Letter to Jada and Vicky
We found your announcement of your love in the park the other day. Cool! We love you (in a sort of abstract way, because we don’t even know you) and wish you the very best. We’re happy for your love.
Here’s a way for you to make your love even stronger. Instead of advertising it publicly, let it seep out of you throughout the day. You know that warm, scrumptious feeling you have when you are with the one you love? Remember it and hold on to it. Feel it as you meet people. View everyone as worthy of love and looking really good and evoking love in you. See everyone with the eyes of love.
We hope this doesn’t sound too preachy. We just mean it as good advice.
Thanks for sharing your love with us. Now try showing it more subtly, almost secretly. It will have more power.
Note: I came upon a picnic table in the park with some graffiti on it, which inspired me to post this to our neighborhood email group. It’s an application of pantheistic panpsychism. As I write this, two years later, the graffiti is still there.
The Existentialist and the Mystic
Jean-Paul Sartre, wrong and incoherent as he often is about human reality,(1) occasionally provides incisive insights about it. One of them shows certain parallels with the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan.
Sartre’s basic notion is that each human being is always able to make free choices. We are not determined by our past. We can always choose what to do, both in individual situations and in comporting ourselves in general. Our free choices determine what we make of ourselves. Sartre famously asserts that “existence precedes essence.”(2) Medieval scholastic philosophers defined “essence” as what something is and “existence” as whether something is.(3) The essence of a unicorn is a horse-like animal with a pointy horn coming out of its forehead. Whether any such animal actually exists is another question. For Sartre, the essence of an individual human being is not preordained or defined in advance. Instead, what each of us is becomes known only after we exist for a while and make choices that define us. We each make something of ourself through our choices of what to do and how to relate to others and the world. Free choice is central to Sartre’s understanding of human reality.
The principle way our choices define us is through our projects. A project for Sartre is uncontroversial; it is simply taking action to achieve an end or to accomplish something. We envision a state of affairs that does not currently exist (Sartre calls this a type of nothingness) and do something to bring it about. A project can be as simple as getting a drink of water or as complex as writing a several-hundred-page tome on phenomenological ontology. It can be accomplished very quickly or take years and years. Through our projects we define ourselves, and the way to understand others is by discerning what their projects are.
But we are more than just a collection of projects. We are each in some way a unified being, not just a bundle of impulses or predilections or undertakings. Sartre gives the example of his friend Pierre, who enjoys boating.(4) What explains why Pierre likes boating? Not just that he likes sports in general and not just because he likes being outdoors and so on. You can think of these as types of projects, but they have “a secondary and derivative quality.”(5) What Sartre is after is a something more foundational.
Unwilling to explain human reality as a causal result of external forces such as, for instance, childhood trauma or social influences or economic status and the like, Sartre wants to explain a person in terms of their freely chosen projects. What gives unity to us over time is our fundamental choice of how to approach the world in which we find ourself. He calls this choice our “fundamental project” or “original project” or sometimes “essential” or “initial” project.
He speaks of
… the fundamental project that I am ….(6)
and says that
In rejecting with equal force both the theory of compliant clay and the theory of the bundle of tendencies, we will encounter the person in his constitutive initial project.(7)
So this project constitutes who we are. Referring to things that have already happened, he says that
… the set of these layers of being-past is organized by the unity of [one’s] project.(8)
The original or essential project is the basis for our unity over time. And it seems to have some defining power over us:
Changes [in my surroundings] cannot bring me to abandon my original project.(9)
… to the extent that our past appears within the framework of our essential project, we are constrained to act in these ways.”(10)
But what is this essential project? To ascertain it, he says, we need a special method:
By means of a comparison of a subject’s various empirical tendencies … we may attempt to discover and isolate the fundamental project that they have in common …. In these investigations we will … stop only when we encounter something whose irreducibility is evident ….(11)
“… it is a matter of finding, beneath some partial and incomplete aspects of the subject, … the totality of his impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the world and to the other, within the unity of … a fundamental project.”(12)
This sounds like an observational method; each person might have a different fundamental project, and to find out what it is we must examine their individual projects to find out what is common to all of them. But in fact, we don’t have to do that, because Sartre claims to know what everyone’s original project is. It is our impulse to survive, to continue to exist:
a [person]’s original project can aim only at its being … the project of being, or desire to be, or tendency toward being …. Man is fundamentally the desire to be ….(13)
The original project that is expressed in each of our empirically observable tendencies is therefore the project of being, or alternatively, each empirical tendency relates to the original project of being as its expression and symbolic fulfillment….(14)
On the face of it, this sounds plausible but vacuous. After all, the goal of every living organism is first to survive, then to thrive and reproduce.(15) Many people have noted the same thing. One of Sigmund Freud’s two basic drives is Eros, which is not just a sexual drive but “interest in one’s own survival.”(16) The master of speculative metaphysics Alfred North Whitehead says “the art of life is first to be alive ….”(17) The desire to be is obviously not unique to human beings. The ancient oracle exhorted “know thyself,”(18) but just knowing that you, like every other living being, want to stay alive is not particularly helpful. We need something more.
Sartre gives us a clue to what that could be, our initial project (or projects). Although at one point he seems to equate a fundamental project with an initial project, at another point he speaks as if an initial project is something different:
… for example, if my initial project aims to choose myself as inferior in the midst of others (the so-called inferiority complex) ….(19)
This example is clearly different from the fundamental project of being. (It’s also a bit strange. Why would anyone choose to feel inferior? But that’s Sartre for you.) Now that you are here, being in your world and in your situation or perhaps several situations, the question is how best to keep on being. What is critical to understanding any particular person, including yourself, is not just that they strive to stay alive, but how they do so. Everybody does it differently.
There is not first one desire to be, and then a thousand particular feelings; rather the desire to be only exists, and is only manifested, in and through … the thousand empirical and contingent expressions … manifested by … a particular person.(20)
At issue is what we might call your strategies for being in the world or for exercising your freedom. Do you have a sort of general or global approach to life? Is it working for you? Even though you might have chosen it some time ago, do you still want to keep on choosing it? These are crucial issues, which Sartre alludes to but does not treat in any detail.
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The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, in some ways diametrically opposed to Sartre, has an analogous view of human nature. Where Sartre is an atheist, Inayat Khan (“Hazrat” is an honorific meaning, roughly, “honorable”) is fully convinced of the reality of God. Where Sartre thinks that human beings have no defining essence before existing and creating one, Inayat Khan thinks that we are each born with a purpose to be accomplished. But Inayat Khan’s purpose and Sartre’s fundamental project are quite similar. In both cases there is something common to all people and something unique to each individual, and each has a great deal to do with how we comport ourselves in life.
Inayat Khan’s view of reality can be called pantheistic panpsychism, although he himself never used those terms. In this view, everything we can see, touch or feel or be conscious of in any way is an expression or manifestation of one being, which is variously known as God, Allah, Buddha Nature, Brahman, the Dao and many other names. This includes both objective things, those that many people can be conscious of such as trees and rocks and stars and other people, and subjective things, those that only one person can be directly conscious of such as private thoughts, feelings, impulsions to action and the like. That’s the pantheism part; all (pan) is theos, God. Panpsychism is the doctrine that everything has a mental as well as a physical aspect; all contains psyche, mind. Panpsychism holds that everything has an aspect that can be directly discerned only by the individual entity that it is—that’s its inside, the subjective aspect—and an aspect that can be discerned by more than one person—that’s its outside, the objective aspect.
Although we are all manifestations of the One Being, most of us don’t know it. The point of Sufism, along with many other mystical traditions, is to train us to realize, to actually experience, immediately and directly, our unity with the Divine and with all beings. Such experience is said to have a great many benefits: it gives us insight into how the world works; it leads us to feel compassion for all beings; it gives us wisdom to lead our lives well; and it feels really, really good, blissful even.
Inayat Khan says the purpose of our life is to attain just such a realization. Here are some representative passages from his works. (Note that he wrote and spoke before there was any effort to remove gender discrimination from common usage. By “man” he means both men and women as well as those who identify as neither or both.)
Man is here on earth for this one purpose, that he may bring forth that spirit of God in him and thus discover his own perfection.(21)
If man does not realize the kingdom of God within himself …, he does not accomplish the purpose of life.(22)
All these different scriptures and ways of worship and of contemplating God are given for one purpose: the realization of unity.(23)
The more you reach such a realization, the more you enable Divine Wisdom to work through you:
That which is most precious, that which is the purpose of man’s life is to arrive at that state of perfection when he can be the perfect instrument of God.(24)
Man’s greatest privilege is to become a suitable instrument of God, and until he knows this he has not realized his true purpose in life.(25)
These passages parallel Sartre’s insight that the fundamental project is to be, except that Inayat Khan goes farther and gives us a reason to be. And just as Sartre speaks of what we might call subsidiary projects, Inayat Khan recognizes that we have many individual purposes which are underpinned by our ultimate purpose:
In all different purposes which we see working through each individual, there seems to be one purpose which is behind them all, and that is the unfoldment of the soul.(26)
Unlike Sartre, who says little about how to accomplish our project of being, Inayat Khan gives us some practical advice about how to achieve our ultimate purpose.
The ultimate freedom of the soul is gained by concentration, by meditation, by contemplation, and realization.(27)
What you are seeking for is within yourself. Instead of looking outside, you must look within. The way to proceed to accomplish this is for some moments to suspend all your senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch, in order to put a screen before the outside life. And by concentration and by developing that meditative quality you will sooner or later get in touch with the inner Self. … And this gives joy, creates peace, and produces in you a self-sufficient spirit, a spirit of independence, of true liberty. The moment you get in touch with your Self you are in communion with God.(28)
This passage identifies the inner Self with the Self of God, but explaining that level of theological detail would take us too far afield. See my book How To Be An Excellent Human for specifics.(29) The point is that there are methods of attaining the desired goal. In his public talks and writings Inayat Khan gave only a broad overview of them. The esoteric school that he founded offers a plethora of practices that are tailored for each seeker by an experienced guide.
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Both Sartre, the Western atheist existentialist, and Inayat Khan, the Eastern spiritual mystic, recognize that there is something deeper to human existence than the many details of our busy lives. In both cases it behooves us to find out what it is and deliberately choose to embrace it. That’s not something you do from the comfort of a philosophical arm chair. It’s something to be pursued with passion. Achieving it can result in a great sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. So if you haven’t done so already, get started.
Notes
(1) See my essays “The Anguish of Freedom“, “Sartre, Positionally” and “Sartre’s Bad Logic“.
(2) Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”
(3) Catalano, A Commentary, p. 9.
(4) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, pp. 729-731.
(5) Idem, p. 729.
(6) Idem, p. 649.
(7) Idem, p. 731.
(8) Idem, p. 651.
(9) Idem, p. 658.
(10) Idem, p. 655.
(11) Idem, p. 732.
(12) Idem, p. 731.
(13) Idem, p. 733.
(14) Idem, pp. 733-734.
(15) Goodenough, “Life and Purpose.”
(16) Gerber, “Eros and Thanatos.”
(17) Whitehead, The Function of Reason, p.8.
(18) Wikipedia, “Know Thyself.”
(19) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, p. 616.
(20) Idem, p. 734.
(21) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 214, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm.
(22) Idem, p. 200, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm.
(23) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals, p. 12, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm.
(24) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm.
(25) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings, p. 116, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm.
(26) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm.
(27) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden, p. 197, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm.
(28) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, pp. 42-43, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm.
(29) Meacham, How To Be An Excellent Human, pp. 63-66.
References
Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Gerber, Timofei. “Eros and Thanatos: Freud’s two fundamental drives.” Epoché Philosophy Monthly, No. 20, February 2019. Online publication https://epochemagazine.org/20/eros-and-thanatos-freuds-two-fundamental-drives/ as of 17 March 2024.
Goodenough, Ursula (Khan Academy). “Life and Purpose: A Biologist Reflects on the Qualities that Define Life.” Online publication https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/life/life-and-big-history/a/life-and-purpose as of 17 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Meacham, Bill. How To Be An Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life. Austin, Texas: Earth Harmony, 2013. Available at https://www.bmeacham.com/ExcellentHumanDownload.htm.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Sarah Richmond. New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2018.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman. London: Meridian Publishing Company, 1989.
Online publication https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 20 October 2018.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 (Princeton University Press, 1929).
Wikipedia. “Know Thyself.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself as of 17 March 2024.
A Physicist on Free Will
Last time I criticized some of Sartre’s ideas about free will but didn’t address whether we even have free will in the first place. Sartre thinks we do, but his view is not shared by everyone. In particular, many think that we have no free will because the world is entirely predetermined. This idea has been set forth recently by Sabine Hossenfelder, a particle physicist and a popularizer of physics for the layperson.
I am not qualified to evaluate her competence as a physicist, but I can attest that her recent Existential Physics is a highly readable and entertaining account of what physics tells us about a number of issues. One of them is whether we have free will. She asserts that we do not because the world is deterministic. Our choices and decisions she says, although seemingly made freely by us, are actually the result of interactions of the physical elements of which we are composed, and these elements obey fixed laws, so our actions and decisions are predetermined. Let’s go through her argument.
We start with the observation that the world contains regularities:
We implicitly assume nature is uniform, constant, and reliable in its proceedings. The laws of nature don’t suddenly change. If they did, we wouldn’t call them laws.(1)
Now, there are some philosophical questions about what the laws of nature really are. Are they just simple regularities? Are they elements in deductive theories that enable us to make accurate predictions? Are they somehow metaphysically necessary regularities?(2) For our purposes, we don’t need to decide. They enable us to understand and control our environment, and that’s good enough. In practice we rely on the assumption that nature is predictable, and so far that assumption has worked out just fine, so we continue to rely on it.
The next step in the argument is called “reductionism” or “materialism.” It’s the idea that, as Hossenfelder says,
things are made of smaller things, and if you know what the small things do, then you can tell what the large things do. There is not a single known exception to this rule. … The behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents—that is, subatomic particles.(3)
And that’s that, according to this argument. All of our behavior, including our decisions, is determined by inexorable laws of nature because the behavior of big things is determined by their constituent small things, and the tiniest things we are made of obey fixed laws.
Except they don’t. Or rather, they do, but some of the laws are only probabilistic. At the level of very tiny things, the quantum level, events are indeterminate. We can’t predict the outcome of a single quantum event, only its statistical probability. Hossenfelder, of course, recognizes this fact—”The future is fixed,” she says, “except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.”(4)—but thinks it doesn’t matter. We can’t change the laws of nature, and we can’t influence quantum events, so we have no choice in what happens.
Her dismissal of occasional quantum effects is crucial to her argument, but it is a mistake. At the macroscopic level of everyday experience, certainly, whatever quantum events that may happen have such a minuscule effect that they are safely ignored. But quantum events happen in the brain, as she recognizes:
… deep down all our brain processes are quantum processes ….(5)
She doesn’t go into details, and there is more than one theory about such processes. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff cite quantum collapse in microtubules inside neurons.(6) Henry Stapp cites calcium ions in quantum-scale neuronal channels.(7) Whatever the details, quantum effects do take place in our brains. Of course submicroscopic events trigger larger events, which are then causally determined. But the initial events, the beginnings of chains of causality, are indeterminate. That means that our thoughts and behaviors are not fully determined in advance.
Does that indeterminacy mean that our will is free? Hossenfelder thinks not. She says
… there is no “will” in quantum randomness ….(8)
In this she agrees with psychologists Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen, who say
If it turns out that your [actions are] completely determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe … and the outcomes of myriad subatomic coin flips, your [action] is no more freely chosen than before. Indeed, it is randomly chosen, which is no help ….(9)
But neither she nor they are looking for will in the right place. The concept of will does not apply to submicroscopic physical events or even to macroscopic entities like neurons. The concept of will applies at a higher level of explanation, namely that of persons. By a “higher level of explanation” I mean what Hossenfelder calls an “effective model.”
An effective model is one that leaves out irrelevant detail. Her analogy is a topographical map with extremely fine detail, having contour lines at a scale of an inch or less of elevation between them, which would show individual cracks and pebbles. You could then zoom out to show the contour lines at 5 or 10-foot intervals of elevation or even more. At a zoomed-out level you lose a lot of detail, but the 5-foot scale would be more useful for planning drainage in a landscape design, and at a 100-yard scale you could plan a hike through mountainous terrain. You pick your scale according to what you want to accomplish.
At these zoomed-out levels
… you have what physicists call an effective model. This model is not fundamentally correct [because some information is left out], but it is good enough at the level of resolution you are interested in. …
It is typical of an effective model that the objects and quantities central to it are not the same as those in the underlying theory; they usually do not even make sense in the underlying theory.(10)
That’s the case with human will, whether free or not. When we consider human action and will, we find things that are best described by using a different effective model, that of personal agency. The patterns of beliefs, desires, aversions and intentions that we ascribe to ourselves and others are at a higher level than the individual neural events which underlie them, and they obey different laws. One of the working assumptions of personal agency is that people can make free choices. The fact is, we all act as if we have free will, regardless of what we say we believe about it. We don’t try to convince a customer to buy our product or a friend to go with us to a concert by altering their brain chemistry. Instead we appeal to their motives and desires, perhaps to their pride or some other emotion, to convince them to make the choice we want.
Pragmatically it makes sense to consider our will as free, regardless of the subatomic and neural events that underlie our behavior. I suspect Hossenfelder would agree with me so far. The agential model is good enough at its applicable level of resolution. But, she would ask, is our will really free? That is to say, is there a way to calculate, deduce or conceptually connect the low level to the high in a rigorous way? Reductionism means that
the behavior of an object can be deduced from (“reduced to,” as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object’s constituents …. (11)
Can we reduce, she would ask, agential properties to those of subatomic quantum events?
Not at present, certainly, and I don’t know whether we will ever be able to. But there is a way to think about the issue that nevertheless seems plausible. Hossenfelder would call this way of thinking “ascientific,” meaning that the scientific method can’t tell you whether or not it is correct.(12) I call it “metaphysical,” meaning that it goes beyond physics to deal with things that physics can’t.
My ascientific, speculative, metaphysical view is that quantum indeterminacy in the brain enables our will to be free. The crux is that what matters is not the outcome of a single quantum event, but the overall pattern of many of them. What appears to be random when you look only at individual events reveals patterns when you look at them in aggregate. Micro-units of quantum indeterminacy cohere into larger arrangements that are not random. Consider a pointillist painting, which consists of distinct dots of pigment. If you look at it up close, all you see is random dots. When you view it from afar, you see identifiable forms and shapes, recognizable objects and patterns. In our case, these patterns are agential.
But what causes (if that is the right word) random events to cohere into agential patterns? What explains such behavior? The process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead provides the answer.
I have written about Whitehead’s metaphysics elsewhere, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Please refer to my book How To Be An Excellent Human and my essays “Dead or Alive?” and “A Whiteheadian Solution to the Combination Problem“. In brief, Whitehead agrees with modern physics that things are made of smaller things. His insight is that the smallest of them, which we refer to as subatomic “particles,” are better thought of as a series of events, which he calls “actual occasions;”(13) and these events are not only detectable by other entities but are also, in a minimal way, aware of their surroundings. This theory is a variety of panpsychism. As I like to say, everything that has an outside has an inside too.
Whitehead intends his categories of explanation to apply both to the quantum level of reality and to the world revealed by our unaided senses. In our everyday world it is undeniable that, unless we are asleep or sedated, we are aware of our surroundings and remember our past. And, of course, others can be aware of us. So Whitehead posits that the smallest entities are also, in a way, aware of their surroundings and of their own past as well as being detectable by other entities. Whitehead calls them “occasions of experience.”(14) The tiniest actual occasion is structurally similar to a moment of rich human experience, albeit in a primitive, attenuated form. What we think of as a particle is actually a temporal series of these actual occasions. A single electron is a series of momentary electron-occasions that form an enduring object much like the momentary frames of a movie form a continuous picture. And that enduring object experiences its world.
Yes, this idea is quite anthropomorphic, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Instead of trying to figure out how conscious beings arise from dead particles, we assume that it works the other way around and the particles are minimally conscious.
So let’s get really anthropomorphic. Imagine that you are a calcium ion in a neuron just arriving at a vesicle full of neurotransmitters.(15) Do you proceed to strike (i.e., be detectable at) a site that will trigger the release of neurotransmitters to the synaptic cleft? Or do you strike somewhere else? Or do you just hang out and wait for a bit? It depends on how you feel. Just as a person might pick vanilla or strawberry ice cream depending on nothing more than what they feel like having in the moment, you as a calcium ion just do what you feel like doing.
And what determines what you feel like doing? The feelings of all the other quantum events and enduring objects in your vicinity.
A critical part of Whitehead’s account of how reality works is that feelings “leak” from mind to mind. Whitehead has a technical term—he calls it “prehension”(16)—for the process by which each actual occasion comes into being by incorporating into itself elements, both physical and mental, of its predecessors and its surroundings. The upshot is that an elementary particle is not like a little billiard ball being pushed around. It is more like a succession of tiny agents deciding what do next. The mental aspect of these tiny agents, these actual occasions, combine into a greater mental whole just as the atoms, molecules and cells combine into a greater physical whole. And that greater whole, especially in the case of us humans, obeys agential laws as well as physical ones. The beliefs, desires and choices of the whole exert a downward influence on the tiny events that make it up. Although the neural events are individually random, as a whole they conform to the larger agential pattern.
Hossenfelder might well sneer at this idea. She says “If you say ‘holism,’ I hear ‘bullshit.'”(17) But despite this account of free will being not experimentally confirmable there are reasons to believe it true.
Crucially, this account is not in conflict with the physics of elementary particles. Any individual quantum event in a neuron is indeterministic. Given the possibility of causing a nerve impulse to fire, it might and it might not; we can’t tell in advance (even if we could observe it without destroying the organism it’s a part of, not to mention causing an unintended collapse of its wave function). Only when we look at the interaction of many of them do we find patterns that make sense in agential terms, including the belief that our will is free.
This account, bare bones as it is, conflicts with no physical laws, contains no internal contradictions and supports the very useful attribution of mental states, desires, beliefs and free will to ourselves and other people. Thus it is reasonable to believe it.
Our will is indeed free. Now it is up to each of us to figure out what to do with it.
(For a more detailed account how our will is free, please see my free ebook, How To Exert Free Will.)
Notes
(1) Hossenfelder, Existential Physics, p. 38.
(2) Bain, “Laws of Nature.”
(3) Hossenfelder, p. 82.
(4) Hossenfelder, p. 125.
(5) Hossenfelder, p. 113.
(6) Hameroff, “Consciousness, Cognition and the Neuronal Cytoskeleton.”
(7) Stapp, Mindful Universe, pp. 30-32. I discuss Stapp’s theory in more detail in Meacham, “The Quantum Level of Reality.”
(8) Hossenfelder, p. 130.
(9) Greene and Cohen, p. 1777.
(10) Hossenfelder, p. 85.
(11) Hossenfelder, pp. 82-83.
(12) Hossenfelder, p. 113.
(13) Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 32.
(14) Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 221.
(15) Meacham, “The Quantum Level of Reality.”
(16) Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 28-29, 32, 35.
(17) Hossenfelder, p. 83.
References
Bain, Jonathan. “Laws of Nature.” Online publication https://research.engineering.nyu.edu/~jbain/philsci/lectures/15.Laws.pdf as of 1 September 2023.
Greene, Joshua and Jonathan Cohen. “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B (Biological Sciences), Vol. 359 No. 1451, pp. 1775-1785. Online publication http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/359/1451/1775.full.pdf as of 7 March 2013. Available at https://www.joshua-greene.net/lab-publications as of 3 September 2023.
Hameroff, Stuart. “Consciousness, Cognition and the Neuronal Cytoskeleton – A New Paradigm Needed in Neuroscience.” Frontiers of Molecular Neuroscience, 15:869935. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2022.869935. Online publication https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2022.869935/full as of 1 September 2023.
Hossenfelder, Sabine. Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York: Viking, 2022.
Meacham, Bill. How To Exert Free Will. Available online at https://bmeacham.com/FreeWill.htm.
Meacham, Bill. “The Quantum Level of Reality.” Online publication http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/Quantum.html.
Stapp, Henry P. Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2007.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Harper and Row Harper Torchbook, 1960.
The Anguish of Freedom
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity contains an extensive taxonomy of ways people try to avoid what she calls “the anguish [one] feels in the face of [one’s] freedom.”(1) Throughout her work she cites “the anguish of freedom”(2) as a reason for various approaches to life that fall short of genuine freedom. But what is this anguish? And what is her concept of freedom? To answer these questions, we need to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. De Beauvoir and Sartre were colleagues, and her work is in many ways a continuation of his monumental tome.
On the face of it, the phrase “the anguish of freedom” seems peculiar. We can understand the anguish of captivity, but a person released from prison or freed from the threat of being locked up would more likely feel happiness or relief than anguish. The meaning of “freedom” here, however, is not physical but metaphysical; we are talking about free will. To say that our will is free is to say that at least in some cases we ourselves, not something other than or external to us, choose what we do and strive for.
Sartre agrees, but takes a very extreme position. He is a radical libertarian (in the philosophical sense, not the political). He thinks our choices are not determined in any way, neither by physical causality nor by prior motivation. Here are some representative passages from Being and Nothingness:
[A person] escapes from the causal order of the world and extricates himself from the glue of being.(3)
In conceiving, on the basis of my perceptions of the bedroom that he lived in, the person who is no longer in the bedroom, I must necessarily perform an act of thought that cannot be determined or motivated by any antecedent state ….(4)
Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play ….(5)
… my motives [are] inefficacious ….(6)
… [psychological] tendencies are actualized with my cooperation, … they are not forces of nature … by constantly deciding on their value, I lend them their efficacy ….”(7)
According to Sartre our will and our choices are not determined by the causal order of the world, nor by our psychological tendencies nor even by our motives. They are not determined by any antecedent state at all!
Now, we can certainly criticize this concept of freedom of will. If our choices are not determined at all, then they are in effect random. But if our actions are caused by randomness then we are just as unfree as if they were caused by determinism. This is quite a radical conception. To see how radical, let’s focus on what Sartre does with this concept. His view leads to him to assert that if we truly realized our radical freedom, we would be in anguish.
He asks how our freedom appears to us. Remember, he is working in the tradition of Phenomenology, which attempts to describe first-person experience just as it is without preconceptions. He asks “What form does this consciousness of freedom take?” He replies,
It is in anguish that man becomes conscious of his freedom or, alternatively anguish is freedom’s mode of being as consciousness of being; it is in anguish that freedom is … in question for itself.(8)
His argument for this surprising assertion is in the form of illustrative examples. One is that of walking along a narrow ledge. Anguish is different from fear, he says, in that fear is of something in the world but anguish is about oneself.
Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am frightened not of falling into the precipice but of throwing myself into it. A situation that provokes fear, insofar as it threatens to change my life and my being from the outside, provokes anguish to the extent to which I mistrust my own reactions to this situation.(9)
He elaborates.(10) You are on a narrow ledge and you are afraid of slipping on a stone or of the ground crumbling beneath you. To avert such an eventuality you pay close attention and take care; you watch for loose stones and stay away from the edge. In doing so you apprehend yourself as a physical object, one among many. Your fall, if it happens, will be determined by causes external to you.
But you are also a free agent; you might, of your own free will, decide instead to jump! Your strategies for preventing a fall “do not appear to [you] as determined by external causes,” he says.(11) You think of other possible behaviors such as failing to pay attention, running heedlessly or thinking of something else, and decide to avoid them. But “no external cause will set them aside. [You] alone [are] the permanent source of their non-being.”(12) These possible events might still happen—not just the loose stones, which are not in your control, but your strategies for avoiding catastrophe, which are. Knowing that your choices are totally free, neither determined by the past nor by your own motives for self-preservation, you feel anguish.
I grasp these motives … as insufficiently effective. At the very moment when I apprehend myself as horrified of the chasm, I am conscious of this horror as not being determining in relation to my possible behavior. … I realize that nothing can oblige me to take this action [of being careful not to fall].(13)
Once you realize your essential freedom, Sartre says, you feel anguish. Anguish doesn’t prove we are free, but it is “a specific way of being conscious of freedom.”(14) So how come we don’t feel it all the time? Because many of our actions are habitual and because most of the time we don’t need to think about what we are doing; we just do it. Anguish arises only when we reflectively notice that we are free, not when we are unreflectively engaged in action.(15)
He gives another example. He is writing a book. As he writes, the words become sentences and the sentences, paragraphs. They have a momentum of their own. Once he gets started, he tends to keep going, possibly pausing for a while, but in anticipation of starting up again. No anguish is involved. But the paragraphs become chapters and eventually a book, and the work as a whole is an occasion for anguish.
This work is a possibility in relation to which I can feel anguish: it really is my possible, and I do not know if I will continue it tomorrow …. I have been “wanting to write it” but nothing, not even what I have been, can force me to write it.(16)
And that is the anguish of freedom. You just don’t know whether what you do in the future will be at all consistent with what you have done in the past. Maybe you will jump off a cliff. Maybe you will abandon a cherished project to which you have devoted lots of time and energy. Heck, maybe you will abandon your whole life and go live under a bridge. Anything is possible; and that, says Sartre, is occasion for anguish.
But is it? Do these examples make sense? My opinion is that they don’t; they are so far-fetched as to be almost absurd. Sartre purports to describe a feature of human reality generally, “a permanent structure of the human being.”(17) I think it’s more likely that what he describes is idiosyncratic to himself. Few of us, I think, would feel anguish in these situations.
Let’s take the second one first. Why should the idea that you might suddenly abandon a cherished project cause you anguish? Why is the idea so troubling? Perhaps the fear is that something alien to your habitual ways of being might suddenly erupt. The abandonment would be a radical disruption of yourself. Anguish would be an appropriate response. But is it probable?
Your considering the idea is a form of what I call second-order thinking, which others call metacognition or self-awareness. You can easily entertain such a thought. Maybe the words just aren’t coming today and you feel frustrated. Maybe you find that you have other, more pressing things to do. Or maybe you are just bored with the whole thing. Those scenarios are plausible, but would not, I think, provoke anguish. Your actually being in anguish about the possibility would be a second-order distrust of your first-order self. If the abandonment happened, you would be like a whole different person. Most of us do have some ego-attachment to who we think we are. Certainly a sudden disruption would threaten that attachment. But it’s not very likely.
Equally implausible is the scenario of being in anguish while hiking on a narrow ledge. The odds of being there on the cliff in the first place are very slim, but let’s ignore that. It’s ludicrous for most of us to think that we would suddenly kill ourself. It’s not a realistically probable outcome and not something you need to worry about. It’s unlikely that you would even think about it. And if you did think about it, it is unlikely that you would be in anguish about the possibility. I asked a friend about it, and she said that the possibility of stepping off a tall building had occurred to her once, but she didn’t feel any anguish and quickly put it out of her mind. I venture to guess that the same would be true for most of us.
Sartre is looking at what software developers call “edge cases,” things that happen only at extreme ends of the range of possibilities, such as maximum and minimum values. If your user is to enter a number between one and ten, you would test what happens when they enter 0, 1, 10 and 11. It’s useful to consider edge cases to avoid unexpected results, but most often we are concerned with normal cases, things that most people are likely to encounter.
Here’s a non-edge case: You anticipate getting some ice cream and you imagine ordering vanilla. As you think about it, you prefer vanilla. But you know that you might change your mind when you actually order it. You might get something else, chocolate or strawberry perhaps. Does that possibility give you pause? Do you feel anguish about it? Probably not. The stakes are low, and if you even think about it, you trust that your future self will make a good choice.
Consider all the proto-humans that lived a long time ago. The ones who cowered in existential anguish over every choice failed to survive long enough to leave offspring. We, descendants of those who did not suffer such anguish, aren’t built that way.
All this is to say that Sartre greatly exaggerates the prevalence of the feeling of anguish. The idea that anguish is universally a response to recognizing one’s freedom is clearly false. It is not a feature of human reality generally, only of a few psychologically unstable individuals.
The idea makes sense only if you buy into Sartre’s notion of freedom, that we are radically undetermined by any past causes, psychological tendencies, motives and the like. If that were the case, then it might make sense to worry about whether we would suddenly do things completely out of character as if we were possessed by some evil spirit. But Sartre’s examples are so outlandish that they serve as a kind of reductio ad absurdum and render his notion false.
Are we then not free at all? No, our will is indeed free, but it is subject to constraints. Causality, tendencies and motives as well as, crucially, our beliefs and desires are far more efficacious than Sartre would have us believe.(18) Sartre is right in emphasizing our capacity for second-order thinking (although he uses quite different language). Observing ourselves and thinking about ourselves allow us to step back mentally, appraise what we are up to, consider possible consequences and decide what to do. In such appraisals we remember our valued projects and our will to live. We might recognize that theoretically we have the ability to abandon our past, but we see no reason to do so and quickly move on.
Our capacity for self-reflection does give us an ability that Sartre evidently does not recognize, however, the ability to choose our response to our freedom. Yes, we can choose to be in anguish, but we can equally well choose take delight and comfort that we are not mere puppets.
A different and more cogent assessment of our freedom comes from a Sufi teacher:
Freedom of will … is strictly speaking continuous opportunity to do good, no matter how many the shortcomings or how often the repetition of serious mistakes.(19)
Far from occasion for anguish, our ability to make free choices can engender hope. We don’t have to be stuck in harmful behaviors. Our freedom can give us the great satisfaction and even exhilaration of knowing that we are each, as the poet says, master of our fate and captain of our soul.(20)
Notes
(1) de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, near the end of Part I. (The online version has no page numbers.)
(2) Idem, throughout Part II.
(3) Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 59
(4) Idem, p. 64.
(5) Idem, p. 65.
(6) Idem, p. 72.
(7) Idem, p. 107.
(8) Idem, p. 66.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Idem, pp. 67-70.
(11) Idem, p. 68.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Idem, p. 69.
(14) Idem, p. 72.
(15) Idem, pp. 74-75.
(16) Idem, p. 76.
(17) Idem, p. 74.
(18) Please see Meacham, How To Exert Free Will for a fuller treatment.
(19) Lewis, The Sutra on the Three Hundred and Sixty Aphorisms, PDF p. 12.
(20) Henley, “Invictus”.
References
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm as of 21 June 2023.
Henley, William Ernest. “Invictus.” Available online at http://www.bartleby.com/103/7.html as of 28 June 2023.
Lewis, Samuel L. The Sutra on the Three Hundred and Sixty Aphorisms. Online publication https://www.ruhaniat.org/index.php/major-papers/prayers-and-sayings-of-hik/2221-bowl-of-saki-of-pir-o-murshid-inayat-khanwith-commentary as of 21 September 2018.
Meacham, Bill. “How To Exert Free Will.” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/FreeWill.htm. Amazon Kindle edition, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SNSGHW6.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Sarah Richmond. New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2018.
On religion and other topics (video)
A few weeks ago I was featured on an online TV show called Created In The Image Of God. Here’s the link:
Not surprisingly a lot of it is about religion, but the show covers other topics as well, such as the difference between goodness and rightness and whether our life has any meaning. Much of it covers my personal approach to life and religion, including the impact on me of my daughter’s death and my subsequent communication with her. The host tells a fascinating story about his seemingly miraculous escape from death, and we discuss faith and the right to believe. If you like a more conversational approach to philosophy than my usual discursive essays, please have a look.
Life Has No Meaning. So What?
Philosophy is supposed to be able to address broad and important issues such as the meaning of life. Philosopher Rivka Weinberg’s provocatively-titled paper “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad” is one such attempt. The question is both universal and personal. What is the meaning of life, but in particular what is the meaning of your life? Does your life have meaning? Is it meaningful? Weinberg thinks not, not because she knows you or anything about you but because she thinks nobody’s life has any meaning.
First, let’s be clear that we are not talking about meaning in the sense of the meaning of a word or sentence. If I ask what “perspicuous” means, the answer is “clearly expressed and easily understood.” If I ask what “Schnee ist weiss” means, the answer is “Snow is white.” But if I ask what life means, there is no corresponding answer because life is not a word or sentence. It doesn’t have that sort of meaning. Some have said that the question has no answer because it doesn’t make sense; it’s a kind of category error to attribute meaning to life. But Weinberg says it does make sense; she just doesn’t like the answer.
In her view, meaning is more like purpose. When we ask about the meaning of life, we want to know the purpose or point of living. It’s a way of asking Why in terms of motivation. We often ask someone why they are doing something. Why are you going to the store? To get some eggs. Then we can ask a further Why question. Why do you want to get eggs? Because I’m hungry (and want to alleviate my hunger). Each Why becomes more general. Why do you want to alleviate your hunger? Because hunger is painful and I don’t want to feel pain. In trivial cases the questions can eventually become divorced from everyday reality. Why do you not want to feel pain? Because it hurts. At this point you might feel like you are talking to a toddler.
Other motivational Why questions seem more salient to the human condition. Why are you sending money to Doctors Without Borders? Because I want to help earthquake victims. Why do you want to help earthquake victims? Because I want to alleviate their suffering. Again, each Why becomes more general, but now the answers are not so trivial. Why do you want to alleviate their suffering? What is the point of alleviating suffering? You might answer that you feel compassion for people who are hurting, and compassion is a painful state for you because you feel their pain. You might answer that you want to build your character to become a generous sort of person, because that would be a better way to live than not. You might answer that you want to be recognized as a good person (in which case you need to let others know that you are donating). You might answer that you feel obliged to do God’s will, who orders you to love your neighbor. Whatever the answer, it gets closer to something ultimate, something you might consider the meaning of your life.
Weinberg observes that in both trivial and morally significant cases, the purpose or point of an activity is something you value that is external to the activity itself. A point in this sense is a valued end(1), and “valued ends are external to the projects toward which they are directed.”(2)
What’s valued is not just the activity. Alleviating your hunger is different from going to the store. Alleviating suffering is different from donating money to a worthy cause. Such activities are called “telic,” meaning that they aim at some end or goal, such as getting eggs or alleviating suffering. (The term comes from the Greek telos, which means end result; by extension it means goal or purpose.) The value is found in something external to the activity. Some other activities, such as going for a walk, are called “atelic.” Their aim is the activity itself.(3) But even in those, the value is not the same as the activity. Your goal in going for a walk might be enjoyment or health or companionship (if you walk with somebody else), but it’s not just to go for a walk.
In such activities and many more you find meaning or purpose or value in what you do. Weinberg calls such meaning “meaning in life.”(4) Even meaning in a cosmic sense—your impact on the cosmos, your role in the grand scheme of things, or the purpose assigned to you by God or some such—is part of meaning in life.(5) But she’s concerned with something else, the meaning of life as a whole. The former sort of meaning she calls “Everyday Meaning” and the latter, “Ultimate Meaning.”(6) “Ultimate Meaning refers to the point of leading a life at all. Why bother …?”(7) And she says that there is no reason to do so, no point in it, no ultimate meaning.
The reason is simple. For things that have everyday meaning, meaning in life, the activity and the goal are both in your life. It is you who go to the store to get eggs, and you who eat them. It is you who donate money and you who alleviate suffering. But to ask about ultimate meaning, the meaning of life is to ask about a valued end distinct from your life as a whole, and there isn’t any. “There can be no end external to one’s entire life since one’s life includes all of one’s ends.” Therefore “leading and living one’s life as a whole cannot have a point.”(8)
Think of it this way. In your life you can at least imagine how it would be to achieve your goal—ending world hunger, say—even if you don’t actually succeed. But once your life is over, you won’t be around to see whether your life goal has been achieved. If you imagine it, you are imagining yourself still alive. But you’ll be dead, so there will be no goal for you. (If you believe in life after death, then the idea is the same. You’ll still be alive but in some other, spectral, realm until you finally die or get sublated or whatever. If you believe in reincarnation, then the idea is still the same; you’ll be alive in another body until you get annihilated into nirvana.) So it makes no sense to think that your life as a whole has any purpose, end or goal. It’s pointless.
Life is pointless, not just because you, in your limited viewpoint, can’t find a point, but because metaphysically there isn’t one to be found.
Well, that sounds plausible, if a bit disturbing. Weinberg makes two claims in her paper, (a) that life is pointless and (b) that we should be sad that it is so. I’ll return to the second point shortly, but let’s stay on the first for a moment. There are some ramifications to consider. One is that in her view one’s life is one’s project or enterprise. But maybe it’s not.
She makes the assertion over and over again. “Why bother with the project, effort, or enterprise of life?” she says. “What is the valued end of running a human life?”(9) “We lead one entire life as an effort or enterprise of its own.”(10) “We are all human and we all, to some degree, put effort into running our lives as an effort or project of its own.”(11)
It’s quite a strong claim to assert that we all do that. The obvious objection is that we don’t all do so. Does an impoverished Afghan wife run her life as a project? Does a homeless vagrant on the streets of Sao Paolo do that? How about a demented person locked up in a psychiatric hospital? More likely, they just try to get by. Not all of us have enough sense of agency to even view our lives as our projects, although I think it would be good if we did.(12)
Weinberg recognizes the objection but dismisses it.
We are not merely alive, like a bacterium or even a rat; we lead lives, we run our lives as a sustained effort or enterprise, often attempting to fit its pieces together into a purposeful whole. Not entirely, of course. We may live for the moment sometimes but a life led that way all the time would likely seem fragmentary, incoherent—not only pointless, but centerless, agentless; not a truly human life.(13)
This seems suspiciously like a “No True Scotsman” argument, one that improperly excludes a counterexample.(14) If you don’t run your life as a project or enterprise, you aren’t truly human, she implies. That’s a dangerous way of thinking. Once you exclude some people from being truly human, you may feel justified in treating them badly, even to the point of exterminating them, as Hitler did with Jews. At any rate, if such a person had no sense of a meaning of their life, it would not be because such a meaning is metaphysically impossible. And lacking such a sense, they would have no reason to be sad about it.
A similar consideration is that her account of human agency seems to require that we view our life as a narrative, a story in which we are the protagonist. But some of us don’t think of ourselves that way. She notes “the importance that the narrative trajectory of a human life plays in leading a meaningful life”(15) and cites several thinkers to that effect. But not everyone views their life that way. Galen Strawson says that he and numerous others are “episodic,” lacking in overall narrative. Their lives are a succession of incidents that do not hang together as a whole story.(16) Presumably such people would find no reason to look for the meaning of their life as a whole. I don’t suppose that Weinberg would consider them as lacking true humanity even though she thinks their lives would be fragmentary and incoherent. They are true humans, but they are not bothered by their lack of ultimate meaning.
These considerations throw doubt upon her second assertion, that we should be sad that our lives don’t have any ultimate meaning. Her title asserts that “we should be very, very sad”. But what is the nature of this Should?(17) It’s certainly not a legal requirement. It doesn’t seem like a moral obligation; we are not commanded to be sad. Is it a prudential thing, that we should be sad about this tragic state of affairs because indulging in that emotion will lead us to greater fulfillment or flourishing? No, it’s hard to see how being sad about something you have no control over would fulfill you or bring you happiness.
More likely it’s a form of social convention, almost etiquette. She talks about being fitting and making sense. “It is fitting,” she says, “to be sad to recognize that leading and living a life is pointless.”(18) “It makes sense to be saddened [and] disappointed that there’s no valued end to leading a life at all.”(19) “Discovering that leading life itself … is pointless should make us sad because it is a fitting response to the facts.”(20) It is fitting because all our other projects, the ones within our life, have a point or purpose, but the project of being alive in toto doesn’t. That one is an outlier; so, asserts Weinberg, it is fitting to be sad about it.
None of these reasons make sense to me. Some people might miss having a point or purpose to life and be sad about its absence, but there are other equally good responses.
We’ve seen that those who have no sense of ultimate meaning don’t feel sad about the lack. Are we to say that they should have a sense of ultimate meaning in order not to be a deficient human being? We’ve already dealt with this issue and found that it’s not an appealing way of thinking. In their case, paucity of affect seems quite fitting.
Those whose lives are episodic may recognize that there is no such thing as ultimate meaning for their lives, but don’t consider that state of affairs a defect. Their appropriate response is indifference.
Some people are just innately cheerful about things. They don’t mind missing out on ultimate purpose. That seems an appropriate response to their situation. Don’t worry, be happy.
I think the Stoics have the best response. Epictetus says “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”(21) The idea is to pay attention to what you have some control over and not aggravate yourself about what you don’t. You don’t have any control over whether your life has any ultimate meaning, so don’t be sad about. Instead, be detached.
Weinberg alludes to this approach to life and finds it lacking. “Why be sad about life’s pointlessness? Is that not also pointless? You might think that lamenting life’s pointlessness is futile, and itself pointless, like crying for the moon. If you can’t do anything about it, why bemoan it?” Her response is telling: “Uh, because it’s sad.”(22)
But that’s no response at all! It merely restates the premise that is at issue. Nothing is sad in and of itself. Something is sad only for a person or some people. The Kansas City Chiefs recently beat the Philadelphia Eagles in an American Football match. No doubt fans in Philadelphia were sad, but fans in Kansas City were elated. Which was the appropriate, fitting response? Neither one in abstraction; both in the concrete. We need to look at the context. In the context of Kansas City fans, elation was quite appropriate; in the context of Philadelphia, sadness was. The Kansas City fans perceived the outcome as happy, and the Philadelphia fans perceived it as sad. Both were right from their point of view. Weinberg’s assertion that the pointlessness of life is sad begs the question. It’s sad only if you think it is. But why think it is?
This is where the Stoics have an edge. They advise us to figure out what we have control over and what we don’t, and to have no concern about the latter. Epictetus says
Examine [whatever bothers you] … by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.(23)
Stoicism, like most ancient Greek schools of philosophy, took the ultimate goal of life to be eudaimonia, a state of happiness, fulfillment or flourishing. One of the things that interferes with being happy is being emotionally agitated. And one of the primary ways we get emotionally agitated is by reacting to things we have no control over. So if you want to be happier, quit reacting. You do have control over that.
There’s a lot more to Stoicism than this, of course: an account of how the world works and the place of human beings in it; ideas about what is fully in our control (our thoughts, judgments and actions) and what is not (pretty much everything else); a list of virtues and a corresponding list of vices; advice about how to practice being less reactive and more serene; and more. If you want to find out more, an internet search will bring up quite enough to keep you busy.
According to Weinberg, we have no control over the meaning of our life because there is no such thing. Feel free to be sad about it if you like, but know that you’re being sad about the absence of something that can’t possibly exist and hence over which you have absolutely no control. If you persist in that attitude, you are actually being foolish.
That said, most of us do want some sense of purpose. We like feeling a connection with something larger than ourselves and having some purpose or meaning within that context. OK, no problem. There’s no shortage of things within life to dedicate ourselves to: truth, justice, climate resilience, animal welfare, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, healing the sick, raising self-reliant kids. I’m sure you can think of more. If we can’t have ultimate meaning, a meaning of our life, we can at least find everyday meaning, meaning in our life. So, the Stoics would say, quit wasting your time with useless sadness and get on with something worthwhile.
Notes
(1) Weinberg, “Ultimate Meaning,” p. 2.
(2) Idem, p. 4.
(3) Idem, p. 3.
(4) Idem, p. 7.
(5) Idem, p. 5, footnote 16.
(6) Idem, p. 5.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Idem, p. 1.
(9) Idem, p. 5.
(10) Idem, pp. 7-8.
(11) Idem, p. 8.
(12) See Chapter 20, “The Human Virtue” in my How To Be An Excellent Human.
(13) Weinberg, op. cit., p. 8.
(14) Wikipedia, “No true scotsman.”
(15) Weinberg, op. cit., p. 13.
(16) Strawson, “Against Narrativity.”
(17) See my “Ways to Say ‘Should’,” chapter 22 of How To Be An Excellent Human and at https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=622.
(18) Weinberg, op. cit., p. 1.
(19) Idem, p. 8.
(20) Idem, p. 10.
(21) Weaver, “Stoic Quotes.” Epictetus, Discourses, Book Four, Chapter 4.
(22) Weinberg, op. cit. p. 21.
(23) Epictetus. The Enchiridion, Section 1, paragraph 4.
References
Epictetus. Discourses. Tr. Elizabeth Carter and Daniel Kolak. Online publication
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/epictetus_discourse.pdf as of 13 February 2023.
Epictetus. The Enchiridion. Tr. Elizabeth Carter. Online publication http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html as of 15 February 2023.
Meacham, Bill. How To Be An Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life. Austin, Texas: Earth Harmony, 2013. Available at https://www.bmeacham.com/ExcellentHumanDownload.htm.
Meacham, Bill. “Ways to say ‘Should’.” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=622.
Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity” in Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Available on line at http://reading.academia.edu/GalenStrawson/Papers/287273/Against_narrativity_final_2008_version_ as of 3 March 2012.
Weaver, Tobias. “Stoic Quotes: The Best Quotes From The Stoic Philosophers.” Online publication https://www.orionphilosophy.com/stoic-blog/stoic-quotes-the-best-quotes-from-the-stoic-philosophers as of 13 February 2023.
Weinberg, Rivka. “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad.” Journal of Controversial Ideas. 2021; 1(1):4. Online publication https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/132 as of 6 February, 2023.
Wikipedia. “No true scotsman.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman as of 14 February 2023.
Sartre, Positionally
Whenever you are conscious, you are conscious of something. Phenomenologists call this feature of being conscious “intentionality,” which means being aimed at or directed toward that something, whatever it may be, which they call the “intentional object.” “Intentionality” and its adjectival form, “intentional,” come from a Latin phrase meaning to aim an arrow; they are technical philosophical terms. Take a look at your own experience and you’ll see what they mean. This feature of being conscious is fairly obvious and non-controversial.
More controversial is what a great many phenomenologists assert: that in addition to being conscious of the intentional object, you are in some less focused way conscious of being conscious. I disagree and have explained my disagreement in some depth elsewhere.(1) One of the earliest and most forceful advocates of this position is Jean-Paul Sartre. In this essay I evaluate Sartre’s argument. (Spoiler alert: I find it lacking.)
In the introduction to his monumental Being and Nothingness Sartre says that
every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself.(2)
That’s not the clearest sentence ever written. What is a consciousness? What does it mean for it to be positional or not? I find Sartre’s obscure language quite aggravating. He sounds profound, but you don’t quite know what he is talking about. And when you figure it out, you find that he is wrong, as we shall see.
In order to decide whether Sartre is right, we have to know what he means by these terms, “consciousness” (“conscience” in the original French) and “positional” (“positionnelle”).(3) Let’s take “consciousness” first.
The term is ambiguous. It can refer to all sorts of things, from a state of being unsedated to the ground of all being. I’ve addressed this deficiency in another paper.(4) For now, we’ll focus on Sartre’s usage.
At one point he seems quite clear:
We said that consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known.(5)
We don’t need to know in detail what Sartre means by “being” and “being known” to understand that “consciousness” means a conscious entity, a person or perhaps an animal. But if we substitute “conscious entity” for “consciousness” in the sentence cited above, we get this:
Every positional conscious entity of an object is at the same time a non-positional conscious entity of itself.
That makes no sense, so “consciousness” must mean something else. My best guess is that it means an episode or state of being conscious. If so, the sentence becomes this:
Every positional episode of being conscious of an object is at the same time a non-positional episode of being conscious of itself.
That is a bit awkward—what is a positional episode?—, so we might rephrase it as follows:
Every episode of being positionally conscious of an object is at the same time an episode of being non-positionally conscious of being conscious itself.
Both of these are somewhat opaque. Perhaps the meaning will become clearer when we understand what “positional” means. For Sartre, it is an adjectival form of the verb “to posit.” He says
All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object ….(6)
This usage of “posit” is metaphorical. Usually the term refers to something linguistic, a step in an argument. It means to assume something as a fact or to put something forward as a basis of argument.(7) So how does being conscious of something posit that thing?
This is where Sartre builds on Husserl’s legacy. Phenomenological reflection reveals that there is a cognitive element in every moment of perceiving something. When you see a tree, for instance, you see colors and shapes but you also subliminally interpret those colors and shapes as a tree. The interpretive element, which Husserl calls “noesis”, is as much a part of your experience as the colors and shapes, but usually we don’t pay any attention to it. Analogously to positing a proposition as a basis for argument, when we perceive a tree we posit the tree as the intentional object we are seeing. Sartre calls it a “transcendent” object because it transcends or goes beyond what is immediately given in experience, the sense-data and the interpretive noeses. Husserl’s term is “noema.” Again, I discuss this in detail elsewhere.(8)
Being conscious of something such as a tree positionally means that we posit it as what we are conscious of. We take it to be an object apart from us. Figuratively speaking, we are over here, and we (again, subliminally) posit or suppose that what is over there is a tree. We take a position with respect to it; or, which amounts to the same thing, the tree is seen to be in a position with respect to us.
Fine, but what about “non-positional”? Well, it must indicate something that we do not posit, something that we do not take as an object, something with respect to which we do not take a position. Objects of which we are non-positionally conscious are those in the periphery or background of our experience rather than being in focus. Some examples are physical feelings that we do not attend to, such as the feeling of the shoes on our feet or the ambient sounds around us; fleeting emotional reactions to things we encounter; the experience of highway hypnosis in which we pay little or no attention to the surroundings but nevertheless navigate the road successfully; and many more. Clear and distinct perception is only one end of a continuum, at the other end of which are vague and indistinct presentations, emotional and physical feelings, and finally subliminally or subconsciously presented objects that we can become focally conscious of only with the greatest difficulty. Such objects in the periphery are what Sartre calls non-positional.
The question is whether, paraphrasing Sartre, something that can be referred to as being conscious of being conscious is always and necessarily present in the unattended-to periphery of our experience. My answer is No. It is not the case that every episode of being positionally conscious of an object includes at the same time being non-positionally conscious of being conscious. In my own experience I find that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. I argue for this thesis in some detail elsewhere.(9) In this essay I just want to examine Sartre’s evidence.
He gives as an example counting cigarettes:
If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. … Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity.(10)
“Non-thetic” means roughly “non-positional.” When we pay attention to something, our intentional object is like the thesis of an argument, the main thing being focused on. “Non-thetic,” obviously, means the opposite, something not focused on.
Here Sartre describes his own experience, and we have no reason to doubt him. While he focuses on the items being counted, his activity of counting is present in his experience in the background. And that background acquaintance with his activity, he says, is what enables him to report what he is doing.
If … anyone should ask, “What are you doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.” This reply aims not only at the instantaneous consciousness [i.e. moment of being conscious] which I can achieve by reflection but at those fleeting consciousnesses [moments of being conscious] which have passed without being reflected on, those which are forever not-reflected-on in my immediate past. …(11)
The “instantaneous consciousness” achieved by reflection is simply noticing that he is counting. (Or that he was just now counting, since now he is thinking about counting rather than actually doing it.) He says that his background acquaintance with his activity in moments just past is what enables him to answer. So far, so good, but then he attempts to universalize the situation.
It is the non-thetic consciousness of counting which is the very condition of my act of adding. If it were otherwise, how would the addition be the unifying theme of my consciousnesses [moments of being conscious]? In order that this theme should preside over a whole series of syntheses of unifications and recognitions, it must be present to itself, not as a thing but as an operative intention …. (12)
By “syntheses of unifications and recognitions” he means the noetic, interpretive element in moments of being conscious by virtue of which our experience seems to be continuous. He says that he would not even know that he has been adding if not for the “non-thetic consciousness of counting,” by which I think he means the appearance of his activity of counting in the background or periphery of all the things present to him in his experience. His intention to count the cigarettes is operative, meaning not focused on but having an effect nevertheless.
But notice that he does not claim that he actually finds an appearance of counting in the periphery of every experience that results in knowing how many items there are. He says such an appearance “must be” there. It is an assumption, not a phenomenological observation.
The assumption of a background, or non-positional, appearance of counting is an explanation of how he is able to answer the question. But it’s not the only possible explanation. Sartre asserts that he must have been conscious of his experience, i.e. known what he was doing, all along in the background. Another explanation is that he could simply have recognized it based on tacit prior knowledge.
Suppose that you are concentrating on something: reading a book, perhaps, or fixing a broken pipe or working a difficult puzzle. Your attention is focused on the book (or more precisely the story or argument in the book), the pipe or the puzzle. Someone asks you what you are doing, and you tell them. How do you know? You have a flash of recognition. Perhaps that recognition comes from having been peripherally aware of your activity of concentrating. Or you could just as well simply see what you are doing and recognize it because of prior knowledge. You have read other books, fixed other things, worked other puzzles. Your knowledge of doing those things does not have to have been phenomenally present in the dim background while you were reading, repairing or working. What you know is tacit; you don’t pay attention to it, and you might not even be able to articulate it.(13) But you know it nevertheless.
We are seeking an explanation of how someone knows what they are (or have just been) doing when asked. We have two alternatives: (a) having been non-positionally conscious of it all along and (b) noticing it when asked and recognizing it based on tacit knowledge. How shall we choose? The best explanation is not that every episode of being conscious of something includes at the same time being non-positionally conscious of being conscious. Sometimes that may be true, but often it is not, at least in my experience. So I think Sartre is wrong.
One’s own experience is key to the whole question. I assert that I, the author, am not always non-positionally conscious of being conscious. Others assert not only that they are, but that everyone is, including me and you, dear reader. There’s no way to decide objectively which is true. The best each of us can do is to examine our own experience and decide for ourself.
As fascinating as the question is for some of us, no doubt it is pretty much irrelevant to most. But the activity of examining yourself is not irrelevant. Knowing yourself is key to a fulfilled and happy life. If you want such a life, examine yourself, exercise the distinctively human function of self-reflection and find out who and what you are.
Notes
(1) Meacham, “Being Conscious of Being Conscious.”
(2) Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. liii.
(3) Sartre, Lêtre et le néant, p. 19. The sentence in French is “toute conscience positionnelle d’objet est en même temps conscience non positionnelle d’elle-même.”
(4) Meacham, “How to Talk About Subjectivity (Don’t Say ‘Consciousness’).”
(5) Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. li.
(6) Ibid.
(7) https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/posit as of 3 November 2022. See also https://www.dictionary.com/browse/posit and https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/posit.
(8) Meacham, “Under The Hood.”
(9) Meacham, “Being Conscious of Being Conscious.”
(10) Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. liii.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Wikipedia, “Tacit knowledge.”
References
Meacham, Bill. “Being Conscious of Being Conscious.” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1660.
Meacham, Bill. “How to Talk About Subjectivity (Don’t Say ‘Consciousness’).” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/TalkAboutSubjectivity_v4.html and https://www.academia.edu/34066339/How_to_Talk_About_Subjectivity_Dont_Say_Consciousness as of 2 November 2022.
Meacham, Bill. “Under The Hood.” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=2121.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Available online at http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/BeingAndNothingness_Sartre.pdf as of 27 April 2020.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Lêtre et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Corrected edition with index by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943. Online publication https://prepasaintsernin.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/sartre-etre-neant.pdf
as of 12 October 2022.
Wikipedia. “Tacit knowledge.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge as of 5 November 2022.
AI Sentience
Could an artificial intelligence (AI) be sentient? How could we tell? A recent opinion piece in the New York Times claims that AIs are not sentient.(1) The article raises an interesting question but does not adequately answer it, in part because it conflates sentience and intelligence and in part because its language is confused. Here is an example of the confusion:
There is no evidence this technology is sentient or conscious — two words that describe an awareness of the surrounding world.
This sentence is little more than a tautology, since in English “conscious” and “aware” mean the same thing.(2) It basically says that “sentient” means “conscious” and “conscious” means being conscious.
Here is another:
Sentience — the ability to experience feelings and sensations — is not something easily measured. Nor is consciousness — being awake and aware of your surroundings.
So sentience is the ability to experience — that is, the ability to be conscious of — feelings and sensations, and being conscious is (substituting equivalent words) being awake and conscious. That doesn’t tell us much.
Confused as this language is, we can agree that “sentient” means being conscious. But in what sense? Does it mean having the capacity to be conscious or actually being conscious during some period of time? Or both? Clearly if something has no ability to be conscious, it can’t be conscious in any given duration of time, so let’s say it means both. The author is claiming that AIs have no capacity to be conscious and are never conscious of their world. Unfortunately, he offers little evidence for his assertion.
Before we get there, let’s dispose of a related question, whether an AI can be intelligent. Here is a definition of intelligence:
The ability to learn — the ability to take in new context and solve something in a new way — is intelligence.
Obviously many AIs are intelligent, albeit artificially so. That’s the whole point of the AI enterprise, to create things that can learn and solve problems in a new way. When Google Assistant or Alexa hears what you say and gives a relevant and useful response, that’s AI at work. And we can judge how intelligent they are by the relevance of their responses. Siri, for instance, comes in a poor third in such a contest. But are they conscious?
We need to distinguish two aspects of being conscious, first pointed out many years ago by philosopher Ned Block.(3) He calls them “phenomenal consciousness” and “access consciousness,” which I prefer to restate as being conscious in phenomenal mode and being conscious in access mode. In phenomenal mode we see colors and shapes, we hear sounds, we smell aromas, etc. In access mode we have ideas or mental representations of what we are phenomenally conscious of, and these ideas enable us to do something with it, such as reason about it, say something about it or take some action on it. We are able to do these things with something of which we are phenomenally conscious because we have a representation of it in our mind.
In most cases the phenomenal aspect and the access-enabling aspect occur together. That’s why many use the term “conscious” to mean both. But some AIs are clearly conscious in access mode even though we doubt that they are conscious in phenomenal mode. An example is a self-driving car or a robot. Such devices detect and respond to their environment. They can make decisions, for instance whether to stop or proceed or to slow down or speed up. They can speak; think of Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. But we doubt that the world appears to them phenomenally in any way at all.
And that’s the issue at hand, whether AIs can be truly phenomenally conscious. Are they — can they be — conscious of things in phenomenal mode, as we are when we are awake and alert? Does a world appear to them as it does to us?
The problem is that we can tell only inferentially. As the author says, whether something is sentient is “not something easily measured.” We have no direct access to someone else’s mind, let alone the mind of an AI. Hence, we can only ascertain the presence of mind from behavior.
Unfortunately, the author cites as evidence researchers who seem to conflate sentience, the ability to be phenomenally conscious, with intelligence.
“A conscious organism — like a person or a dog or other animals — can learn something in one context and learn something else in another context and then put the two things together to do something in a novel context they have never experienced before,” Dr. [Colin] Allen of the University of Pittsburgh said. “This technology is nowhere close to doing that.”
Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology who is part of the A.I. research group at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed. “The computational capacities of current A.I. like the large language models,” she said, “don’t make it any more likely that they are sentient than that rocks or other machines are.”
The argument seems to be that current AIs are too dumb to be conscious. But that doesn’t follow at all. Plenty of conscious organisms are quite stupid.(4) Lack of intelligence is no evidence for lack of ability to be conscious, nor for failure to actually be conscious at any given time.
More likely, although not stated explicitly, is that the author and the researchers he cites are a bit narrow minded. They think that only living organisms can be phenomenally conscious and arrangements of silicon and metal obviously can’t. But that is just prejudice. We think other people are conscious because they are like us, and we know that we are conscious. Animals such as dogs and cats appear to be conscious because they behave like us and we can imagine inhabiting their point of view and seeing the world as they do. There are certain limits to such imagination, of course. Can we imagine how the world would appear to a bat?(5) Or an amoeba? It is even harder to imagine being an AI. But reality is not limited to what we can imagine.
A more plausible reason for doubting AI sentience, not mentioned by the author of the New York Times piece, is that a certain complexity of material substrate — neurons and brain cells in living beings — seems to be required for an organism to be conscious. And the more complex that substrate, the more vivid and intense the world appears to the organism and the more intelligent is its repertoire of behavior. On this view, because AIs lack such a complex substrate of living cells they can’t be conscious. But perhaps such complexity can be mirrored in non-living form. Perhaps it’s not the nature of the material substrate that counts but the complex patterns embodied in the substrate.
The authors disparage science fiction and accuse AI zealots of failing to distinguish science fiction from reality. But science fiction has much to offer. Consider the novels of Iain Banks known as the Culture Series. They are set in a utopian, post-scarcity society of humans, humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent AIs living in artificial habitats spread across the galaxy.(6) The non-human AIs are characters in the stories as much as the humans are. They give every indication of being not only highly intelligent but also quite conscious of their world.
If such a world were to come to pass, we could distinguish between AIs and humans only by means of their appearance, not by whether they were sentient or not. That time has not yet come, but it may well be on its way. We may agree that today’s AIs most likely aren’t sentient, but we have no infallible way to decide for sure. And we certainly can’t be sure that future AIs won’t be. A bit of humility is called for here, as well as a sense of wonder, which underlies science fiction and philosophy both.
Notes
(1) Metz, “A.I. Is Not Sentient.” All quotations unless otherwise cited are from this article.
(2) The English language has two terms that mean roughly the same thing, “conscious” and “aware.” The former is from a Latin root, and the latter is from Old Saxon. (See Dictionary.com, “Conscious” and “Aware.”) Many other languages have only one: “bewusst” in German and “consciente” in Spanish, for instance. The two English terms are interchangeable. The only exception to using them interchangeably is that sometimes “aware” connotes being informed or cognizant in a way that “conscious” does not. If you want to say that someone knows the rules, “She is aware of the rules” sounds better than “She is conscious of the rules.” But that is not the meaning in the sentence quoted.
(3) Block, “On a confusion about a function of consciousness.”
(4) Unattributed, “Top 10 Dumbest Animals in the World.”
(5) Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”
(6) Wikipedia, “Culture series.”
References
Block, Ned. “On a confusion about a function of consciousness.” Behavioral And Brain Sciences (1995) vol. 18, pp. 227-287. Online publication https://www.nedblock.us/papers/1995_Function.pdf as of 6 August 2022..
Dictionary.com. “Aware.” Online publication http://www.dictionary.com/browse/aware, as of 4 May 2016.
Dictionary.com. “Conscious.” Online publication http://www.dictionary.com/browse/conscious, as of 4 May 2016.
Metz, Cade. “A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?” Online publication
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/technology/ai-sentient-google.html as of 6 August 2022. If that link doesn’t work, try this one instead:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/technology/ai-sentient-google.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DFDm4fiPgYCIiG_EPKarskbtp2xDmdWN5MNqNqS_t1wetSeUxxTg3i6r21pKM4GQRn44SiQjFxmJvXQbEz9TKtZWC3dr0jlLf65hjXPX3tWaTbzSYrcw16pJVmJQn73yNfxaaWAfc1joclpYopA5l8RzkEYjDb_KW7TkUjZ6jVK03U-QI0WOpGWDDMnNH6674IcwVaC12uX2ooqC9nq4saYIVLSf65ex0we8P-gqETAnhqKOqqA54xT4vVkNZ6oP65_uCA6uRBZWYDCbN5PK4&smid=url-share.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 435-450. Online publication http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914 as of 29 April 2015.
Unattributed. “Top 10 Dumbest Animals in the World.” Online publication https://www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com/top-10-dumbest-animals-in-the-world/ as of 6 August 2022.
Wikipedia. “Culture series.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series as of 6 August 2022.
