Author: john mcgowan

Life as No One Knows It

Sara Imari Walker is a physicist, (or more properly, an astrophysicist, or even more properly, an astrobiologist since she is looking for “life” in the universe) who has written a book to introduce “assembly theory” to a wider public: Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead Books, 2024). I was drawn to read it because a superficial notice about it in the New Yorker suggested that her positions aligned to some degree with the issues I tangled with in my two recent posts on “Consciousness and Life.” (Links: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/ and

https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/13/consciousness-and-life-response-and-clarification/).

Reading the book showed that those links were not all that substantial. But Walker does declare outright that “to this day . . . we cannot derive life from the known laws of physics, even if we are pretty sure it must be consistent with them” (21). Hence, she shares my view that physics as the science of matter cannot account for life—which leads us to biology, or biochemistry, as the appropriate sciences if we want to get a handle on life.

Interestingly, because “life” stumps physics, there are various physicists who claim life does not exist: since “modern science has taught us that life is not a property of matter” (6), the very category of life is a mistake, “not a natural kind” (22), but a figment of human thought that doesn’t map onto the way the world really is. The parallel with those who declare consciousness an “illusion” is fairly direct. Faced with something we can’t account for within our current scientific paradigms, some just insist those unaccounted-for somethings are not real.

Walker, instead, thinks the available paradigms are insufficient, not that the data (the fact that life exists) should be discounted. Her book is going to introduce the “new paradigm” she and her colleagues are attempting to put into place. That paradigm is called “Assembly theory.”

Before diving into that theory, I must applaud Walker’s quick, but sharp, dismissal of panpsychism. She describes the panpsychist position succinctly: “perhaps consciousness is fundamental, and therefore all matter is conscious” (40). Her dismissal is just as succinct: “an easy way to kill two hard problems [i.e. the nature of matter and the nature of consciousness] with one stone is to make the unexplained thing fundamental” (41-2). Moving the counters around is not a solution (or explanation), but just a way to duck the problem.

So what does “an explanation” look like? “[B]etter explanations are those that explain more observations, change surprising facts into a matter of course, yield accurate predictions of what one should and should not observe, are falsifiable, rest on relatively few assumptions, and are hard to vary such that changing the details dramatically changes the predictions” (152). It doesn’t help that Walker uses the word “explain” in this definition. What does it mean to “explain more observations”? Usually, I dare say the notion of “explain” is linked to some designation of the causal processes that bring the observed thing into existence. And that does seem to be what “assembly theory” attempts to do. I will get to that. In the meantime, we can register Walker’s assertion that “scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts are driven by new explanations, not necessarily new evidence” (152). The observables are there already (in some cases), we just lack a good explanation of them. Such, Walker argues, is the case for “life.” But we should note that, in other cases, there are new observables because new technologies of perception (microscopes, telescopes etc.) bring new objects into view.

Walker’s approach is not to ask “what life is,” but to ask “what life can do”? And that approach starts from consciousness. “Here we are not measuring whether something has experience (what consciousness is), but instead whether something that has experience can do different things because it has an internal world (what consciousness does)” (45). “Does anything in the universe exist that might not be possible if subjective inner worlds did not exist?” (45). The syntax is tortured here, but the question is whether there are existing things that could not exist if consciousness did not exist. Walker’s answer to this question is a resounding Yes. Everything in the built world—cities, technologies, books—depends on humans imagining those things first (in some kind of embodied thought space) and then doing the work of constructing them. “Some things that exist are imagined through abstraction (are counterfactual) and become physical (made actual) through a phenomenon deeply connected to what we call consciousness. It is not that all matter is conscious, but that consciousness is potentially a window into the mechanism for bringing specific configurations of matter into existence across time. If this conjecture is true, consciousness creates the possibility for things to exist that otherwise couldn’t because they did not exist in the past” (47-8). “The key feature is the ability to imagine or represent things that do not exist, such that the act of imagination becomes causal to the existence of some objects” (73).

Construction is, as its name suggests, central to assembly theory. What Walker wants to locate in the universe is causal power (my term, not hers), or to be more Promethean about it, creative power. Basically, she is going to make the same claim about “life” that she makes about consciousness. “Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many, unique, recursively constructed parts” (90). The word “many” is crucial to this description of life. There are simple objects in the universe, ones that are “prebiotic” (her term); that is, they existed before the emergence of life—and, in some cases, still exist in their simple a-biotic (my term) way. These a-biotic objects are not “life” because they do not possess the capacity to generate new objects. Also, they are generally not complex. Living objects contain many parts. (It seems, although I am not sure I understood this correctly, that Walker tells us that only objects that are comprised of at least 15 different biochemical components cross the threshold over into “life.”)

Walker begins from a variant of a traditional philosophical conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing? Her variant is: why does the universe contain these specific objects instead of the many other possible objects that do not exist? Why possible in this posing of the question? Because there are molecular combinations that do not exist even though they, according to the laws of physics, could exist. In fact, humans have managed to create some of these non-existants in the lab. Humans have added to what nature produced on its own. So there are more possible objects than actually existing ones.

So: what caused some objects to come into existence and others not? The causal mechanism Walker turns to is no surprise: evolution and selection. Evolution here is doing its usual work, producing random variations over time as organisms reproduce. Coming into existence takes place over long stretches of time. It is not clear to me how radically Walker wants to upset the idea that all the matter that ever existed or will ever exist was present from the very start. But she does want to insist that “time” is an intrinsic component of (living?) matter, not just the stage upon which matter does its thing. (My “living” with the question mark indicates I am not sure if she is saying “time” is an intrinsic property of all matter, or only of living matter. I am clear that she does divide matter into that which has life and that which does not.) In any case, evolution over time means the emergence of new forms of matter, including forms we would designate as “living.” Life is not there from the beginning, but emerges somewhere down the line. But what emerges as evolution unfolds sets up a variety of constraints; some possible objects become very improbable, close to impossible, once evolution produces a different group of possible objects. The chain of causes is pretty determinative (even if there is always some randomness in reproduction).

Evolution, thus, produces variants (but within fairly predictable ranges once things are fairly launched), just as it does in modern-day (i.e. genetically informed) Darwinian theory. More novel is Walker’s understanding of “selection.” Assembly theory asserts that objects that are “alive” are too complex to simply emerge as products of random genetic mutations, or through any other random physical process. “Some objects require information—an algorithm—to make them. These objects will never spontaneously form and must always be constructed via selection and evolution. . . . All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute ‘life’” (146). “Complex objects, such as molecules, can come into existence only if there is something that can build them reliably, whether it is a cell, an environment, or an intelligent agent. These objects require an algorithmic process to assemble them. Assembly theory considers the algorithm to be an intrinsic property of the object, rather than a feature of the machine that outputs it” (143). [Sidenote: Walker does seem to reproduce the very error she mocks the panpsychists for making; she takes the causal mechanisms she needs, namely time and the informational algorithm, and make them “intrinsic” to matter.]

Selection, then, is made by the algorithm that informs (quite literally) the reproduction of the object—or, maybe it is better to say the persistence of the object over time. It is not the individual who possesses life so much as it is the “lineage” of information that causes the continuity of life forms over time. This shift in locus can be illustrated even in the case of the individual human being. “Over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself—what persists in the informational pattern over time, not the matter (at least not in the traditional sense of the word ‘matter’). . . The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time” (150).

Life is a process—a process of regeneration where the information to bring new forms into existence (or to continually reproduce existing forms that substitute in for prior ones) plays the role of selection. Without that information’s causal power, no life. It is clear that, in Walker’s view, information is necessary to the existence of life, is, in fact, the distinctive “marker” of life. But whether information is also sufficient to the existence of life is less clear. Presumably, there is physical “stuff,” the “objects” she keeps talking about. Information, it would seem, needs to be embodied. There has to be “matter” for information to be “intrinsic” to. I don’t think Walker would deny this. She wants to retain all the laws of current-day physics; she just wants to supplement its accounts of matter and causation with this addition of information as a causal agent embedded in matter. She is not such a complete “process theorist” as to deny any “objectivity” to objects (as William James and Alfred Whitehead at times approach doing.) Or if she is that radical a process theorist, her continual (unexamined) talk of “objects” (possible and existing) undermines that radicalism. Life in her view, it is clear, is a continual making and unmaking, but some of the made things have a relatively stable existence for at least some duration.

In sum, the basic innovation of assembly theory, its supplement to contemporary physics, is the claim that information is causal—and that we cannot explain life without seeing information as its basic cause. There are secondary innovations about how “life” designates complex objects that are “assembled” out of earlier existing objects which embody the information required to construct the new forms. That view opens up vistas of novelty and creativity a more straight-jacketed physics might deny. As usual, the precise biochemistry of information’s creativity is not specified—just as the neural correlates of consciousness continue to elude researchers. Like panpsychism, assembly theory works to animate matter, to introduce principles of motion within matter that do not reduce to the laws of gravity, acceleration, and entropy found in standard physics.

I have left out of my account, Walker’s interest in finding out if life exists in worlds (planets) other than Earth. That’s her astrobiology hat. I will confess to having little interest in that question. Life here on earth is more (in fact, too much!) than enough for me. But to offer a quick and dirty summary of her position (especially since it explains the title of her book, which from my summary of it thus far would be utterly mysterious): since the emergence of life on this planet followed a determinant path set out by the earliest moves in the game, there is no reason to believe that life outside Earth would follow a similar path. Thus, looking for “signatures” of life on Mars (or anywhere else), such as water or oxygen or amino acids, is the wrong way to go. Life on other planets might very well have developed from completely different material bases. The key is informationally driven reproductive processes, not specific molecules or elements. So “life” elsewhere might differ radically from “life as we know it.”

How does Walker’s book—and assembly theory more generally—jive with the questions I raised about consciousness and life? Certainly, I have to appreciate someone who is a real scientist asserting that physics does not have a way of addressing the concept (the fact) of living beings. And Walker, as well, must be counted among the thinkers who is trying to advance new accounts of causation, ones that supplement (at least; perhaps they supplant) traditional mechanistic understandings of cause. Which reinforces my sense (derived from a number of writers) that Darwinian theory does not align with mechanistic (“efficient” in Aristotle’s terms) models of causation–and thus calls for other ways of understanding causation. I also think Walker’s focus on what life and consciousness do (their observable effects) as contrasted to worrying about what they are seems a fruitful and sensible way to proceed. Finally, although she never explicitly says so, I think Walker would agree that consciousness is a feature of “living matter,” not of all matter–and that addressing the puzzle of what life is and does is prior to understanding the nature of consciousness. Understanding life is the best way to make progress in understanding consciousness.

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy

I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read! Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy. Not just that, however. It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument. There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books.

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling. It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist. He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist. He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings. Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights? It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality. For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution. “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson). Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution. Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse. Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives). Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive. Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings. One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats. Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member).

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary. It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society. The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed. Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable. Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest). To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders. For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence. “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57).

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks. The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state. Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time. (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.) Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states. Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective. When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law. The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them. But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive. The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals. Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy. Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others.

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved. Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards. Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them. Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction. Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world.

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate. Morality, he insists, must be exclusive. That is its whole modus operandi. It only performs its natural function by being exclusive. So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive.

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it. Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality. We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.) In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities. Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others. It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality. More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind. This includes moral change, of course. It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates. He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation. It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached. And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made. Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason. He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action. Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice.

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism. As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor. What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments. Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone. Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life. Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world. The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine. It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent. Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process. By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life. In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups. But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed. Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities. They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here. Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits. Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity. Which is not entirely a good thing. “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not. Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life. It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK! Finally, what is this open love? How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions. The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.” Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic. What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89). We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices. Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone. Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert. “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89). They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life. I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood. It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle).

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning. That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history. They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name. Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails. She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer.

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others. Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary. Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds. To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or. We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful.

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level. He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.” I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish. For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self. The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.” Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self. So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024). I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much. More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

Judgment: Quality, Qualities, and Qualia

I have been noodling on about judgment on this blog for quite some time now (years!). And I have written about judgment in Kant and Hannah Arendt in published work, including a forthcoming essay on Arendt that I will post on this blog sometime in the near future.

Still, judgment is a very capacious term and it is often unclear what various thinkers—or me—actually is using the term to designate. So this post will be an attempt to list a variety of ways the term judgment gets used (Wittgenstein: a word’s meaning is its use) and to see if the various uses are tied to one another or are separate (and better left separate). Quality, Qualities, and Qualia as a title is meant to outline the territory to be covered although I am afraid those three terms won’t quite do the whole trick. Complexities will creep in. But let’s start.

Quality.

This is mostly the easy one. Judgment is very commonly tied to an evaluation of something. I judge whether something is good or bad. I am, then, considering what is the “quality” of the item in question. Aristotle thought such judgments were based on a prior conception of the item’s purpose. A good knife is one that cuts well since cutting is a knife’s purpose. Judgments in such cases may be absolute (to cut well is to be a good knife), but in practice tend to be comparative. This knife is better than that knife because this knife cuts better. It requires a Platonic ideal of good cutting to make an absolute judgment about a particular knife. In practice, we usually have something rougher in mind: this knife is “good enough” because it gets the job done. Whether it is the ne plus ultra of knives doesn’t concern us. We are dealing with the knives available to us in the here and now, not the whole range of all existing and possible knives. We make our judgment, we choose, among the alternatives we actually have access to.

Judgments, however, can proceed along different axes. We can judge the knife aesthetically. In that case, its qualities (first appearance of my second term in the title) as a cutter are subordinated to other qualities (its shape, its color, its weight). Aesthetic qualities are ones that please the senses (the root meaning of the word “aesthetic”) and are only tangentially related to function, if at all. Aristotle’s focus on “purpose” is functionalist, whereas the aesthetic is usually only tangential to function, and can be in overt hostility to function. An aesthetic judgment, then, considers an item’s quality in relation to a different set of criteria than a functional judgment does. Notoriously, aesthetic judgments seem squishy as compared to functional ones—and generate much more confusion and controversy over what the criteria for judgment are. Even where there is some agreement and clarity about the criteria being invoked in an aesthetic judgment, disagreement in actual judgments remains very common.

The lack of such disagreements in functional judgments is connected to the use to which the object is being put. If I am using the knife to cut something, then the degree to which it aids or hampers that effort provides the ground for judgment. If I am trying to use the knife to punch a hole in leather or paper, the fact that the knife proves a poor tool for that endeavor indicates I am using it for a purpose it cannot do well. With aesthetic objects, however, their purpose is less clear cut. Do I value the painting because it is pleasing to the eye, because it fills up an empty space on the wall, because it reflects upon a certain tradition in painting, because it indicates my wealth, status, education, and taste? All of these are possibilities and none of them necessarily excludes the others. Aesthetic objects have multiple uses, while seemingly not tied to any specific use. Hence the fuzziness of aesthetic judgments, which vary according to the objective criteria being applied and according to the subjective taste of the one who judges.

The term “value” snuck into last paragraph. A judgment is an evaluation. It makes a determination as to the “quality” of some thing—and such judgments seem inevitably tied to an assessment of that thing’s “value.” A knife that cuts well is more valuable than one that does not. I would rather possess (and use) the good knife than the poor one. (Again, comparative in relation to the possible.) We value things in relation to whether their qualities are desirable and are conducive to advancing our own purposes.

To pragmatic (purpose oriented) and aesthetic judgments, we must add moral judgments. The criteria in moral judgments is not exclusively whether an action furthers achievement of a purpose or if the action is “pleasing” to witness or contemplate. These two bases for judgement need not be excluded in making a moral judgment, but they are neither necessary nor (crucially) sufficient. A moral judgment must involve a further consideration: the quality of the action in relation to specifically moral criteria. Identifying moral criteria has proved just about as tricky and ambiguous as identifying aesthetic criteria. The ongoing debates between Kantians and utilitarians is just one instance of the inability to designate criteria for moral judgments that convince everyone. Such debates often end up appealing to “moral intuitions” to make their case (Wittgenstein: here my spade turns; I can say no more). It’s as if “I know a moral action when I see one” for moral judgments crops up alongside the “I know what I like when I see it” explanation of aesthetic judgments. Moral judgments seem to be endemic—and necessary!—to human social life. But disputes over moral judgments are as frequent as (and seem much more consequential than) disputes over aesthetic judgments.

To sum up before moving on to qualities: judgments are evaluations of the “quality” of something (an object, an action, even of a person). Such judgments, at the crudest level, decide whether something is good or bad. A good knife, a good painting, a good action, a good person as contrasted to ones that are less good or even positively bad. And we in most cases value good instances of things over bad instances. There are notable exceptions to this last statement. We perverse humans can find all sorts of reasons to make the bad our good (to quote Milton’s Satan).

OK. Right now, we are in the land of endless and irresolvable disputes over aesthetic and moral judgments. One common response to that problem has been to say the fact of disagreement can be wildly exaggerated. Do we really disagree over whether the sexual abuse of a child is good or bad? Is there anyone out there insisting that Love Story is a better novel than Middlemarch? Of course there are difficult cases for making moral and aesthetic judgments, but there are many more cases where there is widespread, close to universal, agreement. It’s only philosophers who agonize over the hard cases. For the rest of us, we have “good enough” consensus and learn to live with the instances where consensus cannot be reached. Yes, some disputes lead to serious conflict since human beings are an argumentative and aggressive lot. But humans have also instituted procedures for conflict resolution—and when we are persistent and lucky such institutions do their job and bloodshed is avoided.

Qualities

The informal, non-institutionalized, form of conflict resolution is talking things over and through. And this is where “qualities” enter the picture. We disagree over the quality of a painting. To talk through that disagreement, the best strategy (it seems to me) is to step back from the judgment and to instead focus on describing the painting to one another. Are the colors vibrant or muted? Do they harmonize or clash? How is the space of the canvas allotted? Are the figures representational or abstract (or some blend of the two)? Et cetera. Judgment relies upon, is based on, a discernment of qualities. Various writers, Hannah Arendt among them, wrap this discernment function into the very notion of judgment.

Arguably, Kant does as well. A Kantian determinate judgment is an act of apprehension. For Kant, we apprehend the qualities of a thing—and then judge what kind of thing it is. We very rarely disagree as to whether something is a knife, not a spoon, fork, or kettle. So the most basic judgment is what kind of thing a thing is. And the “kind” is supplied to us by culture, by our language. We don’t invent a new category, or word, or kind, to identify this knife as “a knife.” We use the term our language has already given to us. In this way, we occupy a common world.

Judgment understood this way is non-individual. It is the way that individuals participate in a shared universe. Individuals re-affirm their deep connection to others as they make these mundane (automatic, rarely reflective) judgments constantly. Solipsism is a boogy-man. It is impossible to be a solipsist so long as you use the common language. I read Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is impossible as saying that the individual cannot construct a world to occupy on his or her own. The world only achieves solidity through its being “worded” by an ensemble of selves. Kant’s determinate judgments refer to specific instances where we encounter some thing and need to identify it. But there is no individual ability to make determinate judgments based on a completely individual set of “categories” or “kinds” or “concepts” (to go back to my earlier posts on percept/concept).

It is, I am suggesting, just a further refinement on judgment as discernment to dive down into the “qualities” of things. There is the crude first determination: that is a knife. But now we can appeal to other culturally provided descriptors to be more detailed. The knife has a certain shape, a certain weight, a certain size. Again, agreement about these features should not be hard to achieve. Evaluation of these features is likely to be more various. I might prefer a knife of a certain heft, while you find it too heavy. I might find a certain shape of its handle comfortable and thus a way to make it better for me to use—while that may not be the case for you. But we have narrowed down, specified more concretely, why your evaluative judgment of the knife differs from mine.

We can take the same approach to aesthetic disputes. If we can agree that the work’s colors are vibrant and non-harmonious, we can then understand if we disagree about whether such an effect is pleasing or not. Aesthetic objects, however, are complex. What we value in certain critics is their ability to draw our attention to features of the aesthetic object that we had not noticed. Here we recognize that some people, in relation to some kinds of objects, have greater powers of discernment. These people apprehend more—and have a talent for articulating what they apprehend. When we read a superb critic of a literary work (for example), we see things in the work that we missed. Judgment as discernment highlights “qualities” and appeals to others to acknowledge the presence of those qualities. It enriches the experience of encountering a thing. Taking a hike with a naturalist is analogous. I am alerted to features of the forest that I miss when hiking by myself.

It is still an open question how to evaluate those features. I may find them boring and wish the naturalist wouldn’t bang on about this or that. But I am not inclined to disagree about whether the features actually are present in the forest. Again, when it comes to aesthetic objects, matters can be more complicated. Since a certain form of literary criticism highly values “unity,” we find critics who work very hard to “prove” that Moby Dick or Ulysses are unified works, whereas I find those two books wildly incoherent, manic in their throwing together of disparate materials and thought. But, then again, I don’t rate “unity” as such a valuable criteria for aesthetic judgment as many others do. A conversation about such matters can make at least some progress by clarifying what features (qualities) I think a work has and what criteria I employ to judge its quality. My interlocutor and I can at least see where we agree, where disagree.

Another way to say this is that our stake in making evaluations generates our powers of discernment. That is why judgment comes to encompass both evaluation and discernment. I have increased powers of discernment where something is of value, of particular interest, to me. If I don’t care much about the differences between oaks and spruces or between different varieties of ferns, then I am much more likely not to notice those differences. Where I am engaged, I can discern more. And that’s why we turn to “experts,” to people who have a command of the relevant terms and features that allow more discerning and detailed descriptions of particular things. Those are the people whose judgment about a thing’s “qualities” we have come to trust. I think this is what we mean when we talk of an “informed judgment.” Someone able to apprehend the “qualities” of something in rich detail is more informed about that thing and, thus, has more information on which to base a judgment of its quality.

Pragmatic Judgment

This lead me (before I get to qualia) to another common way to use the term “judgment”—a way not quite consonant with my quality, qualities, qualia rubric. This meaning of judgment is pragmatic, and connected with the Aristotelean term “phronesis” (often translated as “practical wisdom.”) The colloquial usage here is to characterize a person as having “good judgment.” Judgment in this case involves evaluating what is possible and/or desirable to do in this particular set of circumstances. It requires (so the thinking goes) an excellent discernment of the actual features of the situation plus an ability to discern what the situation affords plus a clear sense of one’s own needs/desires plus a sensible prioritizing among those needs/desires in relation to what is possible here and now. Phronesis is both very specific (tied to this situation and to my purposes) and very holistic (it sees the situation in its full complexity). Quality and qualities are intertwined here. I must discern the features of the situation even as I aim to act in ways that enhance the quality of my position. Embedded in the world, I have the meliorist (William James) goal of bettering my position at every turn, fending off threats to well-being even as I also try to improve that well-being. Good judgment leads to success in that endeavor—a fact brought home by witnessing how often human actions are counter-productive, make things worse instead of better. Good judgment is hard and fairly rare, hence its being awarded the honorific term of “wisdom.”

One version of good judgment is to be a “good judge of character.” Since one of the most crucial wild cards in judging any situation is how much I can rely on the other people who occupy the world alongside me, it is very important to assess accurately the talents and trustworthiness of others. I can only expect help from people capable of providing that help (I don’t expect a doctor to fix my clogged pipes) and can only enlist that help from people who will be willing to provide it. So I must make a judgment before the fact as to whether this or that person will actually do what I need them to do. Relying on someone who lets me down is a failure of judgment, of phronesis.

Qualia

OK. Now let me turn to qualia. In the literature on consciousness, the term “qualia” names the “sensation” that accompanies any experience. It feels like something to see a Matisse painting. There is the perception of the painting—and there is the feeling that the perception produces. An organism can be conscious of something; it is only when that consciousness of something is accompanied by consciousness of an internal feeling (some state of being for the perceiving consciousness) that we have “sensation” as well as “perception.” (I am following Nicholas Humphrey here, from his book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023), but Humphrey’s usage is fairly standard in the literature. Only “fairly standard,” of course, because there is disagreement about everything relating to these matters among those who consider them.) “Phenomenal consciousness” is the term deployed to designate the experience of a “feeling,” a sensation (an awareness) of an internal state of being.

Quick aside: the “hard problem” in consciousness studies is how to explain the fact of phenomenal consciousness. Current science can do a good job of explaining the physiological processes that enable one to see the Matisse painting, but we have no remotely adequate account of the processes that would generate the “feeling” that accompanies that perception. The holy grail of consciousness studies is to explain phenomenal consciousness. The “mysterians” say we will never get that explanation; the hard-core materialists say phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not a real thing that needs to be explained. But most writers accept that phenomenal consciousness is real—and that we lack a good account of its reality.

Back to qualia. What has they got to do with judgment? Everything if we adopt the James-Lange theory of emotions. Basically, that theory says that our bodies react immediately to the environmental circumstances one confronts in any situation. (And situations keep unfolding, keep popping up, because the world we inhabit is much more one of constant change than one of stasis.) Living things are reactive—finely tuned to apprehend the environment and to adjust to the circumstances. For James-Lange, feelings (sensations) follow from that bodily adjustment/attunement. The sensation is how we come to realize what our body’s reaction is. Feelings are informational; they inform us of how our body has responded to what the world is throwing at it.

If this theory is correct, then judgment is instantaneous. Our body both judges what the circumstances are (picking out especially what is most relevant to its most important concerns) and judges (acts upon) what an appropriate response to those circumstances are. Qualia (our sensation or feeling) registers for our conscious selves the judgment that has already been made on an unconscious, bodily level.

There are various ways one can argue that it’s evolutionary useful for organisms to acquire an ability to be consciously aware of these unconscious bodily responses. If we know what our body is doing, we can monitor and even (possibly) revise its responses. I return here to the recurrent notion that consciousness introduces a pause into the processes of stimulus/response. The body (in the James-Lange theory) responds immediately and automatically, without any involvement on the part of consciousness. The bodily judgment is direct; it does not pass through consciousness. But the ability to pick up the signal that informs consciousness of what that response is provides the possibility of assessing it and revising it. I.e. there is now a second moment of judgment superimposed on the first, automatic one. This seems similar to the “thinking fast and slow” that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced into the social sciences. (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011]). And it chimes with the work of Martha Nussbaum and others on the cognitive function of the emotions. (Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge UP, 2003].) We know about things, about our environment, through our emotional responses to things. But we are not ruled entirely by our emotions if consciousness allows for us to examine them, to consider if they are appropriate responses to the situations that elicited them.

What, then, of the discernment judgement calls forth (as described in my thoughts on “qualities.”) For James, efforts to explain a judgment always come after the fact. We strive to “rationalize,” to provide reasons for, the judgments our body has already made. We want to “justify” a decision after the fact. Deliberation, we might say, comes after, not before, action. Still, this desire to justify can hone attention, can make us more discerning. And that training of apprehension can then influence future instances of immediate, bodily judgment. Organisms learn. Feedback from one instance gets incorporated (in the literal sense of that word: taken into the body) in ways that manifest themselves in future interactions.

The desire to justify points us toward the communal pressures upon judgment that Kant (and Arendt in her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment) emphasizes. Others demand of us an explanation of our judgments and the actions based upon them. Why do you think Picasso a lesser artist than Matisse? Why did you do that? In answering such questions, we are very likely to point toward features of the paintings or features of the situation we faced as explaining why made the choices we made. Even if these explanations are “rationalizations” in the negative sense of being excuses for judgments or actions actually made unthinkingly, they do heighten consciousness about our own proclivities and about the complexities (the manifold details) of worldly things and situations. Because we are called upon to give an account of our judgments and actions, we develop our powers of discernment.

Arendt translates Kant as saying that our attempts at justification “woo the consent of the other.” There are no absolutely compelling justifications; they are always contestable. But we want to stand in the good graces of others, so we try to get them to see it our way (as Paul McCartney puts it).

For Nicholas Humphrey, this need to justify ourselves provides an evolutionary reason for the emergence of phenomenal consciousness. Because we are social animals, humans must find a way to “work it out” (to quote McCartney again). And we can only do that, Humphrey thinks, if we have some sense of what others think and feel. How can we know what “reasons” others will find convincing as we strive to get them to accept our excuses, our ex post facto explanations? The self-consciousness that phenomenal consciousness enables allows us to imagine how our fellow humans take things, what their sensations are in response to different situations. Judgment moves from being the purely individual response to the environment toward an always already socially-inflected response. Our need for, dependence on, others means that their responses to our judgments (and the actions those judgments will inspire) influence the judgments from the start. Another way to say this: the environment humans face always includes other humans and maintaining desirable relations to those humans is a high priority in any assessment of appropriate responses/adaptations to the environment. Our learning includes a big dose of learning how other humans respond to us when we make this or that judgment, take this or that action. We “norm” our taste to fit the groups to which we want to remain members in good standing.

The changing musical tastes of college students offer a good illustration of that last point. Students will abandon old favorites in favor of more ”sophisticated” ones as they learn new codes of distinction. Is the music they now listen to “better” than the music they abandon? Hard to say. Depends on the criteria applied. But they will almost certainly acquire a richer vocabulary in which to describe and justify their tastes, while also learning what counts as compelling justifications of taste judgments to the people whose consent they are trying to “woo.” And they will learn what musical tastes are deemed outside the pale.

I will end by saying that the entanglement of judgment with “sociality” (to invoke Arendt on Kant again) is where much of my interest lies. I want to nail down (and feel I have yet to do so to my satisfaction) the way that judgments are not just influenced by, but are only possible within, intersubjective relations. Relevant factors are the non-private languages in which judgments are articulated/communicated and the pressure to explain/justify our judgments. But I still feel like something is missing here, some key piece to the puzzle of how what seems individually located (the response of my body to a situation and my subsequent conscious awareness of that response) is not very individual at all.

Percept/Concept (3): The Power of Culture

Culture is a notoriously vague term employed to designate groupings as small as a particular school or affinity group (sometimes labeled as “sub-cultures) and groupings as large as “the West.” Despite its seemingly inevitable vagueness (no blood test for culture and any culture that one dares to identify will also be riven with conflicts and dissenters that belie its coherence), it is also hard to deny culture’s “stickiness.” Habits of daily practice, the ways people interact, and the beliefs/values they hold prove fairly difficult to alter. Efforts to wipe out religion are a good example. Over a thousand years of hostility to Jews across Europe into Eurasia couldn’t kill Judaism off.

I mentioned in my previous post, when commenting on the work of Andy Clark, that his understanding of how expectations (pre-existing categories and projections of what any situation is likely to present to the self) seemed excessively individualistic. So the following sentence from Nicola Raihani’s book, The Social Instinct (St Martin’s Press, 2021) resonated for me: “The idea that beliefs function more as signals of group membership than as vessels of epistemic truth might help us to understand why our brains seem to be chock-full of software that enables us to defend these ideas, even in the face of countervailing evidence” (218). At the very least, our take on what the world presents to us is influenced by our need to establish solidarity with some particular others as much as that take is tuned into the non-human elements of the situation. Not only are our beliefs in many cases adopted from others, but we cling to those beliefs in order to remain in good standing with those others.

The other side of this coin is what I have called the desire of many post-Romantic artists to see things straight off, free from any prior cultural designation. Here is Nietzsche’s version of that desire (aphorism 261 of The Gay Science, quoted here in full from the Walter Kaufmann translation). As we would expect from Nietzsche, he recognizes the paradoxes embedded in that desire—and how it runs straight into conflict with Kantian “communicability.” “Most” originals bow, in the end, to the conditions imposed by communicability; these geniuses (to use Kant’s term) end up assigning names, bringing what they have apprehended back into culture’s warehouse.

“What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are , it takes a name to make something visible for them.—Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.”