"Why is there something and not nothing?" A bit more on the question

I thought it might be useful to offer a few clarifying remarks concerning the philosophical version of the “cosmological question,” and the notion that this question operates (as I claimed in my recent “Science vs. Philosophy?” post) as a wellspring of belief in the transcendent.


First of all, as I noted in that earlier post, Leibniz put the question as follows: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” By “nothing,” here, Leibniz meant absolutely nothing, not even empty space, and certainly not empty space governed by empirically discovered laws that regulate the behavior of that empty space. By most standards of “somethingness” that I know of, to have rule-governed capacities is to be something. (In fact, as I understand one of Hermann Lotze's arguments, that is what makes something something).

Leibniz’s question, in other words, isn’t a question about why there is this kind of something (a vacuum governed by certain laws) as opposed to that sort of something (an expanding universe of quantum particles organized in a rich diversity of ways and governed by a set of basic constants). Leibniz is asking why there is anything at all.

In my earlier post I said that this “cosmological philosophical question” (borrowing the useful designator Burk offers in one comment) operates as a source of belief in the transcendent. I want to clarify what I mean by that. “The transcendent” refers to some reality beyond the empirical world but fundamental to determining its character, much in the way that the reality into which Neo awakens (in “The Matrix” movies) is a reality beyond the virtual reality matrix but fundamental to shaping the latter’s character. Put simply, “the transcendent” refers to a level of reality in principle beyond the scope of scientific inquiry but which, if it existed, would serve as the ultimate “explainer” of the reality that falls within the scope of science.

My claim is that the cosmological philosophical question (hereafter CPQ) helps give rise to belief in such a realm. Note, however, that belief in the existence of such a realm is distinct from any beliefs about what that realm of reality is like (e.g., whether or not it is personal or impersonal, monistic or dualistic, etc.), and also from any beliefs about the scope or lack thereof of human access to such a realm (e.g., whether introspective reflection on the content of consciousness can give us some insight into this realm that outward, disinterested examination of empirical objects cannot). To say that the CPQ gives rise to belief in the transcendent is not to say that it offers any particular answers to these other questions.

But even if belief in the transcendent is divorced from any beliefs about the transcendent or any beliefs about our ability to get in touch with the transcendent, it doesn’t follow that such belief is insignificant. At a minimum, such belief implies that there are important outer limits to what science can discover about reality, even in principle. If we were to imagine that science had completed its work (which it never will), discovering and understanding everything that it is possible to discover and understand about reality through broadly scientific means, belief in the transcendent entails that the most fundamental truths about reality would remain unknown.

To be clear, believing that there are orders of reality that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry is not to say that, within its scope of inquiry, science shouldn’t be trusted (or shouldn’t be regarded as the go-to method for gaining knowledge). It isn’t to hold that some purported revelation from a purportedly transcendent source should be trusted above the direct evidence of sustained scientific inquiry. I think much scientific hostility to the postulate that there is a transcendent realm is rooted in these sorts of confusions about what positing the transcendent does (and does not) involve.

But at least some of the hostility is surely rooted in something that the postulation of the transcendent does imply—namely, that no matter how vital and amazing science is in furthering our knowledge, it cannot plumb the deepest and most important mysteries of existence. Whatever science learns, and however important or useful its teachings, the ultimate nature of reality will remain beyond its grasp. At best, some scientists bristle at this suggestion because they don’t want to place a priori philosophical limits on science’s reach. At worst, they want to believe that they are part of the ultimate project of unearthing the deepest mysteries that there are, and belief in the transcendent undercuts that narrative.

In any event, my claim in the "Science vs. Philosophy?" post was that the CPQ operates as a basis for belief in the transcendent. Now this is different from saying that the CPQ operates as a good basis for such belief, but as it happens I also think that the CPQ can serve as the starting point for a powerful philosophical argument for the transcendent—a point I make at length in Chapter 6 of Is God a Delusion?

I won’t repeat what I argued there. Instead, I will simply summarize the heart of the argument, which is this: In order for the CPQ to have an answer (in order for there to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing, as opposed to the existence of the universe being a brute fact), there must exist something that possesses the property of self-existence, that is, something whose nature renders it such that it could not have failed to exist—something whose nature sufficiently explains its own existence.

This is a property that, as Hume argued, is inconceivable of anything in the empirical realm (or any empirical entity we could hypothetically construct with our imaginations). His principle, in effect, is that the formal nature of empirical reality is such that anything which can be conceived to exist can also be conceived not to exist. And so, no empirical thing we can conceive would be such that it’s empirical nature necessitated its existence.

And so, if the CPQ is to have an answer, we must posit something beyond the empirical—something transcendent. And if the transcendent is posited to answer the CPQ, it is posited as the ultimate explanation for the existence of things.

Of course, we could say that the CPQ lacks an answer. We could say that there is no reason why there is something and not nothing—that, instead, it’s just a brute fact. That’s what Bertrand Russell did. But could a reasonable person reasonably disagree with Russell? Could a reasonable person believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason—that everything admits of an explanation, even if we can’t discern what it is? If so, a reasonable person, reflecting on the CPQ, would come away believing in the transcendent.

I don’t think this “cosmological argument” is irresistible. I don’t, in other words, regard it as a proof of the transcendent. My own view is that this argument, like many other philosophical arguments, shows why it is that a reasonable person can reasonably believe in the transcendent—even if that does not preclude the possibility that other reasonable people might reasonably believe otherwise.

Now it is important to be clear that certain questions superficially similar to CPQ do not serve as any sort of basis—good or otherwise—for believing in the transcendent. That a vacuum is inherently unstable (given certain empirically discovered laws regulating vacuums) may explain why a vacuum in a universe governed by the basic laws that prevail in this universe would resolve into more interesting “stuff”—and thus answer the question of why our universe is a universe full of protons and electrons and stars and planets rather than an endless void. But while that might answer an interesting and important question in physics without invoking anything beyond what is accessible to physics, it does not answer the CPQ.

For the reasons I've given here and elsewhere, I’m pretty sure that if the CPQ has an answer—if there is a reason why there is anything at all—that answer in principle can’t be discovered by physics or any of the other sciences (although I’m open to being proved wrong about this).

There are some (and Krauss seems to be one of them, at least given some remarks he makes in his recent apology about his earlier dismissiveness towards philosophy) who, on the basis of this fact, are dismissive of the CPQ, regarding it as an absurd or meaningless question—as if a condition for a question’s significance is its capacity to motivate a scientific inquiry. But I am very skeptical of such dismissals. If you were a physicist trying to do physics and you confronted a question that wasn’t a question that physics could begin to address, then you might not as a physicist be interested in the question. But it doesn’t follow that no human being, as a human being, should be interested in the question. Nor does it follow that the question is incoherent—unless you adopt a logical positivist philosophy of language, which I’d advise against on the grounds that doing so renders the logical positivist philosophy of language incoherent.

In any event, my own conclusion is that the question can be addressed to some extent philosophically, insofar as it can be shown that on the assumption that the CPQ admits of an answer, we are forced to the conclusion that the answer is something that transcends the reality we encounter empirically.

Whether philosophical arguments can take us any further than reasonable belief in a “something-I-know-not-what” beyond the limits of science—that is a much more challenging question that I won’t explore here (and didn’t explore in Is God a Delusion?). What I will say is that people who (reasonably, in my judgment) believe in the transcendent can and do and should speculate about it. And these speculations are susceptible to philosophical scrutiny, in the sense that philosophers can assess such things as their internal coherence, their consistency with what we know about the empirical world (since certain views about the transcendent have implications for what the empirical world would look like), and their pragmatic implications for human life.

Philosophers can and should engage in such assessments, since such assessments help us to discern what could be true and what can’t be true about a transcendent reality that defies the grasp of specific human knowledge. Knowing what could and could not be the case about X is better than nothing, even if we cannot know precisely what is the case about X. And I think philosophers can and should address questions such as whether there are conditions under which it is objectionable to live one’s life as if one or another speculative vision about the transcendent were true—and whether there are conditions under which doing so is not objectionable.

Foundationalisms

On what should we base our beliefs? "Reason and evidence," some are inclined to reply. Sure. Fine. But what is reasonable, and what counts as evidence?

 

Biblical fundamentalists think that something being asserted somewhere in the Bible is a piece of evidence that the asserted proposition is true. Why do they treat such a thing as evidence? Because, we might say, they believe a certain story about the Bible and its origins, a story which, if true, implies that biblical assertions have enormous evidentiary weight. But why think this story about the Bible is true?

 

Most everybody thinks that sensory experiences can serve as evidence for the truth of claims about a world external to the mind, claims prompted by our sense experience. Why?  Maybe there's a story here, too, a story about our senses and their relation to the world that would have to be very different from the story told in the first part of the movie "the Matrix." But why believe that story? Or maybe there isn't a story here at all. Maybe we just believe the deliverances of our senses, period. There is no reason. We just can't help it.

 

Leibniz thought that the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), much like the principle of non-contradiction, was a self-evident principle (self-evident to our intellect) which could reliably guide our reasoning. As such, he thought he could reason from some pretty uncontroversial propositions to the conclusion that a necessary being must exist. We might say that, based on his understanding of "reason," the existence of contingent things is evidence for the existence of a necessary thing. Why does Leibniz accept PSR? Why does Hume reject it?

 

In each of these cases we are led to think about foundations. Our reasoning has to have starting points from which we reason--things that are either immediately taken as having evidential value, or are taken to have evidential value on the basis of some broader system of beliefs--perhaps organized into a narrative framework. And our reasoning doesn't merely need evidential starting points. We also need to have standards of reasoning--principles which guide our inferences, leading us to take some body of evidence to be evidence for a conclusion.

 

In short, to base our beliefs on reason and evidence, we need rational and evidential starting points. Foundationalist epistemologies treat our starting points as that upon which our whole network of beliefs is ultimately built.  Following the metaphor of building construction, we need a solid foundation or the whole edifice becomes unsound.

 

In my last post, I suggested that Hegel could be viewed as a foundationalist, but of a special kind--namely, a fallibilistic foundationalist. In this post, I want to distinguish some different species of foundationalism, locate Hegel's dialectic within this taxonomy, and offer a case for the advantages of Hegel's approach.

 

I'll begin with a broad distinction between what I’ll call absolute foundationalism and fallibilistic foundationalism. Absolute foundationalism treats one’s foundations as beyond challenge, and might be further divided into two sub-species: what I’ll call Cartesian-style foundationalism, and what I’ll call dogmatic foundationalism. Cartesian-style foundationalism seeks to discover which foundations are, in fact, beyond dispute—through something like the methodological doubt pursued by Descartes in his Meditations—and then rely only on such foundations. Dogmatic foundationalism, by contrast, treats its starting points as beyond dispute but makes no attempt to offer a philosophical case for doing so.

 

In fact, dogmatic foundationalism might be viewed as arising out of the perceived failure of Cartesian-style foundationalism, based on a pair of prima facie compelling critiques. The first critique runs basically as follows. To rely on nothing other than those starting points which are indubitable is to rely on starting points that can’t get you anywhere. If you insist on believing only what can be grounded on such starting points, you are driven to a kind of solipsism: the only thing you can trust is the existence of your own thoughts, and you are unwarranted in believing that any of those thoughts correspond to any reality outside your own mind. This is a kind of extreme skeptical outcome that is intolerable—it makes living a human life impossible—and can only be overcome by allowing in foundations that don’t have the Cartesian stamp of indubitability.

 

The second critique should be familiar to followers of this blog: No attempt to prove that one’s foundations are beyond dispute can be successful, because no such attempt can be ungrounded. How, then, can the attempt itself avoid relying on foundational starting points? And these will be either the very ones one is attempting to establish, or different foundations which, therefore, have not themselves been proven to be beyond dispute.

 

In effect, dogmatic foundationists draw three lessons from these critiques of Cartesian-style foundationalism: (a) everyone has foundations, (b) everyone has more foundations than the class of indubitable ones (assuming this class has members at all), and (c) no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones, since all such efforts are either circular (and hence dogmatic) or appeal to deeper, unconsidered foundations that are held to dogmatically.

 

This third lesson is what leads them straight to dogmatic foundationalism: we have no choice but to be dogmatic foundationalists, but we do have a choice about which dogma to embrace. On this view, the only difference between the empiricist and the biblical fundamentalist is which foundations are being held to dogmatically—"who" one has chosen to treat as one’s ultimate epistemic authority.

 

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it is a false dilemma. There are more options than the two versions of absolute foundationalism (Cartesian-style and dogmatic). There is fallibilistic foundationalism.

 

The fallibilistic foundationalist accepts (a) and (b), but isn’t prepared to embrace an unqualified form of (c). Instead of insisting that “no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones,” the fallibilistic foundationalist wants to say instead that “no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones prior to their adoption.” But once one has adopted a set of foundations, a critical stance becomes possible with respect to specific foundational beliefs.

 

Hegel's dialectic can be seen as falling into this class. I will concede that there are those who would resist using the term "foundationalism" to describe Hegel's method, but this is a linguistic quibble in which I'm not much invested. I recall that once, at a party in graduate school, I announced that Hegel "has a coherence theory of knowledge but a correspondence theory of truth." In so doing I classed him as a coherentist rather than as a foundationalist. But these are terms of art in the discipline--and there is something about Hegel's epistemology that strikes me as warranting the foundationalist label (as I noted in my last post).

In describing Hegel's approach as it relates specifically to philosophy, Michael Allen Fox notes in his surprisingly accessible book on Hegel (called, interestingly enough, The Accessible Hegel) that Hegel was largely indifferent to one's starting point in the philosophical journey. Wherever we start, "our philosophical journey will inevitably be a prolonged process of self-examination in which thought interrogates itself and remedies its deficiencies as it progresses." The end result of this process will be what "'justifies' the starting point we have chosen by proving its fruitfulness in yielding knowledge."

We have to start somewhere--to think at all requires us to have rational and evidential starting points that characterize what that thinking will look like. But as we engage in whatever style of thinking these starting points entail, we will inevitably encounter and transcend deficiencies. Whatever we think about, we will eventually be forced inward to thought itself, and called upon by its failures to revise our starting points.

In fact, Hegel thought this was true not just of philosophy. The same dialectical process plays out not just in the history of philosophy, but in human history. The efforts of human societies to engage with the world drive humanity towards "self-interrogation" in which deficiencies are discovered and remedied.

As a way of clarifying and defending this Hegelian approach, I want to consider a version of fallibilistic foundationalism out of which Hegel's species might be thought to arise. I’m inclined to give it a big mouthful of a name: defeasible-but-trustworthy doxastic practice foundationalism. After all, it’s important for academics to come up with pretentious-sounding names, or they wouldn’t be academics. But to save space, I’ll call it DTDP foundationalism for short.

 

To understand this species of foundationalism, we need to know what a “doxastic practice” is. The term is one I get from William Alston, and it basically refers to any belief-forming practice one might engage in. Here are some examples: 

Assign a set of contrary beliefs to heads and tails on a coin, flip the coin, and believe in accord with the outcome of the coin flip.

Use your senses to investigate your environment, and believe whatever propositions you find yourself immediately inclined to believe based on such sensory investigation.

In attempting to form beliefs about what happened to you in your past, consult your memory.

In forming beliefs about regularities in nature, make predictions about what one ought to observe under given conditions if the supposed regularity holds, then create or put oneself into the given conditions and determine if one observes what was predicted. Keep doing this. If the supposed regularity remains unfalsified after extensive testing, accept it as true.

In forming beliefs about what happened in Europe in the 19th Century, consult your old “History of Western Europe” textbook.

In forming beliefs about what happens after bodily death, consult the Upanishads and the Vedas and believe whatever is clearly stated on this matter in these texts.

 DTDP foundationalism attaches credibility to some but not all of the range of possible doxastic practices, in effect treating as foundational any belief that comes from this select list of “trustworthy” practices. But a belief coming from a “generally trusted” practice is not immune to criticism. Rather, any such belief, call it B, is believed unless and until it is confronted with “defeaters,” that is, other beliefs that arise out of trusted doxastic practices and which call B into question.

 

There are different sorts of defeaters, but I won’t get into that now. What this rough characterization makes clear is that this species of foundationalism acknowledges the fallibility of our foundations, and builds a kind of checks-and-balances system into our belief-forming practices. The checks and balances cannot be implemented apart from embracing the presumptive trustworthiness of a set of doxastic practices, but insofar as the trustworthiness of their deliverances is only presumptive rather than absolute, it allows for specific foundational beliefs produced by the agreed set of doxastic practices to be rejected based on the total deliverances of the entire set.

 

But how do we arrive at which doxastic practices to trust in the first place? Here, there seem to be a range of alternatives. You could take an essentially social approach: identify those doxastic practices that enjoy both wide social use (they are widely relied on in the formation of beliefs) and a high degree of intersubjective corroboration (they typically lead most people to the same beliefs when used in the same circumstances).

 

Then there’s the introspective approach. You look to the “phenomenological features” of the doxastic practice and its deliverances—that is, those qualities or characteristics available to introspection. Perhaps the beliefs formed by the practice consistently just seem right to you, so much so that you essentially “cannot help but believe them.” Or maybe the practice itself has an inner “veridical feel”—a sense of putting you in touch with truth as you’re engaging in it.

Or maybe you identify those doxastic practices you pretty much have to trust if you want to live anything remotely like an ordinary human life, and you trust them and only them.

Alternatively, you might take the approach of someone like Alvin Plantinga, saying that those doxastic practices are trustworthy which involve the use of cognitive faculties under those conditions in which the faculties are generally reliable. The problem here, of course, is that there may be a difference between a doxastic practice being reliable and our being able to tell that it is reliable. Plantinga has famously proposed that we have a cognitive faculty dubbed "the sensus divinitatus" which is responsible for theistic belief and which produces that belief reliably. His critics instantly cry foul--but part of Plantinga's point is that we have no inner guarantee or non-circular proof that any of the things we treat as reliable cognitive faculties are reliable cognitive faculties. That a congitive faculty is trustworthy, in the sense of consistently delivering true beliefs, does not clearly entail that we have immediate access to this fact.  And that, of course, is part of the problem. How do you decide which doxastic practices to presumptively (not absolutely) trust?

 

However you decide, it appears at least initially as if you confront variants of the same troubles that plagued absolute foundationalism. The problems have simply shifted from the level of foundational beliefs to the level of foundational doxastic practices.

 

Consider: Suppose I adopt a social version of DTDP foundationalism—trusting my senses, the pronouncements of certain socially agreed-upon authorities, etc. Either I have grounds for believing that doxastic practices embodying the relevant social features are more likely to produce true beliefs than those that lack these features, or I don’t. If I do, what would those grounds be like? Wouldn’t they either be circular (relying for their support on beliefs that are ultimately derived from these very same doxastic practices) or based on different doxastic practices that then fall outside the scope of justification in terms of their social features? Aren’t we then driven to being dogmatic in our embrace of the doxastic practices we embrace, simply shifting the problem from unjustified trust in certain foundational beliefs to unjustified trust in certain foundational belief-forming practices?

 

Here is where we are, I think, pushed towards something more Hegelian. The reason why DTDP foundationalism offers a basis for critiquing foundational beliefs, even when they come from trusted doxastic practices, is because the whole set of trusted practices can generate defeaters for individual beliefs. But by the very same mechanism, DTDP foundationalism also provides a basis for critiquing the doxastic practices themselves.

 

Here’s what I have in mind. If a doxastic practice that was initially put into the “trustworthy” class keeps encountering defeaters for the beliefs it generates, it might eventually be bumped out of that class. Or if the doxastic practice encounters defeaters in a certain context, it might be judged untrustworthy in that context. We might find that it encounters fewer defeaters when certain refinements are made to the practice, and so the practice might evolve to embody these refinements. It is very easy to see the scientific method as emerging out of precisely this sort of refinement.

 

But keep in mind that all of this evolution is influenced by one’s starting points—that is, by which doxastic practices one has initially included in the generally trustworthy set. What set of doxastic practices one treats as trustworthy will shape what defeaters, if any, drive the evolution of the whole set. Start with too narrow a set, or get “unlucky” in your starting points, and you may be left with only a few refined doxastic practices that you trust—and can you really trust even them? Maybe their having escaped defeat is mostly a function of the shrinking set of possible sources of defeat.

 

The worry here is this: The smaller the set of trusted doxastic practices, the less likely any of them are to encounter defeaters—simply because of how few they are, rather than because of their intrinsic merits. And as the evolutionary process described above continues, you won’t be pumping out new doxastic practices. Defeaters destroy. They don't create. As the evolution continues and the number of trustworthy doxastic practices shrinks, we’ll thus be put into a position in which we should be increasingly less confident that continued-failure-to-be-defeated is a good gauge of trustworthiness.

Perhaps this worry isn't decisive, but a different worry looms nearby. Even if one's remaining doxastic practices are deemed trustworthy based on their success in producing undefeated beliefs, we might worry that the subset of beliefs generated by these practices is far too narrow to be representative of reality, or that it is too narrow to help us live our lives in a way that meaningfully embodies the truth about ourselves and our world. We may have evolved certain practices to a point of high refinement but left ourselves with a set of practices that is nevertheless deficient, because the boundaries of the knowable that they establish are too narrow.

 

But once one treats doxastic practices as mutually evolving in the light of each others’ deliverances, one can begin to ask whether this fixation on nothing but doxastic practices might not itself speak to a set of unconsidered presuppositions—some hidden starting points that shape our ideas about what should be our starting points. Why should we make doxastic practices the sole underpinnings of our belief system? Why not, instead, begin with an interpretation of the whole of experience, embrace a set of doxastic practices based on that interpretation, and then critically live out this whole?

In other words, starting with doxastic practices as the foundation for all our beliefs is not the only way to start, nor is it the only thing that can lead to an evolutionary process. So, why not allow as a legitimate starting point a perspective which treats a narrative picture of reality as foundational, and doxastic practices as derivative?

 

A process that treats only doxastic processes as foundational, and then evolves by successively refining and discarding doxastic practices in the light of experience, is in danger of ultimately leaving one with too small a set of foundational beliefs on which to build. As noted above, while experience with the failures of doxastic practices can refine and rule out ones that were already part of your epistemic arsenal, it doesn’t generally introduce into your arsenal wholly new doxastic practices that you’ve never thought to try.

 

Consider the analogy of natural selection: to take advantage of all the "niches" available in the environment, it’s not enough to have a mechanism that kills off unsuccessful species. You also need some creative wellspring from which new species arise. Storytelling, speculative philosophy and theology, mythological narrative—these things are the creative side of the human endeavor, and it is in part from them that new ways of engaging with the world, of wrestling with what to believe and what not to believe, come about. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't just allow holistic interpretations and narratives as potential starting points, but should allow a place in our epistemological lives for the creative process by which such interpretations and narratives arise. In other words, we should treat storytelling and speculative thinking as not just an entertaining diversion but as helping us in the quest for truth.

This is not to say, of course, that every story we tell should be immediately embraced as true or anything like that. But some stories resonate in such a way that people are moved to live them out as if they were true. And in some cases these initial experiments don't immediately come crashing down by virtue of a volley of defeaters. Instead, the experiments knock down some parts of the story but not others. And some elements in the narrative motivate new doxastic practices which themselves prove extremely fruitful, in the sense of pumping out beliefs that resist defeat. Many see the birth of the scientific method in these terms: the Christian conviction that the universe is essentially orderly, that there must be a regularity and structure beneath even the most chaotic-seeming dimensions of our experience, set the stage for science.

 

And of course there’s more to life than telling stories and engaging in doxastic practices. We have artistic and athletic activities, cultural and religious rituals, spiritual practices, ways of life that embody value systems and moral codes. Engaging in the business of living impacts, in all sorts of ways, our beliefs and our ways of forming beliefs.

 

The point is that doxastic practices are not isolated from human life in all its richness and diversity. To allow them to evolve in isolation from the rest is to presuppose that there isn’t anything in the rest that has the power to promote the quest for coming into alignment with the Truth. And I would say that the fallibilism implicit in DTDP foundationalism calls one to be suspicious of any such presupposition. So, not only does DTDP foundationalism move beyond criticism of the deliverances of one’s adopted doxastic practices and towards lived-out criticism of the practices themselves; it also moves towards allowing for more than just doxastic practices into the class of legitimate starting points one might legitimately live out critically.

And so we've made our way towards something that looks more like the Hegelian approach. But how does it work, you may ask? How does one framework give rise to another? What sorts of deficiencies motivate a change in one's system?

 

Here I must confess to an attempt to be clever. In case no one’s noticed yet, this post has not merely been an attempt to make a case for the Hegelian dialectic. It’s also been laid out, however imperfectly, to serve as an example of the Hegelian dialectic at work.

Considering the Place of Intuitions in Philosophical Reasoning

A key issue that comes up repeatedly on this blog also strikes me as crucial for understanding the philosophical method—and so seems a fitting topic both for students of mine who are about to dig into my philosophy of religion course and for regular readers of this blog. The issue is this: When it is reasonable to trust our intuitions? Put another way, when is it appropriate to make use of an intuitive judgment as a premise in an argument, thereby treating it as a reason to believe a conclusion?


Of course, all of us agree that our intuitions can be mistaken. But does it follow that we are never warranted in making use of them? Is it even possible to refuse to make use of our intuitions—or is it, rather, the case that all of us inevitably appeal to intuitive judgments (but, perhaps, are mostly unaware that we are doing so, because the judgments seem so obvious to us that we don’t even notice we’re assuming them?)

I suspect the latter is true, especially when we are wrestling with philosophical questions—questions which, typically, cannot be answered based on sensory observation alone. In my own experience, everyone who engages in philosophical discussions and debates has intuitions that they are making use of—but not everyone recognizes their own intuitive presuppositions. In a sense, our intuitive starting points operate as the lenses through which we look at our world. Since we’re looking through them, they often become invisible to us. Part of what philosophers strive to do (with greater or lesser degrees of success) is to explicate what these starting points are. And in many cases the most valuable outcome of philosophical debate is that participants come away from them more fully aware of their own intuitive starting points than they were before—as well as more aware of how looking through those “lenses” colors their experience.

Of course, many of the premises that philosophers make use of in their arguments are drawn from observation. Sometimes they are observations of the most general kind (for example, the first of Aquinas’ “Five Ways”—his initial arguments for the existence of something with God-like properties—begins with the premise that there are things that undergo change). And philosophers will also make use of principles that are matters of logic (for example, the principle that something cannot be both the case and not the case at the same time in the same way, or the principle that if A and B are the identical thing, then everything that is true of A is also true of B).

But often enough, a premise in a philosophical argument will be neither of these things. Instead, it will be something that, while neither a matter of logic nor based on observation, just seems right (at least to the philosopher advancing the argument). In some cases the premise is thought to be self-evident. For example, Leibniz appeals at several points in his philosophical arguments to what he calls “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”—roughly, the principle that for everything that is the case, there is a reason why it, rather than something else, is the case. He treats this as a “first principle”—a self-evident starting point for reasoning about things.

And Leibniz isn’t alone. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, offers an argument against the existence of God that depends on a principle Dawkins is only partly explicit about. The principle runs roughly as follows: “In order for an instance of organized complexity to be adequately explained by an intelligent designer, the intelligent designer—whether material or immaterial—must be at least as complex as that which is being explained.”

This principle isn’t a matter of logical necessity, and it certainly isn’t a matter of empirical observation (how many immaterial intelligent designers have we observed so as to ascertain that they consistently display the property of being at least as complex as what they have designed?). So why does Dawkins accept this principle? Because it just seems right to him. In other words, he has a strong intuition that it is true.

Often, philosophers rely on thought experiments whose most important function is to serve as “intuition pumps”—that is, their purpose is to help us get clear on what our intuitions are. In other words, the purpose of these thought experiments is to help us pinpoint what “just seems right” to us, to make these assumptions explicit--in part so that we can make deliberate use of them in our subsequent reasoning as opposed to relying on them implicitly without noticing that that’s what we’re doing; in part because only once we are conscious of our intuitive starting-points will we make them available for critical scrutiny.

And this leads to my next point. If reliance on intuitions is inevitable—but iour ntuitions are fallible—we are faced with an important question: When should we trust our intuitions and make use of them, and when shouldn’t we? Put another way, when is an intuition a good reason for me to believe something, and when isn’t it?

At this point I think it’s important to distinguish between two kinds of intuitions. First, your mind may leap ahead of your plodding intellect to a conclusion that, in a sense, you believe “intuitively.” But in such cases, the intuition presents itself as a kind of research project: You have a sense (an “intuition”) that the body of evidence (or the rules of logic, or the basic doctrines of a belief system) supports this conclusion—but you still need to do the work of showing that it does. And once you take the time and effort to pursue that work, your intuition might be vindicated or undermined. In either case, you no longer believe it intuitively.

That’s not the kind of intuition I want to focus on here. Rather, I want to focus on the kind of intuition that serves as a foundation for thinking and critical reflection. I have in mind beliefs that just seem right to us in themselves, that we have a strong confidence in, but which we don’t believe on the basis of other things. The point is that we all have such intuitive starting points. But having them is no guarantee of their truth…and yet it would be impossible, I contend, to operate in the world without trusting these intuitions at least some of the time. So when do we, and when don’t we, trust them?

Now I don’t think I can, in a blog post, provide a fully satisfying answer to this question and then show that it’s the right one. But I do want to sketch out an answer that I find compelling (based on my intuitions?)—in part so that others can better understand my perspective, and in part to stimulate discussion.

So, when is an intuition of mine a “good reason”—that is, when is it appropriate for me to make use of that intuition in my reasoning, reaching conclusions based on it, making decisions in the light of those conclusions, etc.?

Let me begin the sketch of my answer by making two suggestions. First, I want to suggest that the worth of a reason can be specific to a particular reasoner in a particular context such that what is a good reason for me to reach a certain conclusion, given my circumstances, may not be a good reason for you in your circumstances. This I think is going to be a characteristic feature of intuitions: That an intuition of mine is a good reason for me here and now does not imply that it must be a good reason for you—and so, if you don’t share this intuition, I am not warranted in regarding you as unreasonable.

In this respect, rock-bottom intuitions are different from, say, logical principles. If you deny the principle of noncontradiction, it may be entirely appropriate to call you irrational. If you consistently refuse to accept the clear implications of the most meticulous empirical observations consistently corroborated by the most highly trained researchers, I might be justified in calling you irrational. But if you don’t accept Dawkins’ intuitive principle about complexity or Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, I’m not convinced that a judgment of irrationality is going to be appropriate. Put another way, there are some things about which reasonable people can disagree—and intuitions are among them.

My second suggestion is this: While an  intuition can be a good reason for me even if it is something I could be wrong about, it needn't be. The fallibility of my basic intuitions imposes important constraints on when I can legitimately make use of them in my reasoning and when I cannot.

Because intuitions are fallible, I don’t think one should hold to them fanatically. One should, in other words, be open to evidence and arguments that might refute them (or that might shake your intuitive judgment enough that they no longer seem so intuitively right to you). But in the absence of such evidence or arguments, if I have a strong intuition that something is the case, then I may treat it as a premise in my thinking when the implications of doing so should my intuition prove mistaken are benign (or are no more pernicious than the implications of setting the intuition aside). However, when the implications of trusting my intuition are not benign (or are less benign than the implications of setting the intuition aside), I am not warranted in making use of the intuition as if it were a reliable premise.

To put this more succinctly, intuitions can face evidential “defeaters” (evidence that counts against the truth of the intuition) and pragmatic ones (practical circumstances which make it too risky to trust the intuition).

Let me focus a bit more on the latter. Whether acting on a mistaken intuition has benign or malignant implications may vary according to context—in one situation it may be entirely harmless to trust an intuition even should it prove to be wrong, while in another context the costs of trusting the very same intuition (should the intuition prove mistaken) are grave. But we also need to consider opportunity costs: what benefits are lost if one refrains from trusting an intuition and the intuition proves to be sound? In some cases, there are costs or benefits that emerge regardless of the intuition’s truth—that is, there may be benefits to trusting the intuition even if the intuition proves false (or costs to trusting it even if it should happen to be true).

But hovering over all such pragmatic assessment of intuitions is the difficult fact that it relies on an evaluative framework of some kind. When you say that the costs of trusting an intuition should it prove to be mistaken are high, you are making a value judgment about the consequences of believing an intuition in error. How do we determine what is the right evaluative framework to use? Moral intuitions? You see the problem, I hope.

But instead of pursuing this problem here, let me explore more deeply how pragmatic assessment of intuitions might work by considering an example—a case in which mistakenly trusting one’s intuitions is (at least within my evaluative framework) not benign. Having recently finished reading Bernard Beckett’s short novel, Genesis, a particular scenario from that book comes immediately to mind—and it seems a particularly fitting one because it potentially poses pragmatic challenges to some of my own intuitions, ones that we’ve been talking about in connection with my recent series of posts on materialist conceptions of mind.

(It’s also fitting because it might serve as free advertising for Bernard’s novel, which in addition to being thought-provoking on a philosophical level also earns the high praise of having kept me up significantly past my bedtime).

At the heart of the story is the relationship between two characters—one human, one android. The human, Adam Forde, has violated the laws of the Republic in which he lives in a way that makes him a focal figure in the Republic’s internal turmoil. Neither executing him nor letting him go are safe options from the standpoint of the authorities, and so they pursue a compromise: he is locked away with an experimental android prototype, Art, for the purposes of exposing it to stimulation that will facilitate its cognitive development.

Let’s suppose Adam knows a fair bit about Art’s internal circuitry (I don’t think this is true of Adam in the novel, but let’s assume it). Suppose, furthermore, that based on this knowledge he has a strong intuitive sense that nothing in that circuitry could account for the presence of consciousness.

He might, of course, have the same intuition about the human brain: nothing about the physical system of the brain can, by itself, account for the existence of this thing called consciousness. But, like me, he'd also know that he is conscious, and that his conscious states are demonstrably correlated with brain states. Perhaps he reconciles these facts with his intuition about the inability of a physical system alone to explain consciousness by positing that there is something about the brain which attunes it to some non-physical reality. Although he has no idea what this non-physical reality is like, his strong intuitive sense that a physical system alone cannot account for the consciousness he's so intimately acquainted with leads him to believe there must be some mysterious additional component at work—but that there's also something about the brain’s unique properties that makes the connection with this non-material element possible. (We would have to suppose, furthermore, that he lacks a different intuition that some people do seem to have—namely, that if there is some essentially “spiritual” or non-physical reality, it couldn’t interact with a physical one, at least not in the way necessary to generate consciousness as we know it).

Of course, if all of this is true of Adam, then he might also think the same things about Art’s circuitry—that is, he might believe that any appropriately structured physical system could do the same work that the brain does, such that there is no reason in principle why an artificial intelligence could not be created. But let’s suppose he knows a fair bit about Art’s circuitry—and not only is it unlike the biological circuitry of the brain, but its design is of a sort that (perhaps based on a thought experiment similar, perhaps, to Searle’s “Chinese Room”) Adam has a strong intuitive sense cannot do the sort of consciousness-generating work a brain can do. And so, Adam's intuitions lead to the conclusion that, at best, all that Art's circuitry can do is mimic the behavior of a conscious being.

Now it may be that after prolonged interaction with Art, Adam accumulates a body of data that really challenges these underlying intuitions. Perhaps his interaction with Art has a flow to it that just doesn’t fit with the hypothesis that Art is merely mimicking consciousness. The nuances of their exchanges just seem too hard to “fake.” And so, eventually, he reaches a point at which his intuitions have been defeated by a body of experiential evidence. If so, it would no longer be reasonable for him to invoke his original intuitions as premises—he'll be forced to conclude that one of another of them must be set aside, since taken together they imply a conclusion that he has strong evidential grounds for disbelieving. His intuitions have suffered evidential defeat.

(This, by the way, seems to be what actually happens to Adam in the story.)

But in the first days of his imprisonment with Art, his intuitions will not yet have been defeated in this way. At that point, it may be reasonable for him to trust them—but that depends on the pragmatic assessment of the associated costs. And those costs are a matter of context. My circumstances are quite unlike those that Adam faces. Among other things, I'm not sharing living quarters with an artificial intellegence that behaves as if it is conscious. And that difference might matter a great deal for whether Adam is warranted in trusting his intutions.

In fact, in this case I think it would be unreasonable for him to accept his intuitions, even though they haven’t been evidentially defeated—because operating as if they are true (and hence as if Art is not a conscious being) is more costly, should the intuitions prove mistaken, than operating as if they are false.

Here’s my thinking. If Adam operates as if Art is not conscious and he's mistaken, there is a real cost of considerable moral significance—as I understand it, the cost would be a failure to treat a conscious being with the dignity that such a being deserves. To treat a conscious being as if it were an unconscious one is to objectify it. In a sense, this is what distressed me about Adam’s early treatment of Art in the novel: in their first days together, Adam is happy to act on the assumption that Art is no more conscious than a toaster (although there is some evidence that, even at this early stage, Adam isn’t entirely confident in this assumption--he's drawn into conversation with the android, but almost as if to repudiate himself for acting as if this were a conscious being he strikes out against it in an act of physical violence).

One wonders whether this early treatment by Adam may have played an important role in Art’s subsequent development—if you’re conscious, the experience of being objectified, treated like a thing, creates both wounds and needs that can have long-term negative repercussions, ones that often propagate outwards onto others. (If you want to know more about Art’s development, read the book.)

On the other hand, were Adam to operate as if Art is a conscious being and is mistaken, the costs don’t seem to be comparable. And so, in this case, there is a pragmatic reason for Adam to set aside his intuitions, even if they have not been evidentially defeated--because they have been pragmatically defeated instead.

It is, by the way, this sort of thinking that I believe underlies a comment that philosopher Peter Singer once made to me. (Peter Singer is a renowned moral philosopher who is most famous for having written Animal Liberation, a book that helped to launch the animal rights movement). Back in the '90’s Singer visited the university where I was teaching, and the philosophy department had a dinner for him at the home of one of our department members—a vegetarian dinner, of course. During the meal I asked him what he thought about eating snails.

Now, Singer’s argument for vegetarianism hinges on his case for saying that if a non-human animal has interests, its interests should weigh as heavily in our moral deliberations as the comparable interests of a human. Since pigs and cows and chickens all have interests—as evinced by their capacity to suffer—their interests need to be given the same moral weight as ours. My question to Singer was therefore really a question about whether he thought snails (and other animals with neurological systems far simpler than those of pigs and chickens, etc.) met this criterion of being interest-bearers, a condition that Singer (unlike certain environmental philosophers) doesn’t think can be met in the absence of consciousness--leading him to conclude that plants do not have interests.

Singer’s answer? “I don’t know if snails have interests, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Materialist Conceptions of Mind, Part II: Emergentism and the Explanatory Gap

In my last post I explained why I found a simple identification between mental phenomena and brain processes to be untenable. But such identification of mind and brain is not the only option for the materialist—and so even if my case against identificationism is sound, it doesn’t follow that one must give up on materialism. One alternative to simple identification is emergentism—the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.


This view holds (in the words of John Searle, the most prominent defender of emergentism) “that brain processes cause consciousness but that consciousness is itself a feature of the brain”—a feature that emerges because of something about the distinctive structure and organization and activity of the brain. It is this alternative I want to turn to now.

To get at the idea of what emergentism maintains, it may help to start with an example. On my desk, I have a framed picture of my kids—taken just over four years ago when my daughter was an infant. My son is leaning towards her, laughing while he looks at her. He’s wearing an armadillo t-shirt and is holding a green plastic cup. My daughter is wearing a red bodysuit and looks like she is boxing the air with her little fists.

This same picture is one I've uploaded onto my computer, and it is now part of my slideshow screensaver. When this picture appears on my computer screen, I can rightly say, “That is the same picture as the one in the frame on my desk.” And I can rightly say that because what I am referring to as the picture is something abstracted from (in one case) pixels and underlying hardware controlled by computer programming and (in the other case) ink distributed on photo paper. What I mean by "the picture" is this something that can emerge from each underlying physical substrate—something that both of these very different physical substrates have in common.

And what is it that they have in common? It has something to do with organization. In the case of the framed photo, dots of ink in different colors are arranged on paper in a pattern that produces a holistic visual effect on the viewer. The other image creates an arrangement of illuminated pixels rather than dots of ink, but the pattern into which those pixels are organized is the same. And so we have these two very different physical substrates that each succeed in generating identical images (that is, identical in kind; they are not numerically the same thing).

In each case, the picture of my children is an emergent property of the underlying physical substrate—it is a feature of the physical system that is produced by that system as a whole by virtue of what is true of the parts, but which is not a feature of any of the parts.

Arguably, the emergent property in either case doesn’t really “emerge” in the absence of an observer who has the capacity to find in the similar organizational structures of the two physical substrates a shared meaning. In other words, at least in some cases, emergence requires a subject who is capable of meaning-attributions. Without that observer, we have an arrangement of inkblots or of illuminated pixels, but we simply don’t have an image of my children. That requires someone to find meaning in the pattern—and neither a piece of photo paper with ink on it nor a computer can do that. This point, although not one I will pursue at the moment, may prove to be of great significance for thinking clearly about the emergence of consciousness.

Now, it is not necessary for emergence that there be multiple and distinct physical substrates that are somehow capable of giving rise to the same kind of property. I choose this example for two reasons. First, the fact that there are two very different physical substrates helps to isolate the emergent property and identify it as distinguishable from the substrate which produces it. Second and more importantly, this example is useful for highlighting some of the advantages of emergentism over identificationism with respect to consciousness.

The most obvious advantage, highlighted by this example, is that emergentism makes room for multiple realizations of consciousness. That is, different sorts of physical systems—human brains and, say, “positronic” ones—can both give rise to this thing we call consciousness.

Second, the example makes clear that an emergent property is not to be identified with the underlying physical system that causes it, even if it is causally explained or accounted for in each particular case by the more basic properties and structural features of that system. And because of this fact, one does not run into the sorts of problems that identificationism poses with respect to relational properties.

So, to go back to the picture of my children, I am intimately familiar with this image even though, in the case of its instantiation on my computer, I know very little about the underlying mechanisms which produce it. Since the image on the computer screen is caused by but distinct from the physical substrate that produces it, there is no problem that arises from this difference in relational properties. Put simply, one can be perfectly familiar with one property of a thing without being at all familiar with other properties. And so, if consciousness is an emergent property of brain processes, the fact that I am not familiar with any of the other properties of the underlying brain processes poses no difficulty at all. Likewise, that scientific investigation of a bat’s brain can’t tell us what it’s like to be a bat doesn’t cause the same degree of trouble, because a mode of inquiry that can describe one range of properties possessed by a thing might not be able to tell us everything there is to know about the thing. Some properties might be inaccessible to that mode of inquiry.

Now before turning to the challenges faced by emergentism, let me say a few words about what emergentism claims—and what it doesn’t claim—about consciousness. Here, I want to specifically stress that Searle, although the philosopher most commonly associated with emergentism, rejects some very important materialist theories of mind which are emergentist (at least according to the account of emergence offered above).

To be precise, Searle is a staunch opponent of the kind of functionalist account of mind that, for decades, was almost normative in cognitive science research. Functionalism, in its broadest terms, identifies mental states with functional ones—where a functional state is one that is possessed by a physical system when that physical system responds to a certain range of inputs with a predictable range of outputs. A vending machine has a functional state insofar as, when you insert the right amount of money and push the right button, a can of coke will tumble out. It has a “functional organization” or “pattern of causal relations” (to borrow Searle’s description).

The most interesting functional states, from a cognitive science standpoint, are those that computers possess by virtue of their programming. A computer program is, basically, the imposition of a specific functional organization onto a computer’s hardware. When a particular program is running (Microsoft Word), then various inputs (keys punched on the keyboard) reliably produces certain outputs (letters appearing consecutively from left to right across the screen). Of course, different programmers can generate similar functional states in different ways, and can do so on different hardware. So the same functional state might be produced on a PC with Microsoft Word, or on a Mac with WordPerfect.

The most popular developed form of functionalism is the theory that mental states are akin to computer programs—that is, mental states just ARE the functional organization or software of the brain.

Searle calls this view “Strong AI,” and he has attacked it again and again—most famously with his “Chinese Room” thought experiment. The thought experiment asks us to imagine someone who is isolated in a room and has Chinese characters given to him from the outside. He then consults some rather complex instructions that tell him what to do when he receives such-and-such characters. Following these instructions, he puts together a set of characters and hands them out of the room. It turns out that what he is receiving are questions asked in Chinese, and what he returns are answers. The point is that no matter how sophisticated the instructions for what symbolic outputs to provide in response to which symbolic inputs, the man in the room cannot be said to understand Chinese—because the instructions (the “program”) merely indicate how to correctly manipulate the symbols. They don’t say what the symbols mean. Put another way, a program can offer syntax but not semantics. But consciousness has semantic content—in fact, that’s what qualia are. And so, any system that can’t explain such content can’t explain consciousness.

But here’s the thing: the functional state of a system IS an emergent property of that system—it’s a property that emerges out of how the whole is organized. What Searle’s Chinese Room analogy demonstrates is that it isn’t enough to say that consciousness is an emergent property of brain processes. We need to ask what kind of emergent property it is and how it emerges—and this account has to track onto what we know first-hand about consciousness.

And although Searle is convinced that consciousness IS an emergent property, he has not offered any such account. That’s not his aim, because he doesn’t think he is in a position to do so. Rather, his aim is to spark a research program. He thinks cognitive scientists have been barking up the wrong tree—that their working model for understanding what consciousness IS just doesn’t work, and that as a result their attempts to explain consciousness are really explaining something else entirely (our ability to perform complex calculations, perhaps).

So, to summarize: the emergentist thinks that something about neurological systems—their constitutive elements, their organization, the interactions of the parts—gives rise to or produces on a holistic level this thing we call consciousness. But while one emergent property—the functional organization of the brain—can explain the brain’s capacity to respond to certain inputs (a hot stove scalding a hand) with appropriate outputs (the hand jerking quickly away), or its capacity to perform complex calculations, the functional organization alone is insufficient to account for the content of consciousness.

The problem, of course, is that neuroscientists do not at present have any account of how neurological systems can do this—a fact that most are willing to admit. Sandra Menssen and Thomas Sullivan, in The Agnostic Inquirer, offer some choice quotes from current neuroscience texts that are rather striking in this regard. For example, one of the standard textbooks in the field, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, puts it this way: “Right from the start we can say that science has little to say about sentience. We are clueless on how the brain creates sentience.”

Neuroscientists have had considerable success in tracking correlations between neurological events and conscious states—and then in describing the correlated neurological events in growing detail. They can do this, first of all, because their subjects can communicate their conscious states to researchers. Scientists can ask their subjects what they are feeling, sensing, etc., as those subjects’ brains are being probed using MRI technology or other exploratory equipment. To a lesser extent they can also track correlations because they can reasonably posit that their subjects are undergoing certain conscious states based on their own subjective experience of consciousness (they can assume that their research subject is having a certain kind of subjective experience because they’ve just flashed a bright light in the subject’s eyes and because the researchers know what their own subjective experience is when that happens to them).

But although they have been able to track correlations between brain states and conscious states in this way, we might well ask whether they could have made any progress at all in this project in the absence of either subjective reports from their subjects or conclusions based on attributing to their subjects what they find in their own consciousness (through introspection). The answer seems to be no. And the reason is because there is nothing about the MRI images or other data that by itself gives any clue as to what the corresponding contents of consciousness should be. There is this gulf between what neuroscientists are looking at and describing (the brain processes) and the correlated conscious states with which we are all familiar.

Could this explanatory gap be one that more scientific study will eventually close? Will we, eventually, be able to understand how neurological events can generate this thing we call consciousness? Many scientists express this hope, and many naturalists rest their ontology on it. They say, in effect, “Scientists have explained many mysteries that previously had been thought to be inexplicable in scientific terms. Just give them time, and they’ll explain consciousness, too.” Searle clearly has this hope—but he thinks the hope can be realized only once scientists aren’t being misdirected by philosophical “accounts” of consciousness that really deny the existence of the data to be explained.

But others think that there is a difference in kind between the mysteries that science has unraveled in the past and the present mystery of consciousness—a difference that makes this explanatory gap more than merely contingent. In effect, the view is this: the nature of neurological systems is such that a scientific understanding of them, no matter how complete, cannot account for consciousness.

The argument for this view traces back at least to Leibniz, who offers the following brief argument in The Monadology:

One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.

In short, Leibniz thinks our physical organs which might be thought responsible for consciousness are mechanical systems—but there is nothing about mechanistic explanation which is in principle capable of accounting for our inner perceptual experience. We find a similar argument advanced in more detail by the great 19th Century German Philosopher, Hermann Lotze:

…out of all combinations of material conditions the origin of a spiritual condition of the soul never becomes analytically conceivable; or, more simply expressed, if we think of material elements in such a way as to predicate of them nothing which does not belong to the notion of matter, if we simply conceive of them as entities in space which are moveable and may call each other into motion by their power; if we, finally, imagine these motions of one or many elements as varied or combined as we please, there never comes a time when it is self-evident that the motions last produced may not longer remain motions but must be transformed into sensations. A materialism, therefore, which assumed that a spiritual life could spring out of simply physical conditions or motions of bodily atoms would be an empty assumption, and, in this form, has hardly ever been advocated in earnest.

Of course, Lotze was writing before this position was widely and persistently advocated in earnest by a range of thinkers in the 20th Century—but his argument has continued to crop up, most recently (in an implicit form) in Chalmer’s zombie thought experiment—the point of which seems to be that there is nothing about an arrangement of physical bodies “pushing on each other,” no matter how complex the system of pushes, that implies consciousness. It is for this reason, I think, that Chalmers is convinced we can always imagine such a system existing but lacking consciousness (a “zombie”). Since nothing about the physical system, if it possesses only physical properties, implies consciousness, it is possible for such a physical system to exist without consciousness.

Chalmers’ solution is one that Lotze was well aware of more than a century before Chalmers proposed it with much fanfare. In fact, here is what Lotze says immediately after his rejection of a simple mechanistic account of consciousness:

The materialistic views which have really had adherents have proceeded from the premise that what we call matter is really better than it externally appears. It contains in itself the fundamental peculiarity out of which the spiritual conditions may develop just as well as physical predicates—extension, impenetrability, etc.—are developed out of another fundamental peculiarity. From this results the new attempt, out of the reciprocal operations of these psychical elementary forces to elucidate all the elements of the spiritual life just as its bodily life is derived from the reciprocation of the physical elementary forces of its constituents.

Lotze goes on to challenge this “Chalmerian” view on the grounds that it cannot account for the unity of consciousness—but let me leave this aside for now. The point that Lotze wants to make—a point echoed by Chalmers more than a century later—is that there is nothing about purely mechanistic explanation that renders consciousness “analytically conceivable” in terms of it.

Menssen and Sullivan offer their own analogy for getting at this explanatory disconnect. Here is how they put the point:

Your child has a pull toy that features a little man in a box whose head pops in and out of the box as the toy is pulled along. You wonder, why does the head pop in and out? You examine the toy and see that the wheels are affixed to an axle with a rise in the middle; the little man sits on the rise, so his head goes up and down with each revolution of the wheels. Now your friend comes in and asks, ‘Why does the man’s head pop in and out?’ So you explain. And your friend says, ‘I understand all that, but why does the head pop in and out when the toy is pulled along?’ The question is bizarre: if your friend really understood everything you have said, it makes no sense to continue to ask why the head pops in and out.

This “making no sense to keep asking why once the explanation is understood” is what Lotze has in mind when he speaks of a phenomenon being “analytically conceivable” in relation to a particular kind of explanation—the explanation just shows us how the phenomenon in question is brought about. And this, Menssen and Sullivan maintain, is a feature of any genuine causal explanation. In their terms, “If a putative explanation of a phenomenon is a genuine causal explanation, then if you grasp the explanation in relation to the phenomenon, it cannot reasonably be asked: ‘But why does the phenomenon occur?’”

They follow their articulation of this principle with the following crucial claim: “No matter how much is said about the nervous system, as long as what is said is confined to statements of fundamental physics and chemistry, you will always be able to ask ‘But why does that produce consciousness?’”

The contention here is that not only do current mechanistic explanations fall short of accounting for consciousness, but that “more of the same” sort of explanation won’t close the gap—because the problem lies with the kind of explanation being offered, rather than with the amount of detail involved.

To see this point, consider an analogy my friend and colleague John Kronen likes to employ (one that dates him—and me, since I am able to appreciate it). Suppose someone comes upon Samantha Stevens wiggling her nose to miraculous effect. She wiggles, and the vacuum flies out of the closet and cleans the house all by itself. She wiggles, and her poor husband Darren materializes in the living room, blinking in surprise. Suppose someone came along and said, “Oh, I see! No mystery here. These events are explained by the wiggling of her nose.” Well, we wouldn’t be satisfied.

Now suppose that the person took to studying Samantha’s nose-wiggles and began to observe and record correlations between how she wiggles her nose and what happens. A long wiggle to the left followed by two short ones to the right precede every instance of inanimate objects moving on their own; two short left wiggles followed by two short right wiggles precede every instances of teleportation, etc. Would we now be inclined to say, “Oh, now I get it!”? Of course not. And now matter how detailed the study of the patterns of nose movements—no matter how perfect the correspondence between distinctive sorts of nose wiggles and distinctive events—we would be no closer to having an explanation of how Samantha Stevens does what she does. Nose wiggles are analytically disconnected from flying objects and teleportation, such that they have no capacity to close the explanatory gap.

The claim, in effect, is that physical brain events bear the same relation to consciousness. They are analytically disconnected in such a way that it is not possible to close the explanatory gap.

Of course, it is one thing to say this, another for it to be true. But here is the problem. If someone were to ask why Samantha’s nose-wiggles are analytically disconnected from flying objects so as to be incapable by themselves of providing an adequate explanation of the latter, I would be at pains to offer anything other than, “Well, think about her nose wiggles. Think about flying objects. They have nothing to do with each other.” The sense of disconnect here is so intuitively evident that, in the absence of some astonishingly unexpected explanation that succeeds in establishing a connection, one is justified in assuming that “more of the same” won’t narrow the explanatory gap. We need to look past her nose and introduce some further element that can make the connection.

But, of course, defenders of materialist conceptions of consciousness think brains and minds have everything to do with each other—and so it may well be the case that what we have here is (once again) a basic dichotomy of intuitions. Those who find the explanatory gap argument persuasive have an intuitive and immediate sense of the distinctness of consciousness and mechanistic processes—and this intuitive sense entails that in the absence of a causal explanation that succeeds in closing the explanatory gap, the presumptive standpoint will be that the gap can’t be closed by that kind of explanation.

This is where I am positioned. And because I am positioned as I am, no materialist account of consciousness will be convincing in the absence of an explanation that actually closes the explanatory gap. But for those with different basic intuitions, the situation may be very different.

So what does all of this mean? Do I think that scientists should stop trying to explain consciousness in terms of the brain? No. But it does mean that unless and until they succeed, those like myself—those who see a disparity between brain processes and conscious states as enormous (more enormous, actually) as that between nose-wiggles and self-propelled vaccuums—won’t believe it until we see it. For us, given where we stand intuitively, the burden of proof rests on the materialist to show that the explanatory gap can be closed by nothing other than a deeper study of the brain.

In the meantime, we’ll conduct our own inquiries—looking for something more, some additional element, that can bridge the gulf between mechanistic explanations and the phenomenon of consciousness, and so explain the correlations that scientists have shown to exist between the two.

That different people, with different basic intuitions, are pursuing different theories and attempting to find ways to substantiate them (especially to those who stand on the other side of the intuitive gap) seems to me as if it can only be a good thing--although there are, of course, plenty of people on both sides of the divide who think that what those on the other side are attempting is absurd and pointless and worthy of nothing but mockery.