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.

John Searle: Seeing Things as they Are

I gave this book 5 stars in my review and possibly I should have left it at 4. Not only is Searle a bit over confident about consciousness in general (this is not the book’s focus but he does review his position because most perception happens in consciousness), and the validity of his somewhat circular argument for the nature of perception. However for other reasons (I am after all a realist philosopher) I do believe that his description of what it is that perception delivers to mind is correct, and he very effectively compares and contrasts that description to most of the other dominant philosophical threads on the subject. Thus even if his own view is not so perfectly supported, his demolition of competing views is effective.

Searle’s work dovetails with that of Maruzio Ferraris just about perfectly. I mention this in the review, but I want to say something more about the connection here. Both philosophers might be called “common sense realists” despite their emerging from radically different backgrounds; Searle from Anglo-analytic realism, and Ferraris from Continental anti-realism. For Ferraris, the evidence that our senses present (Searle’s term) already structured mind-independent reality is its unamendability. In terms of “objective ontology” a tree cannot be wished or for that matter simply pushed out of your path. In relation to subjective ontology (what vision presents to mind) you cannot simply “see it” ten feet to the left. By contrast, if you close your eyes and merely imagine the tree, you can, in your imagination, move it anywhere you wish. Reality (Ferraris again) also provides affordances. With the proper tools, you can cut the tree down and make a shelter from it. In Searle’s terms, mind-independent reality responds to (fits) our acts upon it.

I have two more books from Searle to read, the subject being social reality. I expect to find more parallels with Ferraris. For Ferraris, the ontologically objective basis of social reality is located in documents, from constitutions and laws to parking tickets and restaurant menus. One of the first things Searle mentions among constructed social phenomena is money, one of Ferraris’ recorded documents whether represented in bills, coins, or bits in computer memory. I expect to find these parallels because both Ferraris and Searle are genuine realists as compared to “speculative realists” like Harman and Meillassoux. For genuine realists the bottom line, the philosophical starting or ending (depending on which way you look at it) has to be, well, logically prior and already structured mind-independent “objective reality”. If realism is true, then all realists have to agree on (start or end with) the same mind-independent reality. This is clearly not the case with the “speculative realists” (see my “Problems with Object Oriented Ontology” and its links). Harman and Meillassoux come to different and mutually exclusive conclusions about what constitutes the mind-independent world because they are not fundamentally realists at all.

Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (Kindle Edition 2015)

A very good book. Searle’s focus is on perception, particularly vision, but he brings the other senses in as well. He begins by reviewing what he calls the “bad argument” which he claims has misled philosophy for the past few hundred years. His review of the “bad argument” is straight forward but its badness springs directly from its opposition to his own view which he calls “direct realism”, a term he prefers to “naive realism” which nevertheless also fits his position. Searle’s view is like a glass of cool water on a hot day. I would call it “common sense realism”, but M. Ferraris has already adopted that phrase for his “new realism”. The two views have much in common, but Ferraris’ focus is not perception as such. I have reviewed a few of Ferraris’ books elsewhere on Amazon.

In an early chapter on consciousness in general Searle burnishes his materialist credentials by declaring (at least as concerns life on Earth) that consciousness is necessarily associated with brains (which is uncontroversial), but he also declares that brains alone are sufficient to produce consciousness, something that no one (on Earth) knows for sure. This precisely why there is a “hard problem of consciousness”. He repeats this claim a few times but his theory of perception does not hang on it. Another quibble is that he is a little sloppy as concerns statements of cosmological fact. In one of his examples he says “I look at the star and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago”. He could only mean “I look at the stellar explosion” (a nova or supernova) and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago.” If he “sees the star” then the light of its demise has not reached us yet and he could not know that it has already ceased to exist.

Searle begins by recognizing that when we experience something visually, what we have is a “subjective ontology”, a phenomenal experience that philosophers for centuries have called a “sense datum”. The “bad argument” comes down to the belief that this sense datum is really all we KNOW and that for all we know there is nothing about “objective ontology”, the structure of the mind-independent world, to which we have access unless the sense datum represents the objective to the subjective. What has confused philosophy for centuries is the matter of how (or if) this representation actually works. Searle’s argument here is very simple. Our senses, particularly vision and touch, do not merely represent the world, but PRESENT it, presentation being a special case of representation. What constitutes presentation specifically is that there are “conditions of satisfaction” for the presentation. If I see a tree, the sense datum is satisfied (and so presented and not merely represented) by there being an actual tree where I see it. This accounts for hallucinations. If the identical sense datum is hallucinated then the satisfaction criteria are not met, no tree is present where I appear to see it.

Presentation is causal with the direction of cause going from world to mind, objective to subjective. Response (what Searle calls “direction of fit”), on the other hand goes from mind to world. Searle also gets a bit into “action” because it happens that its connection between mind and world is the inverse of perception. Cause goes from mind to world and the “direction of fit” from world to mind. This ties in beautifully with Ferraris’ concepts “unamendability” (perception) and affordance (action). Searle recognizes the matter of will, free will, comes up here but he demurs. I would like to see him talk about it somewhere.

Searle goes on to flesh out perception with a distinction between basic presentational properties like shape, color, motion, and so on, and those properties that require background knowledge on the part of the receiver. Perception is hierarchical. This accounts for the distinction between seeing a shape and color (basic perception) and seeing “an automobile”, and further up the hierarchy (additional background), recognizing “my car”. Importantly, “conditions of satisfaction” lie all the way up the hierarchy and they really apply TO THE OBJECT. The base phenomenology is not only a black object of such and such a size, but a car, and furthermore, it really is my car! All of this makes perfect sense to me, but then I am also a realist. It is hard to imagine not living one’s life in a realist mental environment. If you are about to step off a curb into a lane of traffic but have a visual experience of a black object about the size of a car hurtling down the same lane towards you, you likely ASSUME that the object IS a car and that it makes sense not to step into the lane. You take for granted that the object is being presented and not merely represented to you.

Philosophically though, Searle’s perception requires two assumptions. First that your brain and sensory system are operating within normal parameters, and second that the mind-independent world is genuinely structured AS PRESENTED. It is this mind-independent structure (including I believe its causal relations) that constitutes the “conditions of satisfaction” of the presentation which rests also on the causal relations between perception and the perceived object! For Searle to get his theory of perception out, he has to presuppose that the world is real and already structured having causal properties. The apropos structure must be present to be presented. This is the very assumption that anti-realists want desperately to avoid and it makes Searle’s argument circular. Because of the causal properties, the demand that we live AS IF the world is presented breaks the tie in favor of Searle’s position (and against anti-realism), but I do not recall him acknowledging this circularity..

Apart from this omission, the book is a very refreshing departure from all the anti-realism I’ve been reading lately. It is not a long or very technical read. I highly recommend it.

Problems with Object Oriented Ontology

Graham Harman is a popular guy in philosophy circles these days. Sometimes associated with Maruzio Ferraris, Manuel DeLanda, and Quentin Meillassoux as one of the “New Realists”, he is also, with DeLanda and Meillassoux, known as a “speculative realist”. Although this essay is mostly about Harman (I have written about Meillassoux and Ferraris elsewhere on the blog) I first try to provide some perspective on them as a group.

All four emerged (in their fundamental epistemology and ontology) from late 19th and early 20th century continental anti-realism with its own roots going back to Kant. All four accept that from our inescapable subjective viewpoint we cannot in the end simply assume that, as concerns the appearance of an external world, what we see is what we get, a view called “naive realism”. Even non-continental realist schools recognize this in theory. Some analytic realists agree there is a “representation problem” but discount that it blocks-out as much of the mind-independent world as anti-realists claim. This partly explains their drift in a scientistic direction. John Searle (“Seeing Things As They Are” 2015) by contrast defends naive realism (he calls it “direct realism”) by distinguishing between presentation (what the senses, especially vision and touch, deliver) and representation. Among other things presentations cannot be manipulated at will (connecting up with Ferraris’ concept of “unamendability”) while representations can be manipulated. I will have a review of Searle’s book soon, but for now back to the continentals.

Of the four philosophers named above, only Ferraris has shaken fully loose of the anti-realist cloud (see my article on anti-realism). Ferraris takes a position that what you see is close to what you get. The mind independent world is self-structured (stars, galaxies, primitive life) is all real and already jointed long before mind comes along to recognize and react to the joints. That mind does recognize and react to the joints is a phenomenon fully within the process of world-self-structuring. Mind is a means (not necessarily the only means) of mediating between sensory input (evolved) and behavioral response which partly directs the future of that organism and its community. Ferraris does not think that fish-mind, lion-mind, bird-mind, and human-mind, all mediate the joints in the same way. But the structure of all these forms of consciousness do reflect mind-independent joints, those the animal’s survival depends upon. The evidence for this is the way those world-structures push back at us as well as the manipulative potentials their regularity affords to mind. Ferraris’ ontology is fully real then.

Epistemologically speaking, mind is not merely guessing at what might be “out there”, but knows it at a graining suitable to its daily navigation about the world. Human mind knows the natural world from a far more sophisticated viewpoint yet remains analogous to the viewpoints of higher animals. But humans are in addition able to frame their own abstractions, additional joints, on top of the natural world making recursive use of the affordances (Ferraris’ term) given to us by the regularity of the resistance (we cannot change the past, running into a wall hurts, we cannot fly merely by wishing it), of the world. For Ferraris both the resistance and affordance are epistemological evidence that ontology is “more or less” what epistemology represents.

Meillassoux and Harman are different. I think DeLanda belongs in this group but I have read but little of DeLanda and must limit myself to points he makes in his jointly authored book (“The Rise of Realism” 2017) with Harman. Harman and Meillassoux have not shaken themselves free of the anti-realist fog. In the end, neither can accept that what seems real and jointed about the mind-independent world to consciousness very much likely is real and that the independent joints are close to where we perceive them to be! This is the reason this group are “speculative”, a fitting moniker. If we do not have a good reason to believe the mind-independent world approximates what it appears to be, then in the end the best that can be done by ontology is to speculate about it and hope the speculation serves to enhance insights in some other arena of philosophy or science.

Of the two Meillassoux (from his major work “After Finitude” [2010]) is the more careful analyst. He begins in essence with a traditional anti-realist assumption; the Principle of Sufficient Reason is not necessarily true of the mind-independent world. He concedes that it appears to hold and that it must indeed hold for long periods (essentially an anthropic argument) but in the end he concludes that it need not necessarily hold out beyond what we can perceive in space or in time. That’s fair enough. He starts with an assumption and traces it to a logical conclusion. I think he is wrong because his fundamental assumption is wrong (I’m a realist theologian after all) but I do not fault the quality and professionalism of his reasoning from assumption to conclusion. He reminds me, in style not content, of some modern analytic philosophers like Lowe (recently deceased), Chalmers, Searle, and Deacon among many others.

Harman does not seem (anywhere that I can find) to build his ontology he rather asks us to accept a purely speculative proposal in the hope that it will be useful. Like Ferraris, Harman believes the mind-independent world is already structured as concerns particulars, that is there are particulars along with various relations between them. But Harman asks us to accept for the sake of argument) that “the real” is made up of nothing but individual objects. Further, ‘object’ includes everything from atoms to asteroids, stars, events of all kinds, and thoughts. The last includes both subjective relations (that tree over there as I experience it) and fantasies (the pink elephant I see floating in front of me).

Objects must exist before they can have properties through which they have relations with other objects. Thus Harman introduces an essence or haecceity but it seems to do nothing except stand in for “that which has properties” and grounds its causal potential. The object’s properties, even the complete history and future of its properties (and relations into which they enter) down to the finest detail, does not exhaust the being of the object. This is one place where DeLanda diverges, but for Harman, something is deeper than the object’s complete history and it comes down to the object’s being or essence. Being in his context seems to be a placeholder for “that which must exist but cannot be known”!

From the moment an object exists it has properties that enter relations with other objects through their properties. These relations too are objects as real as their relata, and further, the properties are also objects with their own haecceity, further properties, and so relations. If this looks like the beginning of an infinite regress it is and Harman has no real answer for it. What he offers is the observation that objects do not persist indefinitely. Objects and relations can come and go, sometimes transform into new objects or cause there to become objects that until that time did not exist. But none of this avoids the regress problem. Even considered syncronically (at a point in time), every property and relation in the universe is itself an object related to every other relation and object in multiple ways. This is already a well-neigh infinite number of objects. Physicists estimate there are 10^80 protons in the universe. That makes the number of relations (all objects) between protons alone 10^80^80! But nowhere (in the four books I’ve read) does Harman make a case for the object-hood of properties. The sun is hot and my hallucinated elephant is pink, but hotness and pinkness are not objects in any normal uses of that word. Anything that can be bounded, anything whose joints can be delineated, is an object. But while my pink elephant can be bounded, its pinkness cannot in any way that Harman makes comprehensible. Harman has a problem with universals.

Harman sets this problem aside and moves on however. While all of these objects are equally real (ontology) they are not all “equally important”. Harman knows that importance can be importance to human mind or animal mind but he also suggests a possible mind-independent measure of importance in the form of a “symbiotic object”. Objects of all kinds come and go. Some never persist long enough to express causal relations but most have at least some small effect on their environment. The encounters between properties in their multiple relations, have causal implications for Harman that he calls a species of non-theistic “occasional cause”.

Some few of these object-relations have widespread and long-perduring outcomes. For example (mine, not Harman’s) the iron asteroid that struck Earth 5 billion years ago forming Earth’s core, producing a magnetic field, fueling future tectonic processes, and perhaps even creating our moon with all of its knock-on (hence symbiotic) effects, would be an “important object” that uncontroversially predates mind (on Earth at least). But where to place symbiosis? Start with the asteroid, but then it also has to be the asteroid-Earth-relation, the event (another object) of the impact, and so on. One symbiotic object produces many following object-event-relations. Does the symbiosis apply to all of them? I don’t think Harman would have a problem spreading out the symbiotic credit as it were, but the flatness of his ontology prevents him from drawing any hard lines. Any event, no matter how trivial (like the gravity of any mass) must have some effect on the world-line of any larger event with which it has now, or had in the past a relation. Harman is explicit about all of these objects (not only records in the present) being equally real even if only at some past time.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Even that subset of events with enough world-line effect merely to be recorded such that they appear as present records (physical evidence of their reality, not only formal documents) of past events may or may not be symbiotic in Harman’s view. Surely some recorded events (and by extension their records) were, and perhaps continue to be, more significant than others. There is a continuum of importance. Further, the effect of an event, any event, on a larger world-line spreads out towards the future resulting in an infinitely fine continuum of importance. Ontologically then there is nothing to divide the important from the unimportant (a classic sorites problem). The only relations in which mind-independent objects exhibit a property of importance are mind-dependent objects (see ‘sensual-objects’ below). I do not see how Harman can defend a line between unimportant and important without eventual reference to mind? The asteroid impact predated mind, but its importance stems from its causal impact on the evolution of mind, and in particular human mind, becoming aware of it.

Harman also introduces us to “dormant objects” which are more problematic than symbiotic objects. A “dormant object” emerges from its constituent relations but does not participate in any relations of which it is a constituent. A dormant object “has no effects”. Is such a thing even possible? An object must exist to have properties, but once it exists it immediately has properties and these enter into relations. There are no objects (mental or otherwise as we shall see) that do not immediately have properties and just as immediately (or at least at the speed of light) enter into relations. Perhaps such relations are trivial (analogous to the gravity of a proton) by our lights but they cannot be nonexistent.

In the end there is a top-of-the-chain relation between every particular and every other particular in the universe. This is not an “all is one” view like that of Heidegger or Whitehead because the relation of everything to everything else is no more or less real than the relation between any two atoms or thoughts anywhere in the universe. It is possible, given all the spatially or temporally extended relations, even the most trivial of events will turn out to be symbiotic when viewed over wide enough scales. Again Harman has no way to draw a line other than by “significance to mind”.

Harman also distinguishes between “real objects” and “sensual objects” where ‘real’ here means “mind independent”. The pink elephant floating in front of me is a sensual object as is the relation (resulting in a cognitive acquisition) between my mind and a mind independent tree. Both of these objects are (or might be) causally efficacious; having an influence on a subsequent world-line. If I see the pink elephant while driving I might swerve and cause an accident. If I am driving down a dirt road and see a tree in the middle of it I had better swerve to avoid an accident. I have no problem with this distinction, but it risks un-flattening Harman’s ontology. It at least takes a small step towards an ontological dualism (mind vs everything else) he wants very much to avoid. The move adds epistemology to ontology. The “objects of our minds” are like any other object except that they are ours, belong to an individual subjectivity, while all the other objects are not ours, not a property of a subjectivity! If this is, for Harman, an epistemological distinction without ontological weight, then we cannot possibly know, but only claim by speculative fiat, that all objects, sensual or otherwise, are “equally real”. I do not see how he can have it both ways.

Also problematic is Harman’s claim that “matter doesn’t exist”. I cannot find a way to make sense of this claim in the context of his “Object Oriented Ontology” (OOO). At first I thought perhaps he was suggesting the quantum wave function is the “real real” (some physicists believe this) and matter is merely a second-order by-product. But he doesn’t much talk about the wave function and he cites an example of two tectonic plates opposing each other “rock to rock” which seems material enough to me.

Another possibility is that Harman makes no room for universals. Red doesn’t exist only individual red objects. ‘Animals’ are not an object, only particular animals. But Harman considers sets to be good sensual objects and “classes” or “kinds” are merely another way to refer to sets. Red perhaps doesn’t work here because it is purely sensual, but ‘animals’ does. ‘Animals’ is a concept and so a sensual object. But it is not like the pink elephant because there are mind-independent individual animals tieing the sensual object to the mind-independent realm. Why can’t matter be a property common to some non-sensual objects?

Maybe this claim is about relations? Being (objects existing) entails relation and perhaps in the end relations (mental or entirely mind-independent) are the only objects we can talk about. But that wouldn’t imply that matter didn’t exist only that it might not exist. Relations are not made of matter but some of their relata might be. If existence is logically prior to properties and relations but we cannot grasp all of that in which this existence consists, who is to say that matter is not a part of the essense of some objects? From inside the phenomenal, direct access only to sensual objects, nothing entails or even implies that some non-sensual objects are not matter. OOO must remain ambivilant about this and this is not the end of the problem. Relata, for example non-sensual rocks, are also relations (between atoms) and they in turn are relations (between particles) and so on (infinitely alas) and so in the end there are no relata only relations and Harman is, in effect, defining matter away.

Haecceity seems to be something of a substitute for matter at least as concerns traditionally material objects. OOO here comes down to “there is a mind independent real but in the end we can never experience or embrace the core of it only its effects; manifestations in properties and relations.” But even granting this, the immateriality of properties and relations then cannot stand as evidence for or against the ontological genuineness of matter! If we cannot know “the core of being” then we cannot know that some of it is or is not matter.

I return to the question of what Harman gets out of this? The point of ontology is to be useful at least to other philosophical arenas (epistemology, ethics, aesthetics) and perhaps human endeavor in general whether in the hard or soft sciences, arts, politics, and so on. One thing he might get is univocality of cause. Harman says that cause is fundamentally “agent cause” because an object’s causal potential is some part of its withdrawn essence. But an object’s causal potential expresses through its properties and their relations with other objects. The agent (essence) is the secret of an object’s causality, but what objects manifest to one another are their properties and what mind recognizes of cause is revealed in object-relations.

Physical cause and mental cause are both “occasional” outcomes of relations derived ultimately from properties manifest by being. If this is so then “causal agency” is, ontologically speaking, an assertion of faith, a speculation. All that we know of cause is more suitably described in event or process terms. The ontological (object) status of events or discrete process has no epistemological bearing. Proposing a universal causal manifestation in relations (however grounded in a haecceity we cannot know) tells us nothing new. If everything is a relation, how could cause not express itself in or thru relation? Individual essences, events, and relations are all objects of equal ontological status. Cause therefore belongs to everything equally.

Like the continental tradition generally, Harman takes an interest in the social sciences. In “Immaterialism” (2016) he offers us an example of applied OOO in the form of a corporate history. A corporation is, after all, an object like everything else. It has a historical duration. It has relations to people, events, recordings (documents), and such; the stuff of its daily doings (all objects). Corporations also have relations to later historical events (more objects). The corporation he chooses is the Dutch East India Trading Company, known in Harman’s book by its Dutch initials VOC.

The VOC is an interesting choice because it has a clearly bounded history (1605 to 1795). It illustrates an object’s coming into existence and going from it. At the same time, undergoing many transformations and a participant (not to mention instigator) in many historical events, it shows the ability of objects to transform without thereby ceasing to exist and become new objects at every turn. He also explains here symbiotic objects and dormant objects using the same object, a document (policy statement) introduced by the corporation’s most notorious Governor-General in 1619.

What makes this document symbiotic? It had a far reaching effect on the actions (decisions taken by directors, employees, and so on) of the VOC for the next hundred years as compared (I suppose) to most of the thousands of other documents (minutes of board meetings, policy statements, and so forth) generated during that time; a clear “disproportionate effect”. How then could it also be dormant, an object with “no upward relation”? Harman tries to throw a little too much in here I think. The document was first dormant because it had no particular effect on the actions of the corporation until a few years after its introduction.

But how could Harman possibly know this? He does not know of any immediate effects precipitated by that document, but he cannot claim that there weren’t any. Sitting in the room, when the document was introduced were a pair of investors. One ran home immediately to his wife and said: “The governor general is a monster. We must sell everything we have and divest ourselves of VOC stock now!” The other investor likeways ran home to his wife and said: “that man is brilliant. We must divest of everything elsewhere and double down on VOC!” Now Harman might reply that yes after all there is no absolute but only relative dormancy. That my example is hypothetical and does not come down to us in the historical record (another object) is evidence that relations can be more or less fecund. But such a reply makes importance “importance to human mind”. Only humans care about documents or for that matter “the historical record”. What makes this document important is that it had disproportionate effect, over time, on the decisions of human beings and those, in turn, effected the lives of other humans. Our judgments of relative importance or unimportance are always judgments (themselves always sensual objects) with respect to their effects, ultimately, on other humans.

Immaterialism is given over to much detail on the doings of the VOC and in particular its doings after the introduction of that document. I can only imagine the idea is to show how relations can play themselves out. But in giving us this admittedly interesting history and connecting it up to a particular document Harman does no more than give us a description of decisions (on the part of people) and events (naval battles, enslavement, genocide) that read like a history told by any other historian. Harman neatly divides up traditional objects (cannon, ships, documents), people (decision makers and their decisions), and events (naval battles, invasions) that stand out primarily because they have come down to us in the historical record. Of course Harman ignores many records so he can thread these particulars together in a cohesive story and not write a thousand page book. The problematic part is that in describing all of this, Harman uses the conventional language of objects, relations, and events. Whether all of these are ontologically objects, makes not the slightest difference to the story. Whether or not a particular naval battle or act of genocide had a withdrawn essence that we cannot know simply has no bearing. “Everything is an object and all objects are equally real” doesn’t add anything to our grasp of this history.

Like Meillassoux, Harman is stuck behind the anti-realist wall. There is no hole in the wall for Meillassoux. His conclusions are purely inferences based on an epistemological assumption (the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true only for epistemology and not for ontology) about ontology. This restricts him to a very limited and tentative set of speculative conclusions about the nature of the mind-independent world. Mind independent contingency (for example) entails time and space apart from our mental categories. Beyond this, he cannot say anything about the structure of the extra-mental other than that it appears stable (for now) and is of necessity entirely contingent.

Harman also is not able to say very much about what is mind independent beyond that it is real and divided up into objects having infinite relations. Of course he can distinguish between rocks, rock concerts, and pink elephants because their properties vary, but these distinctions, these joints, are picked out by mind. Harman insists that they are real independent of mind, but his ontology supports this assertion only because every possible object-relation is real. Harman can go a bit further than Meillassoux because, while the mental arena cannot contact the core of any object, it does contact relations, and we are able to explain much using a language of relations as Harman does with the VOC. There is, in effect, a hole in Harman’s wall that lets [some] relations through to mind. The external relation between the tree and me invokes a sensual-object, my perception of the tree, in my mind. This is what allows Harman to say anything at all about the mind-independent world.

Harman’s mind-independent world is therefore a little richer than Meillassoux’s but on the other hand Meillassoux reasons himself to what he concludes about the world from a few assumptions. Harman simply intuits a solution and hopes that other work (like history, political science, art) will demonstrate its usefulness. Only Ferraris manages to get past the wall altogether by connecting up unamendability (a fixed past and the constraints of natural law) and affordance (opportunities, realizable potentials) the world presents to us and so realizes that there is no wall, only a screen, and the screen lets much through to mind which evolved in response to its transparency.

Review: Harman and DeLanda

Two more books, one (2002) by Graham Harman is I think an early statement of his full system. There are things missing here (dormant and symbiotic objects for example) but the core of it, that Heiddeger’s tool/broken-tool distinction is a foundation for a full fledged ontology, and that what is both real and mind-independent has, nevertheless, a being or essence (haeccity is an old word for it from the scholars of the middle ages, but it fits) that is both ontologically real and unreachable (withdrawing) from any relation. The second review is of a recent collaboration between Harman and Manuel DeLanda. I have not read DeLanda otherwise. His thoughts about ontology are not systematically clear for me. Harman’s would not be either if I had only this book to go by. Instead what we get is terminological refinements of one another’s thoughts (each compared to the other) in five broad ontological subjects.

It seems to me that as concerns the most ontologically fundamental nature of being Harman and Delanda have a very fundamental disagreement. The haeccity that withdraws from us (Harman) is summed up (for DeLanda) in the object’s world-line, the exact details of its entire history. I get the impression that DeLanda is saying that if we had immediate experiential knowledge of every detail at all levels of graining expressed in all (even possible) linguistic systems, we would know that object. He concedes that such knowledge is in principle impossible and so what constitutes being cannot ever be fully touch it. Harman agrees that the world-line is real (an object), but insists that even the entirety of its history does not exhaust it. The two positions come out, in the end, to the same thing as concerns our experience of what is real. We cannot ever reach the core of things. In this sense, Harman is a little more realist in the sense that he adds a little more to what is mind-independent, but his addition seems arbitrary, utterly speculative. He never quite explains what difference it makes. DeLanda also doesn’t know for sure if being is encompassed by a world-line, but he argues that it goes at least that far, something on which both authors agree.

Both of these authors, along with Meillassoux are called “speculative realists”. The moniker is well deserved. Coming from a continental anti-realist position both remain trapped behind the anti-realist boundary between thought and mind-independent reality. But even anti-realists (apart from pure idealists who became extinct over a century ago) believe that there is a mind-independent world though nothing can be known for certain about it. In becoming “realists” all three are attempting to formulate a view of what can be said about that world, but they still accept that what might be said cannot be known with certainty. Thus it is they are *speculating!*

Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Kindle Edition 2002)

I suspect Tool-Being was Harman’s first attempt to reveal his developed ontology to the world. The book, written in 2002, is now a bit dated as Harman has updated his ontology with a few modifications (additions and subtractions) in later books, but those are still only adjustments around the edges. The basic ideas are all still here. What I do not see, again, is any development of his conclusions from first principles, but his ontology does not simply spring fully formed into his head. Rather than first principles it appears to have been a patchwork of inspiration taken from the ideas of Heidegger, Whitehead, Latour, and others. If anything Tool-Being provides us with this historical foundation of Harman’s thought.

So what we get here in this book is first a review of Heidegger’s theory of tools and broken tools which forms the fundamental insight that Harman extends to everything, not just tools, in the universe. Next he looks into various interpretations of Heidegger and shows how they can be extended to be about more, and different, than Heidegger himself had in mind. Lastly, we have the explication of his own insights derived from the foregoing. All of this until the last 7 or 8 pages of the book is illustrated by reference to other philosophers, in the last chapter mostly Levinas and Zubri. Finally, at the end Harman states his conclusions and several problems (paradoxes and regresses) stemming from them. He recognizes that these issues must be worked through (presumably by him and others) to fully flesh out the ontology, but he declines to do this here claiming for this book only a pointer to the way forward.

There is a good reason why Harman is grouped with a few others among the new generation of “speculative realists”. Given their continental anti-realist roots (Meillassoux being the only other of this group I’ve reviewed) they accept that perception alone (naive realism) doesn’t give us reality, and that, in the end, we can’t do philosophy (or anything else) from outside the mind. What they have in common is the conviction that from within mind, we can say something reasonable about the layout of a reality that includes both mind and something outside it. But they also know that what might well be reasonable and even useful for other areas of philosophy and the human-sciences cannot be known to be true. At best, as concerns ontology, these ideas of Harman (and Meillassoux and others) are speculations. They are not inductive conclusions based on evidence, but speculative possibilities. Harman is at least aware that the summing up of his particular speculations, up through the development of his thought to this point, leaves many questions to be resolved. He finishes convinced that, as a beginning, the fleshed out [future] system will be useful to someone. I have to wonder if he doesn’t come across a bit too convinced given the historical foundations of his ideas, but he does make a good effort in the last pages to explain his views particularly as they contrast with those of Heidegger and Whitehead.

I gave the book 4 stars because even if one is not a fan of Harman, the book is a superb explication of Heidegger and others as concerns possible implications of their metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology to the nature of the mind independent world.

The Rise of Realism (Kindle Edition 2017)

This little book consists of a dialog between Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, two of a small suite of continental philosophers who today are trying to reclaim realism from the self-referential swamp of anti-realism having its beginnings in Kant. The book is divided into five broad subjects (chapters): Realism and Materialism; Realism and Anti-Realism; Realist Ontology; Cognition and Experience; Time, Space, and Science. In each chapter DeLanda and Harman conduct a conversation covering various sub-topics within the overall category.

One gets the impression of a couple of philosophy graduate students chatting over beers in a local pub. Of course Harman and DeLanda are a bit more disciplined than graduate students, but not by a lot. The conversation tends to drift from sub-topic to sub-topic. As each side of the conversation approaches more technical or nuanced issues over which they might disagree more than being a “matter of terminology”, each changes the subject so as to move on. Nothing is explored in any depth. In part this is understandable. I suppose neither wanted to write a thousand page book. But neither party actually explains the derivation of their particular “system of thought”, merely stating it as it relates to whatever particular subject is at hand. Harman mildly contradicts himself here and there as one broad subject (chapter) moves on to the next, and overall DeLanda’s position seems to me to be the more common-sensical but both have their problems.

Meanwhile, the two rarely disagree and when they approach disagreement they tend to change the subject. Only in the last chapter is there any substantive disagreement discussed. Overall if you are looking for some overview of both philosopher’s thoughts on these broad issues this book is a good summary. As a means of using one another’s thought to adjust their own positions it falls flat. Neither author’s position changes in the slightest except where they can agree that their positions on some particular sub-issue can be brought closer together by terminological adjustments. Not a bad book and a good review of each author’s already mature thought. But it isn’t great either. Nothing new is accomplished. For $18 (Kindle edition) this book is probably more expensive than it should be.

Review: Three by Ferraris

I’ve read three books by Dr. Ferraris reviewed here in order of my reading. Of the three the first, “Introduction to New Realism”, was the best read. The second, his “Manifesto of New Realism” is specifically a comparison between New Realism and Antirealism. The third book, “Positive Realism” is an extension of the Manifesto focusing on New Realism itself. Overall I think Ferraris’ work on social systems is the most innovative. I would love to read his “Documentality” which focuses on his social realism, but as yet there is no Kindle version. I’m starting something new with this post. I’ve read and reviewed multiple books by a few authors like Ferraris. Rather than multiply these postings with individual reviews and commentary, I will gather these reviews into a single post (all separate reviews with links to their books included) and comment on all of them as a group — which from a philosophy viewpoint makes sense anyway…

I’ve read books now by all three of the philosophers said to be the core of the “New Realist” school of continental philosophy, Ferraris, Meillassoux, and Harman (Harman an American but continent-ally inclined). I will have to work up an essay comparing the three one of these days, but for now I will say that of the three, Ferraris is the most straightforward and commonsensical. In fact his variation on the school name seems to be “commonsense realism”. He begins with what is apparently real, physical objects of natural and artifactual kinds along with social constructs like economies or nations, and examines those properties that ground their reality in the physical — either substance, process, or both. It turns out, there is always something.

Harman simply goes too far off the object deep end. Everything, even temporary accidental relations (Ted is taller than Fred) is an object equally real. He does not say that they are equally important however, but importance here must not be construed only as “importance to humans”. I think some of what he takes to be features of his theory are distortions that amount to the very selective attention to details of behavior (what effects an object has) or composition (what an object is made from) that his theory (called “Object Oriented Ontology”) eschews. My Harman review is here.

Meillassoux retains the most continental flavor of the three. I have a Meillassoux review (“After Finitude”) up now for my take on him. He is a great example of analysis in a continental vein. Of the three authors he is the only one who ultimately gets to his version of realism (“speculative realism”) from purely continental-antirealist roots.

Introduction to New Realism —

This is a very good read if you are looking for a solid introduction to the New Realism movement in 21st century philosophy. Ferraris is at the very core of that movement which, as with most philosophical movements, also has a few variations.

The book begins with an introduction by Iain H. Grant. It is meant as a survey of a survey, but it seems muddy compared to the text by Ferraris. As it turns out, once you’ve read the text itself, the meanings of the introduction become much clearer and it becomes an excellent introduction to the introduction,

This is the first “continental philosophy” I’ve read in a while. It points to the presently fashionable anti-realism in continental and analytic philosophy stemming all the way from Kant and updated in what is called Correlationism in which the phenomenal and noumenal are at least connected to one degree or another. A recent book, the author refers to cultural phenomena from movies (The Matrix) to YouTube to illustrate some of his points.

Ferraris begins by telling us the world out there is much as we perceive it. What we take to be common sense distinctions, what contemporaries call “joints in the world”, like animals, trees, chairs, statues, stars, and galaxies are all really out there and not superimposed by mind. We perceive the joints! This is not to ignore the discoveries of science, and the present day realization that underneath all of what we perceive is a reality that can only be measured indirectly and inferred. Ferraris says this is real too. Nor does he deny that our minds project additional meaning onto what is perceived. So as concerns physics this is all pretty straight forward, genuinely “common sense” as in “Common Sense Realism”, another name for this movement. The book gets really interesting when the author moves into the social world.

Human institutions like money, marriage, traffic laws, and nations are the product of human minds. They are not “out there” in the universe independent of us. What is real (and here’s where New Realism comes back in) are the documents and recordings that serve now as the ground of these creations. Documents are everything from national constitutions, contracts, menus, and traffic tickets. They can be in any form written or electronic. What’s important is that once the record is made it exists outside of us. Unlike stars and trees of course, the record becomes worthless, just another object, if there is no one who can interpret it apart from its existence as an object. This is where the social and physical sphere differ. The foundation of the social is the recording AND the capacity of mind to interpret it.

Following the text there is an afterword in the form of an essay by Sarah De Sanctis (who is also the translator) and Vincenzo Santarcangelo which compares and contrasts the New New Realism of Ferraris with a variation called Speculative Realism. In this it does a fine job illustrating their common ground and the subtle distinction between them.

In all of this I have to give credit to the translator. Some of the sentence structure is a little less concise than it could be, but I understand that in the original Italian the sentences are much more convoluted. If the introduction is a little muddy, the main text and follow-on essay are very clear and easy to read. This book is, as it says, an introduction, and the author does not try to apply his insight everywhere, but only to cite examples helpful in illustrating the salient features of the core philosophy. Well written, and well translated.

Manifesto of New Realism —

First published a few years prior to his “Introduction to New Realism” (2015 — Also reviewed on Amazon) in 2012, this book is cast as a contrast to the dominant philosophical (more properly anti philosophical) movement, Postmodernism, it evolved to critique. New Realism can stand on its own, a more grown-up version of the realism underlying the Enlightenment. Ferraris gives it that emphasis in his later book. In the “Manifesto” he explores New Realism more historically as a response to the increasingly antirealism metaphysics and epistemologies of the 20th century (though first taking root as far back as Kant) leading to mid to late 20th century Postmodernism. He addresses Postmodernism’s metaphysics, epistemology, and their consequences for social philosophy — which includes aesthetics, ethics, and everything else having to do with human beings in a social setting. In part then this book is a critique of both Antirealism and Postmodernism from the New Realism perspective.

As goes metaphysics and epistemology Ferraris argues convincingly that the conclusions of the antirealists (his approach is towards what he calls “constructivism” which is something of a corollary of antirealism) are mostly not true here despite the presence of ambiguous cases. As concerns the social sphere, he grants much more to constructivism, but argues that this tells only half the story, the other half being the ubiquity of documentation, something that, once created by humans, becomes the independent reality underlying the persistent social arena. Constructivism engenders Postmodernism, but in the latter all trust in and reliance on “reality” collapses and philosophy consumes itself in what amounts to a “new nihilism” and even a “new solipsism”. New Realism is a good dash of cold water not only waking the self-contradictory philosopher, while providing a positive but not naive foundation on which to build.

This is a short book and a bit over-priced in my opinion, but that onus lies with the publisher and not the author or Amazon. High priced or not, it is a good book especially for setting a proper context for New Realism in relation to Postmodernism. I liked the newer “Introduction to New Realism” a bit better but there is different material here and the student of Ferraris’ work will certainly want to understand both.

Positive Realism —

This book something of an addendum to the author’s “Manifesto of New Realism”. While the former book illustrated New Realism by contrast to Postmodernism, this book moves over to a stand-alone statement of what New Realism stands for on its own beginning with the metaphysical, then moving to the epistemological and the social. As such it stands also as something of an introduction to Ferraris’ “Introduction to New Realism” written somewhat later. There is a little more focus here on New Realism’s approach to art, especially literary fiction, and a final chapter exploring what New Realism has to say about possibility, potentials that aren’t yet real. Cast in the form of a dialog this last chapter ends up being more about the fact that sometimes the line between what is independent of us (of the constructs of our minds) and what is not is sometimes blurred.

This is a short book and thankfully reasonably priced in the Kindle edition. The production is good and the translation clear and smoothly done. Ferraris has a great translator in Maria De Sanctus. Any one of these books would serve as an introduction to New Realism, each covering all the ground but written with a different focus.

Review: Unseen Reality; Kastner

Kastner’s is one of two “most important” books in physics and cosmology that I’ve read (and in my opinion of course) over the past 7+ years, the other being “Singular Universe” by R. Unger and L. Smolin. How many books have I read addressing the subject of “quantum mysteries”? Paradoxes of the “double slit experiment”, “action at a distance”, “the impact of the observer”, and so on. Except for hidden variables, mostly rejected for good reasons these days, all of the *explanations* are either mere speculative descriptions of phenomena taking place independently of their observation, or they explain them away. Dr. Kastner (building on the work of her mentor John Cramer) does actually explain these phenomena without hidden variables! Whether you like her hypothesis or not, it has to be a contender.

“Unseen Reality” is Kastner’s very good explanation for a popular audience familiar with the basic issues of quantum mysteries. She also has a more technical version for physicists: “Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, very expensive, and filled with the math to back her up. I include a link to it here for completeness. If you can follow this more technical version, you probably aren’t interested in my opinion anyway!

I have taken the liberty of modifying this review by adding (following Kastner) a short review of “Quantum Ontology” by Peter Lewis. Lewis’ book is a summary of the ontological implications of various interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Most was review for me but I read the book because he mentions Kastner’s “Transaction Interpretation”. I criticized Lewis (in the review) for failing to note what Kastner claims is the ontological implication of her interpretation, but I now realize the possibility that Lewis was working from her longer more technical book which I have not read. It is possible she does not introduce the ontological implications of her work until “Unseen Reality” published only the year before Lewis.

In 2019 Dr. Kastner published a second book: Adventures in Quantumland in which she reprises and expands on this earlier book. I review and comment on the later book here.

Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Kindle Edition 2015)

Ruth E. Kastner resolves 100 year-old quantum mysteries. Moreover, she explains them without explaining them away and all-the-while retains the fundamentality of the particles (as compared to the Schrodinger wave) and forces in spacetime. She calls her theory a “transactional interpretation”. We’ll see why in a moment. The solution proposed supposes (an inference anlogous to the status of atoms in 1850) that physical reality, the universe explored by science (particularly physics), includes something besides spacetime. She calls this Quantumland and compares it to the bulk of an iceberg which exists beneath our sight while the tip, spacetime, is only a small part of all of what is the physical universe.

All quantum phenomena (“incipient transactions”) happens in this bulk part of the iceberg. It has important qualities. Foremost, it is outside spacetime. Second, unlike the bulk of a real iceberg, incipient transactions are in principle invisible to observation as that is commonly understood by science. What science can observe is what makes it from an incipient transaction to a real transaction, and in that transition moves from Quantumland to spacetime. At that point, an event becomes measurable, essentially observable. This has nothing to do with whether or not it is observed by human beings. It isn’t human observation that turns an incipient transaction into a real transaction but the response of absorbers to an emitter. An absorber might be a molecule in a human eye that evokes some response in human consciousness, but it might also be an atom on the surface of a rock. Our instruments are absorbers, the environment, the whole of spacetime, is filled with absorbers whose transaction-capable atoms can respond to an offer wave outside spacetime.

Here’s how the system works as I imperfectly understand it. Inside Quantumland there is constantly going on an exchange of virtual particles. These are “offer waves” of an emitter (say a photon or an electron), and these waves are met by corresponding “response wave” that comes from the side of every particle surrounding the emitter that can potentially absorb the particle implicit in the offer wave. Individual absorbers can only respond to a fraction of the offer wave, that fraction that the response encounters. When offer wave and response wave meet (remember this is all taking place outside spacetime) we have an “incipient transaction”. The meeting sets up probabilities for any part of itself to become a real transaction. No part of the offer-response (incipient) process transfers energy. Only one of a possibly near infinite number of incipient transactions can become a real transaction and in doing so transfers a quantum of energy. The process is fundamentally random. When it happens, that event enters spacetime and we can measure it!

Quantumland where virtual particles are the origin of the forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic at least) we experience in spacetime is not particularly controversial in quantum mechanics and is the main reason that physicists believe there is a quantum realm even though we cannot observe it directly. Dr. Kastner explores this origin of forces in her book as well, but her addition to the whole idea is that all of this quantum stuff takes place outside spacetime but remains a part of “the physical universe”. It is a transaction’s emergence into spacetime that makes it observable! Quantum physics merges into classical physics because as quantum events emerge into spacetime, one of many incipient transactions into a real transaction, energy is transferred. As these events cluster, quantum physics becomes classical physics. Kastner makes clear how each aspect of the relation between Quantumland and classical physics in spacetime result in what quantum experiments tell us. She explains action-at-a-distance, incipient transactions take place outside spacetime and are not constrained by the speed of light. But the effect cannot be used to send information faster-than-light because sending information requires actual transactions that have entered spacetime and therefore restricted to the lightspeed limit!

There is even more to Kastner’s book than I explore here. She spends time on the distinction between mind-as-absorber and absorbers generally, that is the physical universe, and explores a role for Quantumland in an explanation of free will. Significantly, her explanation really is an explanation. She writes beautifully for a non-mathematical audience and her analogies (many more than the iceberg) capture her concepts well. At least I thought I was with her at every step. I’m sure some of the concepts are oversimplified for the lay audience (including myself) but I think there is a genuine insight here. Excellent book if you have any interest in quantum mysteries.

Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics (Kindle Edition 2016)

A book at the intersection of quantum mechanics and metaphysics. Lewis focuses on the three dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics and various of their variations exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each from a viewpoint of the metaphysical ontology (the philosophy of what exists or what is real) of the universe and our experience. On the whole the book delivers on what it promises. While it fails to come to any definite conclusions, the author is clearly biased towards “the many worlds” view, one of the three dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics.

When I first bought the book I searched it for a mention of my own favorite interpretation, the “transactional theory” of Cramer and Ruth Kastner (see my review of her book “Understanding our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles”). Lewis casts this interpretation as one of a class involving temporally reversed cause. Oddly he fails to mention that Kastner herself rejects this interpretation based precisely on a unique ontological commitment; that quantum phenomena take place outside (as Kastner puts it “underneath”) timespace. In her view, the quantum phenomena only appear to be causally reversed from a viewpoint within time but in reality no such reversal occurs because prior to the phenomena being particularized as energy is transferred in timespace they occur outside of it. This is a big ontological consequence that Lewis utterly fails to notice.

But aside from this quibble, the book is a good review of the dominant interpretations of quantum mechanical phenomena and their associated ontological implications.

Why Free Will?

Let’s begin with physics. I love physics! The mechanisms underlying the physical universe in which we live are fascinating to me. What most strikes me about these mechanisms is that they are purposeless. Underneath the deterministic behavior of macro-physics (expressed today in classical Newtonian Mechanics, electro-magnetic field theory, and both special and general relativity) there is the quantum realm in which a true randomness replaces determinism. This is important. Randomness becomes determinism as quantum phenomena emerge into the classical. Neither exhibits any evidence of purpose in its mechanism.

Authors note: Since writing this essay I have come to learn and understand that quantum phenomena are not random, but indeterminate. The difference is technical and has to do with there being a definite and determined statistical distribution of quantum outcomes. The outcome is NOT determined, but the distribution of outcomes is. That’s indeterminate! The argument in the rest of this essay does not, however, depend on this difference.

If there is any evidence for the existence of God it does not come from physics. Oh we can observe the universe, note its fantastic propensity for delicate structure from strings of galaxies to the operations of the living cell, recognize beauty in it all, and suppose that all of this was brought to be in a purposeful way by a God having some purposeful end in view. As it turns out, this association might be true and not interfere with the progressive discovery, by physics, of purposeless mechanism. We attribute to God the power to paint his purposes on the canvas of purposeless mechanism. But when we get down to the physics of it, we discover not that God couldn’t do this, but that God’s hypothetical purposes are not needed to explain the effect. Gravity, heat, and the values of the physical constants together can get the job done. Of course that these things got this particular job done (including life and what has followed from it), and not some other less amazing result, was simply an accident as far as physics is concerned. But that’s ok. Physics’ job is to uncover the mechanisms, not to pronounce upon their justification in a wider context.

The evidence for God’s existence, if it comes from anywhere, has to come from consciousness, the fact of a libertarian free will (at least in persons), and the detection of values – truth, beauty, and goodness. All of this is discussed in far more detail in two of my books (published in Amazon Kindle format), “Why This Universe: God, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Free Will” (2014) and “God, Causal Closure, and Free Will” (2016). I’m not going to reprise those arguments here. Let’s assume that what I take to be “evidence of God’s existence” really is the evidence we need, at least provisionally, to accept God’s reality. The question I want to address is what the combination of a purposeless physical and libertarian free will accomplishes and how it helps to answer the question, why this universe? Why are free will and purposeless mechanism juxtaposed?

The Nature of Free Will

Free will comes down to our capacity to initiate novel chains of causation in the physical. Chains whose beginning cannot be attributed to an infinite regress of physical causes. The higher animals also have something of this power, but human-initiated causal chains, are novel in a much stronger way than chains initiated by animals. If a lioness hunts and kills a zebra for food, feeding parts of the carcass to her cubs, there are causal chains precipitated from those events, chains that would be absent if the lioness misses the zebra(or chooses to leave it be), while other causal chains would ensue – perhaps her cubs would starve.

Animals can manipulate purposeless physical mechanism to initiate different futures by manipulating pre-existing agents and processes. In doing this, they introduce purpose into universe process. For animals, such purpose is limited to manipulating what already exists. The zebra already exists when the lioness sees it. She can leave it alone or hunt it. If she hunts it, she can succeed or fail. The result is a still-living zebra, a dead zebra, or a tired (but still living) zebra. None of these things would be new in the world.

Humans can also manipulate existing objects and processes in this way, but we can do something animals cannot. We can create genuinely unique objects and processes. These begin with ordinary pre-existing things, but we are capable of assembling such things into new things that did not exist before. Human initiated causal chains not only rearrange what existed prior, but from that re-arrangement build up new things whose effect on the world is entirely novel, emergent, an effect that never existed prior to the object (or process’s) creation.

Human purpose imposes an entirely new level of order on deterministic physics, an order that did not exist prior to its imposition. In Aristotelian terms, mind, including animal mind, adds “final and formal cause” to the universe. But in the animal case, both are restricted to the biological demands of the organism. Human mind, our capacity to create new realities, novel orders on top of deterministic mechanism, is novel in itself. We create much that is but tangential or has nothing whatsoever to do with our immediate biological requirements. Human volitional choosing incorporates both abstract time and [sometimes] the values into its purposes. Something no animal can do.

Let’s imagine an analogy. God is a master artist, and we are his beginner student. The master can work in any medium, any paint, on any surface, sculpt in stone, clay, or bronze, compose and play magnificent music in any style, write masterpieces of literature, write, produce, and act in dramatic work. One might notice right away, that art is in fact one of the channels through which humans use free will to create what is new, but here the art analogy stands for novel creation in general. As beginning students of our master, we are given only one medium on which to create, a canvas which happens, in our case, to be a purposeless physics. Further we are given only one physical instrument with which to create, that being our bodies. It’s pretty obvious how the analogy goes. We impose purposeful order, the purposes being chosen by ourselves (freely) on the canvas we are given, the physical universe, with the only instrument we have, our bodies – and other instruments that we create using them.

But what purpose are we to impose? What are we to create on the canvas that surrounds us? We began by creating simple tools, stone axes, and clothing. A million years later and we have reached atomic bombs, aircraft, computers, vast scientific instruments, medicines, and more. Much of what we have created has, over all, benefited human life on Earth, or at least some portion of it. Much of course has brought also misery on a scale not imagined by our stone-ax-wielding ancestors. Here is where the values come back into this picture. In the theistic view, values, truth, beauty, and goodness, are not invented in human minds, but detected by them. They are the compass, a suggestion from the master (keeping to the art analogy) as it were, for what sorts of novelty we are supposed to create. But for free will to be genuinely free, the master can suggest but not dictate the creation.

Why not? Surely many masters dictate to beginning students. Here I have to leave my teacher-student analogy. In our real case, in the real world, the decision as concerns what to create lies only and exclusively in our will. Why should that be? Given that this can, and has, resulted in much misery throughout human history. Couldn’t God have arranged everything so that we were free in just about anything except as concerns the kinds of choices; choices that initiate causal chains having direct and deleterious impact on other human beings? I have to suppose he could have so arranged things, but the restriction must have an impact on the intended outcome (and God would know exactly what the difference would be) such that it wouldn’t work out to be what God intends.

How can we begin to say what God intends? In fact though, supposing God to be both infinite and [infinitely] good, allows us to say something at least of what must be true of what God wants. It must be the most repleat possible manifestation, in the physical, of God’s values, pointers to his intentions, which for now we know only as our dim detection of truth, beauty, and goodness. This idea is expressed by the phrase “best possible universe”. Whatever else he might want, God must want the “best possible universe” that can be made. Clearly this is not the case now, at least not on Earth. This place is literally hell, tormented existence, for billions of people alive to day, and countless more who have come and gone since human history began. If we can imagine better, so can God.

Of course we do not know the status of life on other worlds, but a generally inhabited universe is easily supported by theism. More importantly, even as concerns this world, time must be factored into the eventual emergence of “best possible universe”. Since “God’s will” must be the highest truth, beauty, and goodness, a “best possible universe” emerges in time when every creature freely chooses to do that will to the best of its ability at any given stage of that creature’s life. Doing God’s will means doing that which increases the value content of the world’s particulars.

Human beings (value-discriminating personalized minds on this and other worlds), must make this choice of their own free will. They must choose purposes and create novel reality based on what they perceive to be alignment with the values! God cannot create a logical contradiction. He cannot make a square circle. Nor does God do anything purposelessly. If the best possible universe could be brought about without free will and its attendant potential problems (evil), God would have done that.

What God must want (at least. among other things) is that world resulting from that choice when the choice is utterly free and made by everyone. Apparently, those people will live in the best possible universe and it will be better, even than a universe that evolves through the same amount of time but in which humans were not free as concerns value entangled choices.

So there we’ve got the whole thing sort of summed up. To make the “best possible universe” human beings, all of them and for all future time, must (and will eventually) choose to align themselves with the values, with truth, beauty, and goodness, and all of that happens to come out to God’s will (metaphysically) and love in human experience. God could, by himself, have created a fantastic universe. But what seems to be the case is that an even better universe can (and will) come from a partnership between God and creatures who detect values and freely choose to incorporate what they detect in the causal chains they initiate. This cannot happen unless human beings are actually free to make those kinds of decisions. That means they are free not to make them, and that, in turn, leads away from the best possible universe, at least temporarily. I will return to this last point below.

The Relation between Free Will and Values

I want to say something more here about values, in particular how and why they figure in this process of human instantiation (literally making-an-instance-of) of God’s will. Three things are traditionally taken to be values as such; truth, beauty, and goodness (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness”). Separately, they are the root concepts of three major branches in philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics respectively. Within these separate domains there are outcomes or instantiations within the world of values, and these outcomes are taken to be “of value” because they do in some sense embody one or more of the core values. A true proposition is “of value” because it instantiates truth, fairness is “of value” because it embodies goodness. Beautiful things are “of value” because they are beautiful, etc. Truth is value in the intellectual domain, beauty is value represented in physical, while goodness is the value of personal choice, the value of interpersonal relationships.

Taken together, all the values raise the same metaphysical question: from whence do they come? In rejecting any theological metaphysics, most philosophers assert one or another version of human invention of values. Phenomenally, they are entirely subjective although it might turn out, as we share much of our phenomenology, that they come out roughly the same in most persons. Their subjectivity is under normal circumstances constrained to a range. Your notion beauty might be different than mine, but it is rare that I would find beautiful what you find repulsively ugly. Truth we normally take to be somewhat more objective, less tolerant of subjective interpretation, while our sense of goodness falls somewhere in between beauty and truth. This view seems to explain how it is that while most persons seem to have some shared sense of values, many do not. Not only are there persons who perceive values in almost exclusive terms, there are those who do not appear to respond to them at all.

Importantly however, as much as philosophers have tried to ground “objectivity of value” on our shared biological experience, such grounding offers no reason why any one individual should pay attention to values. If on the whole the universe is purposeless, its only purpose being our purposes, who is to say that your purpose, to love others, is any more right than my purpose, to make all people my slaves? You might argue that more people will come our happier given your purpose. I might even concede your point but note that if values are invented by us, in the end, the happiness of the many is not any more intrinsically valuable than the satisfaction I derive from being slave-master of all. As concerns the purposeless universe, from my viewpoint, neither outcome is intrinsically to be preferred. If values are metaphysically subjective, the happiness of others can be justifiably irrelevant to me.

As already noted, in the theistic view values are not invented they are detected. They are extrinsic to us, a signal as it were from God, detected by human (and not animal) minds. Now as it might happen, minds are not equally sensitive to this signal, sometimes altogether, and sometimes separately. This explains some of the variation we have as concerns them, but more importantly, however well we perceive them, we are free to ignore them and this explains the rest. Of course our detection capability is imperfect as is our capacity to effect what we detect on the universal canvas. Importantly, value’s metaphysical objectivity provides the reason why any given individual should pay attention. Your purpose to love is in alignment with God’s will, while my purpose, to make slaves of all, is antithetical to it! “Knowing the end from the beginning”, God’s will must eventually come to pass. Your free will choices are dedicated to assisting in the bringing about of that end, precisely the use God (apparently) foresees will result in the best possible universe! My will, by contrast cannot possibly contribute to that inevitable outcome. It must be, that while I might appear to gain something for a time, that which is gained has no intrinsic value. It incorporates nothing of truth, beauty, or goodness. This has consequences not only for others made miserable, but for me. I will deal with some of these issues in a future essay.

There is another important property of our relation with values. Our value-entangled free will choices are the only choices about which we are absolutely free. As such, they are the crucial link in the chain of process that (apparently) brings God’s will into the world; evolving purposeless mechanism into the best possible universe. All our other non-value related choices, while yet free, are hemmed in, constrained by what we can do physically with our tools. Only as concerns value-laden choices are we free in an unconstrained sense. It is with respect to this freedom that we become agents of the connection between God’s will and the physical universe. True our capacity to instantiate value in the physical is limited by all the constraints that limit our other choices. We can act only with our bodies and the tools created with them. But the choice to attempt that instantiation (or to refuse to do so), however imperfectly, is radically open.

The best possible universe not only requires freedom, it requires radical freedom. Given that we are otherwise constrained to the physical, it is only with respect to value-entanglement that we are radically free. It isn’t merely through choice that we incorporate God’s will into the world, it is specifically through choosing to instantiate the values! The values are the link that connects God’s will and purposeless mechanism with human freedom. It is by following their compass that human choices remake the world over into God’s image of what must be the best possible world.

None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that the process of human partnering with God in the making of the best possible universe is straight forward. Although we are radically free with regard to attempting some mapping (instantiation) of value as we perceive it into the physical world, the process of carrying out that decision depends on our skills utilizing the same tools, starting with our bodies, that we employ in carrying out any other action-demanding decision we make. As concerns the individual’s relationship to God it is said that only the motive of the agent is important. An omniscient God knows us each most intimately, and would be an unfailing discerner of motive. The consequences to the individual of such choosing can be the subject of another essay, but I note that as with many kinds of physical action, practice contributes to skill.

As concerns the world however, that is as concerns the effect of some individual act on the world, much depends on both the skill of the actor in effecting the action, and also on the state of the world (including other actors) in which the action is set. Although this last is outside the control of the actor the two arenas do interact. A part of what constitutes skill with respect to a particular act at a particular time takes the state of the world into account up to some limit of which the actor is capable. I’ve already noted that we do not detect value perfectly. As some people have better eyesight than others, some are better value detectors. Detection capacity contributes to an individual’s skill as concerns value instantiation, but it is the state of the world that underlies the apparent relativity of values as they manifest in the world.

Any attempt at value instantiation that impacts more than one or a few near-by persons comes to interact with a wider milieu of states and personal actions that affect its outcome. On a crowded world, vastly different economic, social, political, and geographic circumstances, along with their specific outworking as concerns any particular individual, guarantees that no attempt to do good, aver truth, or enhance beauty will have straight forward and universally beneficial effects. This can be true even as concerns two individuals! If I give some money to two hungry people on the street one might buy alcohol while the other buys needed food. True I might have been more skillful in my choice of action, perhaps bringing food instead of giving money, but even in this case I have no way of knowing (unless I subsequently follow these individuals) how my meager attempt at bringing some goodness into the world plays out.

On larger scales the problem becomes more severe. Ethiopia wants to dam the headwaters of the Blue Nile, electrifying parts of the country for the first time, bringing economic opportunity to millions. But if the dam is built, the flow of the Nile will be much reduced and those nearer the mouth, in Egypt, will loose economic opportunity and their food supply as the river level falls. These kinds of problems are playing out all over our world, and anything the world community agrees to do as concerns these things invariably helps some and harms others. This would remain true even if the community’s motives were purely moral. As it happens, many more motives are typically involved.

The values are not a formula for success in building the best possible universe. They are a compass pointing in a direction but otherwise incapable of yielding specific measures having desired outcomes. Those measures, their implementation and adjustment as one comes to know their outcomes, is our collective task. The compass is important however, and for reasons noted above recognizing its objectivity is also important. But all of that only gets us to justifying the demand for action and that the action be motivated by a desire to benefit those affected. The rest, the creativity, will (personal, economic, and political), and specific action to take are all entirely up to us. Not only is it our mission (at least as concerns God’s intent) to bring values into the world we must learn progressively how to do it! Part of that learning experience involves comparing outcomes of acts back to the compass! But this would make no sense, it would not be guaranteed, or even likely to work, if the compass were not objective.

Theodicy: Free Will and Evil

I have covered this subject in great detail in my first and third book. Here I can only summarize it all. Philosophers divide this problem into two parts, natural and human-caused evil. Natural evil is an oxymoron. The universe God needed includes physical events (for example stars exploding, earthquakes, and naturally-evolved diseases, that harm (or can harm) human beings. Death by gamma ray burst, earthquake, or disease are all bad for us, but they are no more technically evil than are the natural events that give rise to them. No one would assert that an exploding star is morally culpable.

Philosophers also accuse God of being evil for just this reason. Why would he create a universe in which such processes harmed human beings, or for that matter any sentient beings? Consider that the meteorite that ended the dinosaurs was very bad for them, but without those animals disappearing from the face of the earth we likely would not have evolved. The universe God needed, where an animal capable of perceiving value and freely choosing to instantiate it, who evolved through purposeless physical mechanism, could not function if the same mechanism that gave rise to that animal could not, sometimes, also destroy it. The “accidents of time” are not as such evil. An earthquake that kills people is no more evil than an earthquake that doesn’t, either because people have learned to mitigate its effects (earthquake-proof buildings) or because no people happened to live where it occurs. Either way, it is just an earthquake. Remember also that there are other aspects to this theology, personal-survival of death (see “What is the Soul”), but lets move on.

Besides natural evil, human beings also cause harm to other sentient beings, humans included. Philosophers call all of this evil, but they fail of a crucial distinction here. Humans cause harm in two ways. One is by making mistakes. We make decisions and perform actions, both moral and amoral, that cause harm to others because we do not have a full understanding of the future consequences of our actions. It is not our intent that these actions subsequently cause harm, but they do. Mistakes are not evil, they are just errors.

But there is another category. Human beings can deliberately and freely choose to do that which they know is a mistake, to do deliberately something that is antithetical to the values. These actions are true evil. It is through error, deliberately and knowingly chosen, that evil enters the world. It is for this reason that free will is so intimately related to both the building-in-partnership-with-God the best possible universe, and to the degradation of any progress made in that direction, by the willful choice to contravene it. That choice is evil.

My view has been criticized on the grounds that “death is death” whether from earthquake, some error, or evil. This of course is true, but not to the point. Theology coheres together as a piece or not at all. Death from any source is temporary (see above link on the soul). What is important about the difference is that with evil human will is being freely (willfully) deployed in opposition to the direction of value compass. Because free will is so deployed there are consequences in addition to whatever might have stemmed from the action had it been purely a mistake.

Besides those impinging, psychologically and spiritually, on the person who commits evil, the consequences of evil are sociological. They impinge on human life in ways that error alone does not. They are, for example recursively reinforcing (one evil act leads to others by the same agent and others) where error is recursively-correcting. Agents, including the agent committing the error, tend to work toward mitigating the negative effects of a mistake once they are known. Errors serve to teach. Evil can also serve to teach, but typically those who commit it resist such teaching and it is left to others, using their free will, to mitigate its effects.

To make the [future] “best possible universe” God juxtaposed free will and purposeless mechanism in a physical universe capable of evolving value-discriminating mind. He could not do this without allowing that sometimes the physical mechanisms destroy the very minds (and bodies) that evolve from them. In the same way, he had to allow that free will might, if it was really free, be deployed in direct opposition to the universe plan.

The plan must eventually come to pass and be completed. That means the consequences of evil can only be temporary albeit from our viewpoint can extend in time over multiple human generations; all a blink-in-the-eye from God’s viewpoint. As concerns our agency, God must permit much more than he himself wills if free will is to be genuinely free.

Process, Substance, Time, and Space

If we examine the cosmos and its history we face what appears to be an amalgamation of process and substance. Substance refers to the objects and types of things that appear to comprise the physical universe, all the objects that occupy space from gas molecules to galaxies and everything in between including ourselves. Substance might also include such abstract objects as numbers and ideas. Process is what animates this collection, the transformation of substance into other substance or into new arrangements of substances. There has long been a dialectic in western metaphysics between philosophers who take substance and those who take process to be the foundation of reality.

“Radical monism”, a substance view, argues there is really only one substance, the universe taken as a whole. Apart from certain Eastern religions, radical monism has been out of philosophical vogue for many centuries. Substance ontologists today, the Western ones at least, are pluralists. They may argue as concerns the particulars that comprise the foundational “furniture of the universe” but most accept that the furniture is plural; the universe has more than one real thing in it.

Substance-first ontologists all accept that substance participates in processes. No philosopher today accepts the Parmenidian idea that the universe is fundamentally static and all the dynamics are illusion. Process philosophers, by contrast, argue that process is not only fundamental, but that all of what we commonly take to be substance is, under the surface, nothing but process nested in other process. Substance is, if not an illusion, nothing more than the way process external to observing minds manifest to the processes that comprise those minds. They defend this view on the grounds of parsimony. Process “all the way down” is said to be simpler than an ontology of both process and substance.

But simpler does not automatically better represent of the world. Nicholas Rescher is a contemporary process philosopher and pragmatist as concerns such things as the progress of science. He believes that scientific progress is measured in the control it gives us over the world. In Rescher’s view, to the extent that control has been purchased with implicit substance-grounded ontologies (from quarks to galaxies) there is nothing wrong with a substance viewpoint. It has obviously (that is pragmatically) been useful. But Rescher maintains that while useful heuristically, substance is not fundamental while process is. He notes that process cannot be derived from a purely substance view of things, while substance can be derived from a purely process view. Substances, at least what we ordinarily think of substances are, metaphysically speaking, only nested processes.

Although the concrete particulars of the world might perhaps be envisioned from a purely process-centric viewpoint, I do not think this view encompasses everything as Rescher intends that it should. In what is, in my opinion, one of the seminal examinations of cosmology in the 21st century, “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” Roberto Unger (philosopher) and Lee Smolin (cosmologist, quantum-gravity physicist) have offered up what they call a “proposal in natural philosophy”. Centuries ago “natural philosophy” was a phrase meant to encompass all the sciences as science was understood in those days. Today the phrase is not much used, but Unger and Smolin invoke it deliberately because in principle the work encompasses all of science although the book’s focus is cosmology. Their argument leans heavily on process.

To summarize the outcome of their view (not the arguments for it), time is real. In fact time is the only brute and non-emergent reality in the universe and must therefore go back (prior to the big bang) and forward indefinitely. Everything else, space, the cosmological settings, even the laws of physics (descriptive and not antecedently controlling) evolved to their present values in time. To be sure some of these evolved in the earliest moments of the universe and have remained quasi-constant ever since, but it remains true (for Unger and Smolin) that the regularities and constants of the universe emerged as they did through a process of evolutionary change and might have fallen out having other values. This all means that process cannot occur in the absence of time even though, at universe extremes (the opening Planck times of the big bang for example), process might be entirely lawless and irregular.

Compare this to Rescher’s answer to the question “what is process?” from his book “Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues” (2000 U. of Pittsburgh digital books collection)

“A process is an actual or possible occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination: an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally. … A natural process by its very nature passes on to the future a construction made from the materials of the past. All processes have a developmental, forward-looking aspect. … The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualizing possibilities that are subsequently left behind as the process unfolds.”

This quote fits rather well into what Unger and Smolin believe concerning time. Rescher does claim (elsewhere in the same book) that process always takes place in time, but he also claims, somewhat contradictorily, that time, like space, is emergent. That would make time dependent (emergent from) causal process (in the manner of Michael Tooley’s “Time, Tense, and Causation” (1997) Clarendon Press). But something has to be real and non-emergent unless the universe is a case of emergence from nothing. Rescher points to quantum mechanics as an example of a physical realm that appears to be nothing but process. David Albert (“After Physics” (2015) Harvard Univ. Press) would seem to agree with him arguing that the Schrodinger wave (a process) is a sort of holographic fundamental source of substance and not the other way around.

In her book “Understanding our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles” (2015 Imperial College Press) Ruth Kastner offers up another possibility. Her transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that the solution to quantum riddles lies in quantum phenomena occurring outside spacetime. This is not some supernatural realm, it is still physical, causal but not deterministic. Instead, it is fundamentally random. But the measurement problem and the mystery of action at a distance fall out easily from her idea that at the quantum level, process lies outside spacetime. No energy is exchanged in quantum “virtual transactions” until they become “real transactions” and emerge into spacetime subject to measurement. In exchange for an expanded ontology, timeless and spaceless physics, Kastner’s idea fully resolves quantum riddles without explaining them away. For example, action at a distance seems faster than light, in fact infinitely fast from a temporal perspective because the effect is atemporal.

If Kastner is right, then for Unger and Smolin time can’t cover everything. In particular it doesn’t cover the quantum realm of virtual transactions. But Kastner doesn’t claim that time (or space) are emergent from the quantum realm, only that virtual transactions emerge into spacetime becoming real transactions in which energy/information is exchanged. Unger and Smolin are safe because in their view the present universe did not begin with an infinite singularity. For their part, infinities belong in mathematics, but not in physics. “There are no infinities in the physical universe.” The big bang proceeded from some fantastically dense, hot, pressured, tiny region, but not literally a mathematical point of infinite density. Something proceeded the big bang in time, but not in space, or at least not in our space.

So long as we limit ourselves to the spacetime realm, time can “go all the way down” and remain non-emergent. It is conceivable that the same quantum realm (Kastner likens it to the underwater part of an iceberg, much larger than what sticks out above the surface) underlies all of indefinite time. That is, this universe along with its predecessors and successors rest on the same timeless and spaceless quantum realm. What about Rescher? As concerns spacetime he is unaffected by Kastner, but he must abandon his idea that quantum process is necessarily temporal. It seems reasonable to anoint it with the ‘process’ appellation, but it becomes atemporal process.

I think Rescher gets into trouble if he tries to apply his system to such notions as the cosmological constants. The proton/electron mass ratio (1836.15267389) is nothing but a dimensionless number, certainly not a process and perhaps does not belong in a catalog (ontology) of the physical. But it does represent a fixed physical relation. It is not just any arbitrary number. Its value is absolutely vital to the composition of all the substance (if any) and the way all causal process unfolds in the universe.

If we try to substitute process language for substance language as concerns mass we cannot make sense of the notion of ratio. Rescher has not to my knowledge shown us how to reduce something as substantively fundamental as mass to process. Functionally speaking we can measure mass by its effect on spacetime and this effecting is a process, but a thing’s effect is not the thing in itself only a proxy for it. Rescher has not given us an example of a process that is input, sequence, and result simultaneously; atemporally. By his own definition a process requires time.

This brings me to Edward Jonathan Lowe. Lowe is my favorite philosopher not because of what he says but because he writes so clearly and unfolds his arguments so well. Alas he passed away a couple of years ago at the young age of 54 with many books yet to write. Lowe is a substance ontologist but his aim is much narrower than that of Unger, Smolin, and Rescher. He is not trying to formulate an ontology that covers the historicity of the universe, but rather a simple way of dividing up what we find in the universe now so we can talk about it consistently.

Lowe’s best known book “The Four Category Ontology” (2006 Clarendon Press) is an effort to find a minimal description with which we can relate (to one another) the qualities of what we find in the present universe including both substances and processes. Lowe does not deny that there are processes. The point of the Four Category Ontology is not to find the fundamental substance of the universe but rather to develop a simple scheme by which we can characterize what seems to be the case about the substance and process of the universe as this is reflected in mind. All the categories of the scheme and the relations between them are not a part of the ontology itself. A crucial point with which Lowe avoids set-paradoxes. The categories as such are mental constructs. This is not to say that mental constructs, for example concepts, cannot be fit into the ontology. Lowe’s goal was to find a scheme that works under various views of what is real.

The four categories and some of the relations between them are sketched crudely below. [I could not get this drawing to come out right, so imagine there are vertical lines between the four corners so forming a square] Objects are the stuff of the physical world, but they can be abstract like sets, particular concepts, or processes. Note that objects can be particular instances of various kinds. A particular cat is an instantiation of felines, mammals, and animals. Similarly objects can have many tropes. A particular green apple has a specific shade of green, a certain mass, size, shape, etc.

Kind/Type ————- Attributes

Universals
——-
Particulars

Objects ————- Modes/Tropes

Kinds –> Characterized by Attributes, instantiated by objects
Objects –> Characterized by Modes, instantiate kinds
Attributes –> Exemplified by Objects

Material objects fit the scheme easily. A green apple is an object. It instantiates the kinds apple, fruit, and plant. It’s attributes include mass, size, color, while its modes are its particular mass, color, and size, etc. What about that proton/electron mass ratio? The number is not particularly a problem. It is, for Lowe an abstract object in this case a set of one member, that number (1836.15267389). It is an instantiation of the kind/type/class number which, in turn, is characterized by the attribute property magnitude. It’s specific mode (property) is the proton/electron mass ratio. But Lowe has a problem with non-intrinsic relations being in the ontology.

That Mo is three inches taller than Joe is a relation and there is even a dimensionless number that is the ratio of their two heights. But the relation’s properties all belong to Mo and Joe as such. Nothing is “added to the universe” by noting the Mo/Joe height ratio. The relation isn’t intrinsic to the pair. Lowe doesn’t think this kind of extrinsic relation belongs in the ontology at all. But imagine the continuation of life on Earth was dependent on the Mo/Joe height ratio. If Mo grows taller or shorter, the ratio would change and all life on Earth would cease. Suddenly this extrinsic relation is no longer arbitrary and its value, in the cosmological case, depending on the mass of the proton and electron is a lynch-pin in our physics without which the cosmos would unravel. Something is added to the universe by this ratio, namely the capacity of process to generate stars, galaxies, and everything else with which we are familiar. Surely such a lynch-pin belongs in our ontology and clearly it is not itself a process! As goes process, Lowe says:

“A process, then, might be thought of either as being a temporally extended trope, or as being composed by a temporal succession of different momentary tropes, depending on whether or not the process is a qualitatively unvarying one.”

One of Rescher’s examples (of a process) is evaporation. Evaporation occurring in a certain puddle would be the specific process, our particular object. It is an instance (type) of evaporation which might have the attribute property of phase change, and a mode of evaporating.

Alas, I cannot ask Dr. Lowe his opinion of my use of the categories. But Lowe is open to the categories being used in various ways depending on the nature of the particular being characterized. Again his goal is not to identify the fundamental stuff of the universe, but to find a way to classify it all as it manifests particulars and their properties to mind. That Lowe is open to the fact that his scheme may not be the “last word” on the subject is another reason I like him. He is unafraid to pursue lines of reasoning that might lead him to “change his mind” as concerns some of his core commitments. He notes this possibility in several places of the aforementioned book as concerns events, processes, concepts, and other particulars that are not physical.

By contrast, I think Rescher commits an inductive error that might be called “the fallacy of abstraction”, the tendency, having discovered some aspect of truth to say that it encompasses the whole truth. Clearly Rescher identifies process as something that belongs in our ontology. But just as clearly, not everything that exists-as-such is a process. The cosmological constants are not processes though they certainly could be the outcomes of processes as they emerge into substance. The mass of protons (all baryons) results from the energy of quark/gluon interactions. Mass is therefore the result of process. Is the outcome of that process, mass itself, also a process? The values of the constants cannot be processes and yet they are not arbitrary either. If any of them varied by much there would be no cosmos, or at least not one within which we could evolve.

An ontology that includes both processes and substances is more complex than an ontology having only one or the other. But as Einstein famously noted “A theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler”. I am quite willing to accept (along I believe with Unger and Smolin) that every substance in the universe emerged from process at some point in history beginning with the big bang. But having emerged it becomes past-fact and thereby perduring, if yet mutable (by process), substance. To assert that every such substance can be (theoretically) traced backwards in history to its emergence from process might be true. But having emerged it is substance now.

Ruminations

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

Tag: ontology