Tag: philosophy

Philosophy and How One Acts

A friend with whom I have been reading various philosophical attempts to come to terms with what consciousness is and does writes to me about “illusionism,” the claim that we do not have selves. We are simply mistaken in thinking the self exists. The basic argument is the classic empiricist case against “substance.” There are various phenomena (let’s call them “mental states” in this case), but no stuff, no thing, no self, to which those mental states adhere, or in which they are collected. Thomas Metzger is one philosopher who holds this position and in an interview tells us that his position has no experiential consequences. It is not clear to me whether Metzger thinks (in a Nietzschean way) that the self is an unavoidable illusion or if Metzger thinks that ll the phenomena we attribute to the self would just continue to be experienced in exactly the same way even if we dispensed with the notion (illusion) of the self. In either case, accepting or denying Metzger’s position changes nothing. Belief or non-belief in the self is not a “difference that makes a difference” to recall William James’s formula in the first chapter of his book, Pragmatism.

The issue, then, seems to be what motivates a certain kind of intellectual restlessness, a desire to describe the world (the terms of existence) in ways that “get it right”–especially if the motive does not seem to be any effect on actual behavior. It’s “pure” theory, abstracted from any consequences in how one goes about the actualities of daily life.

There does exist, for some people, a certain kind of restless questioning. I have had a small number of close friends in my life, and what they share is that kind of restlessness. A desire to come up with coherent accounts of why things are the way they are, especially of why people act the ways they do. People are endlessly surprising and fascinating. Accounting for them leads to speculations that are constantly being revised and restated because each account seems, in one way or another, to fail to “get things right.” There is always the need for another round of words, of efforts to grasp the “why” and “how” of things. Most people, in my experience, don’t feel this need to push at things. I was always trying to get my students to push their thinking on to the next twist—and rarely succeeded in getting them to do so. And for myself this restless, endless inquiry generates a constant stream of words, since each inadequate account means a new effort to try to get it more accurately this time.

Clearly, since I tried to get my students to do this, I think of such relentless questioning as an intellectual virtue. But what is it good for? I take that to be the core issue of your long email to me. And I don’t have an answer. Where id is, ego shall be. But it seems very clear that being able to articulate one’s habitual ways of (for example) relating to one’s lover, to know what triggers anger or sadness or neediness, does little (if anything) to change the established patterns. Understanding (even if there were any way to show that the understanding was actually accurate) doesn’t yield much in the way of behavioral results.

This gets to your comment that if people really believed Darwin was right, as many people do, then they wouldn’t eat animals. William James came to believe that we have our convictions first—and then invent the intellectual accounts/theories that we say justify the convictions. In other words, we mistake the causal sequence. We take the cause (our convictions) as the effect (our theory), when it is really the other way around. Nietzsche was prone to say the very same thing.

One way to say this: we have Darwin, but will use him to justify exactly opposite behaviors. You say if we believed Darwin we wouldn’t eat animals. I assume that the logic is that Darwin reveals animals as our kin, so eating them is a kind of cannibalism. We don’t eat dogs because they feel “too close” to us; that feeling should be extended to all animals, not just fellow humans and domestic pets. (The French eat horse meat although Americans won’t). But many people use Darwin to rationalize just the opposite. We humans have evolved as protein seeking omnivores and we developed domesticating animals we eat just as we developed agriculture to grow plants we eat. Even if we argue that domestication and agriculture were disasters, proponents of so-called “paleo diets” include meat eating in their attempt to get back to something thought basic to our evolved requirements. So even is Darwin is absolutely right about how life—and specifically human life—emerged, people will use the content of his theory to justify completely contradictory behaviors.

This analysis, of course, raises two questions. 1) What is the cause of our convictions if it is not some set of articulable beliefs about how the world is? James only answer is “temperament,” an in-built sensibility, a predilection to see the world in a certain way. (Another book I have just finished reading, Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents [Princeton UP, 2023], says about 50% of our personality is genetically determined and that less than 10% is derived from family environment. Mitchell has an earlier book, titled Innate [Princeton UP, 2018], where he goes into detail about how such a claim is supported.) Nietzsche, in some places, posits an in-built will to power. All the articulations and intellectualisms are just after the fact rationalizations. In any case, “temperament” is obviously no answer at all. We do what we do because we are who we are—and how we got to be who we are is a black box. Try your damndest, it’s just about impossible to make sure your child ends up heterosexual or with some other set of desires.

2)So why are James and Nietzsche still pursuing an articulated account of “how it really works”? Is there no consequence at all at “getting it right”? Shouldn’t their theories also be understood as just another set of “after the fact” rationalization? In other words, reason is always late to the party—which suggests that consciousness is not essential to behavior, just an after-effect.

That last statement, of course, is the conclusion put forward by the famous Libet tests. The ones that say we move our hand milli-seconds before we consciously order our hand to move. Both Dennett [in Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Mitchell (in Free Agents) have to claim the Libet experiment is faulty in order to save any causal power for consciousness. For the two of them, who want to show that humans actually possess free will, consciousness must be given a role in the unfolding of action. There has to be a moment of deliberation, of choosing between options—and that choosing is guided by reason (by an evaluation of the options and a decision made between those options) and beliefs (some picture of how the world really is.) I know, from experience, that I have trouble sleeping if I drink coffee after 2pm. I reason that I should not drink coffee after 2pm if I want to sleep. So I refrain from doing so. A belief about a fact that is connected to a reasoned account of a causal sequence and a desire to have one thing happen rather than another: presto! I choose to do one thing rather than another based on that belief and those reasons. To make that evaluation certainly seems to require consciousness—a consciousness that observes patterns, that remembers singular experiences that can be assembled into those patterns, that can have positive forward-looking desires to have some outcomes rather than others (hence evaluation of various possible bodily and worldly states of affairs), and that can reason about what courses of action are most likely to bring those states of affairs into being. (In short, the classical account of “rationality” and of “reason-based action.”)

If this kind of feedback loop actually exists, if I can learn that some actions produce desirable results more dependably than others, then the question becomes (it seems to me): at what level of abstraction does “knowledge” no longer connect to action? Here’s what I am struggling to see. Learned behavior, directed by experiences that provide concrete feedback, seems fairly easy to describe in terms of very concrete instances. But what happens when we get to belief in God—or Darwin? With belief in God, we seem to see that humans can persist in beliefs without getting any positive feedback at all. I believe in a loving god even as my child dies of cancer and all my prayers for divine intervention yield no result. (The classic overdramatized example.) Faced with this fact, many theologians will just say: it’s not reasonable, so your models of reasoned behavior are simply irrelevant at this point. A form of dualism. There’s another belief-to-action loop at play. Another black box.

On Darwin it seems to me a question of intervention. Natural selection exists entirely apart from human action/intention/desire etc. It does its thing whether there are humans in the world or not. That humans can “discover” the fact of natural selection’s existence and give detailed accounts of how it works is neither here nor there to natural selection itself. This is science (in one idealized version of what science is): an accurate description of how nature works. The next step seems to be: is there any way for humans to intervene in natural processes to either 1) change them (as when we try to combat cancer) or 2) harness the energies or processes of nature to serve specific human ends. (This is separate from how human actions inadvertently, unintentionally, alter natural processes–as is the case in global warming. I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future–and will discuss it in a future post.)

In both cases (i.e intentionally changing a natural process of harnessing the energies of a natural process toward a specifically human-introduced end), what’s driving the human behavior are desires for certain outcomes (health in the case of the cancer patient), or any number of possible desires in the cases of intervention. I don’t think the scientific explanation has any direct relation to those desires. In other words, nothing about the Darwinian account of how the world is dictates how one should desire to stand in relation to that world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, I am saying, has no obvious, necessary, or univocal ethical consequences. It does not tell us how to live—even if certain Darwinian fundamentalists will bloviate about “survival of the fittest” and gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies.

I keep trying to avoid it, but I am a dualist when it comes to ethics. The non-human universe has no values, no meanings, no clues about how humans should live. Hurricanes are facts, just like evolution is a fact. As facts, they inform us about the world we inhabit—and mark out certain limits that it is very, very useful for us to know. But the use we put them to is entirely human generated, just as the uses the mosquito puts his world to are entirely mosquito driven. To ignore the facts, the limits, can be disastrous, but pushing against them, trying to alter them, is also a possibility. And the scientific knowledge can be very useful in indicating which kinds of intervention will prove effective. But it has nothing to say about what kinds of intervention are desirable.

I am deeply uncomfortable in reaching this position. Like most of the philosophers I read, I do not want to be a dualist. I want to be a naturalist—where “naturalism” means that everything that exists is a product of natural forces. Hence all the efforts out there to offer an evolutionary account of “consciousness” (thus avoiding any kind of Cartesian dualism) and the complementary efforts to provide an evolutionary account of morality (for example, Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project [Harvard UP, 2011.) I am down with the idea that morality is an evolutionary product—i.e. that it develops out of the history and “ecology” of humans as social animals. But there still seems to me a discontinuity between the morality that humans have developed and the lack of morality of cancer cells, gravity, hurricanes, photosynthesis, and the laws of thermodynamics. Similarly, there seems to me a gap between the non-consciousness of rocks and the consciousness of living beings. So I can’t get down with panpsychism even if I am open to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of consciousness from more primitive forms to full-blown self-consciousness.

Of course, some Darwinians don’t see a problem. Evolution does provide all living creatures with a purpose—to survive—and a meaning—to pass on one’s genes. Success in life (satisfaction) derives from those two master motives—and morality could be derived from serving those two motives. Human sociality is a product of those motives (driven in particular by the long immaturity, non-self-sustaining condition, of human children)—and morality is just the set of rules that makes sociality tenable. So the theory of evolution gives us morality along with an account of how things are. The fact/value gap overcome. How to square this picture of evolution with its randomness, its not having any end state in view, is unclear. The problem of attributing purposes to natural selection, to personifying it, has bedeviled evolutionary theory from the start.

For Dennett, if I am reading him correctly, the cross-over point is “culture,”—and, more specifically, language. Language provides a storage device, a way of accumulating knowledge of how things work and of successful ways of coping in this world. Culture is a natural product, but once in place it offers a vantage point for reflection upon and intervention in natural processes. Humans are the unnatural animal, the ones who can perversely deviate from the two master motives of evolution (survival and procreation) even as they strive to submit nature to their whims. It’s an old theme: humans appear more free from natural drivers, but even as freedom is a source of their pride and glory, it often is the cause of their downfall. (Hubris anyone?) Humans are not content with the natural order as they find it. They constantly try to change it—with sometimes marvelous, with other times disastrous, results.

But that only returns us to the mystery of where this restless desire to revise the very terms of existence comes from. To go back to James and Nietzsche: it doesn’t seem like our theories, our abstract reasonings and philosophies, are what generate the behavior. Instead, the restlessness comes first—and the philosophizing comes after as a way of explaining the actions. See, the philosophers say, the world is this particular way, so it makes sense for me to behave in this specific way. But, says James, the inclination to behave that way came first—and then the philosophy was tailored to match.

So, to end this overlong wandering, back where I began. Bertrand Russell (in his A History of Western Philosophy) said that Darwin’s theory is the perfect expression of rapacious capitalism—and thus it is no surprise that it was devised during the heyday of laissez-faire. That analysis troubles me because it offers a plausible suspicion of Darwin’s theory along the William James line. The theory just says the “world is this way” in a manner that justifies the British empire and British capitalism in 1860. But I really do believe Darwin is right, that he has not just transposed a capitalist world view into nature. I am, however, having trouble squaring this circle. That is, how much our philosophizing, our theories, just offer abstract versions of our pre-existing predilections—and how much those theories offer us genuine insights about the world we inhabit, insights that will then effect our behavior on the ground. A very long-winded way of saying I can’t come up with a good answer to the questions your email posed.

Disparate Economies 4: Power

Warning: this post is even more essayistic than most. A lot of speculation as I drunkenly weave through a variety of topics and musings.

The previous posts on disparate economies have tried to consider how economies of status, love/sex, and fame are structured. What is the “good” or “goods” that such markets make available, and what are the terms under which those goods are acquired, competed for, and exchanged. Finally, what power enforces the structures and the norms that keep a market from being an anarchic free-for-all. Markets (or specific economies among the multiple economies that exist—hence my overall heading “disparate economies”) are institutions, by which I mean they a) have discernible organizational shape, along with legitimated and non-legitimated practices by human agents within them; b) are not the product of any individual actor or even a small cadre of actors but are socially produced over a fairly long span of time; and c) change only through collective action (sometimes explicit as in the case of new laws, but much more often implicitly as practices and norms shift almost imperceptibly through the repetitions of use.) Institutions exist on a different scale than individual actors—or even collective actors. A sports team exists within the larger container of the institution that is the sport itself, just as a business corporation exists within the market in which it strives to compete.

It is a well recognized fact that power is among the goods that human compete for. In one sense, this fact is very odd. Here is one of Hobbes’ many reflections on power:

The signs by which we know our own power are those actions which proceed from the same; and the signs by which other men know it, are such actions, gesture, countenance and speech, as usually such powers produce: and the acknowledgment of power is called Honour; and to honour a man (inwardly in the mind) is to conceive or acknowledge, that that man hath the odds or excess of power above him that contendeth or compareth himself . . . and according to the signs of honour and dishonour, so we estimate and make the value or Worth of a man. (1969 [1640], 34–35) The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London: Frank Cass and Co.

Hobbes, sensibly it would seem, focuses on what power can “produce.” For him, power is a means not an end. Power is capacity. We know someone is powerful when he is able to produce the ends toward which he aims. This is power to, the possession of the resources and capabilities required for successful action. Such power, Hobbes goes on to say, also produces, as a by-product, “honor.” The powerful man is esteemed by others; in fact, Hobbes states, power is the ultimate measure by which we determine a person’s “value or worth.” Since, presumably, we want others to esteem us and to think of us as worth something, as having value, it makes sense that we would seek power not only because it yields the satisfaction of accomplishing our aims, but also because it gains us the respect of our peers.

Still, power is instrumental here; it is valuable for what it enables one to get. There is no sense of power as an end-in-itself. In that respect, power is like money. Human perversity is such that something (money or power) which has no intrinsic value of its own, but is only a means toward something else that is of intrinsic value, nonetheless becomes the object of one’s desires. Power, like money, is stored capacity—and, like money, one can devote oneself to increasing one’s store. Yes, spending power, like spending money, has its own pleasures, but there is an independent urge, an independent compulsion, to increase one’s holdings. And that urge can become a dominant, even over-riding, compulsion.

Of course, money and power can be converted into one another. Still, the insanities of current-day American plutocracy illustrate that the conversion is not easy or straight-forward. Think of the Koch brothers (or any other number of megalomaniac billionaires). The Kochs think their money should allow them to dictate public policy. Why, as Gary Will asked many years ago, are these rich people so angry? Why are they so convinced that their country is in terribly bad shape—when they have done and are doing extremely well? They don’t lack money, but they believe their will is being thwarted. Their money has been able to buy them power—but not the kind of absolute power they aspire to. They meet obstacles at every turn, obstacles they can only partially overcome. And from all appearances, it seems to drive them crazy. They want to be able to dictate to the nation in the same way they can dictate to their employees. The thrill of being able to say “you’re fired.” Donald Trump on The Apprentice. Apparently, just the thrill of watching some one else exercise that absolute power is a turn-on for lots of people.

Which reminds us that power is not only capacity, power to, but also domination, power over. Returning to the issue of “an economy,” in this matter of power, the competition is over the resources necessary to possess power. On the one hand, power to depends on assembling enough resources (time, money, health, opportunity, freedom) to set one’s own goals and accomplish them. On the other hand, among the resources one can require, especially for complex enterprises, is the cooperation of others. One person alone cannot accomplish many of the things humans find worth aiming for. How to ensure the contributions of others to one’s projects? Being the person who controls the flow of resources to those people is one solution. Help me—or you won’t be given the necessities for pursuing your own projects. Hegel famously reduces this dynamic to its most fundamental terms. Your project is to live—and unless you do my bidding, you will not be given the means to live. The calculus of power over, of mastery over another human being, is based on life being valued—and thus serving as the basic unit of exchange—in struggles for mastery.

I have in my previous posts on these different economies attempted to specify the norms (or rules in more formal economies) that structure competition and exchange in each case. And I have tried to indicate the power(s) that enforce those norms/rules. Thus in the sex/love market there is an ideal of reciprocity; the partners to an exchange freely and willingly give to each other. Where that norm is violated (most frequently in male coercion of women) family and/or the state will, in some cases, intervene. The deck is stacked against women because family and state intervention is imperfect and intermittent. But there are still some mechanisms of enforcement, even if they are not terribly effective, just as there are recognized ideal norms even if they are frequently violated. Similarly, the billionaire may have gained his wealth through shady means, but he has still operated in a structured market where violation of the rules can lead to prison (even if it seldom does). Outright theft, just like rape in the sex/love market, is generally deemed a crime.

How to translate these considerations over into the competition for power? It would seem that slavery is the equivalent of rape and theft—something now universally condemned as beyond the pale. But it seems significant to me that the condemnation of slavery is not even 200 years old—while slavery as a practice persists. Of course, rape and theft persist as well. And I guess we could say that minimum wage laws and various labor protecting regulations/statutes also aim at limiting the kinds of resource withholding that allows one to gain power over another. So there is some attempt to avoid a Hobbesian war of all against all, with no holds barred. Still, within any economy that enables—and mostly allows—large inequalities, the ability of some to leverage those avenues to inequality into power over others will go mostly unchecked.

Where there is no structure and no norms, the result appears to be endless violence. From Plato on, the insecurity of tyrants has been often noted. Power might be accumulated as a means to warding off the threat that others will gain the upper hand. In this free-for-all, no one is to be trusted. Hence the endless civil wars in ancient Rome and late medieval England (as documented in Shakespeare’s plays among other places), along with the murders of one’s political rivals—and erstwhile allies. From Stalin’s murderous paranoia to Mafia killings, we have ample evidence that struggles for power/dominance are very, very hard to bring to closure. Competition simply breeds more competition—and the establishment of some kind of modus vivendi among the contenders that allows them to live is elusive. Power does seem, at least to the most extreme competitors in this contest, a zero sum game. If my rival has any power at all, he is a threat.

In his life of Mark Antony, Plutarch has this to say of Julius Caesar: “The real motive which drove him to make war upon mankind, just as it had urged Alexander and Cyrus before him, was an insatiable love of power and an insane desire to be the first and greatest man in the world” (Makers of Rome, Penguin Classics, 1965: p. 277.) There’s a reason we think of men like Caesar—or like some of today’s billionaires—as megalomaniacs. They harbor an “insane desire” for preeminence over all other humans. If power equals preeminence, then, in their case, it is an end-in-itself. They desire that all bow before them—which is what power over entails. There is still the suspicion, however, that power is the means to the “honor” of being deemed “the first and greatest man in the world.” And there is certainly no doubt in Plutarch’s mind, as there was no doubt in Hegel’s, that killing others is a requirement for gaining such power. Only a man who “makes war upon mankind” can ascend to that kind of preeminence.

For Nietzsche, of course, the desire for power is primary. But even in his case, it’s not clear if power is an end or merely a means. What is insufferable to Nietzsche is submission. Life is a struggle among beings who each strive to make others submit to them. It would seem that “autonomy” is the ultimate good in Nietzsche, the ability to be complete master over one’s own fate. That’s what power means: having utter control over one’s self. Except . . . everything is always contradictory in Nietzsche. At times he doesn’t even believe there is a self to gain mastery over. And there is his insistence that one must submit completely to powers external to the self; amor fati is the difficult attitude one should strive to cultivate. We are, he seems to say, ultimately powerless in the face of larger, nonhuman forces, that dwarf us. In short, I don’t think Nietzsche is very helpful in thinking about power. His descriptions of it and of the things that threaten it are just too contradictory.

Machiavelli is, I think, a better guide. His work returns us to the issue of security. When I teach Machiavelli, I always have some students who say he is absolutely right: it’s a dog eat dog world. Arm yourself against the inevitable aggression of the other or you will be easily and ignominously defeated. I think this is a very prevalent belief system out there in the world—usually attached to a certain brand of right wing politics. To ventriloquize this position: It is naïve to expect cooperation or good will from others, especially from others not part of your tribe. They are out to get you—and you must arm yourself for self-protection (if nothing else). Your good intentions or behavior is worth nothing because there are bad actors out there. It is inevitable that you will have to fight to defend what is yours against these predators.

This right wing attitude often goes hand-in-hand with a deeply felt acknowledgement that war is hell, the most horrible thing known. But it’s sentimental and weak to think that war can be avoided. It is necessary—and the clear-eyed, manly thing is to face that necessity squarely. Trying to sidestep that necessity, to come to accommodations that avoid it (appeasement!) are just liberal self-delusions, the liberal inability to believe in the existence of evil. Power in this case is the only surety in an insecure world—and even power will still get involved in the tragedy of war, where the costs will be borne by one’s own side as well as by the evil persons one is trying to subdue. Power cannot fully insulate you from harm. (I think John McCain embodied this view–along with the notions of warrior honor that often accompany it.)

It is a testament to the human desire (need? compulsion?) to structure our economies, our competitions, that there are also “rules” of war. On the extreme right wing, there is utter contempt for that effort. There are no rules for a knife fight, as we learn in Butch Cassidy. It’s silly to attempt to establish rules of war—and crazy to abide by them since it only hands an advantage to your adversary. And certainly it is odd, on the face of things, to try to establish what counts as legitimate killing as contrasted to illegitimate killing when the enterprise is to kill so many people that your adversary can no longer fight against you, no longer having the human resources required to continue the fight.

I don’t know what to think about this. Except to say that the specter of completely unstructured competitions scares humans enough that they will attempt to establish rules of engagement even as they are involved in a struggle to the death. But I guess this fact also makes clear how indispensable, how built in as a fundamental psychological/social fact, morality has become for humans. On very tricky and speculative grounds here. But it seems to me that any effort to distinguish between murder and non-murder means that some kind of system of morality is in play. Murder will be punished, whereas non-murder will be deemed acceptable. The most basic case, of course, is that soldiers are not deemed guilty of murder. The killing they do falls into a different category. What I am saying is that once you take the same basic action—killing someone—and begin to sort it into different categories, you have a moral system. The rules of war offer one instance of the proliferation of such categories as moral systems get refined; differentiations between degrees of murder, manslaughter, self-defense and the like offer another example of such refinements. My suspicion (although I don’t have all the evidence that would be required to justify the universal claim I am about to make) is that every society makes some distinction between murder (unsanctioned and punished) and non-murder (cases where killing is seen as justified and, then, non-punishable.) At its most rudimentary, I suspect that distinction follows in-group and out-of-group lines. That is, killing outsiders, especially in states of war, is not murder, whereas killing insiders often is. The idea of a distinction between combatants and non-combatants comes along much later.

Similarly, worrying about “just” versus “unjust” wars also comes much later. Morality is no slouch when it comes to generating endless complications.

I may seem to have wandered far from the issue of an economy in which the good that is competed for is power. But not really. War is the inevitable end game of struggles for power if Hegel is right to say that life is the ultimate stake in the effort to gain mastery over others. If the economy of power is utterly anarchic, is not structured by any rules, then conquest is its only possible conclusion. It is the ultimate zero-sum game. The introduction of rules is an attempt to avoid that harsh zero-sum logic. Putin out to conquer the Ukraine and Netanyahu out to destroy Hamas are zero-sum logics in action. As is the Greek practice of killing all the male inhabitants of a conquered city while taking the women off into slavery. The rules—like negotiated peace deals—try to leave both parties to the conflict some life, to avoid its being a fight to the total destruction of one party.

The alternative (dare I say “liberal”) model is the attempt to distribute power (understood as the capacity to do things that one has chosen for oneself as worth doing) widely. This is not just an ideology of individual liberty, of equal worth and its right to self-determination free from the domination of others. It is also about checks and balances, on the theory that power is only checked by other powers—and that all outsized accumulations of power lead to various abuses. Various mechanisms (not the least of which is a constitution, but also some version of a “separation of powers”) are put in place to prevent power being gathered into one or into a small number of hands. The problem, of course, in current day America is that there are not parallel mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of wealth into a few hands—and there are no safeguards against using that wealth to gain power in other domains, including the political one. That’s why we live in a plutocracy. Our safeguards against accumulations of power are not capable of effectively counteracting the kinds of accumulation that are taking place in real time.

Recently, on the Crooked Timber blog, Kevin Munger offers this nugget (it appears to be a quote from somewhere, not Munger’s own formulation. But he does not offer a source for it.)

“There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.”

On this pessimistic reading, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Any situation in which authority/power is dispersed (as it is in the ideal liberal polity) will be experienced as unstable, unsettling, and chaotic. The desire for order will triumph over the liberties and capacities for self-determination that the “overthrow of authority” enables. Authoritarianism, the concentration (centralization) of power into a few hands, will rise again. Liberalism is always only a temporary stop-gap between authoritarian regimes. Humans, in this pessimistic scenario, simply prefer the certainties of domination to the fluidity (“drifts and doubts”) generated by less hierarchical social orders. Just keep your head down and let those insane for power fight it out among themselves, hoping they will mostly leave you alone and let you focus on the struggles of your not-very-capaciously resourced life.

Unfair as a characterization of a certain form of political quietism that skews rightward? I don’t know. But many people are content to not strive terribly hard for riches, power, or fame—and think their moderation of desire is the only sensible way to live. They just want to be left in peace to make of life what they can with the extremely modest resources available to them. Here we see yet another great divide in current-day American politics. (It is hardly the only divide and not, I think, among even the three most important divides between left and right in our time. But it still exists.) Namely, the idea that it is authoritarian government that will give them the peace they desire, get government off their backs, and curb the chaos of social mores that they feel threatens their children. Liberal permissiveness, along with the liberal coddling of the unworthy, is the real danger to the country and to their “values”—and a healthy dose of authority is just the remedy we need.

Arguing with the Darwinians

In the consciousness literature, Darwin is king. Whatever consciousness is (and there is plenty of disagreement about that), every one in the conversation accepts that consciousness must be a product of a Darwinian process of evolution. There are various competing versions of an evolutionary narrative for the arrival of consciousness on the scene.

In its most extreme versions, panpsychism tries to avoid the sticky problem of identifying the “before” from the “after” moment. The problem for any Darwinian account: once consciousness did not exist, but at a certain point in time it emerged, it arrived. By saying something (just what is unclear) fundamental to consciousness was always already there, the panpsychist tries to sidestep the before/after conundrum; but even the panpsychist has to have a story about how the originating germ of consciousness develops into the full-blown consciousness of humans, higher primates, other mammals, and other creatures. No one is claiming mollusks have a consciousness as fully elaborated as that in chimpanzees. Or that chimpanzees were there at the origins. There still needs to be a story about the elaboration of consciousness from its primitive beginnings into the sophisticated forms displayed in life forms that arrive on the scene at a much later date.

There are two things it would seem any plausible Darwinian account must provide. First, it must provide a plausible bio-chemical account of a) how variants are produced for a process of selection to choose among, and b) the physiological/chemical processes that create consciousness itself. Genetics (most directly random genetic mutations) is assumed to provide most of what is needed to answer the variant question. As for b, a bio-chemical explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, that such an explanation must exist is generally assumed in the literature, although everyone (with a few exceptions, as always) agrees that we are still a long way away from possessing anything like a complete and satisfactory bio-chemical understanding of consciousness.

I am going to leave these bio-chemical questions aside in this discussion—as do Veit and Humphrey in their books. [Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023).] Instead, I want to focus my attention on the second requirement of any Darwinian account.

Namely, such an account must identify the “advantage(s)” that consciousness would provide to an organism. Only if there are such advantages would consciousness be “selected” for. Since (of course) we don’t get to see the competition between creatures possessing different types and/or degrees of consciousness in real time, we must (as both Veit and Humphrey explicitly state in their books) “reverse engineer” the account of how one possible variant is “selected” over another. Those more skeptical of Darwinian explanations call “reverse engineering” “just-so stories.” Lacking direct evidence, a narrative is produced that assumes the mechanism of natural selection.

Essential to such accounts is functionalism. The writer must identify what consciousness does, what functions it performs, and from that basis argue for those functions as providing advantages in a struggle for existence understood in Darwinian terms. Veit is what might be called a Darwinian fundamentalist. He flatly states “the goal of biological systems is ultimately reproduction” (54); and identifies “the real purpose of the organism, which is to maximize its representation in future populations” (55). Armed with this fundamental and overriding purpose, he can then assess how consciousness would provide a leg up in the effort to “maximize” an organism’s chances for reproductive success. That such an account of “purpose” seems awfully reductive in the face of the wide variety of behavior exhibited by animals and humans does not seem to bother him a bit.

More interesting is Veit’s holistic understanding of the dynamic nature of the organism. He calls his approach “teleonomic”: “organisms are goal-directed systems,” that “evolve to value states and behaviors that increase their own fitness and avoid those that are detrimental to their health” (9). This approach falls in with other recent accounts that rehabilitate an Aristotelean notion of teleological or final causes. The organism is directed toward something—and that something acts as one cause in the action of natural selection. As Veit strongly puts it: “the external factors that matter to the evolutionary trajectory of the organism are themselves causally dependent on the organism” (8). In other words, the organism is not a merely passive recipient of what external environmental and genetic factors produce. The organism’s active pursuit of reproductive advantage guides its own selection process; the organism evaluates what the larger ecological scene makes available and works to exploit the elements in that scene that will serve its purpose(s).

Of course, this approach still must posit an overriding purpose present (innate to) all organisms: the drive for reproductive success. So one complaint I have about such Darwinian theorizing is that natural selection does not get off the ground unless there are randomly produced variants. If we only have clones, then there is no range of actual variants for selection to choose among. Yet the theory allows for no variance in the fundamental purpose of organisms. Everything walks in lock step to the Darwinian command to maximize reproductive success. And that leads to the absurdities of the endless worries about altruism, music, laughter, and play. More and more implausible stories must be told about all of these behaviors to make them serve the overriding Darwinian purpose. Reductionism doesn’t simply haunt Darwinian thought; it appears as absolutely central to such thinking.

Veit cheerfully accepts the hard-core utilitarianism of his approach. “It is thus not unreasonable to treat them [organisms] as economic agents maximizing their utility (i.e. fitness). Each individual within a species is fundamentally faced with a resource allocation problem. . . . This is the economy of nature” (19). Casually swept aside are all the frivolous and downright counter-productive behaviors on view every day in the natural world. The failure of humans and other animals to be reasonable resource maximizers must be ignored or subjected to torturous (and implausible) explanations. Surely the simplest approach here would be to concede that the struggle for life and reproductive success doesn’t consume all of the organism’s time and energy—and the surplus is devoted to activities that don’t further Darwinian goals. But very few of the Darwinian advocates take this easy way out. Of course, it has been a commonplace that it is rich societies (Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England etc.) that witness a flourishing of the arts. The problem is that, in fact, we don’t know of any societies without music and dance. Variety, activities that are hard to account for by a strict Darwinian logic, appear baked in from the beginning.

I am hardly conversant with the vast literature about Darwinian evolution. But I do know that whole books get written about the “problem” of altruism. Whereas, as far as I know, no one takes up what seems to me the much more glaring problem of war. After all, from the standpoint of reproductive success, war (which also seems endemic to all human societies of which we have any record) is a real puzzler. Here’s an activity that places in danger precisely the (male) members of society who are in their prime years for passing on their genes. And it would take a lot of ignoring of facts on the ground to claim that wars are primarily about securing resources necessary to life. Despite the intuitive appeal of the Marxist notion that economics drives everything, wars are not only more often driven by issues of pique, status, and out-group hostility than by the scarcity of resources, but there is also the fact that wars destroy resources rather than augment them. Wars are costly—more like potlatches dedicated to the wholesale destruction of goods and lives than a reasonable way to secure resources. (A side note: Engels realized that Marx and Darwin are at one in their appeals to economic reasoning and in identifying the pursuit of “interests” as the primary motive of “life.”) In short, Darwinian reductionism (as well as its Marxist counterpart) offers little in the way of a plausible explanation for this all too frequent form of human behavior.

I want to end by moving on to more technical concerns about evolutionary accounts. I will quote here from Humphrey’s book. “Since we are discussing evolution, we can assume three guiding principles. First, there must have been a continuous sequence of stages with no unaccountable gaps. Second, every stage must have been viable, at the time, on its own terms. Third, the transition from one stage to the next must always have been an upgrade, adding to the chances of biological survival” (101).

I have trouble with both assumptions one and three. This may come down to semantics, to what exactly is meant by a “new stage.” But let me state my worries.

On number one, I don’t see how unexpected and random genetic mutations (which are the engine of change, of movement from one stage to the next) are “continuous.” It’s the discontinuity of mutations that seems much more obvious. As I say, Humphrey might very well reply that I am misunderstanding the sense in which he is using “continuous.” And, of course, various evolutionary theorists (most famously Stephen Jay Gould) talk of “punctuated equilibrium” to describe the sudden transformations that a genetic mutation can generate. Still, Humphrey seems to think there will be an orderly “sequence” from one evolutionary stage to the next. And that assumption will guide his “reverse engineering” account of the emergence of consciousness. I think this confidence in an orderly sequence is misplaced—and thus makes the strategy of reverse engineering much more problematic. It is harder to tell a story that, as Humphrey understands, has “gaps” that are not easily bridged.

The third assumption we might call the “things get better” thesis. Each stage is an improvement over the last in terms of enhancing “chances for biological survival.” But that way of stating things dismisses variants. I had thought one goal of Darwinian theory is to explain diversity. Variants are produced in the course of reproduction—and some of the variants (hardly all of them, but not just only one of them) prove viable (to use Humphrey’s term). They are viable either because they exploit different ecological niches to secure the necessary resources to sustain life or because they are “good enough” to sustain life even as they differ from other variants. Another way to say this: various traits get produced along the evolutionary track that do not undermine the ability to sustain life drastically enough to cause extinction of the organism carrying that trait. A fairly obvious example is myopia. Hardly a great asset in the “struggle” to survive, but apparently not enough of a deficit to have been discarded along the evolutionary pathway that leads to today’s humans. In short, variants get produced all the time that are not “upgrades.” They are simply not strong enough “downgrades” to prove fatal.

By a similar logic, just as not all features of the organism necessarily make fully positive contributions to the effort to survive, not all features of the organism need be devoted to that effort. The issue, once more, is surplus. Just as the arts (in one reading) can seem irrelevant to the effort to sustain life, so various features of complex organisms may not be contributors to that effort. A hard core Darwinian can consider them “free riders”—and that way of addressing the issue is fairly common in the literature. Knowing how to read is not strictly necessary to survival—but humans get that extra ability because it develops from cognitive abilities that are essential to survival. The problem becomes how do we identify (except by some seat of the pants appeals to what is necessary as opposed to what is “extra”) the abilities required by survival and those that free ride upon it. Going back to war: perhaps we would want to argue that just like reading is a beneficial free rider, war is a disadvantageous one. War, in other words, is an offshoot of some fundamentally necessary component of human physiology/psychology and thus can’t be jettisoned as evolution moves us toward “stages” where our chances our survival are enhanced. Even though war itself decreases chances of reproductive success.

I am hardly claiming that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally mistaken theory. But I am saying that the ham-handed, reductionist accounts of evolution overlook a number of puzzles that should give prevailing mono-causal biases some pause. Furthermore, these puzzles should at least disturb any blithe confidence in “reverse engineering” stories. Introducing a wider array of possible causes into such accounts, along with recognizing the random and disruptive effects of genetic mutations, would certainly complicate matters greatly. But it also might yield more plausible accounts of how an evolutionary history got us the diversity and complexity of the animal and human worlds we can observe in the wide variety of behavior displayed in the present.

Addendum (added January 19, 2024). I have just come across this relevant statement by Daniel Dennett on the error of thinking that evolution always produces enhancements of chances for biological success (quoted from Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, Polity 2021, p. 162):

“It is a fundamental mistake in evolutionary thinking to suppose that whatever ways (ideas, practices, concepts, policies) survived this process must have proven fitness-enhancing for the human species, the lineage, or even the individuals (or groups of individuals) who adopted them. Some, even many, of the established ways (of thinking, of acting) may have been cultural parasites, in effect, exploiting weaknesses in the psychology of their hosts.”

Notes on Consciousness

I have been reading fairly extensively in the literature on consciousness. Stuff written over the past thirty years by philosophers and neuro-biologists. This post simply aims to get down a few specifics about what consciousness is.

This post is derived from two sources: Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023). Both Humphrey and Veit are Darwinians who aim to give an account of how consciousness emerged in the course of evolutionary history. I may take up their Darwinism (which is problematic in my eyes) in a later post. For now I just want to get to how they describe consciousness, since I think they are both admirably clear on that issue and basically convincing. I don’t presume to assess whether they are right. Neither of them (and as far as my reading goes no one else in the world either) has a slam dunk physiological/neurochemical account of consciousness. Instead, they both rely on a phenomenological description (what consciousness feels like and is experienced as) and a functional description (what consciousness does).

Let’s start with Veit. He offers five fundamental functions for consciousness:

1) sensory experience. Consciousness entails being able to process various stimuli that originate outside the organism as well as internal stimuli (such as the sensation of hunger);

2) evaluative. Consciousness provides the ability of an organism to evaluate its environment and react accordingly. That is, the organism does not just receive sensory signals, but also evaluates them.

3) the integration of experiences in the present moment. Consciousness unifies; it takes incoming signals that might be visual, auditory, scents etc. and organizes them into an holistic understanding of the present, of what is before the organism and how its various components stand in relation to one another.

4) the integration of experience across time. Consciousness also unifies across time, weaving together the various experiences at specific moments into a history (or narrative) that specifies the relations between the particulars of individual experiences. (I find this function dubious. Or, better, I would not make such an easy assumption of unity, even if the effort to unify does exist. However, it also seems to me that efforts to unify are also more than happy to dismiss various experiences as irrelevant within certain narrative frames. So, yes, we deploy narratives to organize experiences over time, but I don’t think of the narratives as holistic in the sense of incorporating everything. Lots of stuff doesn’t fit with lots of other stuff, even as some things do go together.)

5) Self-consciousness. This, of course, is the biggie, the holy grail of consciousness studies. How to explain its existence—either by specifying its function in a Darwinian account or by providing a bio-chemical account of its existence. It is a matter of faith for just about everyone writing about consciousness that there is a material, bio-chemical cause of consciousness. Materialism (no non-material facts or substances; thus consciousness must be a material thing) and naturalism (everything that exists does so–and originates–within a natural frame; nothing extraneous to nature) are the default positions for 95% of contemporary philosophers and scientists. But no one has come particularly close to providing such a materialistic account of consciousness, so that a skeptic like Colin McGinn argues that no such account is likely to be given within (to pick an arbitrary number) the next 100 years. Materialism, in other words, is an unproved axiom, an item of faith that gets the whole game rolling.

Humphrey is good at describing self-consciousness. He zeroes in on “sensations” and “qualia.” He writes: “Sensations are basically mental states . . . that track what’s happening at our sense organs.. . . They provide us, as subjects, with information about the quality of the sensory stimulus, its distribution and intensity, its bodily location, and–especially—how we evaluate it: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the red light is at my eyes and stirs me up. But ‘tracking’ this information is only half the story. For, as we can each of us attest, sensations have a qualitative dimension that sets them apart from all other mental states and attitudes. There’s something that our pains, smells, sights, and so on have in common that our thoughts, beliefs, wishes and so on don’t”(2). That something extra is what Humphrey (following common philosophical usage) calls “qualia.” Sights and smells have a bodily dimension that beliefs and wishes seem to lack. (I think this statement wrong, as I will discuss below.) Consciousness for Humphrey is tied to the ability to track, to register, the “feel” of sensations, to not only see the Van Gogh painting, but to register the sensation that accompanies seeing it.

Qualia, then, refers to the “phenomenal quality” of sensations. (page 3). Which leads Humphrey (for a variety of reasons that are generated by empirical studies of things like “blind sight”) to distinguish between “cognitive consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness.” There is plenty of evidence that most organisms can process and then respond to information provided by their senses. But for Humphrey at least there is not evidence that starfish have any consciousness of the “feel” of perceptual experience even as they do respond to sensory input. For biological reasons, he thinks phenomenal consciousness is only available to warm-blooded animals.

He tells us that “consciousness of the kind we are talking about” is present when “sensations [are] represented as having phenomenal properties” (139).

Here’s Humphries three stages of consciousness; he thinks they are evolutionary stages even as there are also organisms in 2023 who are living examples of each stage. “(a) First came sentition—an evaluative motor response to sensory stimulation. 9b) Then came sensation, when animals discovered how to monitor this response so as to arrive at a mental representation of what the stimulations means to them. [Cognitive consciousness.] (c) Then, once the process was privatized and feedback loops established, came phenomenal sensation, with the representation taking on a whole new look” (146).

He elaborates: stage one includes “animals with elementary uncentralized nervous systems, whose behavior is largely reflex and does not involve creative processing of information: for example, sea anemones, starfish, earthworms, slugs” (146).

Stage two are the “’Sub-Sentients.’ They do form mental representations of sensory stimulation and what it means but their sensations lack a phenomenal dimension. I would expect this group to include animals with developed brains that may be capable of intelligent behavior that requires cognitive consciousness. . . . They will, however, have a limited sense of themselves as individuals and will not attribute selfhood or mental states to others; for example, honeybees, octopuses, goldfish, frogs” (147).

Finally, at stage three, we get the “true ‘Sentients.’ They uniquely represent what’s happening at their sense organs as having phenomenal depth. . . . They will be highly intelligent, especially in the social sphere, and have a strong sense of their own individual selfhood; for example: dogs, chimpanzees. parrots, humans” (147).

Note that Humphrey thinks “privatization” is a crucial step toward full phenomenal consciousness. There must be the sense of my sensation and its “feel” as belonging to me. It’s my pain, not yours. But, of course, we can say the same about my thoughts, beliefs, wishes, and desires. It seems odd to claim wishes and beliefs don’t have a “feel” attached to them. Surely, there is a sensation that has a phenomenal quality attached to it when I feel jealous or in love or believe in my country right or wrong. And even though it is difficult, we like to think that evaluation (and subsequent revision) of our beliefs and desires is possible, just as we evaluate (and sometimes revise) what we take to be sensory information.

Humphrey, with his privatization thesis, is strongly committed to self-consciousness. Many of those who write about consciousness take the more Humean position that the “self” is, at the very least, problematic. There is no underlying substance or thing to the temporal flow of sensations, of experience. But Humphrey appears to believe that you can’t have phenomenal awareness unless there is a self to whom the sensations that are registered belongs. I think it fair to say, although he never explicitly says this, that his position is that there is no phenomenal consciousness without selfhood. Phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of selfhood (as I understand his work). Maybe better to say that phenomenal consciousness creates selfhood. Where phenomenal consciousness is, the self will also be. No phenomenal consciousness without a self accompanying it. Pushing back a bit from the entanglement of phenomenal consciousness with selfhood, all kinds of environmental and biological things have to be in place for phenomenal consciousness to emerge in evolutionary history and to be present in organisms today. That’s Humphrey’s position.

Veit would seem equally committed to a fairly robust notion of the self. Once he assigns consciousness the task of unifying experiences across time, he is flying in the face of Humean atomism. And, of course, Veit accepts without much discussion the basic idea of “self-consciousness.” This is Nagel’s famous “what it feels like to be a bat.” We don’t only have a sensation related to eating a taco; we also have a sensation related to being one’s self. My selfhood has a “feel” to it—and the ability to register and reflect on that “feel” is part of what it is to be conscious. Consciousness is of the self as well as of things that exist outside of and apart from my body.

I am just reporting here. I don’t have enough footing in this whole field to even know what I think is true and what I think dubious. Veit’s five-fold list of functions seems useful to me just because it puts some flesh on the bones, at least points us to some of the capabilities we would be talking about when we appeal to consciousness. And Humphrey’s focus on qualia, on the phenomenal, usefully specifies the on-the-ground experience that undergirds the assertion that consciousness exists in the face of skeptics who think it does not. (Hume may have been skeptical about the self; but he was not skeptical about consciousness; his very distinction between “impressions” and “ideas” presupposes consciousness as the faculty that works upon the “impressions” offered by the encounter with the world.)

One final point for now. Bentham said the only relevant question to ask when developing a hierarchy of beings, from the “lowest” forms to the “higher”, was whether a given being could suffer. All the rest was sophistry in his view. Our relation to other entities should be governed by their ability to suffer. We can do whatever we want to stones because they are insensate. But if clams and goldfish experience pain as something akin to the unpleasant experience we call pain, then we have as absolute an obligation to avoid inflicting pain on them as we do on a two year old human. Nothing in Humphrey’s distinction between stage two and stage three animals suggests that stage two animals are incapable of suffering. The stage one case is a bit more ambiguous; I don’t know what he would say about earthworms and pain.