Review: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

By sheer coincidence I published the essay, “What is Time”, shortly before reading Carlo Rovelli’s book. Rather than writing additional commentary here, I put a pointer to that essay. While it does not address Rovelli directly (I hadn’t read him yet) it covers the points made in the review included below. But I do not want to discourage people from reading this excellent book. It is always good to understand the arguments of authors with which you (in this case I) happen to disagree. One cannot claim to be a well rounded philosopher without understanding what it is that those you disagree with are saying.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2018) Amazon review

Like consciousness, time is a subject that no philosopher or physicist has ever managed to nail down completely. Thanks to their slippery character, being so close to us (the first one IS us) they are endless sources for fountains of speculation. In this book, Rovelli’s subject is time, but consciousness comes into this narrative as well.

Rovelli is a “time denier”. OK, that’s being a little unfair but not by much. What he denies is that there exists an independent, fundamental property or quality of the universe that is time. Of course the universe is full of movement and change, events unfolding into other events. His basic position is that time emerges into our perspective, our viewpoint, from these phenomena, but it is merely an illusion. The movement is real, the changing is real, but the time in which all of this seems to occur is nothing more than a manifestation of human (possibly animal) mind and the illusion, in turn, is supported by the entropy generated in the functioning of our brains.

The book (not long read) is divided into three parts. In the first Rovelli covers the various sub-disciplines of physics and their temporal implications (or lack thereof). He begins with classical physics (the equations work backwards in time), and moves on to General and Special Relativity, and quantum mechanics. Here he demonstrates that our simple intuition of a universal time flowing from past to future is untenable. Time, mind-independent time, if it exists at all, cannot be like that. In part two he further demolishes time. Not only is it not what we think, in and for physics, it doesn’t really exist at all; even the present is an illusion! In part three, he puts time back together for and in the perspective of an subjective viewpoint.

He argues it is the fact that we view the world from a perspective, that when we perceive the world we inevitably blur the details into a sort of summary or gestalt for our perspective, that causes time to appear to mind, The physics supporting that appearance comes down to thermodynamics. Human time, brain time, is “thermal time”. Certainly Rovelli thinks thermodynamics (in particular the 2nd law) is real, but while responsible for what consciousness perceives of time and so a real enough subjective experience, from the 3rd party perspective of physics, change is real, but time is a mirage.

This book is written for a lay audience. There is almost no math in it (what there is appears in footnotes), and it defends a view common to much of the physics and philosophy community. To be sure Rovelli differs a bit from some of his peers. He argues that relativistic “block time” is no more a “true portrait of objective time” than any other theory. In Rovelli’s view remember there is no such thing as “objective time”.

In 2015 a philosopher (Roberto Unger) and a physicist (Lee Smolin) wrote “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time”. This book (reviewed by me on Amazon) makes precisely the opposite case from that of Rovelli. Of course they recognize what Relativity and quantum mechanics imply about time, but they maintain, nevertheless, that a notion (and reality) of objective, “universal time”, is more fundamental than any other phenomena of the universe, even more than space! Rovelli mentions this book in a footnote and admits that Unger and Smolin’s view “is defensible”, but he leaves it there and never addresses what is defensible about it.

The Unger/Smolin book goes against the grain of 95% of today’s physicists. Personally I agree with Smolin and Unger. The fact (thanks to limiting effect of the speed of light) that we cannot map our present to any present in a remote galaxy, or even the nearest star does not mean there is no present there, in fact everywhere. Something is happening, NOW, everywhere in the universe. We do not know what it is, but that does not mean the present isn’t real as Rovelli believes. Had Rovelli directly addressed Unger and Smolin I would have given this book another star. Had he not mentioned them at all, I would have taken another away.

In summary this is a decent and well written book advocating for a particular view of time (or no time) that I happen to think is wrong, but what do I know? It happens to be the dominant view in physics today. Rovelli is a well respected physicist and a good writer. Those of you interested in the subject will find this book valuable whether you agree with the author or not.

What is Time?

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Philosophers and physicists have developed conventions for speaking of time, but none of these ever say precisely what time is, or even if it is mind-independent. Space-talk is vague also, but not as vague as time talk. We can conceptualize space as a container in which objects exist in various relations of distance and direction. This may not be a complete physical description, but it describes space’s functional role. The structure of space is controversial, but there isn’t much disagreement about its mind-independent existence (Kantians and idealists excepted). This is not the case with time.

We say that time is a one-dimensional container along which we can place not objects, but events. Events can have various temporal distances from one another, but only one direction; from past through present to future. Once an event is fixed in time, past, no “new event” can be placed at an earlier time. This fixity on one side of the present, contrasted with a converse openness to contingency on the other is a central property of time. But it is because this quality is so ridged, and so universal, that it seems to disappear into the phenomena that occur within it.

In examining this hypothetical container we discover that from the present we can only discern evidence of what came before, in the past. We can project certain regularities into the future, but unlike the past for which records or markers exist in the present, there are no records or markers visible for the future. We also notice that from the viewpoint of our experience it is always “the present”. Unlike space within which we are patently able to move to different locations subjectively (in our experience) and objectively (from the viewpoint of third parties) we are not able to experience, or directly observe, anything other than a present moment in which movement and change is the only constant.

Change always occurs in the present which never moves off the unfolding flux of events. Put another way, where that flux is, is the present. This leads a large coterie of philosophers and physicists to say time isn’t an identifiable property of our universe. The causal net, process, is real, but time is nothing but a mirage in subjective mind, a way to interpret the net’s unfolding. That net is, after all, unfolding as patterns of brain states simultaneous with its evolution everywhere else. Consciousness rests on this same causal link.

Philosophers talk about time in tensed (A-series) and non-tensed (B-series) language, the ‘A’, ‘B’ business made up by a Scottish philosopher named McTaggart back in 1908 who argued that time didn’t exist because all talk about it was circular or inconsistent. “Tensed time” means there is a reference, an index, which is always our own subjective experience now. Events will happen in the future, happen in the present, and having happened are now past. Subjectively there is a “flow of time” from future through present to past. A-series talk focuses on subjectivity; a description of how we sense time.

Tenseless time talk is discrete. Event ‘X’ happens earlier or later or simultaneous with event ‘Y’. When speaking in these terms, it doesn’t matter where we are among the event relations. X can be earlier than Y whether our now succeeds Y or is somewhere between X and Y. If our now precedes both X and Y we can project their temporal relation without indexing it to our present temporal position. B-series talk is objectively focused on temporal relations independent of mind. Neither “A” nor “B” talk commits one to a particular view of time (existing or not) as such.

PRESENTISM

Most physicists (and philosophers) are either ‘presentists’, ‘eternalists’, or a particular combination of the two. Neither view commits one time’s mind-independent existence. Presentism relies on a certain idea about what “is real”. A real is something that you can “go to”. You can go to Mars, Mars is real. But you cannot go to the past or the future.

Time, whatever else it is, is not something you can “move around in”. only the present is therefore real. Presentism makes unsurprising our plain inability to move around in time. It accounts for our always-in-the present experience, but it remains non-committal about the physical reality of time as distinguishable quality of the universe.

Presentists have no problem talking about the past. There are plenty of markers or records in the present that signal past events. Importantly the events signaled are not occurring now, but their records, evidence of their happening, persist into, and become a part of, our present. That the intervals between past events and their present records seem to be real gives Presentism most of its philosophical trouble.

Marks or records relate time to truth and facts (see “Truth and Truthmaking”). The proposition “Julius Caesar died on March 15, 44 BC” is true because he did in fact die on that day. But is it the fact of his death in the past that makes the proposition true, or is it the record of that death persisting into the present to which the truth is connected? If we had no record of his death today (as is true of so many nameless historical passings) we would not be able to say that any fact (past event or present record) anchored the truth of the proposition.

Yet we also want to say there were events in the past, for which we have no records, whose facticity would make propositions about them true if records of them persisted to the present time. We discover new facts about the past precisely when we discover that certain present “states of affairs” are records of those events.

Facts are immutable. Time is so universal that immutability alone is sufficient to assign the event to the past. Part of what we mean by past is that some “state of affairs” came to be in just the way it did when that time was the present, and by so coming to be, became a fixed actual while before its occurrence it was only potential. Caesar’s murder was contingent, not necessary. It might have been that all the perpetrators and Caesar were present at the time and place, but some other event took place “there and then” that thwarted the planned deed.

Events happened as they did, but might have happened otherwise. Happening fixes their being, their facticity. Once they have happened, they cannot have happened any other way. This “locking into place” of what were, until now, only potentials, fixing events, is one of time’s salient properties.

Presentism’s recognition of records or markers in the present as evidence of events or states of affairs no longer real, must then connect these markers with the events they purportedly represent. It is something of a paradox to say the vibrant life and events of ancient Rome on the day of Caesar’s death, a present undoubtedly real to them at the time, has become unreal in our time while all the same, some part of the events of that day have perdured through the interval between that day and now. That perdurance is, after all, how we come to connect them up, to assert that they are evidence of past events. These markers have remained real, although often changed, in the interval since they came to exist. Such changes as they undergo (for example the gradual degradation of a ruin), have a continuity traceable to a prior present. Does it matter then if we say the past is also real but fixed?

Since unicorns are not real, saying “this unicorn is bigger than that unicorn” makes no sense. An analogous problem exists for Presentism concerning temporal intervals. If the past is not real what does it mean of two past events that one took place one year (or one minute) before the other or that some other event, a war for example, lasted thirty years? Records of these events are all real at the same time, now, but how can two events no longer real have a real interval between them? We can of course say that this record “came to exist” some years before that record, but is such a statement comprehensible if the past is no longer real?

ETERNALISM

Eternalism asserts that the past, present, and future are real even in and for the present. Eternalism does not commit one to saying that time is real, but rather measuring temporal intervals is never absolute and what looks future to our perspective might be past in another. Eternalism has swayed physics since Einstein’s publication of his theory of Relativity which has some strange and counterintuitive implications for our measurement of time. From within a reference frame (a physical system moving broadly together) time measurement by the speed of light seems identical. But when we look from one frame to another, frames moving faster than our own have slower moving time and vice versa.

This observation means that between frames it is impossible in an absolute sense to say that one event occurred earlier, later, or simultaneously, with another event in a different frame. Fixing a “time line” for events is possible only relative to the observing frame, not over all. Years of experimental work have indeed proved that a clock ticks more slowly in a frame that moves faster (relative to the speed of light) through space than in one that moves slower. Clocks also tick more slowly more deeply in a gravity well. There cannot now be any doubt about these observational results. This has led many philosophers and physicists to conclude there can be no such thing as time in an over-arching sense, only relative times specific to individual frames of reference.

Eternalists do not believe they can “go to” the past or the future in their own frame except for the trick of leaving their frame and going to another where time is slower then returning to the original frame. It would seem as though you have gone to the future (of the frame to which you have returned). In reality, this amounts to waiting out a certain number of clock ticks in the original (temporally faster) frame by spending time in a temporally slower frame.

Eternalism avoids committing itself to the present being in some sense special over-all. Of course it is special to us, and everyone agrees that psychologically it IS special because our subjectivity is limited to it. We are conscious only and always “in the present”. The “reality of the future” in Eternalism is a matter of some faith. It falls out of the mathematics of Relativity, but cannot be experienced observationally other than the trick of “waiting out” another frame’s clock ticks while in a temporally slower frame.

While there are events already past in some other frame that appear to lay in the future of our frame (and vice versa), those events are never observed until their light reaches the observing frame. It is an axiom of our space-time geometry that when the record of an event reaches us through space, our recording temporally succeeds its occurrence. No matter how the “pace of time” varies between any two frames, one frame cannot view an event in any frame before the event happens.

All of these considerations (a much oversimplified sketch) have led many philosophers and physicists to infer there is nothing to time at all, nothing other than a psychological response to motion (and cause) in space. One state of affairs unfolding into another needs some interval and we can assemble that unfolding (within a frame) into a “time line” of “earlier” and “later” states of affairs. Julian Barbour in “The End of Time” (1999) accepts as an axiom of his faith that the future is real and already populated with “states of affairs” presently invisible to us. This leads him to advance a theory in which events of the present not only rest on a past and present foundation but are pulled into their new arrangements by the already settled reality of the future.

For Barbour, time simpliciter is not real, but there is a present everywhere. There is a fixed landscape of future events towards which the present, everywhere, unfolds. His landscape is filled with peaks and valleys the depth of which represent the probability of a given event or state of affairs unfolding in just that way and not another. Barbour does not deny that to us, it appears as though events flow onto this future landscape, but he insists that this is merely appearance, psychological time. Instead, the landscape fixes the distribution of “future states of affairs”.

STANDING NO-TIME ON ITS HEAD

What is it that we suppose time does for us? It allows for motion of course, and therefore cause. To cause requires time. Yet as in Barbour’s theory, we need not, as a result, think that time is a mind-independent property of the universe. In “Time, Tense, and Causation” (1997), Michael Tooley asserts that time is nothing more than a psychological expression of cause. He believes the present and past are real (though not the future) because causal unfolding happened in the past and is happening now, in the present. But like Barbour he believes that time, as such, does not exist. The present is real to experience, and the past is real because events, now fixed, happened, but time is real only to mind.

For Tooley, time is not a property of our universe, but motion and cause are properties of our universe and creatures such as ourselves report this unfolding of the causal web as time. Tooley rejects the physical reality of block time because in his view, the future is not real. There are no events there (yet). But his view does not escape the problem of simultaneity. He concedes that it is not possible, in principle, to place every event in the universe on a single time line. It makes no sense, for example, to say that “the universe is 13.8 billion years old”, something that can only be true (made true by our temporal relation to the big bang) from our specific frame of reference.

In a recent book, “The Order of Time” (2018) Carlo Rovelli more or less agrees with Michael Tooley about causal process, in Rovelli’s description “change and event unfolding” being the real phenomena that manifests in human psychology as a passing of time. Rovelli concedes that this experience is real enough and founded on thermodynamics, but outside of it, there isn’t any time at all, not even a present!

In “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” (2014) Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin take the opposite tack. Their claim is that time is not only mind-independently real, but the most fundamental and over-arching property of our universe. Space can literally come and go in cycles of gravitational collapse and big-bang creation. These cycles are possible because time goes backwards and forwards indefinitely.

Precisely because time is the universe’s fundamental property and, as Unger puts it, “drenches everything” it is a property that cannot be isolated, but is implied by its effect: Motion and cause occur in our universe and history is a particular path taken from the big bang to now, through time. The present universe is a combination of all the space-time paths taken in its history. These paths are real from their beginning notwithstanding they are forever fixed behind their leading edges. Time is not a phenomenon in the universe, but rather the environment in which the universe and its properties cohere. Time is real, because it is the stage on which cause, event unfolding, forms our totality.

It is a truism that the physical sciences can only measure phenomena of the physical world. All our instruments, and the means by which instruments report what they detect, are physical! It is a theorem of causal closure that physical phenomena result always and only in physical effects, and that those effects therefore arise from physical phenomena alone. Instruments and the phenomena they measure both conform to the same physical law. It is precisely the nature of measurement to convert or map one phenomenon (form of energy) that we cannot measure directly into another which we can. Laws remain the same, but phenomena become distinguishable because their interaction energy is convertible.

All of these variously converted phenomena are inside the universe. But time is not inside the universe, it is a fundamental quality of the universe. Everything we know, the instruments and the phenomena they measure are drenched with the same time. We can measure intervals of time by counting harmonic oscillations (from orbits of planets to vibration in atoms), but cannot map time the way we map energy conversions because all of those maps occur within a common ocean of time.

Since cause and time are so closely associated does it make any difference to say that time emerges from cause (Tooley) or that cause is possible thanks to time? Functionally, perhaps not, but each view has philosophical consequences. Assuming time is an ocean embedding everything else (including space) allows Unger & Smolin to reject an unverifiable multiverse.

If time is the universal ocean of the physical then our universe and its special properties is the present variation of a succession of universes each of which inherits characteristics from its prior ancestor. Present characteristics are traced from former characteristics through a temporal interval of extreme (but not infinite) pressure and heat (the big bang). This lets Unger & Smolin imagine that characteristics of the ancestral universe might one day be recognisable in this one. The transformation from one universe to another, unlike the multiverse, is hypothetically, a testable hypothesis.

Global time is yet another outcome of the Unger & Smolin thesis. The universe has the same age in every frame because different time measurements, intervals, can be mapped to one another. Clocks in our frame say the universe is 14 billion years old. This might be 10 billion years in a faster (through space) moving frame as measured from our own, and 15 billion in a slower moving frame. Yet from within all frames the recombination event (in our frame 380,000 years after the big bang) occurs at 0.00275% of the temporal distance between the big bang and that frame’s present.

From the viewpoint of any frame then, all the events of the universe can be fit, proportionally speaking, in the same order in every frame! We can, in other words, map our 14 billion years into the measurements in the other frames while keeping the same order of events. In the Unger and Smolin view, it is conceptually possible to place every event in the universe on a single time line. That the universe has a certain “global age” that is the same in all frames becomes meaningful.

THE THEOLOGOCAL VIEW of TIME

Imagine an alternate possible universe that, at first glance, looks much like our own in that all the stars, galaxies, and planets are distributed in space exactly like they are for us in the real world. But in this alternate universe, there is no time and so no change. Everything is static, nothing moves. Of course this isn’t physically possible, a star could not be a star if in stasis. We are imagining here. In our imaginary universe there is no such thing as a light-year because there are no years, or for that matter hours or any other interval of time.

In our universe we can measure distance by time because we know of a phenomenon, light, that never varies in its speed through the vacuum of space. But we cannot do this in the imaginary universe because nothing moves, there is no change. There can be no speed which always involves distance and time. But there can be a concept of miles, or feet, or meters because defining those magnitudes need not involve time.

Now suppose you live in this universe (again, you cannot, but let’s imagine that a subjective view exists and has experience) on the planet Earth. Suppose you have the means to visit another star, say Arcturus. For simplicity let’s call a light-year 6×10^12 miles (it’s a bit fewer than that but I want to keep the math simple). Arcturus is 37 light-years (again the real figure is a bit less) from Sol. That comes out to 2×10^14 miles. In our imaginary universe Arcturus is that distance, in miles, from Sol even though light-years do not exist. But if you had the means to transport your consciousness to Arcturus, you would, in our timeless universe, cross the distance instantaneously. No time can elapse because there is no time. Want to go from Arcturus to Antares? Another instantaneous transition in space. Why stop at stars in our own galaxy? Visit Andromeda or any other galaxy in the universe, all instantly. Notice the jump from Sol to Arcturus to Antares, to any galaxy all, takes place timelessly. No time elapses in the entire multi-jump transaction.

Here is the point of the thought experiment. You could visit every star and galaxy in the universe instantaneously and that amounts to saying “at the same time”. This makes you omnipresent. You can literally be everywhere in space simultaneously. Supposing you could have experiences (yes, real experience demands time, but again we’re imagining) in all of these places. Not only could you visit everywhere simultaneously, you could remain in all places indefinitely! You would have the experience of everything everywhere simultaneously. You would be omniscient. By extirpating time from our universe creatures like ourselves gain two of the three infinite powers normally ascribed only to God.

God being infinite and eternal is “outside time”. Eternity is not merely “endless time” it is, as with my thought experiment above, something entirely different. In the Unger & Smolin view there is no eternity but time does go backwards and forwards indefinitely (not infinitely, leaving a hanging ontological question addressed only by a “God hypothesis”). But the story of a universe created by God, as near as our metaphysics can put it together puts time in exactly this same role. It is the ocean that governs our universe over-all.

We live in a “time governed universe”, meaning exactly what Unger & Smolin mean by time, an over-arching environment in which the objects, processes, and notional regularities that describe them, are all time-dependent. The mathematics of basic physics works both forwards and backwards in time, but our actual physics, the macrophysics of our universe, does not. God may be “outside time”, but we live in a “time drenched” creation.

Nor should we assume from this theological view that time and eternity are, necessarily, the only two facets of the universe. Besides eternity and time it is possible there are other creations, ontologies that are other-than-eternal, yet not time-bound. But while this is a metaphysical possibility thanks to God’s infinity, there is nothing more we can say about such regimes should they exist. We are stuck in time and cannot detect, that is measure, anything other than time-bound phenomena as Unger & Smolin claim. Even to say “God is eternal” is only a placeholder (We have no sense of what eternity is really like) albeit one made reasonable by the philosophical demands of infinity (see my “Prolegomena to a Future Theology); a causeless, eternal, starting point grounding rational thought.

Yet there is something more here, something ignored by physics and philosophy, for which theology accounts. In both the “time does not exist” and the “time is the ocean” views, we should not expect to be sensitive to time simpliciter. A fish is, presumably, not aware of the ocean in which it swims. How are we aware of time? The philosophical community universally credits our time sense to consciousness in general. Brain processes occur on the leading edge of the causal web with all other process. It makes sense that our experience takes place with time always in the background, and this for animals as well as humans. But for human beings, time is more than background.

Animals live in the present and have memories but these are not connected to abstract ideas of past, present, and future. Human beings not only live in time like the animals but we are abstractly aware of time. Given that everything in the physical universe of our experience is “drenched in global time”, how is it that we are able to distinguish or identify time as a distinct quality of our experience at all?

What theology gives us is personality (see my books and the essay “Why Personality”). Human consciousness is able to distinguish time because human mind amalgamates a changeless pattern. Mind, consciousness is drenched in time and so constantly changing like everything else in the universe, but personality (not our identity but the temporally fixed facet of it), remains fixed. Personality provides the contrast (changeless in the presence of otherwise ubiquitous change) by which we distinguish time itself.

Just about every philosopher disagrees with me and insists that personality (agency being merely another affect of consciousness) changes with everything else. All of these thinkers universally fail to distinguish personality from character, personality’s expression in consciousness and behavior. Character changes, but the personality centered in that character does not. This is how I know that I, the same person, persist (or perdure) through all the character and bodily changes I’ve experienced throughout my life. My body changes, my mind changes, my character changes, but I, the person, have not changed. I am the same person experiencing all of these changes throughout my lifetime.

How is it possible that this miracle of changeless pattern exists in a universe in which all else changes in the ocean of time? It exists and can exist because it comes direct from God who is infinite and changeless and is therefore the only possible source of it. Indeed it is the only phenomenon in the universe of our experience created directly by God and is the real meaning of the phrase “in God’s image”, that is, our being personal. All else, all the rest of the finite creation, including life and consciousness, arises indirectly. God remains the ultimate cause of everything, but the physics we experience, including its embedding in time, has come about indirectly, beginning at some fundamental level through a chains of physical cause.

I go into this subject in much more detail in my books and linked essays, but it is worth pointing out here that the higher animals, while conscious and sensitive to environmental clues occurring in time do not separate time from the other dimensions of their experience. Animals experience time in the same way that they experience values (see again the Prolegomena linked above). They are immersed in them (and it), but because animals are not persons they cannot distinguish time (or values) from their unified experience. A lion is not abstractly aware of being the same lion today as she was yesterday. Animal mind, like human mind apart from the personality pattern, changes along with everything else.

Personality may be the changeless benchmark by which we recognize time as such, but theology gives us something else with regard to mind-independent time. It entails the reality of the future! For Unger, Smolin, and Tooley, the future is not real because there are no events there; the causal nexus is, by definition and experience, the present. But theology fixes one event in the future. It is necessary, if there is a God who is God, that the time-universe has some purpose, some end state that must, also necessarily, come about. This would not be the end of time, but rather the achievement of some intended state of affairs in time.

From the principles of God’s infinity and human sensitivity to values, we can infer that this end must ultimately involve goodness, love, between all persons and become the best possible universe! We do not know what the physical state of the universe will be then, nor do we know by what contingent path it will arrive at that state. But that it must arrive eventually is certain and that fixes an event, the achievement of God’s purpose for time, in the future. If that is the case, the future must be real.

CONCLUSION

Everything in our physical universe, including the physics itself must have a causal beginning. Physicists point to the quantum vacuum, but if Unger & Smolin are right, time itself conditions or constrains this regimen. Physics cannot cause time, rather time is the environment in which physics takes place. But something must then ground time itself, something Unger & Smolin lay aside as brute and un-analyzable. They are correct. Without a “God hypothesis” we cannot make sense of a “beginning of time” even while making sense (the quantum vacuum) of a “beginning of space”.

I am happy with a theological underpinning that makes time real, an ocean that characterizes our universe. Most philosophers and physicists are happy to assume, from our inability to observe any but time-bound phenomena, that time is an illusion arising from motion which underlies cause. It was satisfying to discover a philosopher (Unger) and physicist (Smolin) who are not so flip and recognize that time is the real foundation of our universe. But even, assuming they are correct, to identify time with the over-arching environment within which the system that is our physical universe works, is only a metaphor. It is not to say anything about of what, exactly, time consists.

Time isn’t a substance any more than cause is a substance, but it isn’t a process either. To say it is the foundation on which cause, process, rests is only a metaphor though apt. The exchange of conserved quantities that underlies physical cause is properly a mechanism, and time plays an enabling role. But physical cause is effected by exchange of various conserved quantities and often the transformation of one such quantity into another. By contrast time enables all these uni-vocally. To “exchange conserved qualities”, whether charge, momentum, or energy demands time. Time mediates all of these exchanges, but that is to say nothing more than that they all occur in or through time.

Thanks to time’s global character, physics can safely ignore it. The “time factor” appearing in equations is a stand-in taking duration into account. But as far as concerns physics nothing more needs to be said about “global time”. It is nothing more than a manner of speaking. But if Unger, Smolin, and indeed Theism are correct, such a view, while enough to support calculation, misses an important characteristic of the reality of our physical universe. While it is possible to understand phenomena within the universe without supposing global time is real, it is not possible to understand the universe as a whole. Of course theology enriches this insight, but even without it, Unger & Smolin are, I believe, correct in that we cannot understand the facts of our cosmological history unless time is real.

Review: Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff

Another diversion here into pop culture, this time the more strictly political. We live in dangerous times and there is no better symbol of them than this book. I did note in the review a single philosophical issue I had with the book. I will spend my time here in these comments elaborating a bit on it. As usual, the original Amazon review is included in full following these comments.

The matter concerns the accuracy of the portrait Wolff paints of both President Trump and the Whitehouse West Wing organization with particular focus on Steve Bannon, and the duo Bannon began to call Jarvanka, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared. In a way, the story is told from their viewpoint while pulling together observations and comments of other parties both a direct part of the Trump organization (however temporarily) and those on the wider periphery.

According to the story various cabals formed and evaporated over the course of Trump’s pre-inaugural period and in the first 200 days or so of the administration. It seems like the only constant was the antipathy between Bannon (painted as an essentially driven fanatic with the old fashioned instincts of a bomb throwing anarchist), and Jarvanka a pair of rich and spoiled children whose politics were liberal leaning but who hadn’t the slightest idea of how to really accomplish anything (or what could be accomplished) aside from protecting their riches and their relation to Trump. Nobody had the slightest real political experience.

Wolff gives us no reason to believe that in talking to any of these people (both the narrow and wider set of players) he was getting an unvarnished truth uncolored by their desire to use Wolff himself to “get at” any of the opposing cabals. If what he tells us is true, it would have been almost impossible for these players to relate to Wolff with the unbiased truth. Wolff became (or it was hoped he would become) one of the arrows in each cabal’s quiver. It is therefore impossible to tell if the emerging picture is a caricature or faithful photographic image. That question, I believe, will remain unanswered until further journalistic accounts of Trump’s first year (or tenure however long it goes) are written.

But all the same, and this is the scary part, the answer to the question doesn’t much matter here as concerns the relation between the Trump administration and the world (including ourselves in the U.S.). Whether caricature or photograph, the image is that of a very disturbed and dangerous situation, an American administration that not only does not know what it is doing broadly speaking, but whose ostensible leader appears pathologically unfit to serve in this office. Worse, he is surrounded by other pathologies of various kinds all of which overlap with at least two of his; great wealth taken for granted, and an unswerving belief in their judgments about matters with which their lives have prepared them in not the slightest way.

That, my friends, is frightening to me. But it gets even worse. Not only do they not understand the consequences of their actions as concerns the world at large, they do not really care so long as their wealth is preserved. That is only a little unfair because Wolff does paint Jarvanka as caring, they just don’t know what or how to do anything about it so their focus remains, as with the others, on their wealth, power, and even (especially in Bannon’s case as he was not rich) in the appearance of power.

The story continues to take bizarre twists. Today, January 16 2018, results of the President’s medical examination, including investigation of degenerative cognitive decline, were effusively described. The doctor, a military man with rows of campaign ribbons on his breast told us that this 71 year old (and obviously overweight) man was in perfect health physically and mentally. One wants to believe the doctor and perhaps it is so that there is no disease process detectable in the President’s brain. But perfect health is a bit hard to believe and would be of anyone who looked like Donald Trump does today. The doctor attributed it to “good genes”. Based on what Michael Wolff has told us, this could only be a signal that the news conference was a put on, a show. Or am I being paranoid?

Now September 2018 and Bob Woodward has released his book “Fear: Trump in the White House” which I have reviewed. More good journalism.

That’s all I’ll say for now. Happy to discuss in comments.

Fire and Fury Michael Wolff

This must have been a difficult book to write. There is so much story to be told and the principle threads so entangled that it must have been very difficult to tie them together in a coherent story. Wolff mostly succeeds, but not entirely. Then again that is an important part of the very story Wolff is trying to tell, the story itself is about an incoherent presidential administration.

Told in broadly chronological order of the presidential election of 2016 and the roughly first 200 days of the administration up to the middle of August 2017. At the end an epilogue focused on Steve Bannon, who has a claim to being the book’s main character, brings the story up to roughly October 2017, but the pace of news has hardly stopped there. As I write this in January 2018 I can only be sure that much more will happen. Within its chronology, there are frequent steps backwards as Wolff brings in the various characters and their varying alliances coloring-in their relation to the then forward moving part of the story. Of all the characters brought to the fore, at least among the dozen or more who are in direct proximity to the president by living or working in the West Wing, only a single pair (Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner) keep the same relationship relative to one another throughout. Every other person or cabal-like group changes relationships often multiple times as most of the individuals involved come into the story and then go out!

I do have one philosophical matter to bring up. Let’s grant that Wolff reported accurately on everything he was told by everybody. He presents a fair picture of that to which he was a party either first, or at most second (and occasionally third) hand. At the same time that which he is reporting is, he points out, the back stabbing testimony of each cabal out to paint the others in the worst light possible. Even if those to whom he spoke were not outright lying to him, at the least they were telling highly selective truths almost surely leaving much out. Our only hope in this mess is that from the back stabbing of all sides towards one another and the occasional more neutral voice (though nobody was entirely neutral) from the periphery, Wolff has put together if not a true portrait, then at least a portrait true to the Kafka-esque nature of the administration! If that is a horrible thought, it is what makes this an important book.

This is high class journalism first and foremost, but it reads at the same time like an Elmore Leonard novel! As Sean Spicer began to say “you can’t make this shit up!”. Frankly this book would be hysterically funny if it was not so downright dangerous and disturbing.

Book Review: Assholes A Theory

My only additional comment here is that Amazon rejected my review (below) because it contains the word ‘asshole’. This is political correctness gone crazy. They asked me to delete the word or perhaps change it to something like ‘A******’ but I refused. Considering that the title of the book appears at the top of every review I cannot comprehend how Amazon algorithms would permit the publication of any review of this book. Be that as it may, I am not politically correct and I publish my review of this excellent book here on the blog for your edification.

Assholes, A Theory

Bravo for a brilliant book. Dr. James takes what appears at first to be a trivial notion, “the asshole” as a metaphor for a particular sort of human
behavior and uses it to illustrate how philosophy is done, what it must consider, and the directions in which it can be applied.

He begins by defining the term and then comparing it to other “terms of derision” like ‘jerk’ exploring various examples both hypothetical and drawn from the headlines so that after the first few chapters we are comfortable understanding what an asshole is as compared to other kinds of behavior worthy of opprobrium. Following this set up he moves on to social philosophy; why this behavior exists, how it comes about, various possibilities concerning its root cause (or causes) and why most (but not all) assholes are men. He next discusses what people who are not assholes can do about those who are, both on the individual level and in small or large social systems. In the closing chapters he moves further into the realm of the political and economic. He argues for a refreshing view of what might be called “the problems of capitalism”. Far from the Marxist idea that capitalism is inherently and necessarily unstable, James argues that modern (State regulated) capitalism can be perfectly stable and what makes it unstable are the presence of, you guessed it, assholes, whose behavior distorts the system rendering it less and less stable over time.

Does James make his case here for this final claim? I think he does, and it puts a nice capstone on an all around excellent book in the philosophical arena of ethics. An easy read. If you are looking for an example of good philosophical technique applied to a trivial notion that turns out to have world shattering consequences, this would be a good read.

Where Jacob Needleman Goes Wrong in “Why Can’t we be Good”

Jacob Needleman wrote “Why Can’t we be Good?” in 2007. I read it in 2017. He was a professor of mine at San Francisco State in the late 1970s. The only philosopher of religion at SFSU I took a few classes of his. Only a few. Despite a shared belief in the existence of God we disagreed about almost everything else. I see that this has not changed between then and 2007. Some of this disagreement figures in my formal review (for Amazon) of the book included below. Here in my philosophical commentary, I want to say more about it, and in particular some of that which stems from my personal experience with Jacob Needleman.

First to set some context. Needleman believes God exists. So far so good. In “Why Can’t we be Good?” he is a little vague about his concept of God vascilating between the transcent “Abrahamic God” of the world’s three major monotheisms, and something else, a “God in us”, a thread present in many religions (including the monotheisms) and emphasized in more recent movements characterized as “New Age”. I think Needleman believes that both views of God can be real at the same time which is fine by me, but in this book he is very unclear about distinguishing between the two concepts.

As is true of virtually all of today’s philosophers of religion and theologians terms like ‘person’, ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, and [less often] ‘mind’ can be used interchangeably. I am not concerned with these indistinctions here except to mention them because their blurring together does happen in this book. I am concerned rather with a problem specific to Needleman’s thought, something I came up against almost from the moment I met him and is very clearly stated in this book. One could even say it was the central point of the book. At root, the first and fundamental problem for me is that Needleman believes a genuine relationship with God (and recall he is vague about what or more precisely with whom such a relationship occurs) is a difficult achievement demanding, among other things, much study, perhaps years, and more than this, it requires the competent help of a guide, a genuinely enlightened person who can guide you through your studies. Needleman is quite clear that whatever else is necessary to successful achievement of that genuine connection, a guide, is also necessary.

How Needleman arrived at such a position I can only speculate. Having known him, my speculations might be very close to the mark. But whatever it was that brought him to this position (he does leave hints to it in the book), Needleman grew up into young adulthood and an advanced education in philosophy at a time in which the mystical and New Age ideas that fuel his viewpoint had gained a popularity in the culture of this time, something they still maintain today though far less frenetically. I think Needleman had the good fortune to seek his fortune in somewhat New Age philosophy at a time when this came to be much in demand.

In Needleman’s view, without the guide (and a guide is not the only requirement) we are literally incapable of a “genuine, deep, moral decision and action”. With the possible exception of moments of great crisis (that even this is a problem for the whole idea he just does not see) we have no real free will in the moral domain because we are all asleep, disconnected from the god within (and without). This is why we “cannot be good”. Everything we do (morally) we do out of habit or culture accretion. No moral decision really belongs to us. Needleman simply discounts what it is moral free will really represents. Not some phenomenon that requires study, but opportunity to improve the very connection Needleman asserts we don’t have by what we decide to do! Needleman does point out that one who seeks to strengthen the connection to spirit must be sincere about it, and that sincerity must lead to some action. That is all well and good except that for Needleman, any action we take that seems good is merely the outcome of our life’s moral accretions that do not by themselves get us to where we must be although such action is nevertheless (like sincerety and the guide) a necessary part of the process.

If Needleman discounts free will on the good side, he must also discount it on the bad and he does, declaring unhesitatingly that all evil in the world is the result of our disconnection from spirit. From deliberately sending tourists who ask for help in the wrong direction to ordering the construction of death camps and murdering entire communities, all of this merely a consequence of being unaware of our “true selves”. I find this notion both absurd and obscene. Needleman’s mistake also causes him to blur the distinction between error and evil. If I work in a chemical plant and accidentally open the wrong valve, perhaps I cause an explosion somewhere in the plant, a mistake, error. If on the other hand I freely open that same valve knowing it will cause that explosion, that act is not an error but evil! The difference is plain, but Needleman cannot get to it because he discounts moral free will in all but enlightened persons.

Needleman is correct about sincerity and doing something, that is acting to (freely) do the best good you can (even if it is only a small good) when a situation to do good presents itself and even if much of what you actually do is done out of habit or cultural accretion. Sincerity entails a willingness to try taking action when you can. When you do this, three things happen: (1) you become incrementally more sensitive to such opportunities for action, (2) acting becomes a little easier, and (3) your action becomes incrementally more adroit and fully free. You can call this progressive development “the working of the spirit” or just chalk it up to “practice makes perfect”. Either way, if you persist, eventually the process itself will awaken you. See my “Why Free Will”.

Notice that none of this is particularly intellectual. It is spiritual and not intellectual development. Needleman would be right to assert that the intellectual can support the spiritual. Once you are sincere and acting, study and guidance can reinforce the process, but they cannot be necessary to it.

“Why Can’t we be Good” Jacob Needleman 2007

In the interest of full disclosure, Jacob Needleman was a professor of mine at San Francisco State University where I did my philosophy MA in the late 1970s. I had a few classes from him and found we disagreed about almost everything. I will try not to get into all of that in this review, but some of it cannot, perhaps, be helped. I see the basis of our disagreements in 1979 are very much in evidence here in this book written in 2007.

In “Why Can’t we be Good?” Dr. Needleman takes stock of the evil in the world, much of it obviously the result of human behavior both now and for thousands of years past. He certainly notes that humans do also behave in what passes for goodness in their daily lives. Many of us love our children and do our best to raise them lovingly and there are instances of human action, tens of millions every day all over the world that pass for civil and often “beyond the requirements” of civil behavior. So why he asks are we not doing even better? Why does the world appear steeped in evil?

His argument is that we are not better because we have lost sight of what “real goodness” means because we have forgotten our fundamental connection to the spirit forces (God transcendent, God embodied in “our self” [often blurring these ideas]). He admits that sometimes, in crisis, we act on a “higher, genuine, moral level” but most of the time, the best we can do is merely acting our of reasonably good habits we’ve acquired from our culture, and just as often (perhaps more) we act in downright evil ways. His central claim is that we cannot find (re-discover) this connection by our-self. To re-acquire our consciousness of the fundamental connection demands a teacher, a guide, which always takes the form of some already enlightened person who can both point us to the various holy-literature (be they Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, etc) traditions where the connection is revealed but also help us to understand and interpret what exactly the traditions are trying to tell us. Without this guidance, we are, Needleman tells us, ultimately helpless. Putting it bluntly, we must study what it means to be good and appropriate these teachings into our inner being to even begin approaching genuine moral action.

If this all sounds a bit new agey “I can’t help the world without first helping myself” it is, but Needleman is more sophisticated than that. Besides a “teacher”, the student seeker must sincerely want this for him or herself. We are not in the realm of magic incantations that make us over in one fell swoop. Of course even the new age teachings also note this. What Needleman adds is his recognition that no matter how lacking we are in genuine morality, we must nevertheless try, that is act, in the world of our daily existence. We must act to do the “best we can” as we travel about our daily lives interacting with others however weak and habitual those actions might be. We must practice, not only in our studies, but in life. Only by these things, sincerity, study, and action, can we re-awaken our consciousness of the connection between ourselves and that relationship to the cosmos that results in genuinely deep, and not superficial, moral behavior.

But while Needleman is correct about the need for action, I do not believe he grasps its overriding significance. Because we (most of us) do not know who we really are our “moral free will” is minimal to non-existent. We are hemmed about by habits and cultural acquisitions, social accretions that render us incapable of genuinely free moral choices (except possibly in times of crisis). For Needleman this applies as much to evil as good. He twice quotes Socrates declaring “No man does evil intentionally”. All evil in the world (he says) stems from our disconnection (culturally induced) from the reality we are meant to know. Socrates (at least as quoted here) and Needleman fail to distinguish between error (the truly inevitable outcome of our limited perspective and cognitive abilities including all that we cannot know lying above our intellectual pay grade) and evil. The latter is precisely “error deliberately (that is freely) chosen”! It might be true that “no man does error intentionally”, but evil is evil because it is intentional!

The same must be true of “the good”. Certainly there is a continuum of moral choice from the trivial to the profound. But even our “good habits” were not always habits, we had to allow them to become habits at some time in our earlier life. The same holds for the accretions of our culture. Some of these are certainly harmful and others good. If, on balance, we have adopted (for ourselves) more good ones than bad, this too must be the result of genuinely moral choices all along the trajectory of our lives. The sincerity of the seeker, something Needleman notes is necessary for any sort of success, must already have been a freely made moral decision or it wouldn’t be “sincere”!

A better choice for a title for this book might have been “Why Can’t we be Better”, but that’s less dramatic and would put Needleman in the position of admitting that, provided we are sincere and we do the good that we are able to do now, we will grow incrementally better — practice makes perfect. A guide, should you be lucky enough to find a real one, can be helpful, but cannot be necessary. My applause here goes to Needleman’s emphasis on action, something he talks about more than either of the other two “necessities”, the guide and the sincerity of the seeker. Forty years ago I don’t remember this much recognition of the importance of acting, but then my memory certainly deceives me. In any case he has it here. Included in early chapters are some nice exercises people can actually do together that simulate “the ethical” in the “theater of the mind” as Needleman puts it. Easy to read, not technical. Will it help you along your “quest to be good”? Well it can’t hurt!

Prolegomena to a Future Theology

“Prolegomena: a preliminary discussion; introductory essay, as prefatory matter in a book; a prologue” — http://www.dictionary.com

Updated in April 2019 to smooth rough edges, remove less relevant material, and shorten up.

Most of these blog essays rest on an ontology and theology but briefly explicated. I have written in more detail of it in the two books “Why This Universe” (2014) and “God, Causal Closure, and Free Will” (2016). This essay is an attempt to state it more succinctly and then clearly relate it to the rest of my interests in philosophy. In my books and essays I’ve argued that theology, and in particular, this set of theological axioms and theorems, provide the best explanations for certain aspects of our (that is human) experience both phenomenally and historically. In this essay I’m not going to argue about any particular experience (except perhaps as example) but rather the relation between this theology and the overall viewpoint of my philosophical ruminations.

My over-all thesis is easy to state: A correct theology must follow from the logic of infinity. Holy books, the historical record, can inform but not ground a theology that grasps even some small part of God’s nature and his relationship to mankind.

I did not invent this ontology or theology. It comes from “The Urantia Book” first published in 1955 by the Urantia Foundation and now in the public domain. There are now superb e-book versions for less than $4, one of them linked above. My own contribution is to focus on the inner-most core (God the Father) of The Urantia Book’s theological system, ignoring the many distinctions it makes that otherwise ground the differentiation of reality. My purpose in the blog is often to relate the Urantia Book’s ontology and theology to problems in contemporary philosophy. I do not need its rich theology to do this, but only its core.

The Urantia Book affirms the validity of this approach: “There are many spiritual influences and they are all as one. … As these spiritual presences operate in the lives of Urantians, they cannot be segregated. In your minds and upon our souls they function as one spirit, notwithstanding their diverse origins” [UB 8:5.4]. For example, it is the Infinite Spirit, the third person of the Trinity who is broadly responsible for the phenomenon of mind. But she executes this responsibility in perfect coordination with The Father. To say “God the Father is responsible for mind” is technically incorrect, but nevertheless spiritually true, for the Spirit acts in eternally perfect coordination with the Father.

Joints in Reality

As this paper is primarily an explication of the theology, I will only briefly address the ontology it implies. What follows here is not a presupposition of the theology, but an inference from it. This is to say if God is something like or has something like the positive qualities ascribed to him below, then something like this ontology must obtain.

The entirety of all that is real can, in the final analysis, be divided into three distinct but interacting domains; Spirit, Mind, and Matter-energy. It is said that “God is Spirit”, but whatever else it is that constitutes Spirit we have little ability to know. Little however is not none, and one quality Spirit must have is the power to have been the source of the two other domains.

Mind here is not taken to be individual human minds, but broadly the phenomena of mind in the universe. Mind is expressed as animal mind including the human and perhaps in other ways throughout the universe. As a domain, however, Mind can be taken to be a kind of reality as real as, but also different from, Spirit and Matter-energy.

Matter-energy is the domain with which we are most familiar because even mind of the human sort rests on top of it. It is because Mind in some sense intervenes between Spirit and Matter-energy that localized mind, the sort of mind we have, is capable of comprehending and manipulating Matter-energy relations.

Crucially 1) Spirit is the source of both Matter-energy and mind, and 2) everything that is, everything that exists is either Spirit, Mind, Matter-energy, or some combination of the three. Minded animals are a common example of the combination of Matter-energy and Mind. Human mindedness in particular is also sensitive to the reality of values, truth, beauty, and goodness. This is the only direct phenomenal access we have to “what we can know of Spirit”. It is because human mind is sensitive to values, that we can choose to be “led by Spirit” (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” and “Why Free Will”).

Theology is Realism

Modern philosophy seems shot through with antirealism which not only refuses to recognize a basis for correspondence between subjective experience and the “in-itself out there” external to it, but denies even that it is rational to think there might be a correspondence. This includes even such logical frames as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, self-identity, and the Principle of Non-contradiction. Some antirealists argue that while these three pillars of rational thought are essential to us, to making sense of subjective experience, we are not justified assuming they apply to the “in-itself external” or even that there is an in-itself external independent of our temporal subjectivity. As concerns God it simply isn’t possible for antirealists to assume they can say anything positive. If we cannot say anything meaningful about our immediate externality, how much less could we possibly be able to say about God who would have to be at a further step removed?

Any serious theology then must begin from a realist perspective. God’s existence supports a direct realism (see John Searle “Seeing Things as they Are”). If God is real, human mind can be substantive in someway or other, and can be presupposed to be designed to perceive and manipulate the structure of the world.

We are here philosophers. The point of “God talk” is to get something out of it for philosophy. Does assuming God exists and ascribing logically maximal qualities to him improve insights into other questions. What questions? Broadly, questions about the nature and origins of our experiential world and experience itself and how the two of them go together, that is what relation or relations, do they have? Many philosophers today will say that such questions are not meaningful; they do not correspond to anything real and therefore cannot have a truth value. There cannot be any relation between what exists and what doesn’t exist, God, with unicorns falling into that latter category.

These philosophers will say there is an infinite number of such possible metaphysical claims and no way to discriminate between them. I do not believe this is correct. Not just anything will do. To accommodate all of our real experience, sensory, intentional, directed, only some possible imaginings will work, and in particular, when you add also moral convictions like the social reality of duty, only one works. But before I can defend that assertion I must set forth the one. That is the purpose of this paper.

In what follows I use the personal male pronoun ‘he’, ‘his’, to mean God. I do this only when the reference is obvious and to avoid having to repeat ‘God’ or ‘God’s’ over and again. My use here is by convention only and not meant to imply that God is a man (or woman). The personal pronoun does, however, imply person-hood or I might have used ‘it’. This particular implication is to be fleshed-out later in the essay.

Dispensing with Arguments Against

Why do [most] philosophers and scientists say “God doesn’t exist”? There are two justifications: (1) physics finds nothing to suggest that anything besides physics exists, and (2) every “proof of God” advanced in the history of philosophy is flawed. The first objection is easy to discount. Essays in this blog address it, but the bottom line is that physics cannot hope to “find evidence” for anything purportedly non-physical. In the view of most theoretical speculation about God, his would be an existence (implying a reality) outside physics on the simplest grounds that he created physics (if he did not create physics, then he is not God). But physics can only be about the physical. All instruments, and ultimately our sensory apparatuses, are physical and can only detect and measure physical phenomena. The notion the “physical absence of evidence” for the nonphysical has any relevance to the matter of God’s existence is nonsensical. I note this does not mean that God exists either. It means physics (science generally) is in no position to say.

The second objection is more telling. Even besides physics, no proof of God’s existence (a proof being something that takes place in logic and has meaning only in the mental arena of persons) is to be had. Why? If God exists “the mental arena of persons” is (like physics), a phase of some total creation. The universe is both logical and consistent. God’s existence or non-existence is presupposed in every ontological system that seeks to catalog what is real, what exists. No proof of God’s existence or non-existence is possible from either viewpoint because either way our viewpoints are constrained by the totality in which we are embedded. God is not logically impossible in either case, and even ontological systems that attempt to do without him do not preclude his possibility other than by stipulation.

To derive philosophical value from God, that is to justify or even suggest that assuming God exists makes sense in relation to broad philosophical questions is an “inference to best explanation.” I assume God exists and has certain necessary qualities or he isn’t God. From those we draw consequences and then evaluate those outcomes against our experience subjective and objective. This amounts to phenomenology (and by extension all the powers and limits of language we use to discuss it) and what physics has discovered about the universe. If we get that far and none of the consequences appears to contradict our experience, the last step is to evaluate those consequences against the sum total of our subjective and collective experience. Physics has not dealt well with subjective experience. Supposing God exists ties the objective and the subjective together by grounding both. To do any of this we must be able to say something meaningful about God; that we are able (again supposing God exists) to express propositions whose content could be true (not inconsistent with experience). Such propositions would have a truth maker (see “Truth and Truthmaking”) which would be God.

So we begin by supposing there is a God who is the source of being, the material universe, ourselves, and anything else there might be in whatever sense being is something real including God. God must be his own cause (or strictly causeless) and further he must be the only self-caused (uncaused) entity in the universe; ‘universe’ here cannot be merely the physical world in which we find ourselves. The physical world is underlain by space (possibly quantized) and drenched in time. God must be the source of both space and time, and thus must in some sense be “outside it”. If God is God, then he must be able to act (or by choice refrain from acting) to effect anything not logically impossible, anywhere in his creation whether at a time and place or across all time and space. A traditional miracle, might serve as an example of the former, while the constancy and universality of “natural law” could be an example of the latter. If God is real, then “to exist” entails some relation to God however indirect that relation might be.

None of this is to say that, from the human perspective, we have anything resembling a satisfactory grasp of what existence or being is like from God’s perspective. If some realm “outside time”, with God as the source of it (and himself), exists, we cannot, from a perspective within time, say anything about it. It is, so to speak, above our pay grade. All we can do is postulate its existence analogous to the way in which physicists postulate a “quantum realm”, though that remains physical. Why should we then postulate this realm? If God exists outside time, then we must include (allow for) a something “outside time” in our ontology. At the least we must propose a “placeholder”.

Whatever being is, God must exhaust it. God’s perspective cannot be perspectival. His must be the “totalizing perspective” that totalizes. If God is God, then he is also the origin (perhaps indirectly) of mind and so there is some relation between perspectival consciousness, and the creator. Whatever we take consciousness to be its existence is a part of the overall creation. The creation includes everything including our subjectivity. Not only that but it is reasonable to suppose there is a relation between consciousness and the material world it seems to sense. The outstanding problem of realism, the mystery of its representation of the material world, should not be a mystery at all, even if the mechanism remains unexplained, because God is the source of both.

If the foregoing were not the case, there would be (or could be) something “more than God”, something outside God, and that is impossible if God is really God. If there is or might be something outside of God the metaphysical question of its source would be meaningful. God could not be the source of anything that was “beyond or antecedent to him”, and in that case wouldn’t be God in the first place. Let me be clear here. One of my assumptions is that the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) holds all the way up to God. If this is so, then something (the universe) cannot come from a literal nothing. God must be eternal. There never was a time in which God did not exist and so there never was a literal nothing. God is/was always. To the human perspective eternity can mean nothing more than “infinite time”. It must therefore be at least this, but this should not be construed as meaning that to God it is only this.

If we can get to “at least”, it means we are in fact able to say something meaningful about God even if what we say, our ideas, propositions, and so on, have only some partial (still truthful) correspondence to what God is for himself. We must be able to assert true positive propositions about God even though they represent but a small slice of his being. This is not to say that everything we might imagine about God corresponds to anything real. Like unicorns, some of what we imagine about God might have no correspondence to reality what-so-ever. All the same, correspondence must be possible. If nothing else, we can say that if God is God he must be at the top of the chain of being. All being, including God himself, must proceed from God.

If God is God, then being is univocal except as concerns God himself. Matter, mind, values, time, space, and anything else that can be said “to exist” and isn’t God must ultimately originate from God and be able to interact with God and itself. Nothing exists that isn’t in someway related to God. From the human viewpoint there can be many legitimate joints in reality: past present and future, matter and thought, natural and artifactual kinds, or universals and particulars. By contrast God knows every possible joint, and the whole simultaneously. Substances, processes and all their relations must all exist and be fully present across all time to God.

If this is all the case then it is reasonable (rational and warranted) to believe that the PSR, and the fully determinate logic of self-identity, and non-contradiction apply all the way up the chain of reality to God. They are structurally integral to our thought because they are structurally integral to the universe itself. Some suggest that God himself could deceive us about this, but such deception would entail a schism in reality, the nature and operation of mind would be effectively incompatible with the rest of creation violating the univocality of being. Such a God, would not be God.

To put it in a positive form everything created by God must be consistent with him. The self-consistency of natural law in the physical is one reflection of this, but it would beg our question to infer from the physical to the rest. It would be possible for the physical to be consistent and mind be inconsistent, delivering false perceptions (for example). But in fact the deliverance of mind seems not to be false. To be sure they are incomplete thanks to the limitations of our sensory apparatus, the “aspect (perspectival) nature” of our perception, and [human/animal] mind’s constraint by time. It is from these that seeming inconsistencies arise. They are inconsistencies from our viewpoint. Consciousness, in someway made to exist by God, might not grasp all universe structure (physical or otherwise). But what it does grasp is real and structured in the external (the for-itself) much as it is perceived in the internal (the for-us).

Axioms and Theorems

I will now sum all the foregoing in a few brief statements of what, positive, we can say about Deity even while we have every reason to believe that what we can say encompasses but little grasp of its full nature. If our grasp of material reality does not exhaust its being (Harman and many others), how much less of God’s reality can we grasp with the human mind? Yet we can say the following: God must be unqualifiedly infinite, outside time and space (he is their creator). He must be self-caused (or uncaused) cause and capable of doing anything that isn’t logically impossible.

God must be logical and this means not inconsistent or internally contradictory in any measure. He cannot, for example be both good and evil or changeless and changing. He can, however, both differentiate himself from his creation while his infinity remains yet undiluted — this is not inconsistent and is a property of the mathematics of infinity. He can create a universe of change and potential evil while remaining himself changeless and infinitely good. See the end of this essay for a note on the meaning of “unqualified infinity”.

God is not only able to act, he is free willed absolutely. Absolute here means there are no constraints on his action, and free must be in a robust volitional sense. God can choose deliberately and purposefully. Other than logical consistency there can’t be any limits to both the choice or choices God makes. Nothing limits his ability, within (at a particular time and place) or across all time, to act and bring into being (“make real”) that which he desires. He must therefore be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, and all of this notwithstanding that he can elect to self-limit provided self-limitation is not inconsistent with his infinity. He might choose (for example) not to act in the material creation throughout all of eternity, but he cannot choose to be unable to act.

God is, in short, God. He can do anything, see anything (whatever “see” means to God), anywhere in time and across time. This implies that if there is some point (purpose) to all of what we experience and everything else there is, God knows what that point is. Moreover, in some far distant future from a perspective within time, that envisaged end point, God’s purpose, must come to pass! I can say more. Even that end point is but the completing of a phase for example “perfecting the material universe” (see my essay “Why Free Will”). God must have further purposes, infinitely many. All the foregoing, as best I can express, follows from the necessity of God’s being infinite, willed, and internally self-consistent. These, in turn, imply constancy throughout eternity — which at least includes “all of time”, past, present, and future. Constancy, in turn, is chosen, freely, by God who knows what it means (omniscience) to “choose for eternity”. I want to stress that all of these qualities are theological axioms, a self-consistent system from which we can derive further (theorems) claims.

I allude to will and purpose above. God must be purposeful, have purpose (even many purposes). Humans experience includes both willfulness and purpose. Human beings cannot have what God lacks. If we are willful and elect purposes so can God and because of the infinity and consistency axioms God’s will must be unqualified (other than by logical contradiction) and his purposes consistent throughout all time. His purposes must be changeless.

There can be purposelessness in phases of the whole creation; purposelessness for a purpose. Physical mechanism, the slavish behavior of the physical world described by physical law, is properly purposeless. But the existence of this mechanism, as such, cannot be purposeless.

Purpose and will are two sides of the same coin. Even in the limited context of human will, we cannot will anything purposelessly, even if the only purpose we have is merely to exercise will. For God to have created anything purposelessly would contradict the consistency axiom. A unified God must not only have purpose, but his purposes cannot be contradictory; all of God’s purposes must, together, point at some internally consistent outcome. Further, his purpose(s) cannot have changed since the beginning of the material world (at least) nor will they change into the indefinite future. This does not mean the content of his purposes are all available to our cognitive grasp. If today humans can grasp more of God’s purpose (not that they usually do) than the human beings of thousands of years past, it is because our intellectual scope has expanded, not because God’s purposes have ever changed.

Purposefulness is a quality of mind. It is precisely one of the strategic discoveries of the sciences that the inanimate ingredients of the material universe, from its basic laws down to the behavior of stars and rocks described by them, are not purposeful in their interactions. The mechanisms of the physical world are not purposeful. This does not mean the whole (a whole which includes mind), is not “for a purpose”, a distinction largely ignored today. Life as such is only metaphorically purposeful. The behavior of non-minded life is rule governed (albeit more complex rules) like the inanimate parts of the world. Literal purpose appears only with mind. God, being purposeful, must be minded in some sense or other. This does not mean that we can have anything of a grasp of his mind compared to ours.

Similarly God must be personal. Nothing exists that isn’t related in someway to God, and that must include human beings and their minds. But there are many kinds of relations. Living entities with minds have some relation to God that inanimate objects lack. But while all minds (even animals) experience subjective relations to other minds (the indirectness of this experience is another matter), human beings experience relationships not merely indirectly but directly “person to person”. As human beings we find ourselves not only minded, but personal. As mind in general has characteristic qualities, so does personality (see “Why Personality”). The possibility of direct relationship (distinct from relations) is grounded in personality, something humans are as well as being minded. Although we cannot find personality when we look for it [this problem has a long philosophical tradition (see also “Realism and Antirealism“)], personality has positive properties that condition human mind (see again“Why Personality”) and we cannot have positive properties that God lacks. Personality grounds the possibility of a new relation not available to non-personal mind, a direct relationship with other persons, including the person of God.

This, by the way, is why all the pundits of the present age are wrong when they say that if we met a race from another planet we would have no point of connection with which to grasp their nature. Presumably any race intelligent and sophisticated enough to travel between stars (or even cast a comprehensible signal) would be personal. Apart from the problems of language and the mechanics of communication, we would have no problem relating to them different as their character expression might be.

God must be perfect with perfection understood in a technical sense. Because God is the final source of everything, all distinction in the universe, what is real is dependent on some relation to God. What has no relation to God (unicorns for example) is not real. From this it follows that a degree of reality, that is how real something is, is proportional to its alignment with or semblance to God. The more something is like God, the more real it is. Perfection is then by definition being exactly like God, something only possible for personalities. Why? Because even a minded entity (say a lion’s mind) lacks a connection, lacks a direct relationship, to God, the person-to-person relation that only human beings have. Again this does not mean that persons can become God. It means they can become like God in the sense of sharing the character expression of his personality.

Perfection is much broader than the previous paragraph implies. In general phenomena are “more real”, more perfect, the more like God they are. Stars and rocks are as real, as much “like God” as stars and rocks can possibly get. They don’t get any more real than they already are. Minded life is a little more like God by virtue of being in the “minded set” of things in the universe, things that share mind with God. Personally minded life is one step closer still. Personal mind has a power (several, see “Why Personality”) that non-personal mind lacks, it can elect to be “as much like God as possible”. Personal mind can choose that course as a purpose, something animals cannot do.

A rock cannot become more than a rock, and even a minded lion cannot choose to be a “better lion”, or for that matter be vegetarian. But personality adds a new dimension to the notion of developing perfection, hence enhanced reality, not only living with the personality as given, but by purposefully choosing to enhance it. A person can choose to become “more like God” than she was when she first awakened to her personal status. Only a human being, a personalized mind, can do this.

Values and Goodness

Those are the theorems. God is purposeful, minded, personal, and perfect. I have said nothing about being good. It is tempting to derive God’s necessary goodness from the axioms and theorems. Whatever else evil is, it is disruptive. Evil is characterized by destruction (of many sorts) and something positive must exist to be destroyed. So existence, being as such if nothing else, must be antecedent to evil. “God’s first thought” cannot therefore be evil and by the infinity and consistency axioms there is no evil in anything God personally does. We can call that good but it is a goodness that is, like perfection, true by definition, and unlike perfection, can conceivably be in conflict with our own judgement.

Perfection is abstract. It exists relative to some standard. Goodness has an emotional component that speaks for itself independent of a standard. God’s goodness is but indirectly related to our perspective, on what has goodness from our point of view. It is rather related to the notion that there is such a phenomenon as goodness in the first place.

The conviction that God is good, by our own standards, emerges first from human experience itself. The further claim that God must be good comes from that experience coupled with the axioms and theorems. The human (and not animal) experience to which I refer concerns what philosophy (since the Greeks in the Western tradition) calls VALUES. Over thousands of years of patient philosophical investigation, the values separate into three distinctive but related types; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. They relate in that each expresses the others in some discriminable way. They are distinct because each express differently to mind.

It is an important phenomenological assumption of this theology that we detect, and not merely invent, values. But there is a distinction (rarely recognized in modern philosophy) between values and what has them. The values as such each have one another. Truth has both Beauty and Goodness for example. Besides having one another, each of the values also reflect into subjective experience in complex but distinct ways. No two persons experience (detect) them in exactly the same way analogous to how qualia vary (slightly in normal brains) from person to person.

What is important to keep in mind is that values appear to us, that is to subjective consciousness, as the conviction that these three qualities exist. There is beauty, truth, and goodness. Values as such are NOT about what is true, beautiful, or good. What appears to be true, beautiful, or good in our experience is what has (or might have) value.

Beauty expresses itself chiefly through the physical world. The perception, recognition, of Beauty in the physical world is something like a quale, like red, except not associated with individual sensory apparatuses, but with the presentation of the physical world reflected in subjective experience. It is because no two humans experience the value identically that we disagree about what is beautiful, that is, what has Beauty. We agree only that beauty exists, some things (characteristically objects or arrangements of objects) have it.

Truth is value expressed in mind as such. Propositions are true if they have Truth, but because we all sense Truth a little differently there will always be room for argument about what propositions, exactly, are true except in narrow cases, logical or mathematical propositions.

Goodness is value reflected in the acts and the motivations of persons. As non-minded life is only metaphorically purposeful, minded (but non-personal) animals can be only metaphorically good. They can act in ways that, like purpose in non-minded life, are good from our anthropocentric viewpoint. Only persons can be good, can elect to be motivated by and act in accordance (applied act by act or to a life over-all) with what that person detects of Goodness; what she takes Goodness to be in a particular case. Like Truth and Beauty, those motives and acts vary thanks to our differential appreciation for what constitutes Goodness (and our skill in acting it out). Only persons can act for the sake of Values.

The values are all positive; they are a part of our universe and therefore have a relation to God. Like everything else, they must, directly or indirectly, come from God. Their detection, recognizing their reality, in human mind is therefore a detection (recognition) of some tiny facet of God’s character. Values reflect God’s character (however weakly perceived that reflection) into mind. Since God must be unified and consistent, the character of God reflected into mind must be God’s actual character. Not all of it by any means, but even that small part must be consistent with the rest. The quality of the values we recognize as such cannot be inconsistent with the rest. It is for this reason that God must be good.

Love, that is the Christian idea of agape, the desire to do good to others, is an attitude of persons that is the mereological sum of all three values. This love is not an emotion, but an expression of the flavor of all the values taken together; the flavor of Spirit!

If Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are God’s character reflected into mind individually and totalized as love why should only human minds detect them? I have noted before that a lion cannot choose to be more than a lion, but it also cannot choose to become less or other than a lion. Animal mind is impacted by truth, beauty, and goodness. But these are simply among the unified qualities, the gestalt, of animal consciousness. What it is like to be a lion includes its truth, beauty, and goodness, but they are transparent to the animal.

A lioness can choose between alternate zebras to hunt, but it cannot choose to do anything because it is good or beautiful or true. Lion mind has truth, beauty, and goodness, but only a human being can recognize their existence as such. Perhaps values recognition is something, a power, that personality adds to mind. In any case, clearly only human mind, only persons, can choose (and so act) based on recognition of the existence of the values.

Derivatives

The Problem of Evil

Does evil have a relation to God? How is there evil in a universe created by an infinite good God? Evil is a negative, a disruption of logically prior being. The issue is complicated by the conflation (not least in modern philosophy) of accidents and error with evil. If two stars spiral together and obliterate each other, neither experiences anything let alone evil. If there was some planet, harboring living beings, close to the event, those living beings would be destroyed as soon as the gamma ray burst reached them (possibly many thousands of years after the event). Those living beings would experience the pain of being blotted out and thus evil by today’s common understanding but this is not exactly what evil is from a theological viewpoint.

There is an argument against God’s omnipotence and/or goodness that stems from a misunderstanding of what evil is. No less a luminary than Hume made use of this though he was far from the first. The assumption here is that if God is omnipotent, he must be responsible for evil and so either God is omnipotent and not wholly good, or he is wholly good but not omnipotent. This is another of those false dilemmas stemming from a failure to recognize that God, the Father, is not personally responsible for everything that happens in the universe and that evil is not merely a synonym for “everything bad”. Free will in humans is also real and logically antecedent to evil.

Evil as such (as contrasted with the experience of its effects), like error and unlike accidents, begins in human mind alone. Unlike the Values, evil is not a positive phenomenon in physical space and time. Among other things, unlike error (a bad choice made by a human mind) evil is a deliberate negation of values. Mind introduces evil into the world by freely choosing to negate the Values whether Truth, Beauty, or Goodness. Once such a choice is made and acted upon the typically negative consequences of the act on others we also call evil.

Animals experience, pain, but not that it is evil in the abstract any more than they recognize that pleasure has goodness. Evil is a negative of goodness or truth, or beauty, just as cold is not something positive but rather the absence of heat. Only humans can distinguish evil as such because only humans discern values. But the unity, consistency, and infinity of God require us to recognize that evil is not something positive, but a relative lack, an absence or diminution of value. God does not do evil. Animals cannot do evil (notwithstanding they may hurt us). Only personalized mind, because it is capable of discriminating the values, can choose to negate them and thus bring evil into the world.

There is an important dis-analogy between cold and evil. In theory it is possible to have an “absolute absence of heat”, a temperature at which all molecular motion ceases; zero kelvin. But there is no analogous “absolute evil”. If evil is a relative absence of goodness, then an absolute evil would be some state of affairs that has no relation what-so-ever to God, and that is impossible. An existing (real) object, process, state of affairs must have some relation to God. A reality having no relation to God cannot exist. The further exploration of “the nature and explanation of evil” in theology is called theodicy. There is discussion of it in my books and the essays “Why Free Will?” and “Theodicy in the Urantia Book”. Here I will note only that the solution to the “problem of evil”, rests on the distinction between accident, error, and genuine evil.

Holy Books and Teachers

No part of the above sketch relies on the contents of “The Bible” (Old or New Testament) or any of the holy books on which the world’s largest religions are founded. In this view there are no literally “holy books” (including The Urantia Book whose description of God follows from these same “first principles”), only books (some books) whose content is mostly about God. But these contents are the work of human beings. Some of this content is representative of God, that is consistent with the content of this introduction. Much is not.

If I can start from a premise of God’s infinity, self-causation, unity, consistency, and reason that a god who lacked any of these qualities would not be God, then so can others even down through history to times when people thought much more about God than they do now. But what we now can say in terms borrowed from mathematics, physics, philosophy, and logic could, in the deep but recorded past, be expressed only in poetic metaphor. He who “sends his rain upon the just and the unjust” is consistent and the phenomena of the physical world do not play favorites. He who “knows of each sparrow who falls from the sky” is omniscient, and so on.

There is also much content in the holy books that is not representative. The evolution of the God-concept on Earth points towards an infinite God, but the record (the holy books) often short-circuits itself. God cannot ever have been angry or jealous (human traits). In particular, as concerns the New Testament, the Atonement doctrine, presently a pillar of every Christian variation, cannot be true. God’s relation to his creatures cannot have changed, from his viewpoint, from before the death of Jesus on the cross to a time after that event. Our view of our relationship to God can and should change, but there has been no variation from God’s side.

One can look at the Old and New Testaments together as a historical tracing of the evolving God concept from polytheism to a monotheistic “king of the tribe” to “the Father of the individual”. In between there is fictionalized history (more fictionalized the farther back it goes), and outright mythology (the creation). All of what these ancient texts say about the mechanisms of the physical world is nothing but speculative mythology.

I note that there is a speculative component of modern theories concerning distant origins (big bang, emergence of life, mind) though we can be much more sure of the foundations that underwrite present-day speculation. Some parts of holy books were written (in their time) for purely political purposes, to solidify the power of a nascent church by securing the loyalty of the flock. In the New Testament, the Book of Revelation is just such a piece.

Professional theologians also are not referenced here. Why not? Modern theology has lost its way, and become blind to these principles. For example, it has become more or less settled by philosophy that we, that is human beings, cannot make sense (do not have the necessary cognitive apparatus) of the idea that a God outside time could interact with the universe at a particular time and place if he so chooses. As a result, modern theologians, instead of accepting that the mechanism of such interaction is beyond our ken but God knows the trick, take the absurd view that if we cannot grasp such a thing it must be impossible and therefore God is not outside time and space; God is not omnipotent, or if he is, he is not omniscient, and so on.

This argument against omniscience parallels somewhat the argument against goodness and omnipotence sketched above in the brief discussion of evil. That argument turns on a failure to grasp what real evil is, the role of free will. This argument turns on a failure to grasp the inability of the human mind to figure everything out.

I have had arguments about this with philosophers. All stopping points short of a “Personal God of infinity” are arbitrary, leave something of our experience out of account, or result in absurd consequences. Any sort of demigod could not be his own cause. There would be some antecedent reality not of his making. Where then would that come from? Pantheism (everything in the universe we know is equally God, God is everything at once), something of an opposite approach, entails that God has both good and evil in him (and so is self-inconsistent) because there is, after all, evil in the universe and that must be God too.

The only solution that actually works, accounts for everything while preserving God’s internal consistency (eternally) is the maximal one, a transcendent, personal, and infinite God coupled with a causally closed [physical] universe in which limited (perspectival) minds have nevertheless a genuine, causally efficacious, free will.

These first principles enable distinctions to which modern theology is blind. For example, they allow us to distinguish between what is and what is not representative of God in the holy books that have come down to us through history; those that serve as the textual foundations of large religious institutions. First principles also let us distinguish between religion as such (the individual relationship to a personal God) and religious institutions like the Catholic Church (and all the other major religious institutions on Earth).

As holy books are just books, religious institutions are merely human institutions like corporations, governments, and other social organizations. They differ in claiming to be institutions dedicated to religion, but otherwise they are purely human and subject to all the errors (including interpretations of their founding texts) and potential evil (corruption in various forms) of all other institutions. To the extent that these institutions foster the personal relationship between individuals and God reflected in the social activity of the institution they are doing their job. To the degree that they claim a “special authority” to intercede between man and God, they are both unrepresentative of God and false.

Personality Survival

What about an “after life”? Supposedly the craving for immortality (even if impossible) has been among the drivers of all religion from the most ancient on down to the present-day. By some lights, all religion is nothing more than wishful thinking for no other purpose (ultimately) than grounding a mistaken belief in “life after death”. Theology must surely address this question. I do so in “What is ‘The Soul'”.

This notion, the necessity that some survival mechanism exists and that it applies to [mostly] everyone irregardless of intellectual belief, greatly impacts the failure to distinguish between accident, error, and evil. A death due to accident, a death due to error, and a death due to genuine evil are all still [physical] death. It is this observation that prompts philosophers to lump accident and error with evil. But all forget the implication of survival. None of those deaths are deaths to God. See the aforementioned soul essay for further discussion.

God and History

There is also the matter of the relation of God to human history and exactly what we are to do with our vague perception of values. Has God directly intervened in human history? How would we know? From the moment animal mind had the potential to recognize the values it became personal-mind and gained the power of choice based on values perception. That power has to be some part of the mechanism by which God’s purposes are brought about in time. See my “Why Free Will” for further discussion of this. All of this leads to a theological grounding of ethics and aesthetics, but if God is not to short-circuit free will his interventions must be subtle and few. What evidence might there be?

These are all subjects an advanced first principles theology can address, including for example “Process Theology in The Urantia Book”. It has not been my purpose to demonstrate or prove anything here, but rather to state the first principles. I have briefly sketched the application of those principles to a few theological issues, and I have shown, I hope, that they can be useful in piecing together a new and better human appreciation of the otherwise constant relationship between human persons and God who is our Father.

Note: What does “unqualified infinity” mean?

The qualifier “unqualified” refers to limits, properly the unlimited, ascribed to God. On the one hand, God must be an infinite unity, an entity that stands-for the whole universe, eternally and across all time, a single entity throughout reality. This entails causelessness, perfection, changelessness, self-consistency and so on. Spinoza recognized that a single undifferentiated God would amount to a pantheism. God would be equally everywhere and in everything. In short, everything would be God. Clearly there is a conflict between pantheism and the universe of our experience, a universe of change and moreover containing evil whereas God cannot change and can only be good. If God were equally everything, change and changeless, evil and good, he would be inconsistent with himself, a contradiction.

Three things at least are unique about the infinity of God. 1) It is both one and infinitely (in potential) plural eternally — that is simultaneously throughout all time past, present, and future. 2) Only God can be “uncaused-cause”. He has no antecedents. He is the sole ultimate source of any other sort of differentiation of any kind infinite or otherwise. Ultimate does not mean he is the only source of everything, but he is the first source of everything. 3) He has the power to differentiate the “not-the Father” from himself, even infinitely should he so will, and still remain infinite in all possible ways.

Everything that exists actually or potentially must flow outwards from the Father and only the Father can differentiate from himself infinite attributes of the creation and yet remain a single unified “infinity of everything”. There is nothing any other person in the universe, including the Second (Son) and Third (Spirit) purportedly infinite persons, can do that God the Father could not do personally. This in no way means the Father does do everything. Indeed one point of all the differentiation business seems to be to share the doing with others. But God cannot divest himself of his infinite potential to do anything and everything eternally or in time, nor can he attenuate his eternal infinity in all possible attributes.

God might produce many sorts of differentiation infinite and otherwise. He can create other infinite-persons should he wish (traditionally the Son and Spirit of the Trinity), and of the non-personal sort for example an infinite potential for evolution of what is actual in a partial and incomplete time-space universe. Any and all such derivations are qualified-infinities. They are infinite in some dimension, perhaps more than one, but not every dimension. They are not themselves uncaused cause. They cannot be the source of the Father. Without exception they have at least him as antecedent. It is these differences, and others related, that make the Father’s infinity “unqualified”.

Harvey Weinstein and the Matter of Sexual Consent

Google+ and Face Book are all a twitter (especially Twitter) over the Harvey Weinstein news. No one in this second decade of the 21st Century should be surprised there is sexual predation (of various kinds) in the entertainment industry, (of course not only entertainment, and not only in the U.S). This sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years, and “entertainment industries” (along with a few others) are particularly known for it. There were casting couches long before women were even allowed to act on a public stage! Joseph Goebbels of Nazi propaganda fame had perhaps the most infamous casting couch in all of the world for a decade or so. Now it’s Harvey’s turn. The surprise here, like that of actor Bill Cosby, was not that such behavior occurs, but rather the lengths (depravity and illegal acts) to which it went and the time over which it was able to remain only rumor in the public view.

My question here is not ethics. I am not aiming at what should be the case but at a description of what is the case. What is the case includes a cultural context. It assumes that adult men and women understand (either by direct experience, experience passed down from peers or mentors, and by other indirect means) the cultural context in which they have grown up and now circulate. My question is, given this cultural context, and in particular the cultural context of the modern global “entertainment industry”, at what point in a social encounter between a man and a woman (this might be a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Sexual orientation is immaterial) has there been a sexual consent between the parties involved?

In particular I have the following scenario in mind. A man and a woman run into one another in some public place (typically this turns out to be a big hotel or convention center with hotel attached). They engage in conversation. At some point in the conversation the man (typically) invites the woman to a private meeting in his room. For now I leave open whether the invitation was open ended, “come in for a night cap”, or given some specific non-sexual rationale, “I would like to talk to you about project X”. But this certainly makes a difference to the implications of consent.

In the context of present western culture, an open ended invitation to a private meeting strongly suggests a sexual motive on the part of the inviter. It doesn’t matter if the inviter is a person with whom the invitee has no prior relationship, or they are related as (roughly) employer/supervisor (presently or in the future). If the invitation is open ended, sex is implied and consent is at least provisionally given if the invitation is accepted. ‘Provisional’ comes down to “awareness and assent to the [future] possibility of some sex. The later is signaled by accepting the invitation. I’m not going to be specific about what ‘sex’ comes out to. For my purposes any non-accidental contact between bodies still clothed is the beginning of sex.

Even where there is explicit consent, “consent to what exactly” remains unspecified. Human sexuality can take some strange turns. I am going to accept the principle that a genuine sort of free will is in play on the part of each of the parties. Philosophers call this compatibilism. It means “you are free if no one is forcing you to choose by putting your physical well being in jeopardy. If one party has been incapacitated or is otherwise unable to make a knowing (not necessarily rational by all standards) assent to subsequent behavior amounts to rape. A sexual encounter that isn’t rape tends to unfold in stages. If there is provisional consent it must be remade at each stage of the process. Provisional consent becomes actual consent when each and every step of awareness of possibility is accepted. Either party may “withdraw consent” at any stage. A sexual encounter need not begin as rape to become rape.

Does any of this change when the invitation is not open ended? A non-open ended invitation typically involves an excuse to meet in private that isn’t sexual. The difference in terms of our subject depends on the legitimacy of the excuse. It is not enough that it is not a lie. To make a difference there must be good reasons why the matter cannot be discussed or seen in a more public place. If the excuse is to look at art, and the invitee is an art dealer, there is diminution of any consent (implied, provisional, or otherwise) of a sexual nature. Yet each person must, under the circumstances, be at least aware of the potential for sexual engagement. But in this case, awareness and accession in the form of accepting the invitation need not imply any sexual consent.

In the supervisor-employee case the invitation itself is, at least now in the public face of American corporate culture, including the entertainment industry, already ethically compromised. Supervisors (and employees or potential employees) are just not supposed to do that. That it is done must only strengthen the sexual implications of the invitation from the cultural perspective. In the physical context in which these meetings typically occur (Western hotels) there is almost no reason why business cannot be discussed in a place other than a private room.

Excuse or not it remains true that such an invitation must remain suspicious from its inception. Being given an excuse is not justification for being blind (or turning a blind eye) the the strength of the socio-cultural implications of such an invitation. While we should not assume that a motive (desire for the job) by itself implies even a provisional sexual consent, cultural norms have to count for something! It cannot be that young women older than about 16 can be unaware of sexual predation.

It might be illustrative here to examine this situation where one party is a child. The presumption here is that, if not sufficiently old (and so culturally experienced), the individual concerned will lack the capacity to make a knowing decision as concerns either a private meeting or for that matter anything proposed or attempted in such a meeting. This is especially true precisely because it might be very difficult for a child to resist even purely psychological pressure to consent from the adult even knowing, however vaguely, some of the proposal’s implications. Can this consideration (which to everyone seems reasonable) not apply to the power relation between a significantly powerful adult employer or supervisor and a much younger, if still technically adult, person? It seems reasonable to say that it could. There might be a continuum of provisional consent from a “vague notion something sexual is intended” to “full knowing assent” depending on both the experience (taking age into account) and motives of the invitee. But the achievement of adulthood itself implies “some knowing” consistent with the social circles in which one travels.

Of course sexual harassment (and propositions that are not harassment in the legal sense because they are not unwelcome) happens in many contexts outside hotel lobbies and rooms. Literally on the street it occurs between the harassed party and an unknown person we call a “pervert”. But it also occurs in more formal social settings, an office, or restaurant perhaps where an employer speaks the words “the promotion is yours if you sleep with me (in some as yet unspecified private setting)”. Of course, intent is (or should be to an adult) clearer in these cases. Accepting the offer (because the sexual motive is so strongly implied or even made explicit) in these circumstances amounts to more than mere provisional consent. It does not mean that consent is open ended. It remains true that what the proposing party has in mind might, when the time comes, be unacceptable to she (typically) who accepts the initial proposal.

This last consideration does not change merely because the propositioning party holds potential (present or future) power over the invitee. The degree of “provisional consent” being given depends, in the final analysis, on the strength of the implied sexual motive. That information is cultural. When the proposal comes from a party who has power (financial, political, or otherwise) over the invitee cultural conditions, especially in but not confined to the entertainment industry, virtually guarantee that some sexual motive is implied even where there is an ostensible, non-sexual, excuse. There remains a potential continuum of “provisional consent”. Even where knowingly given it is not open ended.

Given a powerful manager-employer the degree of consent comes down to capacity (affected by age and innebriation) and prior experience. A 60 year old employer propositioning a 25 year old employee (who accepts) might imply a minimal provisional consent. The same acceptance on the part of a 45 year old employee implies a much more robust consent. The 25 year old might not have (though she is presumed to have) “an awareness” that there is a sexual implication in the invitation. The 45 year old will of a certainty be aware.

So I ask how does this all apply to what Harvey Weinstein did to young actresses for years? On Harvey’s side, the first proposition (to an adult actress) is not, technically, harassment. To be harassment, the proposal must be unwelcome and there is no way for the proposing party to know this until he (typically) is rejected. Once rejected, further proposals constitute harassment as understood in today’s corporate culture, including the entertainment industry.

Harvey’s [metaphorical] crime was not propositioning young actresses in exchange for favors. It was the extent, frequency, and blatancy of his proposals followed (sometimes?) by sexual requests of a aberrant nature after provisional consent (actress goes to his room) is secured. There is a saying that goes back to the twelfth century when the Catholic Church decided that celibacy was to be the order of the day among clergy: “If you cannot refrain, be discreet”. Harvey is guilty of being indiscreet.

Did Harvey commit an actual crime? If he propositioned anyone under age, he did. If he incapacitated his intended even by merely permitting her to drink too much “of her own free will” (if one or both parties are incapacitated, subsequent sex is non-consensual anyway), he did. If he talked his way into an actress’s room and raped her, obviously he did. Harvey stands accused of all of these literal crimes, but the most of the complaints against him do not include any of these. Men (including Harvey) inviting women to hotel rooms without accompanying criminal behavior is far more common than any of these crimes. The issue comes down to what, by culture, adult women should know when a man invites them to a room.

There is a recent story of an actor doing an interview in a crowded hotel restaurant. Noise made the interview difficult. The actor suggested the interviewer (a woman as it happened) come to his room to finish. Here is the punch line: he was so concerned about the implications of the invitation that he offered to bring a third party of her choosing to the room. Here we have a legitimate reason to leave the public place and no sexual implications were intended. This story, heart warming as it is (and true the actor is David Schwimmer), is a rare exception. Young actresses invited by senior authorities in their culture to a private meeting should know by the time they get to be young actresses, that some sexual motive is implicit in that invitation.

Can I be wrong about this? Can it be, perhaps, that the most I can claim is that these actresses were aware of sexual implications, but were not thereby consenting (even provisionally) to “some sex”? I do not think so. Awareness plus acceptance of a proposition likely to have sexual intent amounts to, if anything ever does, consent to the possibility of some sex. It is by no means a final consent to sex, but the excuse that one simply “had no idea” is patently absurd.

Reflections on BEING

Being is one of those ideas only philosophers worry about, and not even all of them. There’s a good reason for that. I’ve recently read a few philosophers who touch on the subject. Harman and DeLanda debate what being is in “The Rise of Realism” (2017), while Umberto Eco devotes a chapter to it in his “Kant and the Platypus (1997), and Meillassoux touches on it in “After Finitude” (2015). Eco’s essay ties the others together and points out that being appears to mind only against the possibility of “not being”, and that concept presupposes language that discloses limits to our capacity to rationalize experience. Eco is clear however in that being, should it be more than a mere fantasy of mind, must precede mind. It must be, ontologically, mind-independent, though it becomes visible only to mind and by way of a linguistic shadow.

I am not convinced of that last part. A shadow yes, a blindspot to mind like the blindspot on the human retina caused by the placement of the optic nerve. But it is a phenomenal blindspot and prelinguistic; a genuine epistemological limit. At the same time it is no mere coincidence the recognition, the conceptualization, of this blindspot happens only in humans who also notice that it necessarily reflects itself in language.

So what am I talking about? As philosophers discuss it this purported ontological reality splits into two levels, the particular, and the universal. In the particular philosophers speak of an essence that lies at the core of every particular in this universe, from quarks to all their assemblies both natural and artifactual taken as discrete objects. Every rock, grain of dust, star, animal, statue, and more. Harman extends object-ness to every mind, thought (even outright fantasy), and relation, even to such arbitrary sets as my right arm, the statue of liberty, and the present queen of England. The being of these particulars is what, in addition to their properties, histories and relations, makes up their individual existence.

This being is sometimes associated with what medieval scholars called “haecceity”, or “thisness”, distinguishing particulars from those otherwise identical. The question comes down to whether this impenetrable essence exists mind-independently, or is merely a mirage a product, ultimately, of the nature of human, language-using, consciousness. It has to be human mind specifically because there is no evidence that higher animals (who I take it have sophisticated subjective arenas adapted to their way of life) concern themselves with being. They do not recognize any blind-spot.

Harman says every particular, even imaginary ones, have being. DeLanda denies this. In DeLanda’s view, if we could (and we cannot) know every micro detail about some particular object, if we could know its entire history, including details of all its relations with other objects, if we could literally exhaust all of what could theoretically be known about an object, then we would exhaust the object, encompassing all of what that object is leaving nothing left over. Harman insists that even that would not exhaust the object itself; haecceity is logically prior to everything else. So who is right here? It seems to me that ontologically this is a tossup. Both DeLanda and Harman concede that “knowing every micro detail” is an impossible goal. Mind comes up against a limit. We cannot ever know every detail so how can we be sure there is something left over? Perhaps DeLanda is right in that being lies at this asymptotic limit. It is nothing more than a word standing for “those details we can never know”.

An honest ontologist has no business insisting on residual being one-way or another. Epistemologically the situation is different. Like being itself, only humans, using language, concern themselves with epistemology. Recognizing a “limit to what can be known” about any particular is in part to accept that something more might lie beyond “what can be known”. To label that possibility ‘being’ is simply to name that which we cannot know but perhaps is. What this represents ontologically is indeterminate, but for human mind, recognizing that a blind-spot exists, being seems a reasonable and possibly useful hypothesis. It is reasonable, because we cannot communicate (language) without presupposing existence. Useful because it gives us a reason to reject idealism; to assume there is a mind-independent world.

This brings us to the universal. As associate the particular with haecceity, the universal relates to something the scholars called quiddity. Quiddity is the aboutness of something, that which is common to its type. Kitty cats and lions are both feline. What justifies our carving out this class and assigning to it both kitty cats and lions but not poodles? Today most people would answer with DNA, jaw and tooth shapes, claws, and many other morphological features, but the scholars knew about most of those as well. Their interest was in the logical principles that characterize classes or kinds and what must be the case, ontologically, to make the classification work.

Like haecceity, quiddity might be no more than a stand-in for those principles and if we could theoretically know every one of them down to their finest detail, there wouldn’t be anything left. But what is interesting about quiddity is it applies up the whole chain of nested classes to the whole universe. It is the something in the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” What is common to everything there is (we can debate the details of that if we want) and does not belong to what is not? That would be being.

So what does everything that exists have in common? Trivially, they have existence. Is there anything more to it than this? Once again human mind cannot resolve the ontological question. At least everything that exists must, perforce, have existence. But are existence and being simply synonyms, or must something have being to exist? It doesn’t matter here any more than it did for particulars.

We cannot in principle exhaust existence (witness the endless debate in which philosophers engage on “what exists”) so how could we hope to discover, in any positive way, what might be left over if we did exhaust it? But in this case, we fare no better epistemologically. Mind at least can grasp the particularity of particulars. Human mind can become aware of a blind-spot, the inability to encompass every detail, but at least as concerns the particular we are justified in creating a word for “that which we cannot know about this”. As concerns the universal, we cannot even to that or if we do, it cannot be justified.

As concerns the global being, even human mind has nothing to grasp onto. Metaphysically speaking there can be nothing to grasp onto because unlike a particular rock or even thought, mind itself is a part of that universal. Mind exists in some sense and so “has existence” (and so being if everything else has it) in common with everything else. This also holds for language which also exists and has existence (at least) in common with everything else. To be able to speak about something presupposes being able to distinguish that something from everything else. But as concerns universal being, that which everything has in common, is to presuppose a reality-foundation (or reality concept) for which in principle there are no distinctions to be made. Existence alone is uni-vocal, something everything has in common, how much more so being if there is indeed any such thing.

Where does this leave us on the matter of being? I would say in an ambivalent position. I believe every language has some equivalent to the English verb “to be”. In English this construct and its conjugates applies to material objects (“that is a horse”), and actions, attitudes, or states (“to be creative”, “to be good”, “to be a disaster”) whether those of the physical world or strictly the subjective arena (“to be depressed”). It might perhaps be this broad application that persuades Harman to grant equivalency of existence (being an object) to everything from rocks to thoughts and all their relations (“to be taller than”). But perhaps this is merely an affect of language and should not be counted in an ontology?

If I teach my daughter the word cat, and eventually she displays an ability to tell cats from other animals, has she implicitly understood quiddity or is she merely learning to identify the morphological characteristics that distinguish cats from other animals most of the time? Suppose if she comes to know a particular cat as “Ben”. Has she thereby grasped the notion of haecceity or merely understood that “Ben” is one particular cat easily distinguished from others by subtleties of size, coloration, and so on? Eco insists that all of human language automatically and necessarily involves a generalization from the particular to the class, at least as concerns naming things, but as it turns out in many other contexts as well. Even grasping the idea that Ben is a “particular cat” implies there are “other cats” who are not Ben.

From how we use ‘being’ and how we try to talk about it using language we should infer nothing more than that it names, by implication, or gives some reference to our mental blind-spot, that which we suppose exists in the form of something we cannot know, something our cognitive capacities cannot in principle encompass. There must be such a blind-spot. Why? Because everything that we are counting as subjective experience and the world in which it is immersed has existence in common. We cannot get outside this commonality to distinguish it from anything else. It is the something that we cannot name because it has no particular about which to generalize and applies equally to being in the universal and the particular. Is there anything in common between all cats besides their various biophysical properties (including for example being born of other cats), with characteristic behaviors and relations?

Concerning thinking and experience (including the experience of thinking) if there is a common factor besides the properties we could theoretically come to know (and bearing in mind that even in theory we cannot come to know every micro detail of those properties), it might as well not be there. ‘Being’ stands for the blind-spot. It stands for something that might exist (ontologically) besides all the micro details of properties, relations, and history (Harman), or it stands for the theoretical sum total of such properties which we can only asymptotically approach (DeLanda).

As concerns anything that philosophy might explore it doesn’t matter. What the notion of being delivers, philosophically, is purely epistemological; there must be a blind-spot, there are things the human mind cannot know and because we cannot know them (like Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”) we cannot name them. We can only refer to them indirectly with a place-holder; being.

So why does this blind-spot belong only to human experience? Eco thinks it is language, the necessarily limited product of limited mind, that reveals the blind-spot we call being. I do not believe this is correct. It is only a coincidence that human beings recognize the blind-spot and happen to have language that we use to try to make sense of it. I agree with Eco that only a “rational animal” with a sufficiently powerful language, can attempt some evaluation of the blind-spot, but I think we develop the language, words like ‘being’, because there is something about our prelinguistic experience that suggests the need.

Does lion consciousness then lack such a blind-spot? No, there is a blind-spot in all animal consciousness, but it is invisible to even the higher animals. There is nothing in what it is like to be a lion that suggests anything like the need for an idea of being. It isn’t that lions don’t have “the language”. They don’t have any need for such language because there is nothing about the way they experience the world that suggests it.

If it isn’t language that reveals the blind-spot, what then is it? The key here is personality, in oversimplified terms the agent that appears to itself as a locus of experience. As Hume famously noted (and thus put a stranglehold on philosophy since his day) we cannot find our personality when we look for it, we only find our own minds (perceptions, memories, and so on). Hume was technically correct. His mistake was concluding that therefore, there was nothing there. Hume also derided being. He is one of those philosophers who simply does not believe mind might have “blind-spots”, a philosophical hubris shared by many philosophers down to the present day.

But the blind-spot that makes personality invisible is not the same as the one obscuring being though the principle underlying both is the same. You cannot analyze that which you do not ‘transcend’ in the sense of “rising above” or in some sense being “inclusive but more-than”. We cannot evaluate being because everything in the universe, including mind, takes part in it equally. It might as well not be there because it, should it even be real, is a common denominator of all mind-dependent and mind-independent reality.

Analogously, we cannot evaluate personality because we are it and we cannot distinguish ourselves from ourselves. But unlike being, personality must exist because it is that in our subjective arena which is partially distinct from mind and thereby provides for the possibility of self-evaluation of mind. It is only “partially distinct” because it exists in some sense in (amalgamated with) and expresses only through mind. No matter what we, as agents, experience or choose we experience and choose in mind. This partial transcendence explains why a first person analysis of mind always ends in philosophically slippery speculations that are not ever definitively closed. Unlike lions, we are reflexively aware of mind, but because we are “personalized minds” we cannot distinguish the personal from mind as such.

I have written much more on the subject of personality and its relation to mind in other essays. See “Why Personality”, “Why Free Will”, and “Physics and the Evidence for Non-Material Consciousness” among others. My point of raising it here has only to do with why it is that humans, persons have any epistemological purchase on being at all. As I have already noted, this purchase is something of a negative quality. We experience a hole, an empty place in our examination of experience but unlike personality, we cannot ever know if that emptiness represents anything positive that belongs in our ontology.

Searle on the Ontology of Social Reality

This is a very natural pair of reviews. Both focus on the same subject, the social world and how such social phenomena come about be they marriages, sporting events, cocktail parties, governments, or money. He is not concerned with the history of these things, but their ontological structure and how that structure is brought into existence. Searle devotes particular attention to how language, a special social phenomena with correspondingly unique properties. It is precisely language, particularly its capacity to make declarations (“I anoint you King”), and that these declarations can be compounded, that bring about both informal (cocktail parties) and formal (governments, money) social institutions. Language is not necessary to social organization as such. Higher animals engage in social behaviors without the benefit of language. But social behaviors are not institutions. Only humans create institutions, and declarative language is both necessary and sufficient. As Searle puts it, once you have language you already have [at least one] a social institution.

Naturally this raises some epistemological issues. Searle doesn’t much address libertarian free will in the earlier book, but in the later he has to address it because he recognizes that the obligations and powers of institutions, even abstract ones like money, ultimately devolve onto individuals. But obligations and powers stemming from the declarative utterances of individuals (many of course codified into such things as laws and constitutions) simply make no sense if their creation and subsequent behavioral acceptance was determined by physics. I would take the successful creation of functioning and persistent institutions to be evidence of the metaphysical genuineness of free will, but Searle refuses to go there, asserting nevertheless that it might be an illusion. He does note that if illusion, nothing of philosophy makes any sense either.

At the end of the later book Searle addresses the subject of rights. He seems to recognize that there is no such thing as a “natural right” or “absolute right” outside of a social context. The consequences of being unarmed and meeting a hungry lion on the savanna should put paid to the idea of natural or absolute rights, but he wants to give a sensible context to the terms even within a social context. He tries, but I’m not sure he succeeds. Perhaps this is but a linguistic disagreement between us. Even to communicate the concept of a natural or absolute right requires language, and as Searle points out this puts the notions squarely into a social context from their inception.

The Construction of Social Reality (1997)

In an earlier review of a later book (“Seeing Things as they Are” 2015) I said Searle’s argument for “direct realism” was a bit circular. In this earlier book, he addresses that very circularity.

This book is about the physical and conceptual structure of social reality, such things as money, marriage, government, corporations, and cocktail parties. Searle points out that many animals live and cooperate in packs and so exhibit a “social reality”. All it takes to be social is for two people, or animals, to do something together. If you and I decide to go for a walk together, that, our walk, is a social fact. If we agree that a screwdriver is useful for driving screws, our agreement takes place in a social and linguistic framework in that we both know what screwdrivers and screws are for. But neither the walk, nor the screwdriver are institutional. Walking is something that humans are able to do by their physical constitution and the same goes for the screwdriver’s ability to drive screws. But other objects (coins) can also drive screws and if they can do that it is also thanks to their physical constitution.

Institutions are different. Money is not valuable intrinsically because of the properties of colored paper. It is valuable because it is embedded in an institution that applies symbols to physical things (like printed money) granting them powers they do not have merely as a product of their physics. These symbolic applications can be compounded endlessly yielding more and more complex institutions into which subsequent generations are born and raised against a background of these already symbolized and so constructed social realities. Language, that which we use to assign these symbols, is itself a socially constructed phenomenon and special because it is the institution that originates in a pre-linguistic but already social (in the animal way) context. Apart from the bodies that utter them, words work because they are symbols from the beginning. Paper colored and printed in a certain way by a certain institution (a mint) is, after all, physical. The government itself rests, ultimately, on something physical, a constitution, which is recorded in one form or another. Records (whether in language on paper, pictures, bits encoded in a computer, or uniforms conveying certain assigned powers to their wearer) are often the “at bottom” physical manifestations of our symbolic institutions. Every dollar bill is a record. Here (as I suspected) Searle and M. Ferraris (“Documentality”) come together. All of these are physical RECORDS that constitute the foundations of “from that point on” persisting social institutions. We connect the raw physical thing to the constructed institution by language.

If all of this seems too quick and over simplified, it is here in this review, but not in the book. Searle takes us through the argument that social institutions are, step by step, constructed by such symbolic assignments. “X has power to Y in context C” being the fundamental form of all institutional facts. This structure can be infinitely recursed. “Y’s” can become “X’s” and “C’s” can become “Y’s” generating symbolic constructs (social facts) recursively and Searle takes us through numerous examples demonstrating how it is that our complex social reality can be generated from the same structure which, when fully unpacked, and except for language, always finds its bottom in some physical X. Thus society grows out of the physical foundations of the world and is continuous with it.

In the book’s last three chapters, Searle connects all of this to the ontological reality of the physical world and our shared experience. Physical reality must exist in order that any statements about it are intelligible, and specific forms of physical reality (like Mt. Everest or the screwdriver) must exist and be shareable, part of our “public reality”, or we could not be sure, when we communicate (a social phenomenon) that our meanings are ever understood. If I say “the cat is on the mat” we take for granted that we know what we mean by ‘cat’, ‘mat’, and ‘on’, not to mention an enormous background of experience in physical and social reality such that we understand and agree on a reasonable range of contexts for cats, mats, and so on. Searle essentially argues that it is our capacity to communicate and construct social realities out of physical realities, that demonstrate the independent correspondence between our epistemic categories and the external world. None of this would work if not for mind-independent things structured much as (if not always exactly) we take them to be. Our capacity to communicate rests on the correspondence between language-reflected concept and mind-independent fact.

I would give this book six stars if I could. Searle is exceptionally good at getting at what he means in plain English. Anglo-analytic philosophy at its best, and about a meaningful subject!

Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

This book written in 2010 amounts to a reprise of Searle’s earlier “The Construction of Social Reality” (1997) which I have also reviewed. In the introduction to this book Searle says there were a few issues not sufficiently clarified and his aim is to clarify them.

The two books are about the same length, but Searle manages to say much more in this one about language, free will, and the sensibility of “human rights” outside formal institutional contexts. How does he manage this feat? In the earlier book he very carefully constructs his primary insight into the structure of social institutions and carefully demonstrates its application to a wide range of social phenomena like cocktail parties, sports, money, and government. In this book, he is able to state that fundamental argument more succinctly (he’s had a lot of time to work with it after all), embedding it more firmly into a clarified examination of the nature of human language as it relates to the development of social phenomena. As a result, there is nothing in the first book that isn’t also in this second one, but for some readers the main argument, the structure of all social contexts, might be stated a little too quickly here. I had no problem with it, but then I had already read the earlier book.

But despite the extensions and clarifications here, Searle still leaves a few things not clarified. He distinguishes between negative and positive rights. “Free speech” is a negative right because it requires nothing else of others besides letting me speak my mind. By contrast, a right to clean water (a UN declaration says this is a right) is a positive right because it puts an obligation on everyone else in the world to contribute to providing such a right. Searle rightly points out that positive rights are thus more problematic than negative rights, but he does note that the UN declaration of such positive rights puts the onus of obligation on governments rather than mere individuals. He also uses a strange example, the right (in the context of the social institution of marriage) of a spouse to be consulted by their spouse before the latter commits to some life changing course of action. This is not a negative right as he seems to cast it, but a positive right, the corresponding obligation being on the spouse contemplating the act.

Finally, Searle tries to make sense of the notions of “natural” and “absolute” rights, those that exist by virtue of our being human beings outside any social context. I do not think he clarifies these ideas fully. An unarmed man encountering a hungry lion on the savanna will be eaten by the lion ninety nine times out of a hundred and that puts paid to any such thing as “natural rights” outside social contexts.

Despite getting a little loose with the notion of “human rights” at the end of the book, this is a superb portrait of the ontological structure of social reality. In a last section, Searle points out that most social scientists do not think that a grasp of social ontology really helps them with their work but they are mostly wrong about this. Most social science (for example) begins by assuming language and then asks how social reality is constructed with it. By contrast Searle notes that once you have a language, you already have a significant social context.

Book Review: Mind: A Brief Introduction by J. Searle

Below is the text of my Amazon review of John Searle’s “Mind”, an introduction to the philosophy of mind published in 2004. In this book Searle does a superb job of analyzing the structure of our mental processes, but he runs into problems trying to get a handle on free will and personal agency. Rather than comment on these two issues as a part of this review I have written an article on the subject located here.

“Mind: A Brief Introduction” by John Searle 2004

Another good book from a good philosopher, Searle’s review and proposals concerning the philosophy of mind. He sets out reviewing the dominant threads in the development of philosophy of mind noting and striking at their particular weaknesses. Searle dismisses property and substance dualism but also strikes at the weaknesses of various branches of materialist thinking on the subject. He then proposes his own theory, one that is fundamentally materialistic (physics being for Searle the ultimate basis of all things), but different in that it takes mental properties seriously but rests them firmly on what amounts to “the power and functional purpose of brains”.

Searle is an honest philosopher. He states his assumptions, makes clear his reasoning, and knows when his approach to the subject hits a wall that he has not (perhaps yet) found a way round. In this book, like everyone else, he cannot reduce-away the gap between the objective ontology of brains and the subjective ontology of experience. He points out that while every other phenomena in the physical universe can be both logically and physically reduced to some more fundamental phenomena, subjective experience cannot be logically reduced precisely because it is subjective while everything else is objective, public. Of course he assumes that there is some underlying, solely physical, foundation which will become known in time.

The book covers consciousness taken as a whole, a gestalt, and also intentionality (the “about-ness” of our thinking), the aspectral nature of all consciousness, emotions, desires, beliefs, and with these also acts: decisions and volitional control of the body. There is also a chapter on the unconscious, and that too fits perfectly well into his view of what mind is.

Searle runs into two other barriers not normally acknowledged by other philosophers. In a chapter on [libertarian] free will, he says that from a psychological point of view, free will must be real, but from his own view that consciousness is just what the brain does in the same sense that kidneys filter blood, he admits that he cannot figure out how free will could work. He alludes to a popular view that quantum mechanics might have something to do with this, but is honest enough to admit that this idea still does not really answer the question.

The other barrier is that of personal identity, the conviction that although my body and character change I remain, to myself subjectively, the same person today as I was a month or a decade back and that I can plan for the future when, presumably, this same person will still be around to enjoy the fruits of present labor. Here he addresses the “continuity of memory” theory to personal identity and accepts that this is important but is insufficient to explain the phenomenon. That these are MY memories still presupposes some “I” whose memories they are. He denies the “I” is substantive, but merely a functional hypothesis that we must have to make experience intelligible. He admits that he does not know how to get deeper into it than that.

The book is well written (could Searle do otherwise?) with little formality. His assumptions and arguments are clearly made in plain English. It isn’t an encyclopedic introduction to the philosophy of mind, but it does touch briefly on the main threads of the field as explored by Western philosophers for the past 300 or so years. His own theory, well expounded, illustrates how subtle and problematic some of the questions in the field can be. A good read. Highly recommended.

Ruminations

"And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke" Kipling. "The Betrothed"

Category: Philosophy