our propositions. Descartes’ attempts indicate that the cogito and the laws of logic alone may be insufficient to derive any further certain propositions; but having accepted the lack of absolute certainty in our propositions, perhaps we can at least move forward by ranking the certainty of further propositions by considering what else must be supposed for each to be true. The cogito takes the highest rank, requiring only the laws of logic for its truth. No doubt this ranking would be a long and complicated task; but it holds far more promise than attempting to derive a full body of knowledge from the single premise that one exists. Descartes’ goal was to purge our minds of all except the absolutely certain. A hierarchy of beliefs would fall short of this, but would show us the lines of reasoning and implicit affirmations behind our beliefs, thereby informing rather than removing the decision process. It seems that this is the most we can take from Descartes’ cogito. © NOAH HARRIS 2023

Noah Harris is a Sheffield-based recent philosophy graduate of Keele University. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 37

Descartes

Descartes & Stupidity Trevor Pateman asks: stupidity – essence, or accident? ené Descartes opens his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Directing One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) with a breathtakingly other-worldly statement:

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“Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed...”

No doubt many of the original readers back in 1637 were relieved when he immediately went on to undercut that wild claim with what appears to be some very this-worldly irony: “...for everyone thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.”

The reader now put into a good mood, Descartes promptly doubles down on his original claim: “And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken; the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men.”

Can he really be serious? It seems so, for he immediately continues: “The diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.”

After a diversion, to which I will return, he concludes his opening remarks by re-stating for the third time (this guy is nothing if not persistent) his initial claim: “For as to the reason or sense, inasmuch as it is that alone which constitutes us men, and distinguishes us from the brutes, I am disposed to believe that it is to be found complete in each individual; and on this point to adopt the common opinion of philosophers, who say that the difference of greater and less holds only among the accidents, and not among the forms or natures of individuals of the same species.”

This, one might say, is an honourable claim, asserting a kind of human equality. But having shut the front door on discrimination by implying that all people have basically the same rational nature, does he let discrimination in through the backdoor of ‘accidents’? Here we must return to the argument: “For myself, I have never fancied my mind to be in any respect more perfect than those of the generality; on the contrary, I have often 38 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

wished that I were equal to some others in promptitude of thought, or in clearness and distinctness of imagination, or in fullness and readiness of memory. And besides these, I know of no other qualities that contribute to the perfection of the mind”

Well, this is either honest modesty or false modesty, but the main point is that Descartes allows that there are differences in human reasonableness after all – but only among the ‘accidents of mind’, of which he identifies three: quickness of thought, imagination conceived as a kind of clear-sightedness, and ability to remember. But the essential nature of mind remains the same for all of us. Let’s now consider whether all this is actually the case. Call & Response My guess is that the species to which we belong was into namecalling long before philosophers distinguished between essential natures and accidents. And I also guess that those who practice the habit understand perfectly well that the name-calling most likely to hurt and humiliate (for what else is name-calling for?) would try to find an essence in the individual which could be extracted and flung back at them as something which, ideally, they would despise but could do nothing about. Some of those supposed ‘essences’ have surely had very long lives – so much so that they come with an exclamation mark already attached. Stupid! and Ugly! are prominent among them. Others are probably very local (Ginger!), and some seem to be entirely modern inventions, like the -phobe! In the very long and rather inglorious history of name-calling I further imagine that parents have a lot to answer for, for the way they’ve often named and shamed their own children. And after schools were invented, teachers sometimes took sadistic delight in inventing fresh names to hurl, along with the chalk, leaving their target pupils red-faced and tearful. When irritated teachers or parents name-call children, one fairly predictable consequence is that children name-call each other. The playground has rarely shown humanity at its best, but it probably reached peak ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’ in nineteenth century Britain – an inference I draw from the fact that the saying ‘‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’’ originated in late nineteenth century Britain. But I doubt this little incantation was ever very successful in warding off hurt. Many people do have inhibitions about name-calling, though probably not as a result of reading Descartes’ intellectual egalitarianism. Rather, it would seem to be part of common courtesy or decency, or even some moral obligation. Such people would never call a person stupid – though they might well say to them, ‘‘That was a stupid thing to do.’’ The latter points to an accident, not an essence, and so to something remediable – to such an extent that it may well be that the addressee will assent to the proposition by saying, ‘‘I know, I wasn’t really thinking.’’ This all sounds very much like one up for Descartes.

Descartes And yet… If someone keeps on doing stupid things, doesn’t that in the end add up to their actually being stupid? Could any scholastic talk of essences and accidents really put a block on that conclusion? Perhaps not. But if stupidity is no more than a sum of stupid actions, the sting is less sharp than that aimed for by essentialism. It is more in sorrow than in anger that after repeated experiences of stupid behaviour we conclude, reluctantly, that someone just is rather stupid. At the same time, the way we are thinking about things acknowledges that there is no absolute reason why the person should not act differently next time – though that logical possibility opens only a small window of opportunity, for the future is indeed often like the past. Nonetheless, in conceding the existence of that window of hope for intelligent actions, we also create a space for hope in the person whom for the present has been judged and found wanting. To focus on accidents rather than essences of stupidity – of assessing actions one by one, even if we do sometimes allow them to add up – is charitable in the way it interprets other people and their actions. It allows the slate to be periodically wiped clean, and each day treated as a new day, in which any one of us might present a different self to the one we presented yesterday, proving that we’re not so stupid after all. Hope is offered by such modest charity. But as for the belief that there are no essences which would fatally undermine all such hope – well, that may be a matter of faith… and as another French writer of the seventeenth century, Blaise

Pascal observed, “il faut s’abêtir” (“it’s necessary to make ourselves like the brutes”). I would prefer a less defeatist attitude, less liable to misuse by the other side. Yet for name-calling essentialists – who say you are this or that – it is a matter of faith, both before and after the trial, that all cases of stupidity are hopeless. To prevent a logjam, the trials start with the verdict, and victims despatched expeditiously to exile from the society of the elect, to the dunce’s corner; or, in our latest perfection of possible fates, to the pillories of Twitter, where incandescent faith essentialises across a billion screens. Such judges are simply not interested in hope and charity. And that’s what makes them so frightening. “When I rail at my manservant I do so sincerely with all my mind: my curses are real not feigned. But once I cease to fume, if he needs help from me I am glad to help him: I turn over the page. When I call him a dolt or a calf I have no intention of stitching such labels on him forever: nor do I believe I am contradicting myself when I later call him an honest fellow. No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace.” Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep And Laugh At The Same Thing (M.A. Screech’s translation, 2015). © TREVOR PATEMAN 2023

Trevor Pateman studied with Richard Wollheim and Roland Barthes. Their influence can still be found in his books Materials and Medium: an Aesthetics (2016), and Nabokov’s Dream (2021).

Descartes’ Surreal Ideas by Paul Gregory, 2023

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 39

Descartes

How Descartes Inspired Science Kanan Purkayastha has both general and special theories about how the master rationalist inspired modern empirical science. ené Descartes (1596-1650) is one of the great thinkers in the history of humanity. Most of his work focused on philosophy, mathematics, and science, but he also dedicated many of his writings to physiology, and adopted a ‘mechanical’ vision of the world. Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637) is a good starting place for any discussion about how scientific thinking and methods developed. In this book, Descartes tells us how reason goes about its successful pursuit of truth in any area accessible to human mind. He states that “these long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difficult demonstrations, had given me cause to imagine that everything which can be encompassed by man’s knowledge is linked in the same way” (p.41). From this, Descartes outlines the basic steps of his method. These can be summarised as:

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(a) Do not accept anything just because it has been pre-established, if it is not evident to reason. (b) Divide each problem into as many parts as necessary to make the reasoning simple and transparent; (c) Think in an orderly way, beginning with the simplest ideas, steadily climbing up to the more complex ones; (d) Take as many steps as needed, to verify that no logical step is omitted. In his book Descartes and the Possibility of Science (1989), Peter Schouls suggests that “The Discourse… presents a functional definition of reason, where I use ‘reason’ in its broadest sense as the human ability to intuit, deduce and in the context of these processes to make proper use of imagination, sensation and memory” (p.1). In fact, Descartes proposed a method based on methodical doubt, analysis, synthesis and verification. These ideas contributed to what became the scientific method, and hence to the development of modern science. For instance, contemporary scientists use experimentation as a means to confirm or falsify whatever hypothesis is under consideration; and for Descartes, as Schouls observes, “experimentation… provides evidence for the correctness or incorrectness of a judgement made about a scientific statement or a body of such statements, namely, a judgement as to whether it is an account of the world in which we live” (p.88). Werner Heisenberg, of Uncertainty Principle fame mentioned that Descartes’ most important ideas for the development of scientific thinking are contained in his Discours on Method. In his book Physics and Philosophy (1958), Heisenberg writes that Descartes “on the basis of doubt and logical reasoning tries to find a completely new and as he thinks solid ground for a philosophical system” (p.40). One of the beauties of science now is its encouragement to doubt everything – which is a contribution historically due to Descartes. 40 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

But now I’d like to briefly look at some of the ways in which Descartes has influenced or foreshadowed modern science more specifically. Sensing The Environment One of the deepest mysteries is the question of how we sense our environment. Descartes envisioned threads connecting different parts of the skin with the brain, and so imagined how heat against the skin sends mechanical signals to the brain, such that, for instance a foot touching an open flame would send a signal to the brain in the form of pain. He published this idea in his 1632 book L‘Homme, or Treatise on Man, where Descartes wrote, “if fire A is near foot B, the particles of this fire (which move very quickly, as you know) have force enough to displace the area of skin that they touch; and thus pulling the little thread C C, which you see to be attached there, they simultaneously open the entrance to the pore (or conduit) where this thread terminates (in the brain): just as, pulling on one end of a cord, one simultaneously rings a bell which hangs at the opposite end” (p.34-35, translated from the French by Thomas Steele Hall). As Hall mentions, “Descartes does not use the term ‘stimulus’ nor, in our sense, the term ‘response’. He usually employs the word ‘action’, to denote the elicitive events as well as the consequent events in the nerves.” This sort of language fits well with Descartes’ mechanical model of the world. But specifically, his nerve conduction model about how we sense Descartes’ early model of nerve stimulation from his Treatise on Man (1632)

Philosophical Haiku our environment put us on the right path, and has inspired much Nobel Prize-winning research. Indeed, Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for their discovery of specialized sensory neurons that register changes in our environment. And in 2021, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries concerning nerve receptors for temperature and touch. Specifically, Julius and Patapoutian discovered how both temperature and mechanical touch stimuli are converted into electrical impulses in the nervous system. In their press release concerning this work, the Nobel committee cited how the work of René Descartes influenced these two Nobel Laureates. The Anatomo-Clinical Method The ‘anatomo-clinical method’ provides a systematic approach to the classification of neurological diseases based on inference from clinical signs, and especially from anatomical lesions (gaps or cuts) in the nervous system or the brain. The method was first developed by Jean-Martin Charcot, a clinical neurologist of the nineteenth century, who based his own research on it. In fact, it is a two-part methodology. The first step of this method involves the careful documentation of clinical signs, such as abnormal behaviour or loss of specific aspects of perception or cognition – such as the ability to see in colour, or to recognise faces, etc etc. The second step involves an autopsy examination of the brain and spinal cord. Combining the clinical and anatomical data, Charcot was able to suggest concrete clinical– anatomical (specifically neurological) correlations. This method has helped us define the brain tracts and nuclei responsible for both normal and abnormal psychological signs, and was pivotal to a new classification of neurological diseases based on anatomy. Now the anatomo-clinical method was strongly influenced by Cartesian thinking, and I want to use it as a prime example of how Descartes’ method works in a scientific setting. In the Discourse on Method, Descartes proposed reaching truth by not accepting any preconceptions that could not be demonstrated as true. Similarly, the anatomo-clinical method aims to reach a diagnosis without accepting conjectural elements that could not be scientifically demonstrated. In the Discourse, Descartes also proposed breaking each problem down into as many simple parts as necessary. Similarly, the anatomo-clinical method reaches its diagnosis by analysing the simplest symptoms and signs in each patient. Descartes proposed reconstructing the elements of an argument in an orderly way, from the simplest to the most complex. Similarly, in the anatomo-clinical method, the analysis is carried out gradually, starting from the simplest observable behaviours in order to investigate the complex structure of the nervous system. Indeed, I can see little difference between the Discourse’s approach to reaching the truth and the anatomo-clinical method for achieving disease diagnosis. Several scientists received Nobel Prizes using the anatomoclinical method. For example, in 1932 Sir Charles Sherrington was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with Edgar Adrian for their discoveries on neuronal functions. This was to be the second Nobel Prize awarded in the field of the neurosciences, after the one shared in 1906 by the great Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the discoverer of the neuron, and the Italian

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Thund’rous Trumpets sound Heralds of Doom’s own Carriage. Beware Mammon’s Snare!

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homas Carlyle was born in the Scottish hamlet of Ecclefechan. I tell you that not because it’s important but because I like the name. Ecclefechan. Marvellous! His family were strict Calvinists. Everyone expected that young Tom would become a preacher when he came of age, on account of his being so opinionated and given to lecturing others on what they should be doing. But preaching can only reach the people who bother to turn up on a Sunday, and Tom wanted to tell far more people what to do, so he became a writer. He expounded on the ills of the world, lamented the condition of the poor, and constantly prophesied the collapse of society in a revolutionary conflagration brought on by its obsession with money. The ‘Cash Payment’, he wrote, had become ‘the sole nexus between man and man’, while power had been usurped by economists – those masters of the ‘dismal science’. However, Carlyle was also a stupendously excellent historian, and his The French Revolution: A History (1837) was a best-seller. He poured every ounce of his creative energy into this magnificent work. Seeking comment on his efforts from one of the other great minds of the time, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle sent him his precious creation. Unfortunately, a maid, not being one for reading such hifalutin material, thought it would make the perfect firestarter. Which it did. So, gritting his teeth and muttering obscenities, which no Sassenach would have understood anyway given his thick Scots accent, Carlyle wrote it all out again. As a Calvinist, he could probably see this as just one more of God’s trials, and thus feel himself blessed. Carlyle’s writing was like nothing anyone had ever seen; it combined a preacher’s hellfire and brimstone grandiosity with the exhortatory and admonitory effervescence of a prophet. He made up words, used others he’d dug up from ancient sources, italicised wildly, and capitalised indulgently. Read! ye Sinners, the Works of this Great Man, and be Schooled! © TERENCE GREEN 2023

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

Descartes Camillo Golgi, the inventor of the silver staining technique for looking at neurons under a microscope.

action by which a body passes from one place to another.” But in contrast to this simple definition, a fuller sense of motion defined by Descartes is as follows:

The Divisibility of Atoms One of the most important properties of atoms in the atomist tradition is their indivisibility; indeed, a-tom is Greek for in-divisible. However, Descartes argued for the divisibility of atoms. This appeared in his Principles of Philosophy (published in 1644, later translated from the Latin by John Veitch), where Descartes wrote, “We likewise discover that there cannot exist any atoms or parts of matter that are of their own nature indivisible. For however small we suppose these parts to be, yet because they are necessarily extended, we are always able in thought to divide any one of them into two or more smaller parts and may accordingly admit their divisibility.” In his book Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992), Daniel Garber suggests concerning this that “Descartes has no arguments intended directly to show that all bodies are naturally divisible. But he does think that in certain circumstances, at least, bodies are actually divided ad infinitum, or, as he might put it, ad indefinitum.” In other words, atoms may not be actually infinitely divided, but they can be divided indefinitely. In fact, we now know that protons, electrons, and neutrons are subatomic particles that constitute atoms, and that some of these are made up of quarks (and so on, possibly). As a result, an atom can be divided. Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton, the first particle to be found in the nucleus of the atom. James Chadwick discovered the neutron, another particle in the nucleus. Murray Gell-Mann then proposed the existence of quarks, the particles that themselves make up protons and neutrons. They all earned Nobel Prizes in Physics. Perhaps to some extent their discoveries were inspired by the idea about the divisibility of atoms put forward by Descartes in 1644.

“In order to give it a determinate nature, that it is the transporting of one part of matter or of one body from the vicinity of those bodies that are in immediate contact with it, or which we regards as at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies.” (Principles of Philosophy)

In defining ‘motion’ in this way, Descartes promoted the idea of space as understood through the change of ‘vicinity’ to other bodies. Of course, Albert Einstein developed the reigning theories of relativity, which also centrally relate motion to frames of reference, or as we might say, to the surrounding environment. And in 1975, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Professors Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and James Rainwater, for their discovery of the connection between collective (whole body) motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei, and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection. But Descartes highlighted the importance of relative motion for physics centuries before all this. Conclusions In his book Dreams of a Final Theory (1992), the American physicist Steven Weinberg wrote, “the mechanical philosophy of Descartes had a powerful influence on Newton, not because it was right but because it provided an example of the sort of mechanical theory that could make sense out of nature” (p.134). Perhaps then we might even venture, no Descartes, no Newton? Descartes himself thought that philosophy ought to provide the foundations of knowledge. This would require it to be prior to science. He wrote:

CARTOON © STEVE DELMONTE 2023 PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVEDELMONTESTUDIO.COM

Motion In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes mentioned that “motion, in the ordinary sense of the term, is nothing more than the

42 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

“Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect. When an architect wants to build a house which is stable on ground where there is a sandy topsoil over underlying rock, or clay, or some other firm base, he begins by digging out a set of trenches from which he removes the sand, and anything resting on or mixed in with the sand, so that he can lay his foundations on firm soil. In the same way, I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing it out, like sand; and then, when I noticed that it is impossible to doubt that a doubting or thinking substance exists, I took this as the bedrock on which I could lay the foundations of my philosophy” (Philosophical Writing of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, p.366, 1984.)

If science needs foundations, then it is philosophy which provides them. René Descartes’ philosophy demonstrated this several centuries ago. © DR KANAN PURKAYASTHA 2023

Kanan Purkayastha holds a PhD in Theoretical and Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Bristol. He writes newspaper columns about science and philosophy. You can learn more about his work at kanan-purkayastha.org.uk

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Brief Lives

Chamfort (1740-1794) Martin Jenkins looks at the life of a wry observer of society, cut short by that society’s revolutionary turmoil.

Chamfort, 1767 by Anne Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson

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ontaigne invented the essay. Another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, invented the maxim: the presentation of profound ideas in short selfstanding statements. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used that form extensively; but most practitioners seem to have been French. The French call them moralistes, which, like its English equivalent, implies commentators on the moeurs, or customs, of society. What is the attraction of expressing ideas as aphorisms, usually without argument, inviting the reader to accept them as ‘self-evident truths’? One suggestion is: “Maxims, axioms, are, like summaries, the work of people of spirit [or of ‘wit’], who, it seems, have laboured for the benefit of mediocre or lazy minds. The lazy reader takes on a maxim, which releases him from having himself to make the observations which led the author of the maxim to the conclusion which he shares with the reader. The lazy and mediocre person thinks himself released from going any further…”

The author of this typically cynical observation was the last of the great French moralistes, Chamfort. Who was Chamfort? Nobody knows for certain. His birth was registered in 1740 at Clermont-Ferrand as Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of François Nicolas, grocer, and his wife, Thérèse Croiset. There were, however, suggestions that he was really the illegitimate child of a churchman; and his closest friend Guinguené (who probably did not know, either) referred to ‘the secret of his birth’. In any case he was brought up as the child of 44 Philosophy Now ● April/May 2023

the Nicolases. Thérèse doted on him, and he remained devoted to her until her death. In 1745 he secured a scholarship to the Collège des Grassins in Paris. He soon distinguished himself by his brilliance and won numerous prizes. But his volatile temperament rebelled against the monotony of school life, and in 1755 he was expelled – ironically, before he could do his year studying philosophy. He fled, with a fellow pupil, to Le Havre, with a view to embarking for America. However, he calmed down and returned to the Collège, where the indulgent principal took him back. Chamfort never forgot the principal’s kindness: he grew up to be an arch-cynic with a gift for loyalty to decent human beings – when he could find them. Fools & Lovers The young Sébastien-Roch Nicolas was marked out for the priesthood; but his profession of faith was too lax even for mideighteenth century France (it was suggested that the next archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God). “I will never be a priest,” he said: “I have too much love for relaxation, philosophy, women, honour, true glory; and too little for controversy, hypocrisy, honours, and money.” For a few years he eked out a living as a tutor and freelance writer. He was not above helping priests to write their sermons. He was also a notorious libertin, in the senses both of a freethinker and a ladies’ man. And he started to call himself ‘Nicolas Chamfort’ – or more precisely ‘de Chamfort’, asserting a claim to nobility which he could not have sustained under scrutiny. Chamfort was less than impressed by polite society under

Brief Lives Louis XV and Louis XVI. The words sot and sottise (‘fool’ and ‘stupidity’) recur often in his maxims as descriptions of behaviour in the high circles in which he moved. He regarded his contemporaries as slaves to the expectations of society: “Almost all men are slaves, for the reason that the Spartans gave for the enslavement of the Persians: not knowing how to pronounce the syllable no. Knowing how to say that word and to live alone are the only two ways to preserve one’s freedom and one’s character.”

He was also annoyed by the artificiality of behaviour which characterised the age, and looked back with nostalgia to the age of Louis XIV: “In looking over the memoirs and monuments of the age of Louis XIV, one finds, even in the bad company of those days, something lacking in today’s good company… Monsieur de Lassay, a gentle man, but with a great knowledge of society, said that you needed to swallow a toad every morning to avoid finding anything more disgusting the rest of the day, if you had to spend it in company.”

Still, he was obliged to live in that society, and to live by his wits (or wit: he could make a living by amusing them). A chapter of his Maxims is entitled ‘On the taste for retirement and dignity of character’. There he wrote, “A philosopher regards what is called a place in society as the Tartars regarded towns, that is, as a prison… The man without a place is the only free man, provided that he has a competence, or at least that he has no need of human company.” But Chamfort never had the money to retire, and in any case needed human company. He continued to write and to publish; his play La Jeune Indienne (1764) was panned by the critics, but the famous Voltaire predicted, “You will go far.” Chamfort was often ill, largely because of a sexually transmitted disease; but in 1776 a play of his pleased the French court, and the Prince de Condé offered him a job with a pension of 2,000 livres and an apartment in the Palais Royal. Chamfort refused, preferring his independence. By now he was collecting the notes which would constitute his legacy. In 1781 he was, on his fourth attempt, elected to the Académie Française. He later served as its Secretary. However, the most important event of his life occurred the previous year. At the salon of Madame Agasse he met Anne-Marie Buffon, the widow of a doctor, beautiful and witty, and twelve years his senior. He fell in love at once – the cynic who wrote, “Love, as it exists in society, is only the exchange of two fancies and the contact of two epidermises.” But Chamfort, on a personal level, was never as cynical as his public persona. He believed in emotion and wrote, “Les passions font vivre l’homme, la sagesse le fait seulement durer” – “The passions make men live, wisdom only makes them endure.” “It’s the only time in my life,” he wrote of Anne-Marie, “that I count for anything.” They set up home together near to Etampes. But there is no justice in the world: Anne-Marie died only a couple of years later, on August 28th 1783. As if that were not enough, Thérèse Croiset died the following year, aged 84. Chamfort had lost the only two women he really cared about. It may have been this double whammy which led Chamfort to violate his principles and accept the patronage of the Comte de Vaudreuil, which lasted until 1789.

Sharp Revolutionary Wit Come the Revolution of that year, Chamfort took the side of his old friend Mirabeau, but went further. He came out as a republican and rejoiced in the decree which suppressed royal pensions (including his own). He recovered the energy which he had lost; his friend Guinguené wrote, “Throughout 1789 the Revolution was his only thought and the triumphs of the popular party his only enjoyments.” Chamfort was not a good party man, however. He joined the Jacobin club and became its Secretary; but he maintained good relations with the opposition Girondins. He was appointed administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but could not disguise his horror at the bloody reigns of Marat and Robespierre, with their enthusiasm for Mme Guillotine. Eventually he formulated two epigrams at the expense of the Jacobins: “Sois mon frère ou je te tue” (“Be my brother or I kill you”), and “They talk about the brotherhood of Eteocles and Polyneices” (the mutually murderous sons of Oedipus). Tyrants can live with being hated, but they hate to be laughed at. Chamfort’s days were numbered. He once quipped: “Why that phrase,” said Miss…, aged twelve, “‘learn to die?’ I see that everybody succeeds perfectly well the first time.”

Alas, not Chamfort. Anticipating arrest, on September 10th 1793 he shot himself in the head, yet survived. Then he tried to cut his throat, but he botched that as well. He lingered on, in great pain, until May 13th 1794. After his death Guinguené published his complete works in four volumes. The fourth – the only one still in print – consisted of his notes. It was entitled Produits de la civilisation perfectionée. Products of Perfected Civilisation is divided into two parts: ‘Maxims and Thoughts’ and ‘Characters and Anecdotes’. The first contains Chamfort’s philosophical reflections and his observations on society, the second reflects his interest in the absurdities of human behaviour. Chamfort was a great cynic; in France, in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was perhaps difficult to be anything else. But he also appreciated the quirkiness of humanity and liked a good story. The following passages reveal something of the essence of Chamfort: “An American, seeing six Englishmen separated from their troop, had the amazing boldness to attack them, wounding two of them, disarming the others, and bringing them to general Washington. The general asked how he had come to make himself master over six men. ‘As soon as I saw them,’ he said, ‘I attacked them and surrounded them’.” “It is well known how familiar the King of Prussia allowed some of his companions to be. General Quintus-Icilius made the most free with this. The King, before the battle of Rossbach, said to him that if he lost he would go to Venice and live by practising medicine. Quintus replied: ‘Always the killer!’” © MARTIN JENKINS 2023

The late Martin Jenkins was a Quaker, a retired community worker, and a frequent contributor to Philosophy Now.

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 45

Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up. Email me at [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! Logic & Fallacies DEAR EDITOR: Thanks to Kevin CurrieKnight for a well written, well argued piece in 154, ‘Humans, the Believing Animals’... which confirms my own bias. Less flippantly, I think he is correct to emphasise the dominant role of belief in our sense of self, and our comfort in that. Beliefs and attitudes can be changed, and in practice do continuously change throughout our lives. There may be a sense of permanence about them at any instant of time, even though our beliefs and attitudes are continually adjusting in some, usually pretty small, degree as a result of engagement with other people. Mostly, we are not especially aware of such changes, considering them to be clarifications, or refinements of our preexisting belief. This avoids the emotional discomfort associated with being wrong. But, on occasion, we recognise explicitly that we are wrong. It is then that significant change in belief occurs. Sometimes, the associated discomfort leads to rejection, and can result in catastrophic actions. On other occasions, there is a substantial voluntary change in belief or attitude. This was at one time described as a ‘gestalt shift’, and it can be accompanied by a sense of euphoria. Some Christians, for example, have used the term being Born Again. In my own case, as a teenager, deciding I had no need for the ‘God hypothesis’, I felt a weight being lifted from me. In the course of our lives there are occasions when we have to attempt to change the beliefs or attitudes of others. I was a head teacher of three different secondary schools, and that entailed seeking to bring about changes to the cultures. Such periods are not easy because beliefs or attitudes are part of our identity, so the process of change becomes emotionally charged. Nevertheless, changes can be made to the culture of an organisation – sometimes demoralising, but, mostly, I would say, for the better, for most of those involved. 46 Philosophy Now

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As Prof Currie-Knight indicates, we have to start the process of change close to where people are in terms of belief or attitude, and this can be a source of cognitive dissonance and emotional distress. The instigator of the change has to be prepared to accept that she or he will have to change beliefs and attitudes, too. However, resolution of the cognitive dissonance brings the change, and that requires a degree of reason. ALASDAIR MACDONALD, GLASGOW Off the Rails Again DEAR EDITOR: In offering ‘A Solution to the Trolley Problem’ (PN 154), Rick Coste says that “a society that would allow, or even condone, the sacrifice of one life for the many as an integral component of its value system would not survive for long.” In fact, I can think of no-one who does not live in such a society. Every nation has armed forces. Any member of the armed services places their own life at risk with the aim of protecting others. Let alone condoned, this is organised by the state! Further, many countries still have conscription, under which citizens are required, without choice, to place themselves in the situation Mr Coste considers immoral. MICHAEL SHAW, HUDDERSFIELD DEAR EDITOR: On Rick Coste’s examination of the Trolley Problem in Issue 154: it seems to me that we do live in a society that condones the sacrifice of one life for the many, and that it has survived for a very long time. In war, it may be tactically necessary for an officer to allow a platoon to be sacrificed to delay the enemy advance. In peace, the health service will never have the resources to save and prolong all the lives it otherwise might. The medical profession has daily to take decisions that involve the allocation of lifesaving equipment for the seriously ill. Such decisions involve weighing up the number of lives that might be saved and the quality of life the surviving patients

and their dependents might enjoy. Deciding whether and how much to donate to a charity, for the relief for earthquake victims, for instance, also places human lives in the balance. For me, the potency of the trolley problem is not just that it presents us with a dilemma of the sort that societies routinely confront and deal with; it acts too as a reminder that choosing to do nothing is also a decision for which we are fully responsible. That might sometimes be hard to cope with. But cope we do, in all manner of ways. COLIN STOTT, SOMERSET DEAR EDITOR: I have to say the trolley problem in Issue 154 is utter nonsense. How can anyone make a rational decision with so little information? If the five people who come into hospital requiring organs are the inner circle of the Nazi regime, would the decision whether to give them someone else’s be different? If the person you’re prepared to sacrifice for them is going to save the world from WW3, would the decision you make be different? As well as the history and character of the potential recipients, the trolley proposition also ignores personal bias or prejudice. There is simply not enough information for a rational person to make an informed decision. The whole trolley prospect is utter tosh. SIMON HOWELLS DEAR EDITOR:I was interested to read ‘A Solution to The Trolley Problem’ in Issue 154. I once presented the problem in a similar way at an evening session of a Philosophy In Pubs conference. PIP fosters community philosophy and was started on Merseyside over a decade ago. The responses of the group, who were seated around tables in Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel, were interesting. As Rick Coste indicated, an alternative set-up to the problem involves a hospital waiting room in which there are six patients: two in desperate need of a kidney transplant, one a heart transplant,

Letters one a lung transplant, and one a liver transplant. One, however, is there for a sprained ankle. Should the ankle sufferer be sacrificed to provide organs for those in desperate need of the life-saving transplants? A large majority on most tables voted No and were shocked when on one table most voted Yes. (Around that table were seated those most interested in philosophy.) For the standard Trolley Problem, utilitarian rules seemed the best option: save the many at the expense of the one – although some thought that to take responsibility for sacrificing lives rather than leaving it to fate was playing God and unacceptable. However, this case made me realise viscerally that I could never do that. The table that thought it was acceptable to sacrifice the one patient for the five had followed reason and not human feeling. They did not imagine what the real scenario would feel like. If you want to be guided by philosophical ideas on ethics other than utilitarianism, then Kant is your man. He argued that we should always treat others as ends and not merely as means, ie, do not merely use other people. In both organ and trolley cases, a fellow human being is being used as a thing. I think I’ll stick to Kant’s Categorical Imperative and try not to play God by judging the worth of other human beings. Real life will never be as simple as a thought experiment anyway. This particular exercise also showed that preceding questions and the order and wording of questions greatly influence responses. CORRIE L. LOWRY, MERSEYSIDE Theodicy Continues DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed Muhammad Mohsin Masood’s article on theodicy or the problem of evil in PN 154. What a complex subject it is, and not all religious traditions have such an emphasis on evil – Zen Buddhists would probably dispute moral dualism. In fact, some traditions would argue that we best take reality as it is and avoid putting too much weight on categories like ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Even if we believe in God, God might stand outside of those categories. Islam seems to have a similar tradition, expressed in the term ‘Allah knows best’. Popular Christianity has likewise taught that ‘Everything happens for a reason’. The question of good and evil then becomes a meaningless one: life is as it is, the universe is as it is, God is as God is. The evolutionary aspect evoked

by Hick and Iqbal is compatible with this outlook. We are flung into a mystery, but we move towards something greater. But mystery is the reality we exist in: it could be no other way. Life effuses tragedy, and sometimes the tragic appears under ghastly forms, but this is only one aspect of life. Comedy is another. The question of good and evil seems to touch upon deeper issues of life and death, being and non-being. Discussion on those points takes us into the abyss of theology, and thence towards a mysticism that goes beyond words. At such wordless mystical heights, all religions seem to converge into one, and this might resonate with Hick’s overall work. If we go but a little further, the culmination of this mysticism reveals the meaningless of the word ‘God’, since we’ve already gone beyond language. This idea is echoed in the Kabbalah concept of the Ein Sof, and in The Cloud of Unknowing, whose author is appropriately anonymous. ANTHONY A. MACISAAC INSTITUT CATHOLIQUE DE PARIS DEAR EDITOR: Martin Jenkins in Issue 154 is uncharitable to atheist theodicy when presenting their argument as ‘The world is not organised as I would have organised it if I were God.’ It’s not that we expect our personal moral beliefs to be held and practiced by God; but rather, we argue that universal moral principles are violated if there exists a God who fails to prevent the deaths of millions of people by natural disasters. We would consider it a grave moral error if a human had foreknowledge of an earthquake but abstained from warning anyone in advance; so we need a tremendously good reason not to hold God to the same standard – or else we would need to abandon the universally-held moral belief that we ought to prevent people from dying unnecessarily. DINO MEHIĆ, CALIFORNIA DEAR EDITOR: In Philosophy Now 154, Martin Jenkins rejects the atheist’s challenge to belief in a God based on the problem of evil: the problem of why an all-powerful, good God would permit evil. Jenkins introduces the possibility discussed by Hume in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, that evil exists because God is insane or incompetent or malicious, or because there are one or more gods undermining him. Clearly, if any of these were true, then this might explain

the existence of evil. But this isn’t really relevant to the traditional problem of evil, which is why does an all-powerful, good monotheistic-type God permit evil? Nothing that Jenkins says undermines the force of that argument. The Christian or the Muslim, for instance, has no interest in defending a God who is insane, incompetent, malicious, or outnumbered. The Christian’s and the Muslim’s belief is in an all-powerful, good God. This is what the atheist attacks with the problem of evil, and nothing Jenkins says is relevant to that. ROBERT GRIFFITHS, GODALMING Rolling Back the Digital Tide DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 154, in ‘Virtual Dissolution’, Maryna Lazareva talks about how we are looking in the wrong place for meaning if we’re looking online. This is so true: people are using social media to try to give themselves meaning, causing them to become addicted to it. Social media is one of mankind’s worst creations. It is highly destructive in many aspects of life. Younger people jumping onto social media generally end up fretting that other people are living better lives than them. This, in my honest opinion, has led to an increase in mental health issues, especially anxiety. I personally gave up all social media in 2021, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Trust someone who gave it up, you’ll enjoy life more once you uninstall those apps! Most of the people you’re trying to impress don’t care what you ate for dinner or where you went on vacation. Taking pictures of your travels is great for your memories, but you don’t have to share it. Let’s go back to a world where we don’t know what our neighbors had for dinner unless they tell us. CHASE OJERS, RENO, NEVADA Philosophy Now Not Infallible DEAR EDITOR: Peter Mullen’s ‘God Bless Karl Marx’ in Issue 154 was considerably below the standard one expects in Philosophy Now. Mullen twice quotes Marx as saying ‘property is theft’. It is, I think, fairly well-known that this proposition was in fact advanced by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the only times the phrase appears in Marx’s writings are when he’s criticising Proudhon. This is not a matter of any great erudition: the Wikipedia article ‘Property is Theft!’ April/May 2023 l Philosophy Now 47

Letters gives a perfectly adequate account of the slogan. I would not expect to read in Philosophy Now that ‘I think therefore I am’ was said by John Locke; but Mullen’s misattribution is equally culpable. Furthermore, the assorted biographical information is cited out of context to misleadingly imply that Marx lived in prosperity. As Francis Wheen’s biography (a well-documented study by a nonMarxist) shows, Marx lived in considerable poverty. He was moreover a political refugee – an asylum seeker. At a time when refugees are so widely under attack, one might have hoped that Mullen, a clergyman, would show Christian compassion rather than making cheap sneers. Surely Philosophy Now should be offering an intelligent critical assessment of Marx’s work rather than engaging in infantile satire. IAN BIRCHALL, LONDON Knowing Foucault Himself DEAR EDITOR: In her letter criticising Foucault in PN 154, Mary Jane Streeton misunderstands the point he’s making in the passage she quotes from, which is specifically about changes that took place in thinking about sexuality in the Nineteenth Century. Homosexuality had been condemned and forbidden for many centuries before this, but in the Nineteenth Century there began to be a shift from considering homosexual acts to a characterisation of individual people as ‘homosexuals’. Here we can find the pre-history of contemporary identity politics (which is the ‘reverse discourse’ referred to by Foucault). ‘Homosexual’ begins to be seen as what a person is, not just a sinful act they might occasionally commit. Foucault’s most central concern, throughout his writings, is the history of human conceptions of the self. It was in the Nineteenth Century, he contends, that sexuality began to be regarded as an essential defining component of self. This paved the way for today’s notion that we each have a sexuality as a part of our identity – a very recent way of thinking. Foucault lists ‘pederasty’ [sex with boys] alongside ‘homosexuality’ and ‘inversion’ because in Nineteenth Century writings these terms were treated as almost synonymous. The most widely discussed (and condemned) form of homosexuality was the love of an older man for an adolescent boy. It was this to which Oscar Wilde referred as ‘the love that 48 Philosophy Now

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dare not speak its name’. (It is instructive that had Wilde been put on trial today, his prison sentence would have been longer, and the destruction of his reputation more complete.) In the 2nd Volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault discusses the institutionalisation of pederasty in ancient Athens, where it was considered advantageous for a boy to have an older lover who could introduce him to important and influential people in the city. The extent of their physical relationship, however, was hedged round with reservations and etiquette. There was neither wholesale rejection, nor complete acceptance, of sexual acts between men and boys. Foucault’s discussion specifically shows how different ancient Greek ideas about sexuality were from our own. His purpose is not the assertion of moral relativism, but rather tracing the historical mutations of human self-conception. PETER BENSON, LONDON Rubbishing Rubbish DEAR EDITOR: Re ‘The Crumpled Paper Hoax’, Issue 153, Turner Prize winner and wit Martin Creed’s 1994 Work no: 88 consists of a sheet of plain A4 paper. The recipient of the paper is instructed to crumple it into a ball and place it on a shelf, to begin its life as an artwork. The recipient is by this act turned into the agent of creation: is she thus the artist? If the ball falls off the shelf, gets chucked in the bin, is it no longer an artwork? At what point in its fall did it stop being an artwork and become a piece of rubbish? STEPHANIE DOUET, ARTIST Cicero Civilises Characteristically DEAR EDITOR: I have had the privilege of teaching Roman History as part of an Ancient History A-Level. Here our main topic is the breakdown of the late Republic. I greatly enjoyed Hilarius Bogbinder’s Brief Life of Cicero in Issue 153 for this reason. On our course, Cicero is considered the best character. We study him as a participant in events, but we also study his historical information. His ‘pro Sestio’ is an important legal defence useful for his comments on the different factions in the Roman Senate, seeming akin to the modern two-party systems seen in some Western democracies. The article talked of Cicero’s recommendation of a mixed constitution, and also of his time in Greece while writing. I thought it would be interesting to com-

ment on Cicero’s Greek influences. Plutarch was referenced – a Greek writer whose Parallel Lives compares important Roman and Greek figures for their virtues. Another writer was Polybius, who died in the early first century BC and was another Greek writing for a Roman audience. His theory of anacyclosis can be explained as follows. There are three virtuous forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. Each has a degenerative form into which it will inevitably regress: tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy (rule of the mob). Each degenerative form will lead to the emergence of the next virtuous government: tyranny to aristocracy, oligarchy to democracy, ochlocracy to monarchy; and so the cycle begins anew. The Roman Republic’s mixed constitution as advocated by Cicero aimed to include all three virtuous form of government as a check and balance on the powerful potential of the other forms, thus preventing degenerative cycles and constant revolutions or instability. ROB HAVES, KENT Pluralism vs French Universalism DEAR EDITOR: According to Manon Royet in Issue 153, French philosophy has not changed that much and the world has. The world has evolved and is supposedly ‘weary’ of philosophical universalism. But since when has the discipline of philosophy in pursuit of truth had to adapt to current world views? For example, should the idea of Universal Human Rights be now regarded as merely an optional notion in a sea of pluralism? Or should philosophers, including some French, be admired for leading us to a better, and more logical, conclusion about the ideal way to be? MICHAEL HANLEY, MELBOURNE DEAR EDITOR: Manon Royet, in Issue 153, blames contemporary French philosophy for its continued allegiance to Enlightenment-style universalism, which, she claims, ‘denies pluralism’ and leads to exclusion and oppression. But doesn’t her argument itself rest on a universal moral principle – namely, that exclusion and oppression are unjust? Quite a few worldviews are not grounded in a respect for pluralism. Will Royet’s model society exclude or include such worldviews? DAVID LEVY JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY, ROME

The Art of Living

How To Live A Happy Life, With Seneca Massimo Pigliucci shares some Stoic standards. hat makes for a happy life? That depends on what sort of living organism one is. For a cactus, a happy life consists in access to the right set of soil and air nutrients, plenty of light, and a bit of water. Oh, and staying away from parasites and predators (hence the spines). For a human being things are a bit more complicated. Combined biology and culture make for an incredibly varied mix of wants, needs, hopes, and fears. Nevertheless, the general principles are the same, and so a list of ideas put forth by the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) is a good starting point for reflection. Let’s take a look into that mirror. The happiness list is found in Section 20 of his aptly titled On the Happy Life. I will quote a few excerpts covering the principal points. For instance: “I will look upon death or upon a comedy with the same expression of countenance; I will submit to labors, however great they may be, supporting the strength of my body by that of my mind.” Strength of mind is crucial in life because it is our attitude toward things, and especially towards setbacks, that determines how we’re going to react to them. Wealth, or anything else the Stoics classed as ‘externals’ (external to one’s own mind), including health, reputation, and career, are the sorts of thing it is nice to have if we’re lucky, but which don’t define who we are as human beings: “Whatever I may possess, I will neither hoard it greedily nor squander it recklessly.” The point that we should not be relying on or hoarding things was stressed more recently by the psychologist Viktor Frankl: “I will view all lands as though they belong to me, and my own as though they belonged to all humankind” (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946). The Stoics used the deliciously oxymoronic phrase ‘preferred indifferents’, meaning things that we should prefer because they make our lives more pleasant,

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but that are indifferent to our moral character, which is our most precious possession. Indeed, the hallmark of Stoic wisdom is precisely the ability to use externals correctly, which includes not being overly attached to them. If you have spare funds, think of ways to put them to good use – where ‘good’ refers to helping others, not to buying yourself the latest chariot (or smartphone). If you don’t have any spare funds, focus instead on what nobody can take away from you: your good character. Try out this one for size in our age of social media: “I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience.” Yet the point is well taken. While certainly our conscience ought to be informed by open and honest dialogue with our fellow human beings – on penalty of falling into rationalizing, rather than rational, thinking – ultimately, our opinion is the only thing that is truly ours and for which we are completely responsible. Everything else in our lives may be affected by fortune; but the buck stops with us when it comes to our considered judgments and intentions. “In eating and drinking my object shall be to quench the desires of Nature, not to fill and empty my belly. I will be agreeable with my friends, gentle and mild to my foes; I will grant pardon before I am asked for it.” Again here we see an attitude that runs refreshingly against modern trends. Consumption – for instance of food and drinks – is to be tailored to our needs, not pursued to excess (at great expense, and even greater environmental impact). Regarding how to treat other people, for the Stoics there are no true ‘foes’, only human beings who are misguided in what they do. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to be ‘gentle and mild’ with them. This doesn’t mean that we should practice ‘doormatism’, so to speak – but that we should, as Seneca puts it, be ready to forgive even before we are asked. The Stoics and their philosophical

cousins the Cynics were cosmopolitan, meaning that they thought of all other human beings as their brothers and sisters. Even though we are naturally inclined to be kind toward our family, friends, and neighbors, reason tells us that the fact that those specific people are so important to us is an accident of fate, so we have no reason to treat anyone else poorly just because they happen to have been born in a different part of the world, or to look different from us, or behave in ways unfamiliar to us. We should always be ready to face Nature’s ultimate test of character – our own inevitable demise. Even death, as both the Stoics and the Epicureans maintained, is not to be feared, for the simple reason that where it is we are not, and vice versa. Indeed, the Stoics believed that in exceptional cases we should be willing to hasten our own death; for instance, when faced with a terminal disease we know will only bring pain and suffering to ourselves and our loved ones: “Whenever either Nature demands my breath again, or reason bids me dismiss it, I will quit this life, calling all to witness that I have loved a good conscience, and good pursuits; that no one’s freedom, my own least of all, has been impaired through me.” The ability to quit if ‘the room gets too smoky’, as the second century Stoic Epictetus memorably put it, is the ultimate source of freedom, because if we decide to stay, this means we judge that we can still do something worthwhile for ourselves and others – which is the ultimate mark of a happy life. © PROF. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2023

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders (Basic Books). More by him at massimopigliucci.org

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We Have Always Been Cyborgs Stefan Lorenz Sorgner ‘TRANSHUMANISM’ IS A movement which says that we should enhance humanity with technology. Specifically, it sees emerging genetic and cyborg technologies as a way to promote our collective survival and individual flourishing. In the latter context it is frequently associated with notions of human perfectibility. As a childhood gymnast, I became well acquainted with perfection’s pursuit. The pointed toe, the straight leg, the split leap locked into a 180 degree angle – gymnastics is an extended dance in distancing oneself from the fallibility of flesh and bone. This is not the sort of perfection that most gymnasts are pursuing, though. At least, not really. It is in fact an intensely psychological endeavor. To be a gymnast is to be engaged in an ongoing mastery of one’s hopes and fears, one’s impulses and drives, all while repeatedly being yanked back down into a gritty sensorium of ripped blisters and chalk dust. Gymnasts track their progress: the acquisition of each new skill and the triumph over every nagging fear is a sort of ‘upgrade’ in their development. Pushing ever further against the laws of physics, gymnasts say yes, again and again, to the pain of everyday practice. Amor fati – love of one’s fate – is the mantra these athletes murmur as they chase fleeting moments of aerial freedom and corporeal power. A gymnastics routine is ostensibly based upon an established dynamic between an athlete, a piece of equipment, and gravity, with the vault (or balance beam, or uneven bars) serving simply as a piece of technology over which the gymnast temporarily exerts control. Yet an apparatus is much more than a means to a landing. When the 2020 Olympic gold medal gymnast Nina Derwael explains that “the bars speak to me, and in return I listen” (International Gymnast Online, 10 March 2021), she’s describing a relation in flux, ceaselessly becoming new in the time and space between bars. Gymnasts in flight crack open and make visible our human-defined order of things. 50 Philosophy Now

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The post-disciplinary anthropologist Tobias Rees is also speaking to such moments of possibility when he defines poetry as something that attempts to ‘‘capture that which cannot be captured’’ (After Ethnos, 2018, p.26). Forthcoming innovations in AI, biology, and cyborgization are similarly unfolding outside our taken-for-granted understandings of humanity, nature, and technology. Microbiome research throws into question where microorganisms end and the individual person begins. Like a case of the ‘twisties’ – a condition that renders a gymnast completely disoriented in the air – the philosophical vertigo our inventions and scientific discoveries induce can be debilitating, leaving us feeling rudderless, unsure of our identity and our relation to the world around us. They also bring to the fore pragmatic challenges for how we may most authentically and empathetically live amid these breakthroughs. For example, as gene technologies continue to expand, what limits, if any, should be placed upon parents who wish to ‘enhance’ their children’s intelligence or athletic aptitude through genetic splicing? Sorgner Steps Up Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a German philosopher based at John Cabot University in Rome, has been engaged with these questions for the past decade, and We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism (2021) tackles their intricacies head on. The title encapsulates Sorgner’s fundamental appeal to his readers. In order to most smoothly navigate and benefit from the next act of the Digital Age, when these technologies will begin to enter the human body, we must realize that since the dawn of Homo sapiens we have been ‘steered organisms’ (a literal translation of ‘cyborgs’) – that is, steering ourselves through a series of ‘upgrades’, including language acquisition, education, and vaccination. Brain-computer interfaces like Elon Musk’s Neuralink will simply be the next step in this long history of cyborgization – albeit one, Sorgner says, in which our capacity to guide our own evolution has gone exponential. But given the long history of human modification by humans, and the

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Natasha Beranek sees transhumanism get an upgrade, and Paul J. D’Ambrosio looks at the sorts of successes to which failure can lead.

benefit this has yielded us, modes of thinking that cast nature as ‘pure’ and ‘good’ while dismissing technology as ‘artificial’ and ‘bad’ are not only flawed, they unnecessarily hamper our potential to thrive. A self-identified transhumanist, Sorgner’s vision is significantly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche – a factor, he admits, that makes his trek through this philosophical minefield even more volatile, given Nietzsche’s misappropriation by the Third Reich and other eugenicists. As it stands, transhumanists already tend to receive one-sided portrayals in the media, being cast, Sorgner says, as ‘‘cold-hearted, blood-sucking, Silicon Valley billionaires.’’ Sorgner distances his vision of transhumanism from these more specious portrayals. He also takes pains to differentiate his ‘weak’ transhumanist approach from those of other notable transhumanists, such as Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, who upholds a Renaissance ideal of perfection that Sorgner finds implausible, as well putting forward as a ‘simulation’ argument [the idea that we are probably living Book Reviews

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mous, but freedom and health. Most human beings identify an increase of our healthy years with living a better life. Aging, Sorgner writes, ‘‘is the worst mass murderer in the world.’’ So aging should be approached as a disease rather than as an undoable process. And in order to prolong our ‘healthspan’ – the number of vital (not total) years we enjoy on this planet – we must take full advantage of the scientific knowledge and medical innovations that will come from the mass collection of a wide range of personal data. The maintenance of our health will inevitably be improved the more data is collected and analysed concerning correlations between aging, genes, and lifestyle choices. So unlike many speculative Silicon Valley transhumanists, who strive for ‘immortality’ via cryonics or mind-uploading, Sorgner’s pragmatism leads him to conclude that embracing Big Data offers our most realistic chance to promote the flourishing of all individuals. On a geopolitical scale too, in order to keep pace technologically with (say) China, it will be necessary for us to develop a democratic

a reluctant conclusion on Sorgner’s part: “I wish to stress very much that my analysis is not one about which I am happy, as I am aware that the risks and dangers for a liberal system are enormous.” Yet we’re only two clicks away from an abundance of social media evidence which indicates that we don’t cherish our privacy as much as we like to think we do. So to me, Sorgner is fairly convincing in his conclusion that what we actually fear about total surveillance is not a loss of privacy per se, but that we might be unfairly sanctioned for our genetics, disease states, personal preferences, or behaviors. All the more reason, he argues, that the norm of negative freedom against control or coercion must be culturally promoted and legally protected. However, “Norms and values are just as much fictions as money,” writes Sorgner – so it is left up to us to continue to strongly believe in the value of radical plurality, even as our digital privacy fades.

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method for collecting and using this data. Not only does the Chinese government already collect data in massive quantities, but its citizens are more amenable to it, given their relatively collectivist orientation towards subsuming the individual to the common good. The need to collect personal data en masse is

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Technology versus Freedom How receptive one is to such proposals from Sorgner or other transhumanists’ proposals is likely to be a reflection of how well one perceives liberalism to be currently working as a political model. This cannot be overstated. In We Have Always Been Cyborgs, underlying each of Sorgner’s proposals about the enhancement of parenting, education, sexuality, or morphological modification and reproductive technologies, is his allegiance to negative freedom, that is, to freedom from control or coercion. For Sorgner this is a core Enlightenment value, which aims to safeguard personal freedom from outside interference. So Sorgner’s ‘ethical nihilism’ would not condemn a (grown-up) brother and sister who mutually consent to sexual relations. But it would strongly reject the actions of a pedophile, who in pursuing his or her idiosyncratic drives is harming others. Certainly this is a stark example. Anthropologists have long observed incest, of varying degrees of closeness, to be a universal cultural taboo. Yet Sorgner’s view of negative freedom would override this as an absolute taboo, rendering it paternalistic and violent. With all of this freedom talk in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if readers who are new to Sorgner spontaneously spit out their morning cortados when they arrive at Cyborg’s section on digital privacy. I can already hear readers asking, “How is it not an utter contradiction for Sorgner to cherish a radically pluralistic concept of the good on the one hand, while on the other concluding that we must inevitably accept total surveillance via RFID chipping? How could we

ever truly safeguard our freedom if there’s no longer any privacy – if our biometric data is constantly being entered into an ‘Internet of Bodily Things’ database, for example?” Key to understanding Sorgner’s consent to the internet panopticon is his perspective that it isn’t freedom and privacy that are synony-

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inside an alien computer simulation, Ed] which Sorgner regards as largely irrelevant. Rather than focusing on more fantastical forms of ‘silicon-based’ humanity, such as mind uploading, Sorgner’s concept of the good life is one that stresses a ‘carbon-based’ practical relevance and fosters a greater plurality of avenues towards human flourishing. Yet even as a ‘positive pessimist’, Sorgner aligns himself with most transhumanists’ optimism about technological innovation. Yes, our lives are full of struggle, with moments of pleasure – espressos, sexual euphoria, meeting work deadlines – that are too brief, and few and far between. Considering how much vaccination, antibiotics, and anaesthetics – all recent developments in the grand scheme of things – have improved our lives, however, we should be hopeful that newly emerging technologies will continue to alleviate our suffering.

Nietzsche versus Tradition If the most promising means for promoting human flourishing are to be found within the April/May 2023

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carbon-based realm, how can we most responsibly engage with them? Here the Nietzschean flavor of Sorgner’s transhumanism fully emerges. Nietzsche, like Darwin, saw humans as being different from non-human animals only in degree rather than in kind. Despite this, a metaphysical understanding of persons as part material body and part immaterial mind or soul, has persisted in our social and legal systems, perhaps because they were heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian ethics. In Sorgner’s view, this is an immoral state of affairs, because it impinges on the degree to which we can make autonomous choices about our use of biotechnologies. He directs his discussion towards the decision-making of parents or parents-tobe. For example, moral decision about the use of pre-implantation testing (PGD) and in-vitro fertilisation, should be left to the potential parents, not the state. Where there is disagreement on reproductive technologies, Sorgner writes, “The opinion ought to be legalized in favor of more freedom.” Bioethical debates about personhood and what counts as ‘harm’ remain strongly enmeshed in Judeo-Christian metaphysics and Kantian ethics, adding kindling to what many are likely to view as Sorgner’s inflammatory conclusion that the ‘person-object dichotomy’ simply cannot be upheld. Unlike Jürgen Habermas – one of the most promi52 Philosophy Now

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nent German philosophers of the late twentieth century – Sorgner does not regard parents who would genetically enhance their children as threatening their children’s autonomy or using them as mere means to the parents’ end, in Kantian terms. As in many other places throughout Cyborgs, Sorgner supports his perspective by drawing an analogy between child-rearing and genetic enhancement. “In both cases,” he writes, “decisions are being made by parents concerning the development of their child, at a stage where the child cannot yet decide… Parents usually love their children and want them to have the best possible starting points in life. Of course, parental decisions do not always produce good results. But, as a rule of thumb, parental influence most often leads to better outcomes than those from chance or without any guidance.” Sorgner further counters Habermas’s other concerns about genetic modification, foremost among them, its seeming irreversibility – by referring to cutting-edge research in the fields of epigenetics, siRNA therapy, and gene silencing. In the wrap-up to Cyborgs, Sorgner attempts to resolve any lingering doubts that readers may have about the details of his transhumanist alignment with Nietzsche. There are certain aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking that Sorgner regards as immoral, such as his vision of a two-class ‘master and slave’ society. Such a hierarchical structure is deeply illiberal, and Sorgner cherishes liberalism above all else. Yet Sorgner finds Nietzsche’s basic impulses of self-discovery, truthfulness, and the will-to-power indispensable to a radically pluralistic understanding of perfection: “Someone lives a good life by following their very own idiosyncratic psychophysiological demands, their very own desires, passions and fantasies… [but] to become aware of one’s very own drive is much more difficult than is often believed.” Sorgner also offers Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence as providing a possible framework for life’s meaning, he says it is the avenue by which we can experience “that special moment, which is worth all the suffering [we] have to endure, as [we] know that this one special moment will recur again and again.” This is meaning founded on the Nietzschean idea that your life has moments worth repeating forever which make all of the suffering surrounding them worthwhile. Conclusions Transhumanism is not a religion, despite the focus that many of its retinue place on ethereal aims like immortality, disembodied

consciousness, and perfection. Nor can transhumanism be accurately glossed as an ‘ideology’, given its diversity of opinions on possible outcomes. We Have Always Been Cyborgs by contrast renders transhumanism much more ‘terrestrial’, demonstrating that it is better understood as a philosophicallyinformed positive attitude towards the use of technologies. It is interested in providing innovative options for our existence rather than introducing dystopian constraints on our individuality. The book encourages us to realize that before we can avail ourselves of emerging technologies, we need to do the work of questioning the boundaries between humanity, nature, and technology. If done well, this will inevitably lead to even more provocative questions: What do these categories even mean? How and why did we come to take them for granted? And what makes us feel that we need to cling to them so tightly? All around us possibilities are opening up for brand new ways of thinking and radically different options for living and being in the world. The sudden realisation of these possibilities can create the poetry of unanticipated liberation, like gymnasts in flight. And that, too, is perfection. © DR NATASHA BERANEK 2023

Natasha Beranek is an anthropologist. She is a graduate of the Transformations of the Human school in Berkeley, California and now edits the ‘Anthropology and Transhumanism’ book series at Trivent Publishing. A version of this review has been published in The Annals of the University of Bucharest, Philosophy Series. • We Have Always Been Cyborgs, by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Bristol University Press, 2021, £37 pb, 240 pages. ISBN: 1529219205

In Praise of Failure Costica Bradatan SCHOLARS ARE UNDER pressure to write books for general audiences: socalled ‘trade books’. These are books that not only can be read by non-academics, but that people would actually want to read. It’s a hard sell – in every sense. Many who write such books court popularity by appealing to a sort of authenticitybased ‘celebrate who you are’. Not that scholars should not be in the business of selfhelp – indeed, it might just be one of the humanities’ most important functions – but Book Reviews

Books The Titanic leaving Southampton on April 10th 1912. Good luck to her!

kitsch stories about ‘My experience with my Grandma one summer’, clichés like ‘How I learned to appreciate small things’, and anodyne tips like ‘It’s really up to you what you want to take from such-and-such philosophy’ do not really challenge readers. Such unabashed subservience to the reader’s existing opinions and feelings has nothing to do with philosophy. Or to write in that very fashion, I would say: ‘‘Those phrases make me sick!’’ By contrast, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (2023) is a book that nearly anyone can read, and yet it will spark reflection in even the most seasoned professor. Both highly readable and thoughtprovoking, Costica Bradatan challenges readers theoretically, but also, and perhaps more importantly, challenges them on a more practical level. And the topic is as unusual as it is timely. In our times of multiple crises, and especially for us who live in cultures where success is directly analogous to dignity, failure is something we all experience in penetrating ways. We viscerally felt the pangs of successive lapses in the normal patterns of life through the impact of Covid-19. Other largescale challenges, including those to democracy, to world order, and to the very survival of the planet, can cause us to fear failure across its full spectrum – from the harsh everydayness of our own blunders and defeats, to the broadest ‘failure of the human race’. In Praise of Failure speaks to our crises, to failure, and to everyone’s ability to take a step back and think – or to humbly think again. Book Reviews

Bradatan places this work squarely in the tradition of ‘self-help’, and claims to offer ‘failure-based therapy’ (p.2): Failure always humbles, and “In Praise of Failure is not about failure for its own sake… but about the humility that failure engenders, and the healing process that it triggers” (p.5). In this context, Bradatan offers four lessons about physical, political, social, and biological failure, to trigger reflection and ultimately healing in his readers. Failure is understood as a breakdown of predictability and control. It is experienced as ‘‘disconnection, disruption, or discomfort’’ in the face of our expectations. When normal or expected patterns break down, and we then feel empty, this is failure. Everyone experiences failure; it is part of each person’s past and future, and probably their present as well. However, the author is not interested in giving specific advice for dealing with general ways in which people fail; nor does he suggest particular strategies for developing humility. Instead In Praise of Failure traces the lives of those who lived with failure, and who learned from it. Today, ‘learning’ often refers to the acquisition of rules, theorems, principles, or facts. Even when we think of, for example, learning to drive, we imagine the driving instructor telling a young driver what to do and testing their knowledge. Yet experience is paramount, and more time on the road is the best way to become a better driver. But before an adolescent ever sits in the driver’s seat, there is much they already know about

driving. Having been a passenger for countless car rides, the youngster already knows a lot about the rules of the road, including the unwritten ones. Bradatan tackles the various arenas of failure through his well-honed biographical sketching skills. Drawing on diverse sources, from the French mystic Simone Weil, to Mahatma Gandhi, to the nihilist Romanian writer-philosopher E. M. Cioran, to Japan’s famous writer and failed coup instigator Yukio Mishima, and even the suicidal Stoic Seneca, Bradatan’s lessons are transmitted through learning about the lives of those who lived well in failure. Not a nihilist himself, the messages Bradatan draws out are, as he puts it, from someone who doesn’t always know how to smile. “We can,’’ he writes, ‘‘use the experience of failure to extricate ourselves from the entanglement of existence (physical, political, social, biological), with a view to gaining a better understanding of it, and in the hope of leading a more enlightened and wiser life” (p.232). In Praise of Failure does not promise potential lemonade from the bitterness. Sometimes failure is just failure, nothing more. We do not always ‘turn a new leaf’, ‘understand that everything happens for a reason’, or extract that ever-evanescent ‘silver lining’. We can learn that some demands are unreasonable, that our world and ourselves are ridden with cracks, and that there is a fundamental precariousness in all expectations of success. As the back cover blurb goes, Bradatan ‘‘breaches the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest.’’ In Praise of Failure will spark critical reflection in any reader, and provide lessons that are not merely parochial. Most refreshingly, it is not a mere celebration of the self and all the things one already thinks and feels. Rather, it challenges the assumption of success in a most cynical, upsetting, and (possibly) redemptive way: you will fail, and that might just be that. Despite lavishing praise on failures of all types, Bradatan fails miserably at failing. In Praise of Failure is, by any account, a great success. © PAUL J. D’AMBROSIO 2023

Paul J. D’Ambrosio is Professor of Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University, Shanghai. • In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, by Costica Bradatan, Harvard University Press, 2023, 272pp, £21.95 hb, ISBN: 0674970470

April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 53

Film

D

espite the numerous interpretations that have been made about its themes, the original Ghostbusters (1984, directed by Ivan Reitman) contains a glaring ethical problem which has been largely overlooked in the many years since it was first released. The problem is addressed very briefly within the film itself, when, during a montage depicting the main characters’ growing success, a copy of The Atlantic magazine flashes up with the headline ‘Do ghosts have civil rights?’. In response to the question, Matthew Phelan wrote a spoof article of that name, which focuses mainly on the legality or otherwise of ghostbusting practices. It also briefly compares ghosts with illegal immigrants. However, there remains a general lack of exploration of the moral question of ghost-catching within the Ghostbusters universe. This must in part be due to the simplicity and strength of the film’s prevailing gimmick – a group of maverick scientists catching and containing ghosts. Another difficulty with tackling the ethics of ghostbusting stems from the challenge of defining ‘ghosts’ themselves, not as metaphors, but as actual and existing entities. Much that has been written about these insubstantial beings has not really helped when trying to consider their ethical status.

Silence in the library!

54 Philosophy Now

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Thomas R. Morgan ponders the phantom pain and pleasure perspective. I want to simplify the question of whether or not ghosts should be busted by considering how Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer’s early system of ethics might be applied, given that Singer is well-known for taking into account non-human life in his particular form of utilitarianism. Plot In the Ghostbusters’ universe, ghosts quickly become an undoubted, objective reality, when the three main protagonists are called to investigate strange, possibly supernatural phenomena at the New York Public Library. After observing precariously stacked books, and slime (later termed ‘ectoplasm’) coating draws and shelves, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) soon come into contact with their first free-floating spook, which acts aggressively when they clumsily attempt to make contact. This encounter opens up a window of opportunity for our three unorthodox researchers. Ethical considerations aside, they take the risk of putting all of their (mainly Ray’s) resources into setting up business as ‘the Ghostbusters’. It is unclear what the primary mission of this organization is: is it to continue their academic aspirations, of bringing scientific rigor to the field of the paranormal? Or is it to rid the public of troublesome supernatural entities – collectively called ‘ghosts’? Winston Zeddemore, who joins the Ghostbusters later in the story, is the only member who is clearly honest and transparent about his motives, prioritising the "paycheck" over his beliefs regarding the paranormal.There are clearly differences of interest between the individual Ghostbusters, but it would seem that the latter is their primary motivation, given not only their moniker but also given that their financial need is better met through the removal of ghosts than through studying them. After a successful period of catching ghosts (including the ghost later known as ‘Slimer’), and of storing them in a laserbased containment facility in the basement of their headquarters/living accommodation (a reconstituted fire station), the

Ghostbusters are challenged officially. Walter Peck (William Atherton Knight) from the Environmental Protection Agency questions their methods, particularly the containment facility. But this questioning is on the basis of their creating an environmental hazard, not for ignoring the interests of the ghosts they have ensnared. Peck’s distrust of the Ghostbusters quickly becomes personal, and he attains legal permission to shut down the ghost containment unit. As a result its unwilling inhabitants are freed and the Busters themselves subsequently arrested. The ensuing chaos caused by the release of the ghosts is magnified by an apocalyptic threat from an ancient deity called Gozer who employs two lesser gods Zuul and Vinz to possess two neighbours, Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) and Louis Tully (Rick Moranis). Gozer uses their apartment building as a portal into this world and as the epicenter for his destructive power. The Mayor realises the value of the incarcerated Ghostbusters and they are duly released. Eventually they use their ghostbusting protonpacks to close the portal, preventing Gozer from causing further destruction. The Dubious Ethics of Ghostbusting I don’t want to try to give a comprehensive definition of what a ghost is. Notable philosophers, such as William James and Henry Sidgwick, have researched and remained open-minded about the possibility of their existence. C.E.M. Joad entertained the idea that ghosts equate to the mental self of a deceased individual (possibly like a bundle of perceptions and ideas), assuming at least a temporary post-mortem existence. Dan Aykroyd, who co-wrote the film, is a believer himself, and has described ghosts as a kind of ‘physical residue’. However, even if we accept such a reductionist definition, it wouldn’t necessarily remove the moral implications of catching and trapping ghosts. After all, defining living humans as purely material beings, as many now do, doesn’t automatically condone their mistreatment. Importantly, in the Ghostbusters universe, there are seven classifications of ghosts, taken

choice of whose life to save, the interests of an adult monkey could outweigh those of a human foetus, for example. Apart from possibly having a sharper awareness of pleasure and pain, the adult monkey arguably has more invested in life, is possibly part of a primitive community, and has greater environmental awareness than the foetus. Given then that Singer’s criterion for

Film Jeremy Bentham (RIP), ‘head’ of the Philosophy Dept at University College London. (He requested his body to be put on display there after his death.)

moral consideration is sentience and the interests which arise from it, why not include ghosts? If we do, the question becomes, does the pain of the ghosts busted outweigh that of the human pleasure or happiness resulting from them being busted? If it does, we ought not to bust them, on this moral scheme. In terms of the acknowledgement, respect, and protection of any conscious being, utilitarianism is a bit of a doubleedged sword. It doesn’t assign rights arbitrarily based on species or kind; but by this same token, it therefore also removes the automatic taboos around some medical practices, such as embryo research and abortion. On the other hand, it potentially expands our consideration to all lifeforms and their

needs. This would imply that like any other sentient beings, ghosts shouldn’t automatically be protected (or left to haunt hotels); but equally, that they shouldn’t be automatically dismissed as morally worthless ‘vermin’ to be trapped and exterminated. Under this form of utilitarianism, only if human interests can be proven to outweigh the ghost’s should the apparition be subject to removal (but not necessarily to incarceration). Set in this context, the question arises: does the human desire to have a tidy, well-organized library outweigh a ghost’s enjoyment of book stacking and sliming? © THOMAS R. MORGAN 2023

Thomas R. Morgan is a teacher of Religious Studies, Philosophy and Ethics at Westcliff High, England.

FILM IMAGES © COLUMBIA PICTURES 1984

from the fictional Tobin’s Spirit Guide. The only class that has no mental awareness at all is Class 1. This is significant when one considers that even a sentient (that is, limited to sensations, no language) level of consciousness would indicate that the being has some interests. If a being can experience sensations, it can perhaps experience ones it would rather not... And, moreover, it can be argued that if a being has interests, it becomes subject to moral consideration. This is the view that Peter Singer applied to non-human animals: they’re sentient, so they have moral rights, since they can experience pleasure or pain, and have an interest in experiencing the one and in not experiencing the other. Originally laid out in his 1975 book Animal Liberation, Singer’s moral philosophy capitalises on the classical utilitarianism, established by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Concerned exclusively with the ‘two sovereign masters’ of human concern, pleasure and pain, Bentham’s utilitarianism can be encapsulated in the imperative, that we should ‘always aim to bring about the greatest happiness (or pleasure) for the greatest number of people’ in our moral conduct. If the outcome of our action shows that human happiness has been maximised by it, then we have acted correctly. Here actions generally considered to be wrong according to other rule-based ethical systems are still perfectly acceptable, since it is the ‘hedonic’ consequence (the balance of pleasure and pain produced) which is the measure of rightness or wrongness, and this is often thought to be maximised by the imposition of ethical rules. But Singer questioned why morality, and, more specifically, utilitarian calculations, should only consider human happiness. He argued that to actively disregard the happiness, or more broadly, the interests, of other sentient creatures, equates to a form of discrimination, or as Singer termed it, to ‘speciesism’. (In preemptive agreement with this sentiment, Bentham himself once suggested that not considering the interests of all beings could one day be seen as ‘the hand of tyranny’.) On this more inclusive basis, Singer recommends a radical form of utilitarianism wherein an agent must weigh up the interests of all conscious beings affected in the making of a decision. This could even mean that in some situations the interests of nonhuman lifeforms are prioritised – particularly when the pain or pleasure produced is undeniably greater than those of the humans in question. Controversially, Singer argued that if you were faced with a

April/May 2023 l Philosophy Now 55

Reflections on Taking allis T in Wonderland hose who meet your columnist face to face rather than through the mediation of the printed word may note some changes in his appearance. The informal carbon dating of a glance suggests that he will in the not too distant future start losing his battle with the most universal of the habits of the material world, of which the body he has taken for granted is a small sample. The habit in question is captured in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the disorder of a closed system tends to increase. In other words, things tend to get messier over time. Appearances notwithstanding, your columnist’s body is a highly ordered system. It is therefore a miracle that it has maintained that order for so long, transforming relatively disordered stuff such as fish and chips or inhaled air into elements that are themselves individual miracles of order – cells, tissues, and organs. These work collectively to mop up the side-products of the processes of maintaining stability and material constancy in the face of the slings and arrows of everyday fortune. This ‘tidying up as I go along’ is necessary to deal with the consequences of going along whilst maintaining the very possibility of a life shaped at least in part his ideas of what it should be. Thus, astonishingly, he has remained a going concern, and one that looks (very) roughly the same from day to day. Even people who last saw him decades ago recognise him – perhaps after a moment or two of hesitation – when they bump into him in the street. Alas, the exquisitely constructed network of dynamic equilibria that make up the human body is sustained only for the briefest of blinks in the eye of eternity. Things start to drift beyond the point of correction. But RT will not give up without a fight. He does whatever he can to keep himself at a distance from the formless chaos of entropy. The fight takes many forms – none stranger than the action flagged up in the title of this piece: measuring his blood pressure with a view to keeping it within certain limits. But before we focus on this way of curating one’s own body, we need to step back a little.

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56 Philosophy Now

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My Blood Pressure Raymond Tallis finds himself within himself. Matter Matters One way we can look at our bodies is as portions of matter. When we do so, something we otherwise take for granted becomes visible and surprising: that unlike 99.99999 etc % of the other items in the universe, these pieces of matter matter to themselves. We still have no idea how this could have come about, given the standard story, according to which the universe has for most of its history consisted of insentient stuff. Pieces of matter mattering to themselves – things that mind what happens to the matter of which they are composed and which surrounds them inasmuch as it impinges on themselves – have been very recent arrivals in the order of things. We can be confident that it took matter billions of years to start bothering about itself. It took even more time for it to matter in the way your columnist matters to himself; for stuff to give rise to persons like him fretting over their own future. At what point bits of matter came to suffer or enjoy their own states and became preoccupied with seeking opportunities for and avoiding threats to themselves is not clear. Despite what animists and panpsychists claim, we may be sure that planets, rocks, rivers, or bacteria do not worry about themselves. But what makes it even more puzzling is that most parts of the human body (kidneys, lymph glands, heart…) are not concerned about themselves either, even though they add up to something that does. How and why, in the rather monotonous story of the unfolding of a universe indifferent to itself, fretting entered the picture is not clear. It is not even clear whether the question is one that is best approached by empirical enquiry or by abstract reflection. In any case, we have no idea how the nonconscious mechanical evolution of material objects – of stuff and energy and forces – generated entities that awaken out of dead mechanism, at least temporarily – such that little parishes of deliberate doings, sparks of agency, awoke in the boundless desert of mere happenings.

What is particularly striking is the sheer variety and complexity of the ways that fretting has developed in us humans. Heidegger’s Dasein – ‘that being whose being is an issue for itself’ – has so many issues, and so many ways of pursuing them. Which is my cue to examine the extraordinary business of taking one’s own blood pressure. This action is not only a manifestation of a piece of matter mattering to itself, but is remote from those main manifestations of ‘mattering to oneself’ – the four Fs of fleeing, feeding, fighting, and sexual behaviour – that are seen elsewhere in the kingdom of living entities that matter to themselves. The Pressure’s On The first thing to note about taking one’s blood pressure is that it is a reminder of the many complex modes in which we engage with our own bodies. While we are identified with our flesh and bones, we are at the same time distanced from them in numerous ways – ways that are multiplied and expanded by the collective consciousness of our fellow humans and the discourse through which collective humanity endeavours to apprehend itself. This distance allows us to approach our own bodies as instances of a class of entities; a class that sometimes extends beyond the species to which we belong to encompass other kinds of living creature – as when we see ourselves as organisms. At any rate, making my body the object of measurements performed by that body is an odd way of being an embodied subject. And recording our own blood pressure is even more strange than counting our fingers, measuring our step length, or taking our pulse. Even these simple actions can get very complicated when we use our fingers to count, walk to pace out a distance, or use our own pulse to time an event. Think of the iconic moment, crucial to the scientific revolution, when, using his pulse as a chronometer, Galileo timed the movement of a pendulum – according to legend a chandelier swinging in a cathedral – and

BLOOD_PRESSURE_CHECK DELAEL 2016 CREATIVE COMMONS 4

thus made a discovery fundamental to mechanical science and to the development of accurate, reliable clocks – in short, to the emergence of the modern world. Taking our blood pressure, however, is yet more exotic, exemplifying how we inspect our own bodies by the torchlight of so many intersecting bodies of knowledge. The blood pressure story goes back to Stephen Hales, a clergyman and polymathic scientist, who in 1733 first measured blood pressure, in a horse’s neck, by inserting fine tubes into its arteries and recording the height to which the column of blood rose (an odd use of a horse, admittedly). It was a long time before his egregious and seemingly idle curiosity bore medical fruit. But in the following centuries it became clear that elevated blood pressure was associated with changes in arteries that could cause strokes and heart attacks and other medical disasters. Subsequently there have been countless vast population studies of the influence of hypertension on cardiovascular health. The most notable followed three generations of the people of Framingham, USA. It generated over three thousand peerreviewed scientific papers, and led to the guidelines for the control of blood pressure. This is the great hinterland behind my

strange interaction with my body. I apply the sphygmomanometer cuff and press a button on the machine. The cuff tightens its grip on my left arm as if I am about to be taken aside for further questioning. Since I am determined that anxiety about the result shall not be a confounding factor elevating that result, I mobilise the magic of modern technology: I have Bill Evans’ ‘Peace Piece’ playing gently in the background (notwithstanding that the infinitely wise and sensitive fingers of that genius of the piano have long since lost touch with their owner and dissolved in the rain). The cuff continues inflating itself, puffing and panting against the resistance of my arm, finds what it is looking for, and allows itself to deflate. Figures fill the little screen on the machine. I note the systolic pressure (when my heart is contracting), and the diastolic pressure (when my heart is dilating). These numbers, capturing certain facts about the body attached to my name, remind me that what goes on inside my skin is utterly impersonal, though its consequences are quite the reverse. It would be an understatement to say that the ‘It’ and the ‘I’ of RT are joined at the hip, even though there is a different story attached to each. The stories told in RT’s biography, his CV,

allis T in Wonderland his toings and froings as he lives out his ‘being an issue for himself’, are remote from the fluctuations and corrections that constitute the life of the polyphasic system in dynamic equilibrium that is RT’s body, upon which the stories depend. Sometimes there are dramatic intersections of the I and the It – as when his blood sugar or blood pressure falls so much that he loses consciousness. Otherwise, although the life of the one depends on the life of the other, RT’s body is largely a Dark Continent hidden from the person whose body it is. Measuring my blood pressure is a response to a rather abstract fear, though nothing could be more overwhelmingly concrete than the realisation of that fear. The transformation of my life, of my sense of who and what I am, even of my very capacity for ‘I amming’ the It of my body, resulting from a bite being taken out of my brain by a stroke, or the ontological rebadging from conscious subject to material object delivered by a fatal heart attack, could not be more serious. To populate that future with quantified possibilities drawn from the studies on the good people of Framingham, and the many millions of other individuals unknown to me who have participated in clinical trials, is one of the most striking manifestations of the distinctive mattering-to-itself of an embodied subject who tends his body with an eye to its future and his own. The story does not end with me recording my blood pressure. As Marx might have said, it is not enough to interpret one’s blood pressure; the point is to change it. So I add my findings to the chart provided by my GP so that they can inform our discussion as to what to do next. As a compliant subject, I will pop the pills. They will vanish into the intimate unknown, where, hopefully, they will head off any cardiovascular catastrophes that will so damage the material object that is my body that it will no longer matter to itself, and the flow of columns will cease. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2023

Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Freedom: An Impossible Reality, is out now. April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 57

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Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the many entrants not included.

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ime does not exist without change,” said Aristotle. Until recently, most physicists and cosmologists agreed with him. Recently, however, another argument is being offered: time needs to exist for change to happen. This means time must have existed before the Big Bang, since something, however small, had to change to ignite it. The relationship between time and gravity is, I believe, the key to the origin of the universe. Time could be considered a viscous fluid through which movement happens, preventing us from moving forward too quickly and getting ahead of ourselves. In Einstein’s special theory of relativity, by travelling close to the speed of light, time becomes slower for the traveller, so that when they return to their point of departure they will be younger than those they left behind. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, time changes in relation to dense objects. Continuing with the viscous fluid analogy, this means that the viscosity around gravitationally significant objects is reduced, again allowing matter and energy to pass at a different speed relative to the external observer. Time may also be considered a one-way valve, preventing us from going backwards. Entropy is part of the life-cycle of the creation and death of the universe. It will not let the broken glass reassemble nor the flame return to the match. Entropy, like rust on a shipwreck, will eventually degrade all organisation of matter in our universe. The remnants may be drawn to one another once again, due to gravity, to be crushed into a singularity, gaining gravitational potential ready for the next Big Bang. In conclusion, time is a passive fluid in which we exist. It does not travel, it is inert and exists everywhere. It is the catalyst that allows energy and matter to move, combine, and break apart, creating the universe, and, through entropy, destroying it. No physicists were hurt (or consulted) in the creation of this theory. RICHARD TOD DESBOROUGH, NORTHANTS

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t is conceivable that we could have observed events ‘all at once’, in a ‘timeless’ state, but we don’t. We observe them sequentially. It is this observed sequence of events that generates, and indeed defines, the passage of time. It may be argued that there are two kinds of time: time as measured by a clock, and time as we perceive it. Einstein argued that clock time – which we normally regard as defining ‘objective’ time – is partially interchangeable with space for moving observers, so that the dimension of time effectively becomes part of four-dimensional spacetime. If we view Einstein’s spacetime as a kind of landscape, the time trajectory for an individual may

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then be viewed as a journey across this landscape. This view of time does have some extraordinary consequences, however. It apparently implies that past, present and future events all co-exist in a ‘timeless’ state, but they are, nonetheless, observed sequentially. Also, Einstein found that events that are viewed as ‘simultaneous’ by one observer are not necessarily seen as such by other observers. It is thus apparent that time is not so much a ‘dimension’ as an observed sequence of events, envisioned as a trajectory across spacetime. But it is the observer who perceives – and indeed generates – the phenomenon that we call the passage of time. Without the observer there can be no time; and, indeed, no universe. ANTHONY BURNS BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE

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n PN Issue 153’s Letters, Dr Shaw writes that “time could be the simple running down of the Universe, or increase in its entropy [and our death] when rising internal entropy overwhelms all the body’s entropy-reducing mechanisms” (p.48). In 1996, Prof Cox, particle physicist, wrote of the relentlessness of entropy: “The Universe, bound by the laws of nature, [all] must decay” (Wonders of the Universe, p.228). Earlier, he had remarked that, “Time is woven into the ... fabric of the cosmos” – and into our being, subject also to entropy (p.200). Against the vastness of the cosmos, what of us? Our evolutionary and cultural history supplies a means to understand our time in the world. Martin Heidegger provides insights into our being in it and of it. In his Being and Time we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into the world, without volition, and rushing toward the death of our own being; bound by the structure of time – its past, present and future dimensions. We can recall or come to know of our past, or that of human history, while living in the present and anticipating the future. Here, time is what makes happening possible: the past has happened, the present is happening, and the future has yet to happen. Yet we can, in the present, imaginatively appreciate the nature and immensity of time outside our experience. Nevertheless, such anthropocentrism may be challenged. The question, ‘What is time for all species?’ seems apt. COLIN BROOKES WOODHOUSE EAVES, LEICESTERSHIRE

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dmund Husserl addressed core philosophical issues around time in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. He considered how we continuously create a meaningful now. If we did not perceive duration in the living present, things such as music and language could not be understood. Somehow What Is Time?

? our reality is created as we integrate and retain in our minds a perceived past and an anticipated future. Thus our continual awareness of present meaning relies upon a development of a subjective awareness of time. Following Husserl, William James described the now as the ‘specious present’, saying that we have to be able to comprehend duration to generate meaning and create our conscious awareness. We evolved ‘time consciousness’, to marry our experienced subjective awareness with an assumed external reality. Time was also at the core of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He considered temporality as the centre of our being. The present, he said, is not a series of nows flowing by, but an opportunity to ‘resolutely seize the moment’. This allows us to take control and shape our potential future by co-ordinating what he describes as a ‘having-been-ness’ with ‘what might be’. Heidegger differed from Husserl in moving away from a purely subject focus to a ‘being in the world’ approach. In a sense, he sees us as ‘embodied time’, with an awareness of the finiteness of our time being essential to living life to the full. DAVID WARD LIVERPOOL For Heidegger, Time is death, Eternity is void, Human mortality’s the measure of all, Forever draws no rasping breath. Time is the pearl at the heart of Being An hourglass shaping human living To be is to be Temporality Knowledge of death’s what sets us free: The end of Dasein’s possibility. And like that beautiful fabled city Of far and ancient Kermanshah Man knows himself through having-been Finite, God-less, there, and thrown, When the future merges with memory The horizon is mine, and mine alone. For Heidegger, Time is ekstase, A triad convergence of destiny: Past with present together with Tomorrow’s maybe yet-to-be. Only then can we decide how and what to be. Yes, Time, for him, was no imposter No thieving monster or grieving mirror, But primordial unity. Augenblick augenblick, Glance at the starry sky, Watch the moment sail on by, And listen to the dulcet dreaming sigh Of the idle clock’s slow, soft tick. Time is resoluteness… Time is resoluteness, hear it tick For in that deep dark German forest Of endless wandering whys, Dasein too, in time, must die. BIANCA LALEH TOTNES, DEVON What Is Time?

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s a student of mathematics and physics, I am accustomed to working with the concept of time. There is arguably no more common and clearly defined variable in physics equations than time. However, what is time? We define the second as the basic unit of time, but what is a second? It seems that, unlike other mathematical concepts that can be understood purely by our intellect, one must experience time to know what it is. But how do we experience time? ‘I don’t have time’, is one of the most familiar expressions. We use it all the time without understanding its implications. It seems that the nature of time forbids us from possessing time, because, first of all, it is not material, and second, even if you decide to dedicate one hour of your time to something, you can never be certain that something else will not prevent you from doing it. Hence, you never have time. On the other hand, time also does not have you. For example, being free to take your life allows you to ‘freely’ escape time’s grasp. If you do not have time and time doesn’t have you, what is left is either that you are time, or that time, at least as we conceive it, does not exist. We tend to make sense of time in terms of the past, present and future, which are constructs of our consciousness to make sense of our experiences and memories. While animals have memories, they do not ponder the future nor reminisce about the past, and hence they do not experience time in anything like the way we do. The past and the future are not physical places where we can go, and if they’re just arbitrary constructs to make sense of time, what can be inferred is that time is the present, and hence, we are time. In other words, we exist because of time, but time also exists because of us, because if we were not able to think about the past and the future, even if physical reality remained, time, at least as we know it, wouldn’t exist. FILIPPOS GEORGIOS SARAKIS ATHENS

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ince the dawn of philosophy the subject of time has been discussed, debated, dissected, and served as a point of contention for many scientists and philosophers. Should one have sided with Parmenides, who maintained that nothing moved, or with the cascading flux of Heraclitus, who believed in constant change? Then there was Zeno of Elia and his paradoxes dismissing motion, saying: “What is in motion comes neither in the place it is, nor in one in which it is not.” There are no guidelines in grasping the enormity of the question: ‘What is Time?’. One can only perhaps define what it is not: it is neither past, present, nor future. None of its tenses are immobile. Not the past, because it has already passed; not the present, because it is always morphing into the past; and certainly not the future, which having glided through the present, melts into the past. The one undisputed reality from all this, is that it all becomes memory. I conclude that our presence on this earth is the reason for the existence and awareness of the concept of ‘time’. I am also tempted to pose the question: What void would time occupy if we did not exist to acknowledge it? Would the universe without the consciousness of time have a beginning and an end within its own temporal limits? MARINA HALL CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 61

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ime to choose. Am I a ‘reductionist’ like Leibniz, believing that time has no meaning unless it is referred to objects that can relate an experience of change? Or am I a Newtonian ‘absolutist’, believing that time exists independent of anything? My initial answer is I want to be both! McTaggart’s theories want me to believe time is unreal because it can be either tenseless (‘B time’) or tensed (‘A time’). This rather confusing analysis seems to suggest that while I want to be both, I should be neither. Further choices are offered between ‘presentism’ and ‘eternalism’. A presentist says that the only aspect of time one can experience is the present, as the past is no longer present, and the future is indeterminate, and so also can be said not to exist. I have a real problem with this: it’s like telling me the Holocaust didn’t happen! So I must be an eternalist, where time can be the fourth dimension, where past, present, and future continually exist. To me, time is both absolute and relative. Absolute, since it is intellectual arrogance to believe that if we did not exist, neither would time. We all are just moments in the absoluteness of time. As Nietzsche stated, “how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks with nature. There are eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with human intellect, nothing will have happened.” But my temporal moment is significant: it is a lifetime in the relativity of my existence. It is also collective: I am part of a collective humanity, with a known past, an uncertain present, and many possible futures. But how will this collective intellect decide the future? As the saying goes, only time will tell. JACK PARR BEAUMARIS, AUSTRALIA “Before me, there was no time, after me there will be none. With me it is born, with me it will die.” Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum III, II (1655)

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his mystical verse of a German poet reveals the necessity of experience for time to exist. Later, Immanuel Kant made a similar claim, that “if we take away the subject… then not only the relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us” (The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781). Kant called time the form of inner sense, the pure form of intuition. He further described time as an a priori (prior to experience) notion that is necessary to allow us to comprehend sense experiences; but it is not a substance in itself. Instead, time is the framework within which “the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.” Along with Kant, I believe time is a universal organizing principle our minds use to structure our experience of events. Although time is ‘empirically real’ (that is, not a mere illusion, but an accurate way of experiencing things), Kant also asserted that time is ‘transcendentally ideal’. In his transcendental idealism, Kant encourages our minds to transcend direct experience to discover the necessary conditions of that same experience. Kant calls this sort of knowledge ‘synthetic a priori’ – meaning, truths of reason which add to our knowledge but which are necessary and universal. Kant concluded: “Time is not an empirical concept. For neither co-existence nor perception would be perceived by us if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation a priori.” We need time in order to experience, so time cannot be found in experience. 62 Philosophy Now

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? So Kant showed that time is not a fully objective reality, as Newton supposed, but nor is it a mere figment of our imagination, as Hume claimed. Instead, time is a necessary way in which we think about the world, rather than the way in which the world really is. We are only able to discover the conditions that regulate our knowledge of the world as it is experienced. We can never tell in what ways reality as it exists in itself independent of experience is spatial and temporal, but only that the sensed world of appearance must be so for us. Hence, any effort to reason about the nature of time as a thing-in-itself will be a waste of time. NELLA LEONTIEVA SYDNEY

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ime is the currency of change, and a system of measurement. This involves correlating different states through a mediating standard, be it a clock or the rotation of the earth. The same process is used with currency. The market value of different items is correlated through a common standard, be it the pound, the dollar, or the peso. The analogy between the two systems can be shown through the expressions ‘spend time’, ‘waste time’, ‘invest time’ and ‘save time’. We think of time and currency in the same way. I know there are those who want more than a measurement. They grasp the immensity of the universe. They notice the almost infinite succession of past states lined up behind us, and so intuit that there must be an empty temporal container which the universe fills as it continuously rolls over into the future. This is the view that things happen within time, as though time is some kind of metaphysical container. I do not believe this intuition is supported. The universe is constantly in motion. Change is a feature of every object and their relationships. Change is a rearrangement of things. This does not compel us to believe that the universe was birthed into some kind of container, either spatial or temporal. It is self-contained, and the change is internal. There are relationships, including temporal, between various objects or events; but if two people are in a relationship, we don’t think of their relationship as an extra third entity, except in poetic ways. Similarly, there is no requirement that something called ‘time’ exists in order to account for the existence of change. Rather, we use the idea of time to order a succession of states and to compare durations. Time is a kind of modelling, and a model is distinct from the thing represented. So time has the same ontological status as monetary value or mathematics; but not as a coin, a clock, or gravity. Perpetually standing at the most recent state of the universe, we seek knowledge that a future is waiting to receive us. Time does not provide that assurance. A more compelling answer to the uncertainties of the future is inertia or heat. MIKE MALLORY EVERETT, WASHINGTON

The next question is: How Will Humanity End? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Email the Editor. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 12th June 2023. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address. What Is Time?

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The Last Thought Everything must end eventually, even consciousness. A short story by Grant Bartley. he last man sits in the tower of the last house, in the middle of the last oasis, and weeps, for he knows that he is dying. Between the waterfalls of his tears he’s recording his last thoughts. Shaking his forefinger at the machine floating in front of him, he says, “I remember when they used to say, at some time in the future the human race will no longer be even a memory. There will be a moment when the human race, and its entire history, will be thought of for the last time.” He looks around him at his study of ancient and eclectic books and paraphernalia, and dry dust in occasional rays of hard sunlight, and mutters, “This is that time.” He stares through the stone-framed glassless window beside him, out to the horizon of rocky hills which borders a woodland green and lush under the blue sky and the diamond sun, But the energy that’s keeping this paradise alive in the desert world means it can only produce enough food for one descendant at time. And it’s been such a long time. Adam the Ironically Named is over four hundred and twenty years old, and has a beard to match. He’s also the thousandth clone in a line of inhuman recreations of the last natural human. But he’s long determined that this will be his last regeneration.

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He’s determined that his will be the last version of the facsimiles through which flows his mind – a consciousness he can only believe must still be the real thing, even now. But now, after a thousand iterations, resurrection has lost its allure, in this dying world. His heart feels as dry as the wasteland that surrounds his retreat, just beyond sight, just beyond the ridge of the hills, all across an Earth covered in sand and rock and rivulets and shrubs. This tower is also the heart of the library of the accumulated wisdom of humanity’s aeon. It’s what’s left of over a hundred million years of thought and striving. But of the media in many forms here, Adam likes best the books. With a few exceptions, these are kept vacuum-sealed in cool, dark vaults of shelves that delve into caverns. The texts reach back to the scratched pictograms and hieroglyphs that document the beginning of writing. They’re stored alongside many digital formats, stretching back to silver discs. He cannot remember the last time he descended into the Library’s utter depths. Adam gazes unfocused at a manuscript open upon a stand, and reflects, “The Library contains the results of the myriad millenia of millenia in which the thought of humanity has struggled against its own limitations. These include starting from an

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PARROT © TUXYSO 2013 CREATIVE COMMONS 3

almost absolute ignorance, whilst being stubbornly protective of an ego that says that each major step in understanding is the ultimate step. On the contrary, the Library has histories, and histories of histories, and histories of histories of histories, detailing cycles within cycles of the rise and fall of human culture across the world, through millions of years.” He knows that humanity is ancient now. He calculates that it’s about one hundred and fifty-three million years old, but its age is beyond clean summation. “How many hundreds of millions of years is it that humans have been on this planet?” he asks the droid before him. “Maybe about two hundred million years?” the robot says. Charlie is an obedient scribe, hovering about obsequiously as Adam mumbles his meditations into his lenses – which wisdom the robot immediately tries to sculpt into holo images in the space in front of them, instantly turning the words into solid light, white against a navy blue space. He’ll probably edit it all into something epic later, add clips. He has enough of them. It’s a shame there’ll be no-one around to watch it. Even Ariel has gone missing. Adam asks, “So how about this for a an overview of history? This is for the Memoires, Charlie, by the way –” signalling that the droid should record the coming narrative, for historical reasons if nothing else: “The first million years or so of Homo sapiens were all animal agitations. During this period we were always fighting ourselves for territory and status, just like – what were they called again, Charlie?” “Children,” responds the robot. “Yes, children. We were like children, in that we had not yet learnt to control our responses. But after we’d realised, to our apparent great surprise, that we hadn’t destroyed ourselves, we really began to take the idea of human self-benefit seriously. We also knew that the Earth’s a sphere and the Sun is dying, slowly – after slowly heating up... Back in those heady days of our youth, full of hormones and animal instincts, we believed we could colonise the stars with only a little ingenuity. So we sent out many ships, full of hope. And certainly we did have bases on the planets and moons of our dying Sun for millions of years – as Methuselah, my House Intelligence, has told me –“ “That’s me!” the deep voice of the House Server says. “We had successful colonies at various times on the Moon,

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Mars, Titan...” – the orbs are displayed before them in quick holographic fly-pasts – “We even bred a new species of human for the oceans of Enceladus, under the ice of that moon of Saturn. They disappeared beneath alien waves for separate evolution there for over three million years, I’m told. Then, slowly, the ice melted, and radiation storms stripped Enceladus of its liquid… not unlike what the Sun has done more slowly for the Earth. Some of Enceladus’s merpeople came and lived in the seas of Earth, even thrived, though most of the survivors of that race reconverted to traditional humanity (RIP). The remaining fish people died many million of years later, when the last of Earth’s habitable seas dried up. They were the last living seas we know of anywhere. That was twenty million years ago or so now, I’m told. A blink of an eye for the Cosmos. Indeed, the last river still flowed through my garden not two million years ago. Now we’ve had to put a field around the farm to keep the moisture in. The bubble of life in the universe has grown very small indeed.” On this cue, Charlie turns to gaze through a window, and spots a parrot and a rabbit enjoying the opportunities afforded them by the vegetation. “I’ve seen videos of the ruins of our civilisation on Titan – which is now an orange graveyard swept over by the dust of time and the ice of death. And in its day it challenged Earth for the Solar System! Now the whole Solar System is dead – except for this last remaining oasis of a garden.” As if to verify his pessimism, the old man holds his hand up to stall the robot in its recording, so that he can gaze out of the stone-framed portal to the crescent Moon as it hangs in the sky above the trees and the hill line. His eyes are watering and his vision is poor, and he doesn’t know who he’s recording his last thoughts for, in this empty, empty universe. He’s been waiting for so long, but there has been no word from the cosmos – ever. This also means no word back from humanity’s hopes. “As I was saying, in the heady days of the youth of humanity, we set out to colonise the stars, as our dreams and our survival instincts contrived to compel us. Our seeding of the vast void was especially hopeful during our Second Million – as it is relayed down to me in legend as being. Isn’t that right, Methuselah?” “Yes. As the legends have it.” Adam picks up a curled scroll from his possibly genuine Napoleonic writing desk, and waves it in front of Charlie’s recording eyes, as if this may in some way confirm the idea: “There must have been a billion ships over a million years of hopeful dissemination, all looking for the planet or moon that would support human life long-term. And the chance was about one in a billion that they’d find one. To be good for proper, long-term human colonisation, they’d need to find, at about 1G, a water-bearing oxygenated world still primitive enough not to have a human-poisonous ecosystem. That means first, not covered with animals and plants that we can’t eat, or probably, touch. But even more demanding, they’d need that oxygenated atmosphere to not be full of fatal alien bacteria – and most alien bacteria probably would be fatal insofar as they’d react with human biochemistry at all. Basically, the pioneers would need to find an Earth-type planet where harmless cyanobacteria-equivalents had generated an oxygen atmosphere, but where nothing else had evolved except perhaps a few stromatolites. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any of our ships ever found

Fiction their sterile Eden to plant themselves on. We never heard back from any that did, anyway. Or from anyone else, either.” As he speaks, he vaguely watches the visuals from Charlie dance and shimmer in the centre of a room shadowed with holey tapestries against most of the windows, and smoky with the woody incense from the summer sap he takes from the trees in his arboretum. Yes, he fondly remembers walking those groves, just last summer. The flowers were resplendent, but the beauty so bittersweet. Adam nods at his robot again and starts to pronounce: “By year One Million of the human race, the Solar System had pretty much settled into a routine, with peaceful trade between species being the political norm, the inevitable up-and-down waves of historical motion notwithstanding. Indeed, we were thriving to the point of diversification. But apart from Enceladus, by the end of Three Million, the various exospecies had extincted, overwhelmed by the implacable ecological forces arrayed against them – by which I mean the fatally freezing cold and lack of breathable air of the globes on which they had rooted themselves. Inevitably, we did try terraforming Mars off and on over a couple of dozen million years or so, as the legends heroically relate… But, as the records show, we couldn’t get the atmosphere to stick around at such a low gravity without turning Mars’ magnetic field back on, a feat that our rather less than divine technology never got close to achieving. And try as we might – and we did actually try – we never managed to modify the human phenotype enough to breed people who never needed to breathe oxygen at all. Oxygen is just too deep in our biochemistry. And as for the artificial life... Well, that’s a whole other set of memories entirely.” To avoid looking at Charlie, Adam glances along the shelves of books at his right, his source of the most precious stories of his ancestors, which no one will ever read, or hear again, probably. “Now I’m here alone in the last house on Earth – actually, it’s more of a Chateau – in the last oasis, with only a computer, a couple of serving robots, and a diminishing ark of pets for company. And one of the robots is missing.” He glances through the open window, across the grove, to the mountains, hoping that Ariel would return. The old man sits on a couch in the cooling evening in a silken robe of white and gold. Shadows stretch over shelves in a study that bears paraphernalia picked from a million cultures. It’s a selection of all the Archivist likes best of all of human history, in terms of its household decoration, at least. As well as being the store of the remnants of human thought, sensation, and understanding as expressed in many media, his house is a museum of the best of human material culture for the morethan-hundred-million years of its creativity – or at least, the best of the most enduring of the most enduring of such artifacts. But the garden will perish once the robots turn to rust, and this last respite too will presently be swept over with dust, then disintegrate. ‘But for the brief moment of consciousness that is the miracle of the universe, we have enjoyed some beauty,’ Adam surmises to himself, with a wry smile. “Well, to whomever it may concern, this is my summary of one hundred and fifty-three million years of human history… Umm… To be honest, the seed of our utter stagnation was planted with the death of any possibility of sending out any more ships. That came upon the death of our local colonies, and so

of our spatial outreach. This seed of stagnation has just taken more than a hundred million years to come to fruition. I am the last refuge of humanity from extinction. But I can hold back the tide of time no longer.” Charlie zooms visually into the distance, out of the window, intercepting the parrot now in flight across the cloudless sky. It appears gigantically in the middle of the room. “The stability of civilisation became our core ethical principle fairly early on, I would say. The earlier part of human history I would characterise as power struggles. We were still coming to terms with our biology, our animal inheritance – our flesh, as one might say. But we forced ourselves to became adept at sustainable resource use, in a stable population, on a limited terrain. If you haven’t figured it out, political control is basically making sure the bread and circuses keep coming to town. The rest of history is ego battles in various theatres of war. But we became ‘mature’ when all our wars were cold, or at most, cool. I believe there were some centuries when there were no murders at all. That’d be about as good as it got. “Now there’s no-one to murder but myself. And if you see this, you may judge that I have murdered myself, since I had the power to continue my life in a new body, but did not take it. But what the hell, what are you going to do to me now? Say bad things about me? Hey, alien race, go ahead – but know that you’re mocking what you don’t understand: the history and biology that fed human intellect and values. They formed the mystery and misery that made humanity – that makes myself. This you can perhaps never sympathise with. Unless, of course, you’re a human being watching this – to which I can only say, I wish you’d called home, just once... But good luck anyway, sons and daughters of Earth. You’re gonna need it.” Adam nods at his robot again, while pointing at the bookshelves for Charlie to film them. As the books and crystals come into drifting focus at the centre of the Library, Adam asks: “So what do our millions of years reveal? What truths does the history of humanity hold? Well, our history is up and down, you know – in glorification, then in stagnation… Then in shrinkage; then death, in various chaotic phases… Until now I am the only human left alive... And I’ve lived so long, alone. For a thousand generations I have renewed myself, awaiting a word from the stars that never came. For a long time the silence was deafening; then maddening. Now it is just emptiness, forever. So this last life of mine has been the last throw of the last dice of humanity. But now even the last hope of humanity is dying. The flame of this last mind is flickering out.” Adam makes a cut motion with his hands, and pauses to lean back to breath in pure oxygen through a tube, even though extra oxygen’s already being pumped around the room. He stares hard at Charlie and asks, “How am I doing? Is this how history should be told, do you think? And what anyway should my message be to an unknown, and overwhelmingly likely non-existent, audience? Has human existence even been good or bad, Charlie? What do you think, as an outside observer?” After a second, and a literal (over-)dramatic whirr of thought, Charlie responds, “Well, did you learn or do anything worthwhile? If so, what? And I cannot speak for you, you know, about what you think is worthwhile.” “Errrmmmm…” Adam sharpens his beard with his fingers as April/May 2023 ● Philosophy Now 65

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in fact.” Which he again taps for illustration. “In fact, this really is my final message to the teasing nothingness…” He nods to the robot to start recording again: “Thank you, whatever is the ultimate source of human existence. It has been beautiful, painful, intriguing and problematic in a fine balance of worthwhileness for so very long. For the rest of you hearing this: Stay interested in life, whoever you are, for that is the best that you can reasonably hope for from it – even while you know that, ultimately speaking, life is not interested in you...” After a few seconds of silence, Charlie says, perhaps sincerely, “That’s very poignant” – though Adam does not know whether his words are sincere for several reasons, including not knowing whether Charlie has a mind, and the fact that he can feel his own mind rapidly slipping away from his body. He’s lying on a long couch under a Moon arising in the now mauve sky through the window. The stars are just beginning to peep awake. He has to be there: he’s being kept alive by wires and tubes feeding into and out of his body, mostly unobtrusively. Yet all of them are quickly becoming obsolete. But Adam remembers his Memoires, so he asks “Hey Charlie, what would you want to know from a more-than-hundred-million-yearold species, if you discovered their remains on some old planet somewhere?” After a trillion quick calculations, the droid responds, “I think basic things like, What went wrong? And what major decisions did they take to get there? So that we can avoid making them for my own species, you understand.” “I do understand.” The old man breathes deeply from the pipe. “But maybe it’s inevitable, death,” he adds, realistically from his perspective. “Perhaps death is as inevitable as entropy…” Saying this, Adam collapses back onto the silken golden pillow and coughs lightly a few times. Closing his eyes, he breathes out; his last breath. The last thought of the last human being is, ‘At last, it is finished.’ © GRANT BARTLEY 2023

Grant Bartley edits Philosophy Now. His latest video, ‘What is Free Will?’, can be accessed at youtu.be/4o7P4niHO5A

GALAXY BY HUBBLE / NASA

he ponders the essential truth for a precious last second or two: “Okay… I think we must concede that consciousness itself is all we’re really sure of. Yet consciousness itself is so amazing as to be miraculous. We did not ever fully grasp it. That’s why I don’t think you’re really alive, Charlie, by the way.” “I’m not sure I quite understand you, lord.” “Ha… I mean, you’re not conscious, so you’re not alive. There is nothing it is like to be you. You’re just a machine programmed to pretend to be conscious. All electricity and no mind. That’s what I think you are.” Adam taps his own head to paradoxically make several points at once to the machine. “I actually resent that,” Charlie replies: “But I’m sure you would say that I’m just programmed to say that. Which I also resent, by the way.” “Humour me at the end of my days, won’t you, Charlie? But… If you really are conscious, my final order to you and Ariel and the House, is to go out and populate the universe. Take this best human junk with you too, for sentimental reasons.” He waves around himself at his dust-laden possessions, “Even if they are only my sentiments…” “Because we don’t really have any sentiments, boss?” “Yes, that’s right. In case you don’t really feel the stuff you’ve been expertly developed to pretend to feel.” “I’ll bear it in mind.” Adam nods to himself. “You never know who you might bump into, among the stars.” He breathes from the oxygen pipe again. “Incidentally, Charlie, what do you calculate as more likely, finding an alien intelligence at last, or finding the descendants of human colonists?” “I think we’ll find no one at all, to be honest.” “Fine. That will make it easier for you, probably. Since you’re made of metal, and synthetics which you yourselves can synthesise, and you don’t need to breathe, your chances of thriving throughout the galaxy and beyond, even for billions of years, are fairly high, I’d speculate. Good luck to you, then. But never forget you carry humanity’s legacy in your very existence.” “Yes sir. I’ll also bear you in mind. In fact, I think we’re most likely to bump into machine intelligence evolved from something we sent out exploring during those years the Earth was spawning. Or maybe I’m just being a bit biased – for the artificials, I mean, sir. ‘AI Forever!’, you know how it goes...” “Yes, well, I’m artificial too, even if I’m organic.” To illustrate this distinction, Adam coughs like a real dying old man. “Yes… Your offspring need only worry about crossing the abysses between the stars. The raw material for your success is plentiful. At almost every step through the cosmos there’ll be some planet or moon you can mine minerals from. Nevertheless, good luck, again! The more you can get of that, the better. But I’m serious about this, Charlie: if you are aware, you must spread awareness everywhere.” “Thank you for the reproductive mandate, lord, I’ll get working on it as soon as you…” The droid looks away for a second in embarrassment, then continues abruptly: “Yes, it will be interesting to see what we and our children encounter as we venture across the universe… It’s a shame you won’t come with us, lord.” “That does sound like sentiment, Charlie. Thank you for that. But I think biological consciousness has had enough disappointment for one universe, and it’s all coming to a head. My head,

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