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”.

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.

Comments on “Mind” by John Searle

In a wonderfully written book, “Mind” (2004 — see my Amazon review here) John Searle introduces us to issues in the philosophy of mind and promotes his own version of a theory of mind. While carefully rejecting present views of dualism (substance and property versions), and a larger set of variations grounded in materialism. He proposes his own view grounded, in the end, in materialism, but claims to avoid all the problems with other versions. What makes his version materialistic is that he assumes both the necessity and sufficiency of brains to be causally responsible for consciousness, that is agent subjectivity and intentionality. In large part, it is because of the causal relationship that presentation to consciousness via sensory experience, and causal action by an agent who can “make things happen” that the “interaction problem” (the “mind-body problem”) largely disappears in Searle’s philosophy of mind.

But it never completely disappears. Searle runs into problems with free will and personal identity that the theory fails to accommodate. Free will does fit into his view of mind as it relates both to the individual and the collective. It has “conditions of satisfaction” that can be easily specified in Searle’s terms. Personal identity is far more problematic. I discuss both below.

While the necessity of brains to consciousness is these days not controversial, Searle’s assumption of their sufficiency begs the question in the debate between dualists (particularly substance dualists) and materialists, including Searle. It is precisely the point of the debate here that no one has established sufficiency of brains to minds, and it turns out the whole debate turns on what evidence there might be that brains are insufficient. It turns out the evidence, not proof, comes from physics itself; the causal closure principle!

Searle implicitly recognizes this “begging of the question”. At the end of chapter 4, having said that he belives his arguments fully refute the various materialist variations he explores, he says this about dualism.

“Notice that these arguments still leave dualism as a logical possibility, though I think extremely unlikely, that when our bodies are destroyed, our souls will go marching on. I have not tried to show that this is an impossibility (indeed I wish it were true), but rather that it is inconsistent with just about everything else we know about how the universe works and therefore it is irrational to believe in it.”

I do not believe he really “wishes it were true”. If he did, he might have found a more sophisticated version of the argument (see also “From What Comes Mind?”). He also says, in the same conclusion to chapter 4 that as goes the two ontological realms (the mental and the physical), “No one has ever succeeded in giving an intelligible account of the relationships between these two realms”. Part of the purpose of this essay is to give such an account consistent with his structural analysis of mind. In the end, the precise mechanism of the connection remains a mystery, but in my view, it is no longer a connection between realms. One problem is that by “how the universe works” Searle is speaking of the discoveries of science, starting with physics. In physics, there simply is no evidence of any positive reality added from elsewhere (besides brains) that could constitute consciousness some separate thing added to physics. Physics finds no other realm and that is certainly true! There is no other realm that physics can possibly detect. But for physics to declare, blithely, that “nothing other than physics exists” obviously begs the question, something even physicists (those not pushing some vested interest) admit. This blatant assumption impacts both substance and property dualism.

Property dualism is a materialism where brains are necessary and sufficient causally, but what they cause comes, inexplicably, to take on a being of its own. Property dualism says that a new ontological realm emerges from physics, and once emerged has independent properties that are ontologically objective and yet remain interactive with physics. Property dualism springs from materialism and either proposes a new, fundamentally different ontology springing (who knows how) from the material, or it falls into epiphenomenalism. The core of this view falls into the same trap as many nondualistic (materialist) explanations, the naked assumption that “nothing but physics” is manifesting any such ontologically novel realm.

As for substance dualism, Searle refers explicitly to a strictly Cartesian version. In this variation, God in some direct way imposes mind on bodies. Brains are not even directly involved, although even Descartes recognized that some connection must exist between them. This view leads to all sorts of distractions (souls, disembodied minds) that are not, in fact, entailed even by a “mind realm”. Searle believes the whole idea of an ontologically objective “mental realm” (substance or property) is the root of dualist problems and he is right, but for some of the wrong reasons. His reasons stem, mostly, from belief expressions that come down to us through the history of religious institutions. These beliefs are vague and confused and may not properly distinguish between mind, soul, person, or spirit. All this vagueness was present in Descartes, and everyone (dualist or anti-dualist) since Descartes has simply imported it into their idea of what dualism must entail. Property dualism of course looses the disembodied soul notion but still comes out to an ontologically objective “realm” that brains produce. I agree with Searle, this is the wrong way to look at it.

There are more sophisticated versions of a proper substance dualism argument, but it remains the case that some of what is substantial about substance dualism has to come from something that is itself nonmaterial. This typically ends in God because that is what humans have thought must ground anything nonphysical. Once you have God, the physical too becomes grounded, and the fact of interaction between whatever it is that constitutes the mental and the physical is no longer a surprise. Nevertheless, the mystery of the interaction mechanism remains. But we need not go as far as God to paint a more sophisticated substance dualism; we can start with physics. The principle of causal closure stated briefly is that physics comes from and produces only physics. Subjective experience, being in its essential nature nonphysical, cannot emerge from physics, at least not physics alone!.

Consider a radio, powered up, properly functioning, playing some music. The music issues from the proper functioning of the radio in a way analogous to subjective mind’s issuing from our brains. Clearly the music (technically pressure waves of a certain type) is not the radio itself. But there is no music realm, only music which stops (or becomes distorted) the moment the radio stops functioning properly. Note now the properly functioning circuitry of the radio is 99% responsible for the music, but not 100%. There is something else, in this case a physical electromagnetic wave, that carries information to which the circuitry of the radio is (through a complex convolution of electron perturbation) sensitive. The important point here is the music is not merely added to the radio the way Descartes added mind to body. That is why, in the case of the music, there is no realm. The radio is responsible, the cause, of the music, and brains are similarly the cause of consciousness.

Consciousness is not added to brains, but stems from them. However, the radio while necessary is not sufficient to produce any music at all without the information bearing (and electron perturbing) radio wave to which its functioning circuits are sensitive. The music (strictly speaking the configured pressure wave) is the expression of that sensitivity transformed through the radio’s circuitry. Something to which the brain is sensitive results in a metaphorical interpretation we experience literally as experience. There is no realm because mind as such is not added from the outside to brains. Mind, subjectivity, springs from brains in response to or as a result of (transformed by brain circuitry) sensitivity to something nonphysical that must, nevertheless, exist inside the physical universe.

We must posit something, we need not go all the way to God, existing inside (is a part of) the physical universe that has three qualities. 1) It cannot itself be physical. 2) it must be able to affect brains, or put another way, brains must be sensitive to or detect this something. 3) it must be everywhere in the physical universe such that where ever the right circuitry comes to be in the universe, a subjective experience, attached to that circuitry, appears in or rather as some subject. This “hybrid-substance dualism” says this: Consciousness emerges from brains. Consciousness is not added to brains from the outside but emerges in functioning brains themselves in conjunction with or as a result of (causal) interaction with some entity that is not itself material.

Why not material? Because the material alone, the brains, cannot invoke the nonmaterial which is the essential characteristic of a subjective awareness! This is my core assumption, and I justify it not by religion but physics! No physics has demonstrated the emergence of a nonphysical phenomenon from nothing but physical forerunners (causes). It is also a fact that the only seemingly nonphysical phenomenon we know is consciousness, subjectivity, itself. Given what it is physics is competent to explore, the physical, and that we have a manifestly nonphysical subjective experience that is clearly reliant on brains, the only legitimate assertion physics can make about mind is that we cannot possibly know if physics is sufficient to produce it. This does not prove “physics doesn’t produce it”, but it also gives us no justification to say that it does.

In both of my books and a few essays here on the blog I call this entity “Cosmic Mind”, but that has the unfortunate connotation that it is itself a thinking entity or that it amounts to panpsychism. Neither is the case. Perhaps a better name might be “Cosmic Mind Field” (CMF). Existing in time and pervading all space. It is nevertheless not a panpsychism because it evokes consciousness only in brains, not rocks, individual living cells, or thermostats. But it must function as a field (albeit not electromagnetic) because it performs where ever functioning brains are present and evokes a continuum of consciousness from brains of varying levels of complexity.

Perhaps there is “something it is like to be a fish or a lizard, but we have good reason to believe that whatever that is, the consciousness of lions, apes, and parrots is richer, and that of humans richer still. Like two radios of different quality, the more primitive brains invoke a more primitive and limited consciousness in the same way the lower quality radio reproduces less of the information present in the electromagnetic wave.

This picture allows Searle’s view of consciousness to go through. Brains being causal entities evoke consciousness. There is no mystery of “causal mind” because brains do all the causing. Searle’s analysis of “aspectual intentionality”, qualia (aspectual perception), belief, desire, the subconscious, and so on all can go through as he supposes they do. My proposal avoids the Cartesian “realm business”. Mind is not some realm imposed on bodies, but stems from them. At the same time it resolves the causal closure dilemma. Mind is nonphysical because its invocation from brains isn’t entirely physical but depends on the brain’s sensitivity to the CMF.

But what is that exactly? It is precisely because the only handle we have on objective (mind-independent) ontology is perceptual and therefore physical that we cannot say. We cannot detect the CMF with physical instruments, nor conceive of any experiment that would isolate it from other phenomena because we can only so isolate physical phenomena! CMF sensitivity is common to all consciousness. There is nothing that we have from within consciousness that isolates the effect of the CMF because consciousness is that effect. But human consciousness at least effects a partial escape from this. I will come to that a bit below.

The Free Will Problem

In Mind Searle runs into two problems he cannot fit into his analysis, free will and personal identity. As concerns free will Searle admits he cannot reconcile even a causally efficacious consciousness with free will on the brain side. On the psychological side, from within subjectivity, he cannot shake the conviction that free will must somehow be genuine. We presuppose it in everything we do and every utterance we make. Does my model help us here? I could always say that free will is just a power (more in man than in fish) that consciousness has. Searle would rightly object that this doesn’t explain anything new. It doesn’t explain the ontological ground of the freedom. How in a universe of random (quantum) and deterministic phenomena does anything (even the nonmaterial) become free in the volitional sense?

This is both a physical and a metaphysical problem. It’s hard enough to accept that physics alone is sufficient to cause consciousness. Now it also happens that this consciousness is volitional, its choices neither determined nor random (both purposeless) but now directed and purposeful? The CMF is becoming extraordinary indeed.

The metaphysical issue is not merely the possibility of volition in the universe, though that is one issue. Like consciousness, free will must be possible as its exercise supports our entire intentional state. As with consciousness, free will’s possibility is something physical law makes room for. What physical law demands is that physical causal chains have some physical starting point. Physics allows its macro-deterministic behavior to arise from randomness, the quantum vacuum. If physicists were being honest, they could not rule out that something else, something not visible to scientific method, can also start causal chains.

Volitionally initiated causal chains, the causal part, all begin with some macro-physical starting point; for example the motion of a hand or a speech act. They are not causal chains until that point. But physics cannot preclude that, perhaps simultaneous with neural activity, a volitional act neither determined nor random, initiates that chain. It is, in other words, logically possible that physics alone is not enough to explain the appearance of a third source of causal chains; volition. Not only is this logically possible, physics itself recommends the conclusion. In centuries of sophisticated experiments and observation physics has found only determinism and randomness. Why should physicists concede the possibility of a type of cause they cannot, even in principle, detect? Because unlike other hypothetical entities (ghosts) and powers (remote viewing), free will is presupposed in virtually every decision we make as human beings. Volitional capacity is the closest thing to “obvious in our experience” besides experience itself. Not only must we presuppose it, our entire culture, language, art, institutions, cleverly designed experiments, and engineering feats, all imply free will.

In “Making the Social World” (2011) Searle devotes a chapter to language and the commonalities and differences between pre-linguistic and linguistic mind. He lists five possible types of “linguistic utterances”: Assertives, Directives, Commissives (e.g. promises), Expressives (e.g. apologies), and Declarations (e.g. “I pronounce you husband and wife”). The first four of these all have pre-linguistic forms (beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions respectively) but Searle says that Declarations, making something real (e.g. a married couple) merely by declaring it, has only a linguistic form. Searle does not recognize that free exercise of will is precisely a pre-linguistic declarative. It “makes something real” by willing it, and has the same “two directions of fit with the world” as declarations.

One freely chooses (Searle’s “prior intention”, “will-to-world fit”, “world-to-will” cause) and then freely acts (“intention-in-action”, “world-to-will fit”, “will-to-world” cause). The “conditions of satisfaction” for free will are the same, indeed a combination of, those of perception and action, homologous to linguistic declarations. If I think I am free, that belief can only be true if I really am free. If I act freely and introduce into the world a new [physical] causal chain that action is satisfied only by a genuinely new causal chain initiated by a free choice. If this analysis is correct, then free will is a property of consciousness in the same sense as intentionality and the CMF must, in some sense be its metaphysical ground.

The Identity Problem

Searle demurs on free will’s “ontologically objective” reality, but he cannot bring himself to do the same for agent-identity. To be conscious, to have purposes, to choose, are, in human experience, the consciousness, intentionality, and volitional elections of an agent. All of our experience presupposes agency, some singular identity that recognizes the change all around it by reference to its constitutive changelessness. Searle doesn’t use the word ‘changeless’, but his examples are telling.

He shows that memories do not explain the phenomenon. There is an image in my mind from when I was two. I believe it is real because my parents explained to me once what it was when I was a little older. But then there is a gap and the next memories (few) I have are of events taking place when I was four. Gradually, the gaps become smaller and the number of memories grows, but gaps persist here and there even to recent times. And yet, I have the unshakable conviction, as much as the conviction that a persistent “I”, the same person, have existed since that earliest memory.

I had that memory and I have all the other memories, the same I despite gaps in the memory record spanning years! What about the future? I can plan for a future, say going to graduate and postgraduate school to become a philosopher. I can act today so eight or ten years from now I, the same I who today applies to graduate schools, becomes a philosopher. Looking backwards from that time, I will be the same person who filled out those first applications. I will recognize this. If my brain has functioned normally throughout that time, its truth (reality-representation) is immediately apparent. The “conditions of satisfaction” for changelessness are met.

Searle believes it necessary to posit some functional entity that stands for this “I”. He does not hesitate to declare that it cannot be a substance, but something must stand antecedent, logically anterior, to consciousness itself. As we experience it, agency is inseparable from our (that is human-subjective) exercise of will. Both the freedom and the will in “free will” seem, in our phenomenal arena, to come from, to be the will of, my agent-self, my “I”.

Is Searle’s “functional entity” helpful here? What does it mean for a functional entity to be changeless? How does this property emerge in a universe where everything else from physics to thought is constantly in flux? How does a functional entity dependent in some necessary sense on both a changeable brain and changeable consciousness gain this quality? Searle’s suggestion is merely a stand-in, but the qualities it must have suggest more.

Functions are processes. A changeless process is logically impossible. The agent can only be a substance whose persistence, at least, is logically possible. If that is the case agency cannot take origin in mind. The always-changing cannot produce changeless substance any more than physics alone can produce nonmaterial mind. Agency is always experienced and expressed in mind, but its metaphysical source must be external to it.

It is this substantial agency that makes possible the capacity to partially escape otherwise transparent subjectivity, something it appears only humans can do. By this I refer to our capacity to analyse mind itself. Lions have some sense of individuation from the world, but do not exhibit any ability to think about their consciousness as such. Only humans do this, and while language seems to be necessary in the exercise of this capacity it isn’t sufficient for its appearance. Even though what we experience of our own identity is experienced only in and through mind, only the existence of something in someway distinct from mind can provide a sort of “binocular perspective” that enables us to say something about mind itself, to describe our subjectivity (to ourselves or others) as if, as it were, from a third person perspective. I have much more to say about this in my essay “Why Personality”.

Putting it All Together

Both free will and identity raise extraordinary ontological issues. For mind, it seems an extraordinary coincidence that this CMF happened to be around to evoke consciousness from a certain organization of matter, especially as both the consciousness and the life on which it rests were contingent. Not only is the CMF implicated in consciousness (which at least we can suppose is generated by brains as music is generated by the radio), but also volition, something for which physics and philosophy cannot even account for logically let alone physically!

Identity is even more remarkable. It is one thing to suppose that some nonmaterial reality can arise out of the purely physical. It is even more of a stretch to demand that an entity that never changes in time arises in a time-drenched universe in which everything else changes! The absurdity of these impossibilities ends in two extreme positions, denial that nonmaterial phenomena exist, including consciousness, or that its existence must be purposeful. This is to say the antecedent presence of the CMF, is not an accident, but produced for the purpose of causing consciousness with free will when the right material organization comes along. Of course this has further teleological implications.

Searle insists that all explanations find their ground in physics, material reality, but he is left with three problems resulting from this demand; the mind-body problem, free will, and timeless agency. Starting with consciousness as such we have Searle’s assertion that it is just “what brains do” but he knows his explanation does not cross the gap. Dual-aspect (Russellian) monisms (Davidson, Nagel) or panpsychism (Chalmers, Goff) also fail to bridge the gap. If, as these philosophers insist, mind is nothing more than an expression of undiscovered physics then we should find evidence in physics for the emergence of something (besides mind which begs the question) even minimally nonphysical.

My own solution, the CMF, doesn’t get to the details either, but it explains why what we seek is not found in physics. It isn’t there. If the CMF and brains interact (which they seem obviously to do) then either we are back to impossible physics, or there is a third entity responsible for both. When we discover interaction between two otherwise discontinuous phenomena in the physical world we take this discovery to be evidence of some third phenomenon that mediates the interaction. In proposing such an entity, a common source of physics and mind, we are doing nothing new philosophically speaking.

The CMF makes consciousness possible, evoking subjectivity from brains, but by itself doesn’t give us free will. If free will, obviously exercised in and by mind, has a ground it must come also from our third entity. That entity must itself be willful, purposeful. It is reasonable to locate free will in mind, a power of consciousness, because its operation fits perfectly into Searle’s structural analysis of intentionality in language and both exhibit constraint by time. We choose only in the present and both the choices made and the conscious arena in which they take place are constantly changing.

But the same cannot be said of human subjective agency. This also exists in time and expresses in mind; I am here in the universe after all. But unlike everything else agency does not change. Our consciousness is always changing and our will (free or not) can act only in the present, but all this change takes place within a phenomenology of changeless self. This is such an extreme problem for Searle that he proposes a functional entity in some sense independent of both mind and physics. But just as we never see physics resulting in the nonphysical, it cannot yield up a changeless entity antecedent even to mind. Moreover, it is this agency that enables us to reflexively examine mind itself, something it could not do if it was not in ontologically distinct from mind.

Function resting on a constantly changing consciousness cannot be changeless. Unlike volition, changeless agency cannot be a product of the time-constrained CMF. Our antecedent and ontologically objective source must also be a timeless agency, able to add this agency to time-constrained mind. With this step we are all the way to a personal God outside time.

Granted this is a truncated argument. Searle is honest enough to admit that substance dualism remains logically possible but rejects it on the grounds that it adds nothing useful to the philosophy of mind. But Searle does not get any closer to the secret of subjectivity emerging out of physics alone other than to insist that it does. The dualism I propose takes nothing away from his analysis of the structure of consciousness as we experience it. My analysis of free will (above) shows that Searle’s basic insights about mind remain sound. Free will fits into his ideas about the relation of mind to language, better in fact than in his own analysis!

While not popular with physicists or philosophers, God, like dualism, always remains logically possible. Moreover, while theism does not explain the details, it does account for free willed nonmaterial agency outside physics. It tells us why physics cannot find these in physics itself but yet experiences (presumably in the minds of physicists and philosophers) them in a physical universe otherwise governed by deterministic process resting on the randomness of quantum mechanics.

That we have agency and do exercise free will is so obvious to me that I will make the extraordinary claim that what motivates most free will and agent denial is not physics as such which says only “physics cannot account for it”, but precisely that accepting the ontological objectivity of free will agency too easily opens the door to theism. Of course physicists and philosophers will greet this claim with derision but the fact remains that, in the end, only God can provide the ontological ground for both free will and agency.

Searle’s Quantum Mistake

In a chapter on free will (of the libertarian sort) Searle runs into something of a wall. He concedes that psychological freedom must be real, but he cannot reconcile this with what is ultimately physical biology (brains) both necessary and sufficient to produce consciousness, the arena in which psychological free will operates. He speculates on a popular suggestion, that quantum behavior, some quantum randomness essential to the brain’s function, is in some part responsible for a genuine (ontologically objective) volitional will. Searle knows that randomness is not volitional freedom, but he says that it is possible that something about the brain transforms the randomness into volitional freedom in agent consciousness.

But he doesn’t like this solution because it makes the brain different from all other organs in that only the brain requires quantum processes in its role. I believe he is mistaken here. There is good reason to suppose that life itself rests to some degree on quantum phenomena. Every bacterium, amoeba, or living cell in an organ of the body lives because quantum phenomena are an intimate part of the mechanics of living processes. The brain then would be no different from any other life in this respect though it may (I suspect does) further constrain (in Terrence Deacon’s sense, see “Incomplete Nature”) the quantum processes necessary for life. That is the brain utilizes quantum processes in some quantitatively or qualitatively “enhanced way” as compared to life in general, but it is no longer unique in its dependency on quantum process generally.

Suppose I am right here. Does it help us answer the free will question as concerns biology? No. There always remains the gap between physics and the subjective experience. How do “enhanced quantum constraints” become volitional, or for that matter subjective? The interaction problem always remains. But my suggestion does clear one of Searle’s objections to the involvement of quantum phenomena with the phenomenal experience of consciousness and free will; quantum processes are essential to life generally.

Review: N. Rescher “Free Will”

I’ve read two books by Rescher. The first “Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues” (2000) I did not review for Amazon because there is no Kindle version and I managed to find the complete text as a PDF or online read here. This book inspired my essay “Process, Substance, Time, and Space”. Rescher’s examination of the free will issue, often the gorilla in the room for philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics, not to mention ethics, is nothing short of thorough and well articulated. Another of my essays “An Epistemological Argument for Free Will” was written prior to my reading Rescher’s “Survey” or “Free Will”. It addresses some of the same issues, but Rescher does a much better job.

In the review I mention Lowe (“Personal Agency” 2006), but I didn’t want to add my own philosophical commentary to a book review. Here I will note again the two works are complimentary. Although Lowe is a substance and Rescher a process ontologist, the compliment arises because Lowe’s focus is metaphysical, while Rescher’s is phenomenological and epistemological. Lowe’s book is directed more towards establishing the metaphysical possibility of free will in a deterministic and/or random (quantum) universe. He looks at causal process and asks what freedom means, what it must accomplish, its “existence criteria” to be called free and willful (purpose directed) in the context of a causal universe. By contrast Rescher gives us an explosion of distinctions in types, kinds, or categories of experience in which we explicitly and directly recognize the freedom and willfulness of our acts. For Lowe it is about what we understand freedom to be, while for Rescher it is about how we experience it. Along the way, Lowe must, perforce, delve into the epistemological, while Rescher only rarely touches on the metaphysical.

Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal, Second Edition (Kindle Edition 2015)

This book has been out on Kindle for over a year and a half now and I am its first reviewer. I suspect this has something to do with its $40 price which is frankly obscene for a Kindle book. My opinion here casts no aspersions on Amazon for it is the book’s publisher who sets the price. This is a particularly greedy publisher especially as it appears that a bit of sloppiness crept into the production here but I will save that at the end.

Sometime ago I reviewed a book on the same subject by Richard Swinburne (“Mind, Brain, and Free Will”) and in that review I said that Swinburne “conceded too much to the determinists.” Having read Rescher now I come away with the conviction that even in my own writings, with a much more expansive view of freedom than Swinburne, I have conceded too much to the determinists!

If this is not the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of free will it is a very close second to that of E. J. Lowe, “Personal Agency” 2006 (it’s a tough call). I was surprised to discover that Lowe is not cited in the book’s bibliography. Lowe’s focus is more metaphysical, the nature of agency, while Rescher aims squarely at the phenomenological, the subjective qualities of free will, but their thought runs in parallel streams detectable throughout the book. Rescher’s arguments are thorough. He spends the first 2/3 of the book making distinctions and investigating what free will would have to be like if it existed. His first and most important distinction is that between metaphysical and moral freedom. He does not mean what either of these terms normally connote. “Moral freedom” for Rescher is commonly addressed by what philosophers call Compatibilism, the notion that an act is done without constraint from outside the actor, like a thief with a gun to your head ordering you to open the safe. For Rescher, moral freedom is simply the freedom to act free from “undue external constraint” whether or not the act has any traditionally moral implications. Metaphysical freedom, by contrast, is the freedom to choose, to make a decision prior to an act, and that such a choice arises from the deliberation, “the thought” (conscious or subconscious, though not unconscious), of the decider. In contemporary philosophy, Compatibilism is a response to the fashionable notion that Rescher’s “metaphysical freedom” is impossible, not supported by physics. Rescher stands the matter on its head and notes that moral freedom, the possibility of a “freedom to act” (in a manner fully compliant with physics, not to mention the limits of one’s biology) depends on having a prior freedom to deliberate (even subconsciously) and choose. Even with a gun to your head you have “metaphysical freedom”. You can deliberate over alternatives like fighting off the thief. That you would not actually succeed, are likely to die, is what revokes your moral freedom, but deliberation, the choice to deliberate, remains available. The choice “in mind”, prior to any final decision to act, is “metaphysical freedom” in Rescher’s sense.

Rescher raises many issues usually addressed in the negative. Besides making important and obviously useful distinctions here, He effectively demolishes many of the challenges to free will like Galen Strawson’s claim that for a decision or act to be free every input to it, including every motive, belief, and inclination of the actor would have to have been both consciously and freely chosen going back to the earliest life of the actor. Rescher also demolishes the notion that one could, in principle, trace the neurological basis of some particular choice or action back indefinitely in the history of the actor, and addresses various interpretations of the infamous Libet experiments. He points out and argues extensively and well that without some stopping point in the thought of the actor not only is there no room for freedom, but consciousness itself becomes pointless. Without eventually referencing thought itself, there is always something that is left out of the description of most human behavior. That such “leaving out” is an inevitable outcome of a purely physical description, is evidence that something genuinely important is being missed.

It is not until the book’s last two chapters that Rescher addresses the metaphysics of “metaphysical freedom” as he understands this. His case here is entirely circumstantial, but convincing nevertheless. He notes explicitly that there can be no empirical demonstration of free will one way or the other. He argues that broadly speaking evolutionary advantage accrues to animals the more they have the power to choose and revoke choice in thought prior to acting. Mind and brain exist together in lock-step such that there is never a “mental eventuation” without there being some correlative brain activity. The mental is not causal in the traditional sense but “initiating”. Exactly what the difference is here is not really explained but at least one difference is initiation’s lack of temporal precedence. At no time is there a mental eventuation (there is a distinction Rescher makes between “events” and “eventuations”) without a corresponding brain activity. Rescher is, in the end, a materialist. From the traditional metaphysical viewpoint he argues that free will, like the consciousness (capacity to think) underlying it, is simply emergent from physics through biology (Darwinian mechanism) and that therefore there is nothing mysterious about it metaphysically speaking. The agent herself emerges from the bundle of tropes that constitute her consciousness. That we do not know (and can never discover because it is not strictly causal) precisely the mechanism by which thought takes control and initiates does not mean it doesn’t happen. He argues persuasively that the entirety of our experience not to mention the subjective meaningfulness of consciousness itself suggests that it, that is free will, is real, and it is always rational for us to proceed on that basis.

While I thoroughly enjoyed this book I did notice a curious production issue. There are places in the book where whole paragraphs (sometimes two or three successive paragraphs) are lifted from one part of the book and placed in another. At first I thought this a curious stylistic device as in each case the following discussion takes different turns. But as it began to happen more and more, not only between successive chapters but inside chapters and in the last case even within the same subsection, I began to wonder if this was not a production error on the editor’s part?

Nobody interested in the free will problem from one side or the other should be without this book. Dualists and monists of all stripes will find if not a complete answer to their questions, a host of useful distinctions and considerations bearing on the problem. It is unfortunate that it is so expensive. The publisher is doing the community of philosophers-at-large no favors here.

Arguing with Automatons

Introduction

There is no metaphysical middle ground between libertarian free will and automatonism. I stress the metaphysical here because there is phenomenological (psychological) middle ground that backs up into the epistemological. By “phenomenological middle ground” I refer to what I take to be most people’s every day experience with making choices. If you step into a taqueria and for a moment do not know if you “feel more like” chicken, beef, or pork, you think about it and choose one. We each make these (and many other) sorts of decisions throughout our day. In this process I (for I can in the end only speak for me) do not feel impelled by something, some combination of events in my past, to make one particular choice over another. I had chicken last week, so this week I’ll take the steak, or perhaps I liked the chicken so much I choose it again. Whether you are committed to libertarian free will philosophically the choice of chicken, steak, or pork, feels at least superficially free. Whichever choice you make you are at the same time aware that other choices (and so futures) were potentially open to you.

I will not further address this experience of phenomenological freedom because it is conceivable that you can genuinely believe you are free without actually being free just as genuinely believing you are Napoleon reincarnated does not mean you are Napoleon reincarnated. The issue then is not whether the alternatives appear open to you but whether they actually are open. Although you might have chosen beef or pork and have done so in the past, on this occasion something stemming from your past (indeed going all the way back to the big bang) determined that you would choose chicken and this determination was (usually is because otherwise the phenomenological room would also disappear) at least entirely subconscious if not in fact unconscious. On this occasion you were going to choose chicken just as on prior occasions there were determinations that led to your choosing steak or pork at those times. Automatons are entities that sometimes appear to make free decisions from a purely behavioral viewpoint, but which we know not to be free because we understand all of what leads deterministically to those choices; that is, we know all of what underlies the behavior both necessarily and sufficiently.

In this paper my goal is not to defend a view of libertarian free will as I have done that before here in this blog and other places. What does interest me here are two related things. First does it make any sense for a human being with free will to argue or debate with an entity who appears to be a human being but lacks free will? Second, if no human beings have free will does any debate or argument between such entities have any meaning or significance? I am thinking of the following scenario. Two human beings are having a debate. The thought of the first being is freely expressed through speech in a language that both know. That speech, having some meaning in the common language the other being grasps in her thought, leads to a free decision in the thought of the second being to accept the argument of the first being or to reject it and freely offer a counterargument of her own. Note the freedom involved here would entail the second being might have, besides agreeing or offering a counterargument, instead have chosen simply to be quiet and abandon the discussion among other options. What is crucial to meaning here is the respondent understands the semantic relation between the argument presented and her response whatever that turns out to be. “The semantic” is important here because the relation is not about the brain states of one party invoking brain states in the other, but rather subjective states of consciousness whose form and content do not resemble brain states.

The Argument

An automaton is a “state machine”. Some combination of parts each having various but finite numbers of states in which they can reside together determine what the automaton “does” at any given moment. The parts here can be mechanical, electromechanical, or of any other constitution that can express a “state”. Automatons today range from such trivial devices as automated floor cleaners to sophisticated computers in which software initially constrains possible “states” expressed in hardware; servomotors controlling a driver-less car or making chess moves on a game board. Every automaton begins in some first state when it is “turned on” and that state evolves in time from that point depending on what the automaton experiences in its inputs. Inputs include what it senses of the world’s response to its outputs (for example a chess move) which become further inputs. Not only do modern automatons “adapt” their behavior (within the range of mechanical possibility) by responding to their various inputs (given the potentials embedded in their programming), and that behavior can appear unexpected from the viewpoint of a human observer.

That these behaviors appear unexpected does not mean they are not fully determined (causally) by the automaton’s present state including all present inputs. In all the automatons we build from thermostats to self-driving cars and game playing computers we take this “ultimately determined” status for granted. We know that if we examine the machine’s workings in fine enough detail we will find exactly which combinations of states determined any particular behavior, that those states were sufficient to cause the behavior in question, and that those states were recursively determined by prior states (plus inputs) back in time to the machine’s first state. Because we know exactly how one state causes another we assume there is nothing more to the behavior of the automaton than its history of prior states. We assume that is, the automaton experiences no internal subjectivity. If two such automatons were to have an argument of some sort, a third-party would see what looked like our argument response between two humans illustrated above. But we have good reasons to believe that despite the behavioral similarity there is no subjective, semantic, understanding occurring in either of them.

Back in the 1970s there was an automaton named ELIZA. Today there are far more sophisticated automatons, but ELIZA is illustrative for my purposes here because it was specifically designed not so much to “be intelligent” but to mimic intelligence passing the Turing test. Simply stated, the Turing test proposed that a machine would or could be taken to be intelligent if in interacting with a human being, the human could not tell if it was interacting with a machine or another human. But the Turing test proved a little easy to pass under domain restricted circumstances and ELIZA was proof of that.

ELIZA’s domain was psychotherapy of the lite sort in which a therapist speaks one-to-one with a patient. Humans (students) were the patients and asked to talk (type) to their therapist.

Patient: I’m not sleeping well lately.
ELIZA: Have you any idea why?
Patient: I’m having bad dreams.
ELIZA: What are the dreams about?
Patient: My mother.
ELIZA: Tell me about your mother.

A simple program by today’s standards ELIZA found subjects, verbs, and objects in patient sentences and wove questions around one or more of them. If the program could not find any specific word to incorporate in its reply it output something more general like “why?” Most patients could tell that ELIZA was a machine but only after enough interaction that they realized ELIZA’s answers weren’t getting at anything. But initially, and in brief transactions, many patients thought they were speaking (typing) to a human being. But here’s where it gets really interesting for this argument. There came a point in work with ELIZA that some students, even knowing that ELIZA was a machine, not only continued to interact with it (some for long sessions), but reported experiencing therapeutic value! Some students said the sessions reduced stress and helped them think about their lives. The sessions “had meaning” in the broad sense, they had significance to the student.

The first question we want to ask is: were these interactions of meaning or significance to ELIZA? We assume not. We normally take it there is “nothing it is like” to be ELIZA, there is no consciousness there, no free will, no subjectivity. All of ELIZA’s replies are necessarily and sufficiently determined by a few hundred lines of code controlling the CPU and memory registers of a non-conscious automaton. One alternative view (taken by Chalmers and others) is there is something minimally “to be like” ELIZA, there is some subjectivity there though we cannot, from the human viewpoint “get at” what it might be like. Thomas Nagel (“What is it Like to be a Bat” 1974) deliberately chose an example (the bat) that to most people would have a subjective experience of some kind. Nagel’s argument is that it is in principle impossible for us to access bat-experience subjectively. His conclusion is taken to apply to any other subjective experience including that of other humans.

What would happen if we made two ELIZA programs interact? From a third-party perspective it would be a conversation between a therapist and a patient, that is two persons. But we know that this is not the case. We can explain all the behavior of both sides with reference to nothing but algorithms and programmable hardware, and we have good reason to believe that these are both necessary and sufficient causes of the observed behavior. We wouldn’t normally think to say that either side experienced any “therapeutic value”, semantic understanding or indeed had any internal experience of the interaction at all. Why not? Two reasons. One is that we do not impute any consciousness to ELIZA, and not having any consciousness, ELIZA cannot have and will at all. We normally take for granted that some consciousness is a necessary ground of any sort of willing. Will is only experienced, only exists, subjectively and never, like Hume’s cause, in the third person. My theme here focuses on the will so I want to stress the causal determinism (both necessary and sufficient) of the combination of algorithm and hardware is what robs the automation of anything that could conceivably be called “will”.

Now suppose we substitute real human beings for the two ELIZAs but stipulate that neither has a free will. The interaction is, in a manner perfectly analogous to “algorithm and hardware”, causally determined by states of the brains of the two humans. This causal relation is both necessary and sufficient to bring about every question and response there being no genuine “will” about it. So what is different about these two cases? Why (and where) can there be meaning and significance in the humans but not the automatons? The difference is the humans are (or could be) conscious – I stipulated only that they had no free will.

In the literature on free will and philosophy of mind one often finds that deniers of free will are not always deniers of consciousness. That is, although there is no genuine will there is experience, something subjective, and meaning arises in that arena. But consciousness itself is problematic for the same reason as free will. As Sean Carroll (“The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself” 2015) put it “thought can’t cause physics”. But if consciousness is real, then by some mechanism physics causes thought, subjectivity, and that should be equally impossible. There is, to put it bluntly, no more evidence in all of modern science that physics causes thought (subjectivity) than there is (from a third-party perspective remember the two ELIZAs) that thought causes physics. Consciousness and free will are two sides of the same coin.

If consciousness is real, and therefore experience can have meaning, then one must hold that physics causes [nonmaterial] thought. Rejecting this leaves only epiphenomenalism or eliminative materialism. The first makes experience (the subjectivity we experience every day) an illusion, while the second says it isn’t even illusory but nonexistent, something experience itself makes incoherent. Think of having a few orgasms in some clinical setting. The clinician asks you “which orgasm was the most powerful?” You say “the second.” The clinician, monitoring the behavior of every nerve in your body, says “No, my instruments tell me the first was more powerful.” The question comes down to who are you going to believe? The report of the clinician or the orgasm qualia you experienced? I stress here that it isn’t the orgasm, the measureable biological phenomena of nerve and muscle, but the subjective quality of the experience that matters.

The above example applies to qualia in general, but orgasms are particularly individual and subjectively qualified. It would be absurd to hold the third-party measurement had logical priority over the subjective experience. The quality of an orgasm is in its subjective experience and nowhere else. It would also be absurd to hold that an orgasm was illusory (epiphenomenalism) or nonexistent (eliminative materialism). An “illusory orgasm” is no more possible than a “square circle”. But none of this means there isn’t some brain state associated with every experience including experiences of thinking or choosing. If subjective experiences (think orgasms) are real, if they mean anything to a subject, there must be at least a logical separation between brain states and subjective experience. This is the gap so well described by David Chalmers (“The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” 1996 and “The Character of Consciousness” 2010), and that forces one to accept a property dualism of some sort.

In his 2015 book “Free Will a Philosophical Reappraisal” Nicholas Rescher asks us to consider that there is some brain state literally simultaneous with “the thought”. The question is not which is physically antecedent (and so causal) but logically antecedent and so initiating. Rescher is a materialist, so his scheme must work from the side of physics. He argues the relation between physics and thought is not causal in the normal sense that physics understands it. Instead of a cause he calls it an initiation. He makes two distinctions here. Initiations are atemporal. Rescher (a process ontologist) holds an “event view” of cause in which events unfold (cause) other events. What is important about all event unfolding is its temporality. Events have duration (however short or long) and “causing events” must precede result unfolding in time. By contrast, initiations are simultaneous with their physical expressions. Crucially they are not “events”. Rescher calls them “eventuations”. In Rescher’s view the eventuations go both ways. Brain states eventuate thoughts, and sometimes a certain class of thoughts we commonly call choices or decisions eventuate brain states.

Although Rescher does not try to resolve the mystery of the interaction metaphysically he doesn’t have to. What he shows is the reasonableness of the relation going both ways. If physics can evoke consciousness, then consciousness can, correspondingly, evoke physics. A second consequence of initiations is that there is some brain state just before a decision or choice in thought which is not sufficient to guarantee evocation of the brain state correlated with the thought. Of course the “thought correlate” is compatible with that prior state. It must be one of the following states that can evolve from the prior state. That it does evolve requires the prior state (or some other compatible prior state) but also the initiating thought which remember by Recher’s view is not strictly a cause. This is important because the neuroscientist need not accommodate any thought. One brain state (an event with temporal duration and so causal powers) is traceable backwards through (temporal) series of other brain states, the prior unfolding into the latter (as in ELIZA) without ever detecting the inflection point where a thought had non-temporal control.

Rescher’s distinction gives us the possibility of free will but at the cost of some logical dualism. If one accepts such a dualism then there is no unique problem with free will. But if one rejects all dualism in favor of eliminative materialism, then not only free will, but consciousness itself (and so subjective orgasm) is impossible. The only escape from such a trap is the ad hoc move of declaring that physics causes thought but not the other way around. There is no particular reason to believe this is the case however for even in this view, the basic metaphysical problem of the mechanism remains. If someday neuroscience does resolve the matter of how physics causes consciousness and demonstrates its sufficiency, it is reasonable to suppose they will discover at the same time how it is that consciousness [sometimes] causes (eventuates) physics.

My original statement “no metaphysical middle ground between free will and automatonism” has now come to the identity between eliminative materialism and automatonism. We have no reason to suppose that consciousness is real (think orgasm) and free will is not. Each must interact with physics in what might well be the same mechanism, some non-temporal cause not yet identified but that crosses Chalmers’ gap. But where does all this leave us on the meaningfulness of arguing with automatons? If you accept that consciousness is in some sense real then there is no choice but to accept some dualism. Once you accept that, there is no reason not to think that libertarian free will of some capacity is real also. If you reject this and insist on eliminative materialism then neither free will nor consciousness is real, and you must accept this in the face of that very experience that leads you to this conclusion. In short, the conclusion is incoherent and that means eliminative materialism is an epistemological nihilism.

Epiphenomenalism fares little better here. There are no epiphenomena in the physical universe apart (purportedly) from consciousness itself, no evidence that physics can cause epiphenomena. If consciousness is epiphenomenal so are its contents including judgments, thoughts, and everything built upon them; our mathematics and all of what we take to be empirical knowledge. Suppose we (and who is this “we” given the epiphenomenal nature of consciousness?) use our mathematics and science, build a real (not simulated) airplane, step into that airplane and it flies.

Is our flight experience something real (remember the orgasm) or also an epiphenomenal illusion? If illusion, what mechanism (the interaction problem) entails such a reliable connection between the illusion and the world? Physics produces an illusory phenomenon able, nevertheless, to make discoveries and use them to engineer devices that can only work if the discoveries (mental phenomena after all) match purportedly independent physics across time. Planes don’t only fly occasionally or by happenstance. Properly designed, built and maintained they fly every time. The only alternative to this extraordinary coincidence is there is no “independent world” at all.

What saves epiphenomenalism from metaphysical nihilism is that they must hold (being materialists) that it isn’t anything subjective (in this case discoveries and their connection to application) resulting in these engineering marvels, but brain states determined in an engineer’s deep past. None of what we take to be “subjective experience”, for example thoughts about airplane wings, can have any causal relation to the production and flying of airplanes. Experience tells us this is patently absurd. Rescher’s notion of initiation might help here but physics (and traditionally materialism) does not recognize any atemporal cause.

If eliminative materialism or epiphenomenalism is true then human beings cannot be anything more than complex automatons whose “initial state” goes at least as far back as conception. Possibly it goes back further, but just as an automaton cannot know what states of the world led to its being “turned on”, it would be impossible for humans to know one way or another if what fixes [illusory] choices goes back any farther than conception of your body.

Either way, it doesn’t matter because there is no you in anything that you do, choose, believe, or think. There is your body of course, but what issues from it is no different in principle than what issues from ELIZA or for that matter a robot floor cleaner. There is no reason for any conscious and free willed being to accept anything that issues from you as anything more than properly (let us say) formed propositions in the English language. The signs (words) carry standard meanings to the conscious recipient but the issuer counts for nothing being unable to have any “genuine opinion”, that is subjectively (though it may falsely report having such opinions), to consider one way or another.

Note that this does not mean that propositions expressed by automatons are not true. They may well be true, but if they are it is purely by chance that such truth is expressed through this particular channel compared to any other. There is no reason to credit the source other than to recognize the expression came from this source. The expressive vehicle has no “stake in the game”. It makes perfect sense to take the propositions of automatons seriously in the same sense that it makes sense to take a chess move by Big Blue seriously. But at the same time, it makes no sense to further argue or debate an automaton or give it credit for being clever. As clever as their behavior might appear to us (who have consciousness and free will) the cleverness (though not the truth) is imputed to the automaton by us.

Consequences

So what happens if you debate an automaton and as a result your argument and alters its behavior? Nothing is going on other than your output becoming its new input and deterministically re-vectoring the automaton’s report. There isn’t any mind there to change and arguing with it becomes nothing more than a game played with the objective of affecting the course of its behavior. One might interact with ELIZA merely to try to invoke a particular response. But note that an automaton (or other determined entity) changes our free minds all the time. How many books have I read whose contents have persuaded me to alter my opinions or beliefs? Of course we normally assume that a conscious free-willed person writes the book, but there is no reason this must be the case.

Being free willed I allow the arguments (by accepting as valid and good and choosing to alter my beliefs, behavior, motives) in the book to have the impact on me that they have. Linguistically, crediting the book with “changing my mind” is merely (usually) a proxy for according its author that credit. But the book is neither conscious nor free willed and yet the book, by my reading, and not its author, is the proximate cause of my change of opinion.

At the end of the day then debating an automaton simply makes no sense. Winning such a debate is like winning a chess match against Big Blue. On the conscious side it might be satisfying and it provides new inputs to the automaton, but we have not thereby altered any mind. No person acknowledges any “good argument” on our part. If the automaton has a designer she might come to recognize something novel about my argument. I might be impacting some mind at second order here, but among the foundation pillars of materialism an insistence there is no designer.

So what do we do with an entity who looks just like a free willed person but claims to be an automaton? There are three possibilities: 1) the entity is lying, 2) the entity is mistaken, and 3) the entity is an automaton. Notice the three alternatives concern only the status of the free will claim. An automaton can produce true propositions. Theoretically, a mind might fruitfully engage with an automaton, even learn something from it. But fruitfulness is precluded if the subject at issue is or inevitably involves the no-free-will claim. As it turns out, most philosophical issues are entangled with the no-free-will claim. Obviously metaphysics and epistemology touched above, but also ethics (any subject having any socio-political import; anything on our world involving interaction between entities that look like people) and aesthetics (can an automaton experience beauty?); all the classic philosophic sub-disciplines.

If the entity is lying there is no point in arguing because we do not know the motivation behind the lie and thus even a knock-out argument serves no purpose. If the entity is an automaton then again there isn’t any point arguing because no argument exists that would make the truth other than it is. Big Blue is an automaton no matter how hard we try to convince it otherwise. Indeed we might cause Big Blue to report that it isn’t an automaton, a mistake by the machine. Reporting free will (or consciousness) when none exists does not change the fact of the matter. We have done nothing more than caused a deterministic system to mis-adapt in a small way, a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. Big Blue’s mistaken report need not affect its chess playing skills.

That leaves “being mistaken” by a conscious entity. Here at least there is, presumptively, a mind to be changed. In theory, some argument can affect it, could make the conscious entity recognize that it must in fact be free willed. While possible, such an argument isn’t likely to be found. Why? Because the individual concerned believes the falsehood (often asserted by authorities like physicists and philosophers) “there is nothing but physics” and “thought cannot cause physics” (even bearing in mind the causal distinctions made above). Ironically many of these same authorities see no inconsistency in physics causing thought. We cannot prove the reality of free will or even consciousness in any logically rigorous way any more than we can disprove it. Human beings (I speak biologically here) who claim “no free will” believe this (typically) for metaphysical reasons. If physicists are correct as far as they (all science) can legitimately claim and there is nothing but physics to be found by physical means, then the only possible evidence of the reality of consciousness and free will is what we experience subjectively in the daily business of our lives.

Either we assume that human beings on Earth who deny any free will are mistaken by intellectual error, a choice (free willed) to accept a falsehood, or we take them at their word and they are not, in fact, free willed. If we take the second alternative, continued interaction is nothing more than a game played with a sophisticated ELIZA. Of course in our real world, some mix of the these is also possible. Some of those who report lacking free will are simply mistaken, while others might genuinely lack it. But all of this only matters to free willed human beings on one side or the other. If a free willed being mistakenly believes she has no free will, she might be enlightened, liberated, saved by our interaction with them — however unlikely this is. If the being on one side has no free will, really is an automaton, arguing with it about this is a waste of time.

By contrast if there is no free will on either side, then everything is a “waste of time” because all interaction would be meaningless; epistemological nihilism. There would be nothing “to know”, only what determined physical behavior, a process physics does correctly recognize as purposeless and therefore also metaphysically meaningless. Why should all of us automatons bother to do anything at all? The answer should be plain. The capacity to ask that last question cannot issue from a true automaton. To an automaton, the answer must be determined, perhaps “to maintain its existence”; not a rationale or purpose (of a mind) but a blind switching of state. To question the meaningfulness of existence presupposes some subjectivity whose experience, and so existence, it is. If subjective experience is real then physics causes (perhaps atemporally initiates as in Rescher) thought, and though obscure there is no a priori reason why thought shouldn’t cause (initiate) physics by the same mechanism.

The Nonsensical Notion of Compatibilism

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Compatibilism is a philosophical attempt to rescue personal responsibility from determinism. The idea, now fashionable in scientific and philosophical circles that, thanks to an ultimately deterministic macro-universe, libertarian free will is an illusion. The libertarian part is important because compatibilists are so named precisely because they claim that we can be responsible for our acts even in the absence of our capacity as agent to initiate novel physical chains of events (through control of our bodies which are indisputably physical). Initiation is the key here. As Lowe points out (“Personal Agency” 2004) when I elect to raise my arm it is my brain and its physical connection to physical nerves, the nerves to muscles, etc. that actually controls the physical motion of my arm. That is the micro motions of my arm, the exact speed with which it goes up, exactly how high, and at exactly what angle, etc are all controlled by a physical chain of multiple events in my nervous system coupled with the capabilities of my muscles. What I do as an agent is initiate this process by choosing to raise my arm in a general sense with such and such a force, in so and so direction, etc. In order to be libertarian, that choice has to be theoretically prior to any physical causation. I might raise my arm because I want to ask a question of a lecturer, but that reason is not the cause of my arm’s going up because I could just as easily have chosen not to ask a question at that moment. Nor does any activity in my brain outside my conscious control force me to raise (or not raise) my arm. For libertarianism to be real then, there must be some agent who has the power to “initiate physics”. It is exactly this power that is denied these days by a large number of scientists and philosophers.

I think compatibilism has problems on several levels but before I get to them let’s look at what compatibilism says. The basic idea here is that if some act of mine is not coerced by an external agent, then I remain responsible for it even if in the end the act was foreordained by some prior set of physical events ending in my brain and thus the act itself. If someone puts a gun to my wife’s head and threatens to kill her if I do not rob a bank, then I am not responsible in any full sense for robbing the bank. If on the other hand there is no gun to my wife’s (or my) head then I am responsible for robbing the bank even if that act was not a libertarian choice but rather the culmination of prior physical causes, that is brain activity. Notice however the key requirement for agent coercion in the compatibalist view. Suppose I am far from home, tired, cold, and have no money. I choose to break into what appears to be an unoccupied house merely to get warm and spend the night. Surely I am responsible for that act. Now imagine that it isn’t tiredness that drives me but a hurricane from which I wish (naturally enough) to take shelter, so I break into the same unoccupied house. Neither act involves agent coercion and any court would find me guilty of breaking and entering in either case. In the latter case, the court might forgive my act because it would be reasonable for me to believe that by remaining outside the hurricane threatened my life. But I remain responsible for the act. By contrast if a man (an agent) put a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if I did not break into that house I would not be judged responsible for it.

So lets have a look at this… If I am coerced into doing something under threat of death from another agent then I am clearly not responsible for that doing in any normal sense. But given the assumption that libertarian free will is an illusion, why does agency coercion make a difference? Presumably if not coerced I would not rob the bank, but what about the agent who coerced me? Supposing he was not himself coerced into putting a gun to my head, a court would say he was responsible for that act. But since libertarian free will is an illusion, his behavior was determined in some sense by his brain in someway over which he had no prior control. Indeed even if I was not coerced, I too had no choice in the matter because my behavior also was determined, if not by coercion then by events in my brain and their causes and their causes and so on all the way back to the big bang — or at the very least to my birth.

The difference between the gun to my head and the hurricane is that in the latter case we might presume I had some alternative than breaking and entering. A hurricane might kill me, but then it might not. But the same thing cannot be said concerning brain events. The universe may not be an agent, but its deterministic imposition is even more sure in its result than a gun to my head. I might, after all, fight off an armed man, but I cannot fight off the causal outcome of a brain state over whose particulars, the result of a long chain of events, are beyond my control.

In effect I am an automaton differing from a more conventional automaton only in degree and not in kind. Even today we can build highly adaptive automatons so our appearance of adaptiveness is hardly a counter argument. The difference is only that the conventional automaton’s fixed state, its starting state, goes back only as far as when it was first turned on. Mine goes back at least to my birth, and if we take the metaphysical implications of the sort of determinism we are talking about seriously, all the way back to the big bang.

Returning more directly to compatibilism, besides the matter of prior determination, by a coercing agent or the universe, there is the problem it presents for the notion of agency itself. Libertarian free will is dismissed on the grounds that there is nothing in physics that supports it. But the same can and has been said about mind, consciousness in general, and the experience of agency, our subjective awareness of a self that appears to have an internal arena (consciousness) and the power of libertarian free will. There is nothing in physics that supports those either! If purely physical processes can cause to emerge a subjective that appears from the experiential inside to be non-material, there is nothing in physics that would permit that epiphenomenal entity to have any downward effect on physics. Physics might recognize an utterly illusory agent (although the ontological status of illusions is problematic), but the illusion cannot be permitted to effect a change in physics. If it could, then any such effect might in fact be the freely chosen act of an ontologically genuine (given that an illusion cannot cause physics) agent, the very notion rejected as being impossible.

How can an agent coerce me if the agent is an illusion and cannot affect physics? A man with a gun to my head is merely another automaton. Of course I will follow instructions and rob the bank because an additional layer of coercion has been added to that which determines my choices anyway. If there had been no gun to my head I would not rob the bank, but that course too would be the outcome of a deterministic chain. There is nothing in physics that prevents the behavior of one automaton from becoming part of the input to which another automaton adapts but either way, there is no agent acting, only a zombie (albeit a complex zombie) body, so the relation of agency to compatibilism is incoherent. Without libertarian free will the agent is no different from the hurricane. By denying libertarian free will and resting compatibilism on the presence or absence of a coercive agent, philosophers are resting a doctrine of responsibility on a redundant illusion. I am coerced by circumstances no matter what I do and no matter if there is an “agent-automaton” present or not.

If libertarian free will is genuine then we are already responsible; we are agents of our will and must own our acts. We don’t need compatibilism. But if libertarian free will is an illusion, no compatibilism will recover our responsibility because (1) the very notion of “agency” becomes problematic, and (2) even if the agent notion were somehow coherent, its behavior is determined at some level with or without the presence of a “coercing agent”.

Response to Criticisms of Agent Causal Libertarianism

I’ve just finished a short book “Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism: A Philosophical Dialogue” by John Lemos, Hackett Publishing 2013, an introduction to philosophical issues surrounding free will. Lemos explains several variations (each) of Incompatibilism, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism as concerns free will. As concerns Libertarianism, he discusses three variations, the first being “agent causation” and the other two (indeterminism and “indeterministic event-causal”) trying to do (unsuccessfully I think) without the agent. As concerns agent causal libertarianism he notes three types of objections. Because my view of free will, derived from the theology reflected in all of these essays, is of the agent type, my purpose in this essay is to respond to those three lines of criticism.

In the theistic view I hold, the agent is the person, personality being a non-material “information extra” on top of non-material mind. Higher animals have mind, but not personality. God can distinguish this extra pattern (he puts it there), but we cannot. To us, the mind-personality combination just looks like mind, like consciousness, our “what it is to be like” experience. Human subjective experience is an amalgamated whole, a mereological sum consisting of everything that goes into mind, plus personality. No experience of the person takes place outside of mind, and every decision of the person occurs within mind’s all encompassing embrace.

In my essays on personality and free will I explain why we must infer personality even if we cannot discern it. To summarize, we must infer it, among other things, because we experience our exercise of free will, something that a fully macro-deterministic and micro-random universe (which would include mind in the absence of personality, higher-animal mind) cannot support in the absence of a crack in physics, a crack that allows for genuine causation, and not merely event-unfolding. My view is fully committed to agent-causal libertarian free will not because of any crack in the physical except as concerns personal agency. It is plainly what we appear to experience from our subjective viewpoint; not as concerns every choice we make, but in many of them throughout our lives.
Objections to agent cause are of the following three types:

1) Uncaused cause is not scientific, nowhere supported by physics.
2) Agent Cause does not solve the “luck problem”.
3) Agent Cause is incoherent because agents persist while the events they cause happen at specific times.

The first objection comes down to scientism. Physics allows for exactly two types of causes, and in addition causal language is taken to be naieve. For physics, events, that is physical events including the movement of biological bodies, unfold into subsequent events. Thus there are two broad types of events, those that are determined, and those (quantum events) that are fundamentally random. Because of quantum randomness, physicists concede that the macro-level of description is not entirely determined, but to the extent that it is [slightly] undetermined, it is [slightly] random. There is no room in our physical description for purposeful, that is original and non-random cause; an event that occurs without any prior event other than the undetermined (more precisely not fully determined) but purposeful choosing of an agent.

This objection is question begging. The agent-causal claim is precisely that there is an exception to the two physical possibilities of determinism and randomness, and the exception is specifically personal agency! Agent causalists do not claim that the free agent is physical even as they of course concede that their bodies are physical. For physics simply to declare that no such non-physical thing can exist because there are only physical events having physical (determined or random) antecedents begs the question of agency being the exception.

On the theistic view, the exception is not problematic as God himself produces this exception, configures it on consciousness in time. Other than how he produces it, there is no “interaction problem” because the person is a cause only in mind. The interaction issue remains between mind and body and a topic for another essay. Non-material agents can be a cause in physics because they have a causal effect in mind, and mind has a connection to its physical root, the brain and from there to a body. From our perspective within time we cannot and never will be able to answer this question. First we cannot even access personality directly and second, even if we could, the mystery of how God does such things understandably resides with God. The universe is highly accessible to our collective minds, but there is no guarantee that every mystery is accessible.

The second objection builds on elements of the first and extends them in its own way. The “luck problem” is so called because scientists (and most philosophers) recognize only one exception to determinism, that being quantum randomness. Since randomness cannot be purposeful, if randomness has anything to do with choice, then the outcome (of choice) can only come down to luck. I have dealt with the physicalist aspect of this objection above, but there is another. Imagine a possible world in which there exists a doppelganger of you, exactly the same as you in every respect except at the moment of some decision she makes a choice different from yours. The problem here is that the “same you” made different choices under identical situations so it makes no sense to say that you, qua agent, determined one choice over another. Which choices you make still comes out to luck when considering all possible worlds containing you.

There are two broad ways to conceive “possible worlds”. One is to think of them as merely heuristic devices for exploring truth conditions in counterfactual arguments, and the other is to hold that they are real ontological entities. From a theological viewpoint either comes out to the same argument for the following reasons. If possible worlds are heuristic only then only the real world matters and there is one unified and infinite God. If possible worlds are real, then there can still only be one unqualified infinity (God) in the universe of all possible worlds.

Since God bestows personality, patterns consciousness with it, he cannot create two personalities between which he cannot distinguish. Since each personality is patterned on a separate mind (and God is related to each individually), God must be able to distinguish between them. That means no two persons in the universe can be “the same person”, that is identical to God’s eyes, and this across all possible worlds. A possible world containing a person who (indistinguishably even to God) is also you is logically impossible. Such a world would be, like a possible world containing a square circle, an “impossible world”.

In possible world talk, something is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds, and contingent if true in only some of them. Something is impossible if it is true in none of them, or true only in impossible worlds which comes out to the same thing; impossible. The luck objection is answered because that person in the other possible world, though she shares your history up to the moment of this particular decision, is nevertheless not you; she is a different person and hence can make a different choice for her purposes. Two different people making different choices do not raise the luck problem. The decision in your world is your decision and in the other world it is hers.

The third broad objection to libertarian agency is incoherence. As with the first charge, this one too comes out to begging the question. An action, random, determined, or volitional, is conceived as an event while the agent who is the event’s “original cause” is conceived as substance, albeit non-material. Since physics holds that events unfold (not cause) into subsequent events, how does the substance, exactly, become a prior-determiner of an event when it is not itself an event? A second component of this objection is temporal in character. Events occur at specific times but the agent is extended in time. If there is literally nothing other than the agent’s volition that determines subsequent events how is it that the event happened at some specific time? Why that time and not a little earlier or later? How is it, in other words, that a temporally extended substance that is not itself an event can bring about an event at a specific time? Put another way, how does an extended substance that is not an event interact with time and events?

I want to note first that the notion of “causal agent” as substance and “event” are not so far apart. E. J. Lowe in his “Personal Agency” (2008), demonstrates that any talk of “events unfolding into other events” can be easily cast back into substance-causal terms. Lowe suggests that all cause is “agent cause” but some (most) agents happen to be inannimate. An example can be taken from Lemos’ book. I thrust a red-hot iron rod into a bucket of cold water. The water (substance) causes the iron to cool down, while the iron (substance) causes the water to heat up. Lemos points out that what is really going on here is that events in the iron, the rapid motion of iron atoms, are unfolding into subsequent events as their kinetic energy is transferred to the slower moving molecules of water. What Lemos fails to note, and Lowe points out, is that it is just as reasonable to conceive of the atoms in the iron and the molecules of water as agents. They are not animate agents, and no psychology, consciousness (panpsychism) is imputed to them, but they are agents of the effect, kinetic energy transferred from the iron atoms to the water molecules. Some specific kinetic energy is a temporary property of the atom-agents. Any event description can be transcribed into an agent description, at least as concerns physical process.

Simalarly, persons can be cast as “extended events”. Given the human capacity for abstraction, this is not at all uncommon usage. A galaxy comes into existence and eventually, after hundreds of billions of years, passes out of existence, at least as an identifiable galaxy. Certainly a galaxy can be cast in substance terms, it is an agent for example when its deeper gravity well steals gas from a smaller neighboring galaxy. But it is also a process, an event, the galaxy’s temporal worm whose existence spans some interval.

That we can take what are commonly thought to be substances like galaxies and view them as extended events is not new. This is, after all, what process philosophy is about. By itself, this doesn’t resolve the problem of luck however. In a galaxy after all, when specific events occur is either determined or random. We can refer to measurable antecedent events to explain the timing. Although a person can be cast as an extended event the view doesn’t help us here. As concerns the agent-causal view, there remains nothing about the qualities of the temporally extended person-event other than agent volition enact-able at specific times also determined by the agent. Lowe would probably be uncomfortable casting persons as events and to be sure it is an awkward view in this case. Unlike an atom or a rock animation makes a difference. Either view works easily enough when the agent has no libertarian free will, or indeed any will at all. A substance-agency, becomes more appropriate precisely when the evocation of an event at a specific time is neither random nor determined other than by the agent because only then is it genuinely original cause and not merely events unfolding into other events.

So the question of the coherence of agency here turns on whether there is anything (in the universe) other than “other events” (random or deterministic) that can purposefully initiate events at a specific time that are neither sufficiently determined (by antecedent influences) or random. The agent-causal claim is at root the claim that a libertarian-endowed agent has precisely that power. Put conversely, the power, on the part of an extended (in time) agent, to trigger events at specific points in time determined by the agent’s purposes alone (and of course her skill manipulating her body to bring about the desired event) is one of the qualities (at least) that makes that power libertarian! The capacity, to be original cause at particular moments in time, moments elected by our temporally extended agency, is at the very core of what it means to have a libertarian type of freedom. That this should be is not a mystery theologically speaking because human freedom in time is a derivative of God’s freedom outside time, a derivative God himself bestows upon us.

In God, freedom is absolute, unconstrained (except by logic), and acts across all time. Human freedom is not absolute nor unconstrained. Indeed part of the timing issue can be understood in terms of conditioning influences, the history and present environment, in which the agent finds herself. More importantly, the capacity to initiate an original causal chain, to be an original cause, at a particular moment in time, is how God’s unconstrained freedom comes out in human beings altogether limited to the temporal world. Far from incoherent, this capacity is the essence of the libertarian claim. The coherence of this claim can be in doubt only if God does not exist, but that begs the question because if God does exist it is well within his capacity (not being a logical contradiction) to bestow that very power on personal agents.

The incoherence charge begs its own question because it presupposes the inconceivability of that quality in the agent, the power to originate events without sufficient antecedent cause, that the agent-causal libertarian maintains is in fact a special power of such agents alone. Agent-causal advocates do not deny that this power is not to be found anywhere else in the universe other than in [some] animate agents. To our knowledge (that is human knowledge on Earth) only persons are fully free (a fullness that remains, nevertheless, highly constrained in timespace) in a libertarian sense. The higher animals sometimes appear to exercise choice in ways that suggest they have some similar agent-properties, but I am not sure if in the animal case, the seeming libertarianism of the act is not imputed to them by us.

All three types of objections to agent-causality fail if God is real. The first objection fails because the nature of personal agency, the person being non-material, lies outside science’s domain. The second fails because if “possible worlds” are real, then persons must, nevertheless, remain unique across all possible worlds, and if they are not real, then only the actual world matters and no two persons can be absolutely identical. A person identical to you can only exist in impossible worlds. Two people who are the same person are a logical contradiction. The third objection fails because the very power, of a non-event to initiate an event at a specific time, declared incoherent under an event-only view of causation, is the power of agency given to personality by God. Even if physicists are right about causality being nothing more than the unfolding of events into subsequent events, personality is the exception to that rule in the universe. The exception is possible, conceivable, and not incoherent, precisely because God makes it possible.

God’s existence is a highly prejudicial matter with most scientists and philosophers today. One of the more general problems they have with the agent-causal view is that it so easily slides into dualism and from there to substance-dualism and God. In Lemos’ book, one of his characters (the book is written in the form of a dialogue) notes the association between the view and dualism of one form or another. From a theological perspective, substance dualism grounded in God is suggested precisely because it is a solution to the three objections discussed above. I have argued in many essays collected on this blog and books, that free will, our experience of it, and its conflict with physics, is one of the major reasons for evaluating the explanatory power of dualism. My answers to the objections noted in Lemos’ book flow from what I take to be consequences of God’s existence. Moreover, and this is perhaps the main point to contemporary scientists and philosophers, they justify and warrant our belief in the reality of what seems to our experience to be a genuinely libertarian free will at least as concerns some of our decisions. Agent-cause grounded through personal-agency in turn metaphysically grounded in God explains our seeming freedom the way we actually experience it! None of the other alternatives seem fully to encompass that feat.

What is “the Soul”?

In all the other essays in this blog, as controversial as they might be, I could at least argue from some part of the content of our experience. Whether or not libertarian free will is real (or even possible) can be debated, but most people at least do admit that it seems like it is real and that we exercise it. The same is true of values: truth, beauty, and goodness. Are they illusions? Do we make them up, deliberately invent them? Perhaps we really detect their presence, they are real and stem from the same source as consciousness itself.

When it comes to the soul, however, we are at a loss. Simply put we experience nothing what-so-ever of our soul. Now philosophers of religion and theologians will perhaps disagree with me here, but their world is quite mixed up as concerns the soul. Mostly they use it as a word to mean just about anything they want having some bearing on what they take to be our “experiential core”. ‘Soul’ has been used as a synonym for ‘essence’, ‘personality’, ‘mind’, and any combination of any of them even including the body. I do not believe the soul is any of these things. To put it bluntly, we do not experience anything of the soul.

If we do not experience it, why should I think there is a soul at all? The answer has to do with the conviction that God, if he exists, must be both infinite, good, and the source of personality. If “God’s purpose” has to do with personality’s progressive alignment with the “will of God” as described in my first and third books, and more briefly my blog essay “Why Free Will”, then it doesn’t make sense if, on material death, the personality simply vanishes from the universe never again to be expressed. If we are supposed, progressively, to become perfect, like God, in a spiritual sense, this process certainly is not completed by the end of a very short (in cosmic terms) mortal life. What is the point of the fixed temporal reference of personality (see “Why Personality”), of all that we acquire, if it vanishes after a few score years on Earth?

If all this process has a point then personality must somehow survive mortal death. When we die our brain-based consciousness is obliterated, but not the information, the pattern configured into it by God. There is no consciousness here, something that we might best relate to having surgery under general anesthetic. In that case, consciousness (along with its configuring personality) is placed into a deep sleep. With no consciousness in which to operate, personality simply ceases to experience anything, and that includes the passage of time. But as our brain-based consciousness returns to wakefulness, the personality is again expressed.

The inference that there must be a soul if God is real is one of the “consequences of Infinity” I discuss at length in my books and here in “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”. In this case, a consequence that lies strictly beyond our subjective experience. Unlike personality, whose direct apprehension skirts the edge of our self-consciousness and must be present to explain, for example, recursive self-consciousness, the soul doesn’t have to be there at all as far as we, that is our personal selves on Earth are concerned. In short, it has nothing to do with our mortal lives.

Following material death consciousness ceases, but after some unknown duration we wake up again. The person emerges in association again with mind, that is, a consciousness produced by contact with Cosmic Mind (see “From What Comes Mind”). There is also, I presume, some vehicle of expression, something analogous to a body recognized by other persons as the locus of the individuality that is our-self. The vehicle isn’t material by our present reconning but it can be seen and identified by the expanded perceptual systems of its own type. Other post-mortal persons can see and discriminate one another from some environment. In this new case, the mind isn’t brain-based, but rests on something not material, not measurable by physical instruments, and within a vehicle with which the new person-mind combination can express itself. What kind of stuff is that? Is it the same “spirit stuff” of which God is made? I do not know and as we cannot detect it, we cannot say much about it. But if non-material reality actually is real, a part of the Universe’s fundamental ontology, there can be any number of levels or layers or types of “non-material stuff” between God and the material world with which we are familiar.

So we have “the person” and we have a consciousness (likely greatly expanded over our present matter-based version), and a vehicle of expression, but so far no memories. As I noted in my “Why Personality” essay the person has no purchase on its identity without memories which, in our case, are brain-based and so vanish when we die. This, I believe is where the soul comes into the picture. It is, if you will pardon the metaphor, the lifeboat, the escape mechanism that retains memory of the mortal existence. Memories with which we are re-associated when we “wake up”.

What memories? All of them? In our present estate the soul must evolve, grow, along with us even if we experience nothing of it. It is something like a baby within us albeit a baby we do not experience. Possibly it contains all of our memories, God must remember them after all, but I do not think so. Human life is filled with experiences of no spiritual value, that is no bearing on the free willed choice to “do God’s Will”. Experience of physical pleasures are obvious examples, but there are many others. What does have bearing on our future, what is of “spiritual value” are the experiences we have as result of instantiating (or attempting instantiation) of one or more of the values (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness?”) the only “stuff of spirit” with which we, with our brain-based minds, have contact. I hypothesize (and this is purely a speculation) that the memories we retain and wake-up with are the instances of value choice we make during our mortal life. Every time we make a positive spiritual choice, a choice to fit or instantiate some value into the world (more precisely to attempt that instantiation since we are not always successful and often only partly successful) that choice is recorded in the soul.

If true, this has interesting consequences. Notice in describing this mechanism I have said nothing about any intellectual belief in the reality of God. Atheists and theists alike make “spiritual decisions”, choices based on and for “reasons of” truth, beauty, goodness, or some combination of them. We commonly relate these to “the moral” and choosing “the moral” in any given instance has nothing directly to do with the intellectual baggage carried by the choosing individual. It might seem that “a believer” has more reason to make value-laden decisions than “an unbeliever”, but this is only theoretical. There are, in real life, many atheists who make more of these decisions than many theists. All of them have a soul.

Suppose we take two normal people (atheists or theists it doesn’t matter). One of them makes some value-instantiating decision on average every day of her life, at least those in which she was aware of herself and values. Lets say she had 50 years of such experience since becoming “self-aware” and before she dies or dementia degrades her brain enough to destroy her sensitivity to values. Our other person, on average, makes only one value entangled choice once every month over the same 50 years.

Upon waking in the post-mortal life our first candidate will retain some memory of every day of those 50 years, more than 18,000 memories. Even those she has forgotten in the mortal life will be available to her. By contrast our second candidate will have memories of 600 days of his previous life. Our two candidate’s status, as concerns personality, consciousness, and expressive vehicle when they wake is the same. But one of them retains far more memories of her prior experience (even if she was an atheist and never attended a church in her life) than the other even if he believed in God and attended church every week! To the extent that “going to church” motivates you to make more spiritual decisions the experience is of value. If it does not then, as with what you believe about God, it makes no difference what-so-ever.

Although this is the variation that recommends living a better, more value-entangled, life on Earth, I do not know how much of a difference it makes in the end. Like two siblings born 3 or 4 years apart, the difference in ages makes a considerable difference in their comprehension of the world for a few years, but by the time 30 or more years have elapsed the age difference is washed out. This is the meaning, I believe of Jesus’ parable of the harvest. Everyone gets the same thing in the end. Even a 75 year life on Earth is but 28,000 days. It might take trillions of days measured in Earth-time to reach some provisional end to the process of “becoming perfect as God is perfect”, more than enough time to obliterate the difference of a few thousand memories. But in the early times of the post-mortal career, there will be a difference. Our first candidate will advance in the program more quickly than the second.

I would make two quick observations before ending this. First philosophers have debated the nature of such identity transfers or duplication. Usually these are cast in terms of clones or star-trek-like transporters, but the notion has been applied to God. Does God move the person (and/or soul) from Earth to somewhere else, or does he use his omnipotence and perfect memory simply to recreate them? While such thought experiments are indeed puzzling as concerns clones or transporters they amount to a difference that makes no difference as concerns God. God is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Either way, the resulting copy, if that is what it is, is perfect, suffering no degradation whatsoever. From the subjective view of the individual no difference could be discerned. Either way, we will wake up aware that we are the same person who lived another life in another place and that the memories we find in the contents of our new consciousness belong to that person, us.

Second there inevitably arises the question of soul death. Can a soul die? Since it is non-material I do not think it can suffer death by accident or be murdered. But if free will is genuine, we must be able to commit suicide, to choose not to continue in the post-mortal adventure. Suicide of this sort is probably very rare if it ever happens at all in the post-mortal experience, but it must be possible if we are genuinely free. There is nothing to suggest that the post-mortal experience is timeless, the soul is not immortal in an unqualified way. On the other hand, I am not sure simple cosmic-suicide is possible on Earth. We can kill our body, but in that case the automatic life-boat mechanism kicks in and that person/soul combination survives having developed up to the point of physical suicide. In the next life, we begin where we left off here whether we were 80 or 10!

It might be possible to kill our souls on Earth through consistent, repeated choices of evil, choices in opposition to what is represented by the values. If we are (individually) evil enough, so steeped in evil that we lose the capacity to discern values altogether, we also lose the capacity to know right from wrong, and not just most of the time but always. We become, in short, iniquitous! It is possible (though I do not know) that in such a case our souls can wither and die. From that point on, in the life of that mortal, no survival raft exists and such personality vanishes (perhaps merging back into the infinite as a drop of water merges with the ocean) on physical death. Notice that this suicide entails the repeated exercise of free will choice. A single horrifically evil decision would not seem to be enough to obliterate the soul. Accident or disease, the degradation of the physical brain to the point that value discrimination is no longer possible, might freeze the soul in its present status at that time in the life of the individual, but God well knows that the individual has not chosen this outcome of his or her own will and the survival mechanism remains operative.

My speculative story ends here. I have gone into these things in more detail in my books (the first and third). More importantly it is there connected up with what we do experience of spirit. I emphasize here, in conclusion, that this is nothing but a speculative story based not on direct experience but on inference from basic assumptions about the nature of God and the purpose of experience, in particular the point of free will in a physical universe of purposeless mechanism. I tell this tale because it fills a hole in the theology I describe in my first book. If God’s “perfect universe” takes billions of years to complete, then the short mortal experience, something usually less than 100 years, we have on Earth cannot be the end of the story even though we have no experiential (subjective or otherwise) evidence of this mechanism’s operation.

Why Personality?

This entire essay is substantially re-written in April 2019 to bring it in line with the evolution of my thinking expressed in more recent work. Additional work in November 2019 better clarifies the connection between mind and information.

I am not merely a dualist, but a tri-ist. Mind is not the only substantive entity in the universe of our experience that isn’t physical. To understand why my ontology makes room for a personality which is in the human (not the animal) case a facet of our selfhood experience, I have to explain what it is about human experience that demands our postulation of it. To do this, I must begin with mind in general and not “personal mind” or “personalized mind”. The higher animals give us what we need here.

Physics alone cannot give us mind though to be sure it is one of mind’s roots (see in particular “From What Comes Mind?” for a general over-view of the model, “Physics and the Evidence for Non-Material Consciousness”, and “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind”). Over-all the metaphysical ground of my views on this is theistic, specifically a theism sketched here in “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”. I am not going to go into the theology here, but I must delve a little bit into mind because the point of the essay is to argue that even postulating a substantive (in a quasi-Cartesian sense) mind is not enough to account for human experience. There is something else in addition to mind. That is to say, there are certain experiences that suggest such a thing exists, and this something I call personality.

Mind broadly speaking is purposeful. Animals have purposes for which they engage in their various behaviors. They do not articulate these purposes as such but it is clear that there is a reasonable sense in which higher animals can be said to be both minded (having some content of consciousness) and “act with purpose”. Indeed it can be said that life in general, even non-minded life (say paramecia) act purposefully and indeed they do. But lacking consciousness, it is less reasonable to say that such animals “act volitionally” and more reasonable to say that human beings impute purpose to life in general. Paramecia act, but the purposes of those actions are not the purposes of an individual, as these become in the higher animals. It is consciousness generally that adds both individuality and purposefulness.

But we notice limitations in animal mind that are absent in humans. Animal purposes are always local, limited to the present time. To find food if hungry, reproduce, shelter, even to socialize, all of it for its own sake. Humans by contrast exhibit all of these same sorts of local purposes, but they also exhibit purposes extended in time, purposes for next year, or a lifetime.

Animal do not recursively evaluate their purposes. They do not abstract. A lioness, being hungry, engages in the hunt for food. She decides on the specific course that hunt might take as new data emerges to her senses concerning the presence of food. But she certainly does not deliberate on the purpose of hunting in the abstract. Humans do exactly this. We are said to be “self conscious” and are able therefore to deliberate not only on the process of executing a purpose, but on the purpose itself.

Humans are also creators in a way that animals are not. Apes can modify sticks or other objects to use as tools, but only humans create new tools, even vast engineering projects that are more than mere modification of existing things. There is also the matter of art, social institutions, religion, and abstract-capable language.

It is these qualities that signal something special about human consciousness that needs explaining. At the same time, I have to explain how it is that we cannot locate this entity in a recursive examination of consciousness. Our self-consciousness does not permit discrimination of the personal from consciousness as a whole, even in the first person!

I follow here briefly with a sketch of my theologically-grounded theory of mind. See above linked articles and my first book all covering this in more detail. God is the source of the physical universe of spacetime. Into this universe, besides a physics of purposeless mechanism, something I have called “Cosmic Mind” is also added. Cosmic Mind is not a person, but rather a sort of field pervading space and time analogous to an electromagnetic field. Important here is that the field is in space and conditioned by time. It is non-material however. It does not convey any sort of proto-consciousness or panpsychism on the universe, but interacts only with certain complex organizations of matter-energy that we call brains. When nervous systems (of animals) become complex enough they are able to be perturbed or in some manner affected by Cosmic Mind and it is this interaction that manifests subjectively as consciousness.

This is the quasi-Cartesian aspect of my view. It is quasi-Cartesian because mind is not added to brains in Cartesian fashion, but rather emerges from brains, a property dualism, in response to, or because of, the universal presence of Cosmic Mind. Yes, there is an “interaction problem”. As it turns out attempts a purely physical explanations of mind (other than eliminativism) all have variations of the same problem. See the aforementioned “Fantasy Physics” article for much elaboration on this.

The point of Cosmic Mind in the theory (it may have other roles in the universe) is to effect subjective experience in sufficiently evolved nervous systems. Brains are, in effect, detectors of Cosmic Mind and consciousness constitutes that detection. Evolving mind at first detects very little of this signal producing minimal consciousness — perhaps a “what it is like to be” a fish or a lizard. More evolved brains are affected in richer ways and the nature of those individual minds deepens.

When we reach the human level, indeed the definition of humanity from a God’s-eye-view, the brain begins to feel the impact of parts of the Cosmic Mind signal not detected by any other animals. Specifically human brains begin to detect what the Cosmic Mind signal conveys of spirit, the hypothetical stuff of which God is made and the antecedent source of both physics and mind. From the subjective viewpoint, spirit is conveyed in the form of the values, truth, beauty, and goodness. See “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” for further elaboration on these.

The detection of the values by human (and not animal) mind is not an automatic “good judgement” concerning what has values; what is true, good or beautiful. It is the discrimination of their three-part existence. The “spirit component” of the Cosmic Mind signal is always there. It impacts animal mind. But animals do not discriminate it as distinct elements in consciousness. Humans do.

Continuing the theological picture, something else happens when brains and therefore mind reach this level of physical complexity and signal-detecting richness. Such minds are personalized by God directly. In the fashion of Thomistic or Aristotelian Hylomorphic dualism, God configures each such individual mind with extra information (a form) that becomes fused with that consciousness in such a way that from any perspective (even in the first person) it is not possible to tell what part of subjective consciousness comes from Cosmic Mind alone, and what part from the fused-in personality.

No other mind in the universe, personal or otherwise, can make this discrimination, but it cannot be lost to God. Other minds, including ourselves in the first person are aware only of the combined result, mind simpliciter in the third person, and the content and structure of our own consciousness in the first. God alone knows what was done to each value-discriminating mind to personalize it. To emphasize, the added pattern is not physical. It is a form imposed on immaterial mind itself.

The relation between a value-discriminating mind and a personalized mind is contingent (nothing forces God to immediately personalize every value-discriminating mind) but constant. Value-discriminating minds are all and always personal, they are the minds of persons.

The idea of a substantive personality within the mind is derided in philosophy as a homunculus, a little controller commanding the rest of the conscious arena like the captain of a ship. This model proves to have many philosophical problems, but it is an incorrect model. When a captain steps onto a ship, you have a ship and its captain. The captain is added to the ship and remains distinct. But personality is not added to mind in this sense. Rather mind itself is personalized in the manner of a lump of clay turned into a statue. One does not “add statue to lump”, but rather transforms or forms lump. Once transformed, there is still nothing but a lump of clay albeit in a more structured configuration.

From any viewpoint other than God’s, “personalized mind” is still only mind. Even the individual (the person) whose mind it is cannot segregate itself from the mental arena as a whole that includes it. Even we, subjectively, cannot find personality through self-examination, because as Hume noted all we find are properties of mind. The character of our subjective mind includes personality (the imposed form) but we cannot isolate that inclusion. We do however experience its presence as a part of our mind-personality amalgam, our phenomenal sense-of-self. Our minds are what they are after all, but human mind has capacities that mind alone (animal mind) does not appear to have.

Information

It can be useful to examine mind from an information perspective. In physics, information is another way to express the structure of and relation between physical objects. The more structured, the higher their information content. Information is an inversion of entropy. Stars are information-rich compared to clouds of hydrogen gas, but in the case of stars, the information added comes from nothing more than macroscopic and deterministic behavior described by natural law. Life is far more information-rich than stars and it is not clear all of life’s information assembled itself from nothing beyond the operation of natural law. There are those who quite reasonably suggest (having math to support it) that life’s information is unlikely to have assembled itself accidentally. But this is another subject.

As we move up the evolutionary chain of our biology we encounter artifacts of mind. A beaver dam for example is a configuration of sticks, logs, and other natural products suitable for habitation and young-raising by beavers. We can examine such a dam and quantify the information it contains in its configuration, but it is clear in this case that the specification for that information came from outside. The dam didn’t build itself. One way or another, the specifying information was imposed on the physical ingredients by the labor of beavers. If there is something it is to be like a beaver, then that information, the information to cut and configure the trees, lodges somewhere (from our third-party perspective) in “beaver mind”.

Beaver mind emerges from beaver brains plus its contact with Cosmic Mind. There is no doubt that the structure of brains can be described in information terms. Brains have all the information contained in life and then some. There are those who claim there is nothing more to mind than information coded into brains, but this is controversial. Nevertheless, from stars to life to brains we grasp that information is expressed in physical structure of one kind or another.

On my “Cosmic-Mind-Perturbation” model, can consciousness itself be understood in information terms? The structured perturbations of electrons by an electromagnetic wave in an antenna are information. Whatever goes on in the interaction between Cosmic Mind and brains it is reasonable to suppose that information is involved. If the interaction affects any part of the physical (electro-chemical) resonances of the brain we would expect to be able to measure it, though there is no guarantee we would recognize the significance of what is being measured. In any case, it does seem like the content of consciousness (as distinct from consciousness as such) is information rich. Qualia in particular are often cast in terms of information.

It isn’t as clear that consciousness per se can be cast in information-language. Information is quantifiable. Subjective experience simpliciter is precisely not quantifiable. Consciousness is an experience of a subject. It’s content is information-rich, but it might be the case that what can quantified of that information is a product of the brain alone. The information content of mind need not be a contribution of Cosmic Mind.

When we come to human mind, personalized mind, there comes to be, necessarily, information in mind itself, in its form not merely its content. Personality if it is conceived as a hylomorphic form on mind can only be information added to mind, structuring the gestalt of the emergent consciousness. But we can only infer this is the case, that human mind includes some directly incorporated information, from qualities we subjectively experience! We cannot ever hope to identify it. Personality is utterly transparent!

Individual mind, even apart from personality is likely unique. Given that no two brains (human or animal) are absolutely identical, no two minds are identical. But personality adds an additional quality of uniqueness, a unique pattern joined with and as that mind.

We can say that personality is an additional configuration on top of mind analogous to the way brains are a configuration on top of life. But even if life origin involved some purposeful addition of information to the universe, life remains self-sustaining from that point forward in time. Consciousness, by contrast (with or without personality) is dynamic and depends on the constant interaction between Cosmic Mind and brains. Mind’s presence (at least in animals on Earth) cannot be maintained in the absence of a properly functioning brain. If the brain fails or becomes functionally distorted in some way, consciousness is impacted and in severe enough cases disappears altogether. If the mind disappears, so does its personal configuration.

The specifics of the addition being a non-material extra-configuration of a non-material entity cannot be measured by any instruments. Any third party distinction is likewise forever out of the question. Even to our view, personality isn’t segregated from mind. God can distinguish it, but we experience nothing other than the mental arena that results from the fusion. From a phenomenological viewpoint it is all “merely mind”, in the same way that a lion’s mind is all merely mind.

Personality is epistemologically transparent in the first person because we cannot distinguish its information as such. We cannot distinguish where mind leaves off and personality begins. Everything that we do and experience as persons, what we subjectively experience to be ourselves, takes place in and through mind, the amalgam of personality and mind-simpliciter. We are forced (discussed further below) to infer that personality must be real and distinct, ontologically, from mind as such, but even the evidence that this inference is valid is experienced only in and through the amalgamation. The reality of personality is a metaphysical inference made with some phenomenal, but not epistemological support. It is to that phenomenal support that I now turn.

The Metaphysical Requirement for Personality

The evidence for our inference comes down to recognizing that human consciousness has qualities that cannot take origin in mind alone. This is the phenomenal evidence that something is going on besides mind. There are three such qualities: self-consciousness, persistence without change in time, and a partially a-temporal free will. The first and last are consequences of the personality’s separation (though we cannot discriminate it) from mind. The second quality is characteristic of personality itself.

— Recursive self-consciousness

Animals experience contents of consciousness and can evaluate those contents. They have limited free will. A lioness can choose between two zebras, one a bit nearer but appearing younger and faster than another somewhat farther away. She is quite able to evaluate both and make a decision (perhaps in error) concerning which is easier to catch. But the lioness is not able to evaluate consciousness as such, she merely accepts its nature and content as given. Only humans are capable of making this second-order evaluation and we are able to make it because our consciousness contains the extra personal information. Although we cannot find that extra information, its presence enables recursive evaluation analogous to the way having two eyes gives us a direct perception of depth in three dimensions.

Self-consciousness is the most uncontroversial of the three qualities personality contributes to consciousness. That is, it is uncontroversial that we, humans at least, are self-conscious. There is some dispute over this matter as concerns some animals, but I believe that these cases constitute a reading-in, an anthropomorphic imputation similar to metaphorical imputation of purpose to simple life. Most of this controversy comes from observation that animals exhibit complex emotions including feelings of compassion, affection, and even awareness of the possibility of other selves when they are not immediately present to the senses. At the same time, there is no direct evidence of self-evaluation.

In humans self-evaluation seems to compel attempts at expression. It is one of the drivers of language development. We see no evidence of a “compulsion for expression” in any animals. Animals who have shown remarkable ability to acquire human languages do not seem to use what they acquire to construct abstract propositions concerning consciousness itself. If an ape, taught to spell English words, in blocks wrote out “is my green the same as your green?” I would have to modify my view here.

If from our viewpoint we cannot discriminate personality from mind what then is contrasting about it to us? Self consciousness is an automatic consequence of amalgamated mind. The signature quality of personality itself is its changelessness. Even Cosmic Mind lies inside time and is subject to it. Mind, our mind’s, change over our lifetimes. Personality, the specific pattern or form amalgamated with a temporal mind never changes.

— Changeless identity

The person of God is changeless absolutely and for all eternity. He (perhaps with his two coordinates in the Trinity) is the only literally changeless entity in the universe. This needs some elaboration. Persistence in the material universe is not ever absolute. We say that material objects persist even though we recognize that they slowly undergo change over time. Not only material objects, but consciousness too changes with time. The contents change of course, and the overall quality and structure of the arena undergoes change as well. Yet the part of the “personalized mind” recognized by God as the person never changes and this self is but vaguely sensed by the subject as that entity takes and has taken ownership of that conscious life in and through all of the changes it otherwise undergoes.

There is no direct third-party access to subjective consciousness. To phenomenal experience, the person, my “I” is even more private than consciousness. I can to some extent examine my own mind, but even I cannot examine my personality distinct from that mind. Yet the amalgam does provide a distinct experience that is independent of what does change, our character, that which we express. Character can be measured. It is the expression, the output, of the internal personalized mind acting to control a body, evolving and changing along with everything else in the universe.

Anything about a human being’s behavior or inner state that can be observed or queried (e.g. “personality tests”) comes under character. None of it, internal (a sunny disposition) or external (observable behavior) is personality as I am using that term. Because consciousness (and more obviously the body) changes, character changes.

The persistence of a changeless self throughout the history of that character is even more invisible than the presence of a consciousness behind its expression in character! But the owner of those changes remains the same and is aware of being the same throughout. Despite having traversed many changes in character (and physical characteristics) over the course of our lives we are perfectly aware, under normal circumstances, that the same person owns all of those changes.

In theory, if we had an instrument that could measure, perhaps make graphic, a subjective viewpoint without personality, and then the same individual mind personalized, it would be possible to subtract the first measurement from the second and identify what it is about consciousness that constitutes its personalization. That is, it would be possible to recover the information difference between the two. But there is no such instrument nor can there ever be because the only detector that exists in the universe for this phenomenon is the personalized mind.

There is yet another reason why such a subtraction would not be possible. Human mind, mind capable of detecting value, is always personalized. Value detection (or its potential) appears to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the immediate awarding of personal status. This is another one of the reasons for the phenomenon’s epistemological transparency. We cannot have even a memory of a time when our consciousness was not personalized.

The quality of changelessness has everything to do with our (that is human) relation to time. Humans alone among the animals can project purpose into the future as such or act for the sake of the past. We can do this thanks to a fixed reference available as a temporal background in our experience. There are examples of what appears to be such capacity among the animals; squirrels storing nuts in the fall to eat in the winter come to mind. But I question whether the squirrel is projecting a purposeful self into a future time or merely following biological imperatives at any given time-of-year.

Humans uncontroversially project themselves, their “I” into the future and choose courses (in the present) to affect that future as such. If I am a competent architect with many successful projects, I do confidently project myself, that is the same self that today begins a new project into a future time when that project will stand completed. Of course I understand that contingencies beyond my control might block the future I envision. My present choices do not determine that future, but much experience supports our confidence that we can, under most circumstances, bring about that which we project and that the same “I” will own the completed project in the future as now takes ownership of its beginning.

Many people tell me that their person is not changeless. They look back and remember themselves as much younger people and declare that, of course they have changed since then! But when I point out that they also remember being the person who was once “that way”, the person who owned those differences at an earlier time they admit that this is so, but attribute this seeming merely to memory. This is not correct. They are confusing character with personality. Yes, their character has changed, and yes, they remember their old character. But they are also aware that a single entity has been present throughout those changes, an entity that owns and is responsible for them all. That thin sense of “awareness of sameness” is our only direct phenomenal handle on personality.

Memories are, as it were, complicit in our sense of changeless ownership because even that sense is had in and through consciousness. Personality is the core of our sense of changeless ownership, but it is that plus memories and synchronic (moment by moment) awareness that constitute the sense of identity as a gestalt. That memories are not the sole source of our identity is demonstrated by wide gaps (years perhaps) in memories of early childhood while we yet we retain the sense of ownership over those coming both before and after the gaps.

Even when my memories of some particular event completely disappear, for example as concerns my very young childhood of which few memories remain, there is nothing in my experience to suggest that I was literally a different person at that time. We have a very strong intuition that in that past we were still the same self as we are today even if everything about that self, memories, character, etc, have changed. But memories are important to our integrated mind/person sense of self. Without them, the personality has no purchase on what, exactly, it is a changeless core of…

— Free will

Free will is a power of mind. It is mind’s capacity to initiate causal chains in the universe that are both volitional and purposeful; causal chains that are not fully determined by prior physics. Higher animals have it. Human mind, has the capacity to discriminate values (truth, beauty, and goodness) and thus can exercise free will with respect to them. Animal mind is in someway affected by the values but they cannot choose with regard to that which they cannot as such discriminate.

Animal mind however is temporally constrained in two ways, human mind only in one. Humans and animals can exercise will only in the present. In addition, animals can only exercise will for the sake of the present. By contrast, humans can exercise will for the sake of the past and especially for the future. Like self-consciousness, this difference in human consciousness is a function of personality’s substantive reality, in this case, its changeless persistence. We have a binocular appreciation for the depth of time, the relation of past to present and future, because we have a reference, a thin awareness of changeless ownership of our experience beginning sometime in the past.

This awareness of ours has both a qualitative and quantitative character. As we “grow up” we are qualitatively aware of a significance to larger intervals of time. We are quantitatively aware of the magnitude of the interval through we ourselves have passed. We can be aware of these things because we have a changeless reference providing the temporal contrast to present experience.

The future has been open since the big bang but not until consciousness comes along is there something in the universe that can take advantage of its openness. Not until personalized consciousness comes along is there something in the universe that can freely elect purposes with which to direct action having only a contingent relation to the present in which the choice is made. We must begin somewhere to constrain the future and shape novel outcomes that are the end-products of those purposes plus our skills in acting over time to fulfill them.

This sort of freedom, not only the freedom to choose but the freedom to choose for the future cannot come from physics in which no mechanism, individually or in their totality, exhibits any present let alone future oriented purpose. Because our (human) partial-temporal-liberation is a function of personality’s changelessness, it can have only one source, a “changeless God” who can ground (is the only possible ground) of changelessness. God is the direct cause of personality.

The metaphysical inference

Neither of the three contributions of personality to consciousness appear to exist in animal consciousness. If consciousness is an emergent combination of brain resonances and Cosmic Mind, personality is a further information imposition on that consciousness. From our viewpoint, it all just looks like consciousness. Only God knows what part of our phenomenally unified consciousness is “the person”. That explains personality’s “epistemological transparency”.

Constancy is nowhere to be found in the physical universe except in personality. That constancy is personality’s distinguishing passive characteristic. Changelessness in time, in turn, sets up our capacity to experience directly the relation between past, present, and future. Our fixed point of temporal reference in the past that permits projection into the future. Animals have only the present and memories. It isn’t clear that their memories engender any intellectual sense of an abstract past in animal experience, but clearly we have one.

Self-consciousness is a property of the relation between personality and consciousness. Personality provides the contrast, the transcendence, needed to reflexively examine our own consciousness. What we find in that examination is of course partly the person indistinguishably (from the subjective) fused with the consciousness being examined. But that we have this recursive ability at all can only be because something about the fused entity transcends consciousness simpliciter. Changes in the content of consciousness of all kinds can be viewed abstractly thanks (in part at least) to the contrast generated by personality’s constancy. Finally, a temporally liberated free will is personality’s distinguishing active power. Persons are free to become purposeful original-causal agents and elect to effect (attempt to effect) temporally distant purposes.

Personality therefore belongs in our ontology. It must be real even though we cannot identify it directly and it must come from God because he is the only possible source of changelessness in anything. It is transparent, in the final analysis, because nothing distinguishes it from the mind gestalt in subjective experience (epistemic transparency). Personality permits mind to recursively examine itself, but there is nothing further to provide contrast to personality — and this puts paid to the homunculus problem. We experience personality only within the fused whole of our consciousness.

In a wider theological context there is more to be said about personality, but that “more” has nothing to do with our present [phenomenal] experience of it, but other inferences that can be made from its existence and origin. I discuss one of these in another essay. see “Why Free Will?”

Ruminations

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

Tag: free will